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OUT OF THE PAST

OUT OF THE PAST
* « SOME BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS

BY THE RIGHT HON.
SIR MOUNTSTUART E. GRANT DUFF
G.C.S.I., F.R.S.
AUTHOR OF "notes FROM A DIARY "

IN TWO VOLS.— VOL. I

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1903

ADVERTISEMENT
In these two volumes, which may be considered as
supplementary to my Notes from a Diary, I have
collected some biographical papers, most of which
have appeared in the periodicals enumerated in the
Table of Contents, to whose Editors I beg to
return my thanks for permission to reproduce
them. I have added several Addresses of a similar
character, which I have delivered from time to
time. The last paper in the Second Volume was
a Friday Evening Lecture, upon Epitaphs, given at
the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. I have
placed it here, because it deals with a subject to
which the other contents of the volume naturally
turned my thoughts.
" For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time has prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before
And one by one crept silently to rest."

CONTENTS

Chesterfield as an Educator. (From The Fortnightly
Review, 1879) ......... I
Some Recollections oi' Oxfokd, 1847-1S50. (From the
Transactions of the Franco-Scottish Society, 1897) . . 35
Senior's "Conversations." (From The Nineteenth
Century, 1878)  55
Manning and the Catholic Reaction of Our Times.
(From The Edinburgh Review, 1896) .... 94
The Dilettanti Society. (From The Spectator, July 2,
1898) .... . . . . IS7
The Club. (A Speech at Oxford, 1896) . 167
Some Recollections of the House of Commons,
1858-1881. (Being Passages from an Address at Elgin,
1898)  ... 173

OUT OF THE PAST

CHESTERFIELD AS AN EDUCATOR
"The eagle," said one of the wisest of men, "does not
nestle securely in the very bosom of Jove, the day on
which he has quarrelled with a beetle." How much more
serious, however, is the predicament of the royal bird, if he
has offended, not a humble insect, but an animal of a far
higher order. This was the misfortune which befel Philip
Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. Justly or unjustly,
for we know but one side of the story, he roused against
him the anger of the " literary whale " ^ of his generation,
and his memory suffers from it unto this day, in spite of
the partial reparation which was made by his assailant. It
is not my intention in the following paper to attempt to do
anything towards rehabiUtating Chesterfield, who had
unquestionably his fair share of faults. Persons who set
to work to rehabilitate damaged reputations are peculiarly
apt to be attacked by a dangerous form of the rabies
' Peter Pindar prophesied very truly of Boswell —
" Triumphant thou thro' Time's vast gulf shalt sail,
The pilot of our literary whale."
VOL. I. A

2 CHESTERFIELD [1879
biographica, and to confound truth and falsehood, right and
wrong, in their headlong advocacy. The object of the
following pages is far more humble, and purely practical.
Mr. Leslie Stephen, not the least eminent of an eminent
family, has adopted, or almost adopted, what appears to
me a monstrously unjust criticism of Dr. Johnson's upon a
work of Chesterfield's, which ought in my judgment to be
far more generally read than it is ; and I am anxious, by
recalling to the attention of some readers what really was
the essential part of the teaching of Chesterfield, to do
something towards making the study of his letters to his
Son what I think they ought to be, a regular portion of the
education of every Englishman who is likely to enter public
life tolerably early. Before going further, however, it is
absolutely necessary to admit, without any qualifications,
that the book has some very grave defects. These fall for
the most part under three heads.
ist. There are a number of coarse expressions and
allusions thinly scattered through the four volumes which
are, although they occur in all the light literature of last
century, not the less repugnant to modern eyes and ears.
and. The whole book is pitched, so to speak, an octave
too low, if not for the day in which it was written, at least
for that in which we have the good fortune to Hve. A man
of the wodd, as shrewd as Chesterfield, would in the year
1879 have grasped the truth that to make an assured and

1879] CHESTERFIELD'S CHARACTER 3
honourable success in politics now, a character ought to be
broader and deeper than that on the building up of which
he laboured so assiduously. There must be just as
much shrewdness and knowledge of the world as ever, in
the composition of the politician who is to play at the gold
table and to win ; but there must be, in an age when great
masses are to be moved, a good deal more enthusiasm, a
good deal more sympathy, and a good deal more poetry.
3rd. There are a great variety of passages which inculcate
what we have happily learned to think a most detestable
morahty. Chesterfield drew a broad distinction between
ordinary dissipation and the gallantry which the practice of
his times authorised in all continental countries, and to
this topic he recurs with provoking frequency.
If I were engaged in estimating his character, it would
be necessary to linger on this disagreeable subject, and to
inquire what weight ought to be given to it in balancing his
faults against his virtues. I cannot, however, make it too
clear that I am not engaged in estimating his character.
That was done very well, more than a generation ago, by
the late Lord Stanhope in his History, and by Mr Hayward
in an Essay, which has been reprinted.
My object is, as I have said, a purely practical one —
to examine, namely, how far his Letters to his Son can be
made useful at the present day, and it fortunately happens
that all his bad morahty may, for that particular purpose,

4 CHESTERFIELD 1879
be left on one side. "No one," says an eminent legal
writer, "however feloniously disposed, can run away with
an acre of land," and it is not less certain that no young
gentleman on his grand tour, however lax may be his
principles, could form in every capital which he entered
those intimate relations with ladies of position and
reputation which Chesterfield is always pressing upon his
son ; although he would find it but too easy, if he had a
turn that way, to indulge in those grosser forms of vice
which Chesterfield so justly and so continually reprobates.
As to how far Chesterfield's views with regard to the
women of his own day squared with the facts, it is beside
my purpose to inquire; but whatever may have been the
case a hundred and fifty years ago, there cannot be the
slightest doubt that any young man of adequate merit and
position, who was properly introduced, and would take a
little trouble, could now pass from capital to capital, living
everywhere in the society of women who would do all for
his manners that Chesterfield desired, and more even for
his mind and his morals than they did for his manners.
Before we can estimate Chesterfield's educational ideas
correctly we must understand what he proposed to effect.
He proposed, then, to make his natural son, Philip
Stanhope — a youth of fair, but not shining abilities, cursed
by nature with curiously ungainly manners — an all-accom
plished man, worthy to stand in the first rank of politics,

1879] CHESTERFIELD'S SYSTEM S
now as a Member of the House of Commons, now as a
negotiator at foreign courts, now as the confidential adviser
of the heir to the throne, and now as Secretary of State.
He wished to do this in an age when personal influences
were much more powerful than they are in our day, when
the people had very little power, when the idea of a
Frenchman's fighting for " la patrie " as he would fight for
" I'honneur du Roi " seemed wildly preposterous ; when a
letter in Germany might be returned if only one of twenty
titles were omitted in the address — in short, in that world
of minute etiquette and endless formalities which M. Taine
has so well described in the first volume of his book on the
Ancien Regime and the Revolution.
This being the problem to be solved, it is clear that
importance would have to be attached to many things
which are nowadays, to borrow a happy German-student
phrase, " colossally unimportant ; " while on the other hand
the world having progressed much since the middle of last
century, many things now of great moment could not be
expected to find a place. On the whole, however, the
reader will, it is to be hoped, think that there is much more
of what is permanently valuable than is usually supposed in
the book to which it is sought to direct attention.
What then was Chesterfield's system ? And, first, what
was its foundation ? Its foundation, startling as the reply
may appear to those who know his book only by hearsay.

6 CHESTERFIELD [1879
was morahty and religion, as their author understood them.
If we turn, for example, to Letter cxx.i we find the follow
ing passage: "As to the moral virtues, I say nothing to
you; they speak best for themselves, nor can I suspect
that they want any recommendation with you ; I will, there
fore, only assure you that, without them, you would be
most unhappy."
Again, in Letter cxxui., after some observations about
knowledge, we read : " For I never mention to you the two
much greater points of religion and morality, because I
cannot possibly suspect you, as to either of them."
Again, in Letter cxxxii. occur these words :
" Pray let no quibbles of lawyers, no refinements of casuists,
break into the plain notions of right and wrong, which every
man's right reason and plain common sense suggest to him.
To do as you would be done by, is the plain, sure, and un
disputed rule of morality and justice. Stick to that ; and be
convinced that whatever breaks into it, in any degree, however
speciously it may be turned, and however puzzling it may be
to answer it, is, notwithstanding, false in itself, unjust, and
criminal." Looking on to Letter clxviii., we find this :
" While you were a child, I endeavoured to form your heart
habitually to virtue and honour, before your understanding was
' My references are throughout not to Lord Stanhope's edition,
which, although the best, is scarce and dear, but to the third edition
(1774), which is more easily procured.

1879] MORAL VIRTUES 7
capable of showing you their beauty and utility. Those
principles, which you then got, like your grammar rules, only
by rote, are now, I am persuaded, fixed and confirmed by
reason. ... I have therefore, since you have had the use
of reason, never written to you upon those subjects : they
speak best for themselves ; and I should, now, just as soon
think of warning you gravely not to fall into the dirt or the fire,
as into dishonour or vice."
Nothing could exceed Chesterfield's horror and detes
tation of the ribald talk against morality, which was a not
unnatural though calamitous result of the revolt against
superstition, which formed so important a part of the history
of the last century. On that subject he writes with a
passion which he shows about hardly anything else.
Thus in Letter cxciii. he says :
" I hope in God, and I verily believe, that you want no moral
virtue. But the possession of all the moral virtues, in actu
primo, as the logicians call it, is not sufficient ; you must have
them in actu secundo too : nay, that is not sufficient neither ;
you must have the reputation of them also. Your character in
the world must be built upon that solid foundation, or it will
soon fall, and upon your own head. You cannot therefore be
too careful, too nice, too scrupulous, in establishing this character
at first, upon which your whole depends. Let no conversation,
no example, no fashion, no bon mot, no silly desire of seeming
to be above what most knaves, and many fools, call prejudices,
ever tempt you to avow, excuse, extenuate, or laugh at the
least breach of morality ; but show upon all occasions, and take
all occasions to show, a detestation and abhorrence of it."

8 CHESTERFIELD [1879
With regard to religion he observes in Letter clxxx. :
"Putting moral virtues at the highest, and religion at the
lowest, religion must be allowed to be a collateral security at
least, to virtue ; and every prudent man will sooner trust to two
securities than to one."
As to the form of his religion, Chesterfield began by
being a bigoted, but soon became a very moderate member
of the Church of England, extending his tolerance even to
the Roman Communion, which, associated as it was with
opposition to the rising spirit of inquiry and with the exiled
dynasty, he heartily disliked both as a philosopher and a
politician ; but to whose priests and services he directs his
son to show on all occasions proper respect.
On this foundation Chesterfield desired to raise a solid
superstructure of knowledge, beginning, of course, with
what we now call the "three r's," and the subjects usually
taught to children before they go to school. A large
portion of the first volume is filled with letters upon the
elements of political geography and history, generally
written in French, which was carefully taught to young
Stanhope from the very first. Of what we now call Physical
Geography there is of course not a trace.
Soon Latin and Greek were added, and made the staple
of education for some years under competent private tutors ;
and later, at Westminster, "Classical knowledge," that is,
Greek and Latin, the boy is told, while still only about

i879] STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 9
twelve years of age, " is absolutely necessary for everybody,
because everybody has agreed to think and to call it
so." . . . "You are by this time, I hope, pretty near
master of both, so that a small part of the day dedicated to
them, for two years more, will make you perfect in that
study." It would be an error, however, to conclude from this
passage, that the writer did not attach importance to the
study of the classics for their own sake. Many of his judg
ments about particular authors, as for instance where he
speaks with contempt of the Greek epigrams, some of
which are amongst the most exquisite of human composi
tions, are sufficiently absurd. For the Letters and De
Oratore of Cicero, however, for the History of Thucydides,
and the Orations of Demosthenes, he had evidently a genuine
admiration ; and again and again enjoins their study.
Classical reading, indeed, filled a larger place in young
Stanhope's training than a wise man, who had in view the
same objects as Chesterfield, would now allow it to do in
the case of his son. It must not be forgotten, however,
that in the middle of the last century the importance of
Greek and Latin works, weighed against the other hterary
productions of the human mind, was enormously greater
than it is now. German literature cannot be said to have
existed, and the number of works of a high order, either in
French or English, was trifling compared with what we now
VOL. I. B

10 CHESTERFIELD [1879
enjoy. Numerous passages could be cited to prove that
Chesterfield had an eye for what was best in the writings of
his contemporaries. Pope, Atterbury, Hume, Robertson,
and Voltaire, receive indifferently the tribute of his respect
for the excellence of their style and other merits, while he
uses the very strongest language to describe the impression
made upon him by the eloquence of Bolingbroke, of
whom he has left a portrait worthy to be set side by side
with some of Clarendon's. He was anxious that Philip
Stanhope should write good Latin, and has some exceed
ingly sensible remarks upon that subject in Letter cxxxii., in
which he contrasts the Latin of a gentleman with the " Latin
of a pedant who has probably read more bad authors than
good." Were he alive now, he would doubtless be very
indifferent to his son's writing Latin at all. Circumstances,
however, are entirely changed. In Chesterfield's time, not
only did learned men still correspond not unfrequently in
Latin, but the power of writing good Latin might at any
moment have been useful to a man who, like Philip
Stanhope, was intended to spend much of his life in
countries where he would be brought into contact with men
who used Latin as the language of business, which indeed
was the case to a considerable extent in Hungary up to
183s, and in Croatia even later. Then, again, a great
many branches of human knowledge, of which the elements
should be mastered during the course of a general educa-

r879l THE STUDY OF SCIENCE n
tion, did not then, at least for educational purposes,
exist. Chesterfield speaks with respect of geometry
and astronomy, desiring that his son should know their
elements; but for him, as for most of his contem
poraries, natural science had no being. To him a man
who occupied himself with it was as frivolous a trifler as
one "who contemplates the dress, not the characters, of
the company he kept."
Now all this is altered. So able a person would have
seen clearly that in an age when material progress has
become such an important feature in the life of all civilised
nations, when everything seeks for a scientific basis, it
would be worse than futile for one who aspired to be in the
forefront of politics not to have at least a general acquaint
ance with, and a sympathy for, one of the most important,
if not indeed for the time the most important, portion of
human activity. He is always urging his son to be the
" omnis homo,'' the universal man, and to describe any man
by such a name at the present day, to whom natural science
was a sealed book, would be merely a bad joke. We may
then be certain that as he could not increase the number of
minutes in an hour, and as an important part of his system
was to allow some six hours a day for work, and to devote
the rest to exercise and pleasure, he would have suppressed
the writing of Latin, and indeed every accomplish
ment, however elegant, which did not go to build up

12 CHESTERFIELD [i§79
his ideal of a statesman fully equipped for his work in
the world.
A good foundation of Greek and Latin having been laid,
Chesterfield's next care was to make his pupil perfect in
German, Italian, and French, so that he might employ all
those languages with ease, and become acquainted with
what his father considered to be best in their literatures.
Chesterfield had the greatest respect for the French authors
of the age of Louis Quatorze : of the Italians he recom
mended especially Tasso and Ariosto, giving the preference
to the second. His literary criticisms, in short, were the criti
cisms of most intelligent men in that age; sensible enough as
far as they went, but rarely going below the surface of things.
Woe be, it has been well said, unto the nineteenth century
in so far as it denies the eighteenth, for it generally loses
itself in dreams if it does. In criticism, however, it has
certainly a right to boast that it is "far better than its
fathers." Young Stanhope, who, when he left England, already
knew a good deal of French, was sent abroad with the Rev.
Mr. Harte, a man of some learning, and the author, at a
later period, of a Life of Gustavus Adolphus. They
travelled by Heidelberg to Switzerland, and settled first at
Leipzig, where, in addition to working at Latin and Greek,
Stanhope heard lectures on public law and the law of the
Holy Roman Empire, studied the principal European

1879] GEOGRAPHY AND COMMERCE t3
treaties, and began to make himself acquainted with the
best works on modern history, then a task far less for
midable than it would be at present.
His father kept urging him to increase his knowledge of
geography, " wearing out his maps by constant reference to
them." He insisted, as I have said, on a perfect know
ledge of French, German, and Italian, but treated Spanish
rather as a counsel of perfection, pretty much as he would,
if writing now, have treated Russian.
He advised his son to make himself acquainted with all
the circumstances of every country in which he might be ;
to question every man whom he came across about the
things which he knew best, and liked most to talk — old
soldiers about war and fortification, priests about the
ceremonies and tenets of their respective churches, diplo
matists, and more especially the Venetian and Sardinian
agents (of whom Chesterfield had a particularly high
opinion), about political affairs. Nor did the old states
man fall into the error which has been too common
amongst diplomatists, of thinking that commercial matters
were only fit for the attention of consuls. On the contrary,
he pressed Philip Stanhope to learn as much as he could
about them, by reading whatever he could find that was
really good, from Huet's treatise on the commerce of the
ancients to Sir Josiah Child's litde book, which might be
called, he says, the Grammar of Commerce. It is true that

r4 Chesterfield [1879
the mind of the teacher was full of the illusions that beset the
world before the days of Adam Smith ; but this did not arise
from any carelessness or want of interest in the subject.
During his son's residence at Leipzig, Chesterfield's
exhortations to the cultivation of good manners became
incessant. These exhortations — which occupy so large a
portion of the Letters as to have become associated with his
name to such a degree as to have entirely thrown into the
shade their most important features, and to have greatly
misled people as to their author's character, fall into three
categories. First come a series of precepts so elementary as to be
useless nowadays to any boys who have been decently
brought up, but which are curious enough as showing
how very low was the standard of manners in the middle
of the eighteenth century at our public schools and
universities. Secondly, we find a great multitude of injuncdons which
were extremely valuable for one who was to spend a great
part of his life in courts, as courts were during the " torrent's
smoothness" which preceded the Niagara of the French
Revolution. Many of them hold good at the present day,
many do not ; but it is unnecessary to dwell upon either.
They were the tools of Philip Stanhope's trade, but are too
technical to give any value to the book for general purposes
now.

i879l MAXIMS 15
Thirdly, we have a number of maxims which are, and
always will be, of great importance. I subjoin a very few of
these ; —
" In the case of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is
always thought as bad as the thief" (Letter cxxxiv.)
" A man of the world must, like the chameleon, be able to
take every different hue ; which is by no means a criminal or
abject, but a necessary complaisance, for it relates only to
manners, and not to morals." (Letter cxxxiv.)
" Cautiously avoid talking of either your own or other
people's domestic affairs. Yours are nothing to them, but
tedious ; theirs are nothing to you. The subject is a tender
one ; and it is odds but you touch somebody or other's sore
place : for, in this case there is no trusting to specious appear
ances ; which may be, and often are, so contrary to the real
situations of things that, with the best intentions in the world,
one often blunders disagreeably." (Letter cxxxv.)
" The scholar, without good breeding, is a pedant ; the
philosopher, a cynic ; the soldier, a brute ; and every man dis
agreeable." (Letter xcvi.)
" There are two sorts of good company ; one which is called
the beau monde, and consists of those people who have the lead
in courts, and in the gay part of life ; the other consists of those
who are distinguished by some peculiar merit, or who excel in
some particular and valuable art or science. For my own part,
I used to think myself in company as much above me, when I
was with Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, as if I had been with all
the princes in Europe." (Letter xcvi.)
" All general reflections, upon nations and societies, are the
trite, threadbare jokes of those who set up for wit without
having any, and so have recourse to common-place." (Letter
Ixxviii.)

l6 CHESTERFIELD [1879
" Company is a republic too jealous of its liberties to suffer a
dictator even for a quarter of an hour.''^ (Letter cc.)
"Good breeding carries along with it a dignity that is
respected by the most petulant. Ill-breeding invites and
authorizes the familiarity of the most timid. No man ever said
a pert thing to the Duke of Marlborough. No man ever said
a civil one (though many a flattering one) to Sir Robert Walpole."
(iv. 304.)
" When the old clipped money was called in for a new coin
age in King William's time, to prevent the like for the future,
they stamped on the edges of the crown pieces these words,
et Decus et Tutamen. That is exactly the case of good breed
ing." (iv. 304.)
There is not a shadow of foundation for the idea that the
manner which found favour with Chesterfield was an over-
elaborate or affected one. That Dr. Johnson should have
considered it so to be is natural enough, but as a matter of
fact it was simply the kind of manner which is the usual
outcome of good-feeling, a strong desire to please, and a
wide acquaintance with men and things.
The objects of his supreme horror and aversion were the
young Englishmen who were sent to travel abroad at twenty,
"but who in truth stayed at home all the while, for, being
¦" It is curious to compare Chesterfield's idea of conversation with that
of Dr. Johnson. To the latter conversation was a gladiatorial combat,
in which he succeeded best who showed the greatest skill in fence com
bined with the strongest sinews. To the former it was either a means
of adding to one's knowledge, or a harmless relaxation from business,
in which he succeeded best who gave to his companions the greatest
amount of pleasure,

1879] MANNERS 17
very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the
languages, they go into no foreign company — at least, none
good." Of these he has given a number of sketches, as in
Letters cl., clxi., etc., etc.
The kind of manner which Chesterfield approved, has
been approved ever since, and will be approved to the end
of time, by all competent judges. I do not know that it
has ever been better described, than by a man who was the
very antithesis of Chesterfield, in the warmth of his feelings,
the loftiness of his ideal, and the depth of his enthusiasm.
In a letter marked by all that curious felicity of style which
received and deserved the enthusiastic praise of Monta
lembert, Albert de la Ferronays wrote : ^ —
" Quant k I'^legance, je me fie k toi et je suis sur que tu as
celle que tu sais, celle que j'aime, ce bon gout cosmopolite qui
n'est d'aucun pays et qui est de tous : un cachet etranger, ni
italien, ni franqais, ni espagnol, mais de tout un peu, de rien en
entier ; une tournure h. part, une mise k part, un parfum h part :
tu me comprends, n'est-ce pas ?"
The reason why Chesterfield so constandy referred to
the subject of manners was, that they were Philip Stanhope's
weak point. AU his father's efforts never succeeded in
making him other than what he was born, a very uncouth
and clumsy person. Even Mr. Harte, who was much
attached to him, and who was himself as unfortunate,
^ In a letter from Korsen to his sister, who later became the mother
of the great Catholic orator. Count Albert de Mun.
VOL. I. C

i8 CHESTERFIELD [1879
admitted that Stanhope wanted nothing except good
manners, but that the want of them, considering his
destination, was a fatal one.
The best as well as the most numerous of Chesterfield's
maxims refer much more to the conduct of life than to
manners, understood in their narrower sense.
Such are the following :—
"I would wish you to be a Corinthian edifice, upon a Tuscan
foundation ; the latter having the utmost strength and solidity
to support, and the former all possible ornaments to decorate."
(Letter clvi.)
" Whoever is in a hurry, shows that the thing he is about is
too big for him. Haste and hurry are very different things."
(Letter civiii).
" Tout brillant qui ne resulte pas de la solidite et de la
justesse de la pensee, n'est qu'un faux brillant. Le mot Italien
sur le diamant est bien vrai k cet egard, quanto piii sodezza,
tanto pill splendore.'' (Letter ccv. — in French.)
" Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and
see things ; and the rest of the day go and see people." (Letter
ccxlvi.)
' "The political reflecdons (in the Memoir of Cardinal de
Retz), which are most of them printed in italics, are the
justest that ever I met with ; they are not the laboured re
flections of a systematical closet politician, who, without the
least experience of business, sits at home and writes maxims ;
but they are the reflections which a great and able man
formed, from long experience and practice in great business.
They are true conclusions drawn from facts, not from specula
tions.'' (Letter cxiii.)

1879] THE CONDUCT OF LIFE 19
"A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men ; mystery
is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones." (iv. 298.)
" A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have
nothing told to him." (iv. 298.)
" When a man of sense happens to be in that disagreeable
situation, in which he is obliged to ask himself more than
once, What shall I do? he will answer himself. Nothing.
When his reason points out to him no good way, or at least
no way less bad than another, he will stop short and wait for
light. A little busy mind runs on at all events, must be
doing ; and, like a blind horse, fears no dangers, because he
sees none. Ilfaut savoir s'e?inuyer. (i\'. 299.)
" Patience is a most necessary qualification for business ;
many a man would rather you heard his story than granted
his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable
demands of the petulant unmoved, and the tedious details of
the dull untired. That is the least price that a man must
pay for a high station.'' (iv. 299.)
" In business, an elegant simplicity, the result of care, not
of labour, is required. Business must be well, not affectedly
dressed ; but by no means negligently. Let your first atten
tion be to clearness, and read every paragraph after you
have written it, in the critical view of discovering whether it
is possible that any one man can mistake the true sense of
it, and correct it accordingly." (Letter ccxxxiii.)
"Lay aside the best book whenever you can go into the
best company; depend upon it you change for the better."
(Letter ccxlviii.)
" Trivial futile books swarm and buzz about one every day ;
flap them away, they have no sting." (Letter ccxlviii.)
"Common sense (which in truth is very uncommon) is the
best sense I know of: abide by it; it will counsel you best."
(Letter cxxxii.)

20 CHESTERFIELD [i879
"The height of abilities is, to have volto sciolto s.nApensieri
stretti ; that is, a frank, open, and ingenuous exterior, with a
prudent and reserved interior." (Letter cxxxiv.)
"Young as you are, I hope you are in haste to live ; by
living, I mean living with lustre and honour to yourself, with
utility to society ; doing what may deserve to be written, or
writing what may deserve to be read : I should wish both."
(Letter clxxxvii.)
From Leipzig young Stanhope went with his tutor to
the Courts of Dresden, Berlin, and Vienna, whence they
passed into Italy. While in that country he was
encouraged by his father to pay a fair amount of attention
to arts and antiquities ; although, even there, history,
languages, and society were to be his chief care. His
Murray, by the way, was to be Alberti, a work " from
whence I am assured," says Chesterfield, " that Mr. Addison,
to save himself trouble, has taken most of his remarks and
classical references."
After leaving Italy, tutor and pupil travelled by slow
journeys to Paris whence Mr. Harte returned to England,
but his late charge remained, devoting himself, or being
supposed to devote himself, not apparently with any great
success, to his " exercises."
The exercises on which Chesterfield insisted were riding,
fencing, and dancing. It is odd that in the case of a
person who was to move so much about the world as Philip
Stanhope, he should not have added swimming. For field-

i879] FIELD SPORTS 21
sports he had the most hearty contempt, and avowed it in a
manner which seems strange when we think what a large
place they now fill in the lives of men of his class in
England. In Letter cxxiv. he says : —
" All gaming, field-sports, and such sort of amusements,
where neither the understanding nor the senses have the least
share, I look upon as frivolous, and as the resources of little
minds, who either do not think or do not love to think."
Again, in Letter cxlviu., we find these words : — •
" .Sottish drinking, indiscriminate gluttony, driving coaches,
rustic sports such as fox-chases, horse-races, &c., are, in my
opinion, infinitely below the honest and industrious professions
of a tailor and a shoemaker, which are said to deroger."
Again, in Letter ccxxx., Chesterfield remarks : —
" The poor beasts here are pursued and run down by much
greater beasts than themselves ; the true British fox-hunter is
most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to the
country which no part of the globe produces."
Possibly the brilliant way in which hunting is now
managed in this country might have induced him
to modify his language ; but he would, it can hardly
be doubted, have sympathised with him who said :
" England is the only country on the face of the earth
where you are thought to have given a sufficient account of
a gentleman of fortune and position, and one creditable to

22 CHESTERFIELD [1879
the person spoken of, if you say, 'He is a Master of
Hounds.'" It is interesting to speculate as to what he would have
thought of the interest excited, not in the crowd, but
amongst people of his own rank, by the Boat Race, or the
Public Schools Match at Lord's. The cricket of his day
he classes with pitch-farthing, evidently considering both as
very good games for litde boys. Eight-oared boat-racing
had not broken out in those times.
During Stanhope's residence in Paris, his father directed
him to see all the best forms of society, to go much to
Court and to the foreign ambassadors, to frequent as much
as he was allowed to do the society of the more eminent
men of letters, Montesquieu, Fontenelle, and the like. He
was also to pay much attention to the courts of justice, and
the general principles of the French law.
After a short visit to England, the young man returned
to Paris, where he continued his education, and worked
as a supernumerary attache at the Embassy, under Lord
Albemarle. After that he passed into Germany, and
went eventually to Hanover, in the suite of the Duke
of Newcastle.
" It is your first crisis," writes his father ; " the character
which you acquire there will, more or less, be that which will
abide by you for the rest of your life. You will be tried and
judged there, not as a boy, but as a man ; and from that

t879] MANY ENGLISHMEN 23
moment there is no appeal for character : it is fixed. To form
that character advantageously you have three objects particu
larly to attend to ; your character as a man of morality, truth,
and honour ; your knowledge in the objects of your destination,
as a man of business ; and your engaging and insinuating
address, air, and manners, as a courtier ; the sure and only steps
to favour. Merit at Courts, without favour, will do little or
nothing ; favour, without merit, will do a great deal ; but
favour and merit together will do everything." (Letter ccl.)
Stanhope was now at the age when most boys are on
the eve of leaving school. About a year afterwards his
father wrote to him as follows : —
"You are now but nineteen, an age at which most of your
countrymen are illiberally getting drunk on port, at the
University. You have greatly got the start of them in learning ;
and if you can get the start of them in the knowledge and
manners of the world, you may be very sure of outrunning them
in Court and Parliament, as you set out so much earlier than
they. They generally begin but to see the world at one-and-
twenty ; you will by that age have seen all Europe. They set
out upon their travels unhcked cubs ; and in their travels
they only lick one another, for they seldom go into any other
company. They know nothing but the English world, and the
worst part of that too, and generally very little of any but the
English language ; and they come home at three- or four-and-
twenty, refined and polished (as is said in one of Congreve's
plays) like Dutch skippers from a whale-fishing. The care
which has been taken of you (to do you justice), the care you
have taken of yourself, has left you, at the age of nineteen only,
nothing to acquire but the knowledge of the world, manners,
address, and those exterior accomplishments. But they are

24

CHESTERFIELD [1879

great and necessary acquisitions, to those who have sense
enough to know their true value ; and your getting them before
you are one-and-twenty, and before you enter upon the active
and shining scene of life, will give you such an advantage over
all your contemporaries, that they cannot overtake you ; they
must be distanced." (Letter cclxiv.)
The reader who has accompanied me thus far will have
seen that Chesterfield was not easily satisfied in the matter
of solid acquirements, and the following passage will im
press that fact even more firmly on his mind.
In a letter written to Stanhope, when he was only
seventeen, his father says : —
" When I cast up your account as it now stands, I rejoice to
see the balance so much in your favour ; and that the kerns per
contra are so few, and of such a nature, that they may be very
easily cancelled. By way of debtor and creditor, it stands
thus : Creditor, by French. Debtor, to English.
German. Enunciation.
Italian. Manners.
Latin.Greek. Logic.
Ethics.History.
j Naturre.
Jus < Gentium.
I Publicum.
This my dear friend, is a very true account, and a very encourag
ing one for you. A man who owes so little, can clear it off in a
very little time, and if he is a prudent man will ; whereas a man

i879] LITERATURE 25
who by long negligence owes a great deal, despairs of ever
being able to pay ; and therefore never looks into his accounts
at all." (Letter cxcvii.)
It is not quite clear what Chesterfield meant by Ethics
and Logic, but it is hardly probable that Stanhope had
devoted any great amount of attention to either study.
The other items on the creditor side, however, imply a
large amount of acquisition for a boy of seventeen. As a
matter of fact, thanks to the abominable arrangements of
our schools and colleges, a far humbler curriculum than
that which Philip Stanhope had passed through at seven
teen, is not finished till two- or three-and-twenty, even by
clever young men. And there is no reason to suppose that
Philip Stanhope was clever. He was brought up on a
plan which was relatively good, under excellent teachers ;
that was all the mystery.
Now, we should be well content, in the case of a
man who desired to arrive at the highest political success,
if general education could be finished by one- or two-and-
twenty. The literature that ought to be read early, even if
attention is only given to the very best books in each
language, has enormously increased since Chesterfield's
day; so have the mass and complication of modern
history, and time must be found for the attainment
of sound general ideas with reference to the elements of
natural science, political economy, and our own municipal
VOL. I. D

26 CHESTERFIELD [1879
law. All this might well cover the whole period before
one- or two-and-twenty, even if time were gained by begin
ning the classics late, abandoning Latin composition, and
throwing overboard everything now taught which could not
successfully re-state the reasons of its existence.
A man, however, who aimed at the highest political
success for his son, would not be satisfied without giving
him a special preparation for politics, after his general
education was complete. The range over which the
modern statesman's knowledge must extend is far greater
than that which was sufficient in the middle of the last
century. A modern English statesman who limited his
views as completely to Europe as Chesterfield very
properly did, would inevitably be a very bad statesman.
Nearly the whole of our existing colonial empire, and
nearly the whole of our Indian Empire, have grown up
since those days. In one of his later letters Chesterfield
just mentions Clive, but, naturally, without having the
faintest inkling of the way in which the deeds of the
"bright-eyed young adventurer'' would react upon and
complicate our European position. An English statesman
must in these days, if he would be anything but a blind
guide, extend his view over the whole world. To him,
more than to anybody else, apply the wise words of
M. Laffitte, in his remarkable, and surely not sufficiently
well-known book, Les grands types de VHumanM : —

i879] THE EAST AND THE WEST 27
" Les chefs europdens, il y a encore deux si^cles, n'avaient
gu^re k porter leur regards au delk de I'Occident. C'est tout au
plus si la Turquie, de temps k autre, venait leur rappeler qu'il
existait des orientaux. Toute la diplomatie se pratiquait entre
populations qui s'etaient elevdes ensemble, qui avaient contribu^
toutes, bien qu'k des degr^s divers, k fonder une meme civilisa
tion, qui possedaient une croyance commune, dont les moeurs
et les lois n'etaient point trop differentes. Mais aujourd'hui
I'homme d'etat doit porter dans sa tete la plan^te enti^re.
L'Occident n'est qu'un point, I'Afrique et I'Asie I'inquifetent
autant et plus qu'une partie quelconque de la vieille Europe ; il
faut conclure des trait^s avec les peuples de l'e.xtreme Orient ;
il faut savoir ce qui se passe k P^kin, k Jeddo, k Calcutta, ou k
Benares. Comment cultiver ces relations, nouer ces alliances,
gouverner en un mot, si I'on ignore ces populations, si I'on
n'appr^cie pas k leur valeur les civilisations qu'elles ont
constitutes ? Le temps oii I'on traitait de barbares ou
d'imbeciles tout ce qui n'etait pas chretien est definitivement
pa.ss6." If, then, some knowledge of India and other Asiatic
countries, together with some acquaintance with the
British colonies, must be added to those subjects on which
Chesterfield insisted, it is evident that we want more
time. But the two great subjects we have mentioned are
far indeed from exhausting the list of new requirements.
The relations not only of the states of the Old World, but
of those of the New, have become part of the knowledge
which a man who destined his son for a pohtical career,
with the hopes which Chesterfield kept before his mind,
would naturally desire him to possess.

28 CHESTERFIELD 1879
If, however, more time is required for preparation, more
is available. It has been seen that young Stanhope was
already beginning the world at nineteen. He had, however,
two advantages which even the sons of the greatest
magnates cannot now command. His father could put
him in the House of Commons as soon as he pleased, and
could keep him in it while he fulfilled diplomatic functions
abroad, only coming home to take part in its proceedings
from time to time, at the call of the Government of the
day, or as suited his own convenience, so that his political
education for the highest posts was really being continued
for a long time in the best possible way.
Few, however, are those who have the good fortune to
get even into the House of Commons in these days at one-
or at five-and-twenty ; while no one finds himself at either
of those ages both a legislator and a diplomatist. Now, too,
that the custom of allowing ministers and ambassadors to
attach persons, in whom they take an interest, to their
legations or embassies has ceased to exist,i and that private
secretaryships are given chiefly to members of the
permanent Civil Service, the chance of young men who are
preparing for political life getting any training in business of
the highest and widest kind is much diminished. The
best substitute for it, which circumstances permit, is
probably that which so many take to, namely, writing in
' Happily this is no longer the case (1902).

1 879] TRAINING FOR STATESMANSHIP 29
newspapers and periodicals. But that, although it has
many advantages, does not call into play the same
faculties, and is subject to many drawbacks. Inconvenient,
however, as it is that young men should have so few
opportunities of being trained to statesmanship, it is in the
nature of things, and there is not the slightest reason to
suppose that, until the wealthy take the trouble really to
train their sons for a polidcal career, it will ever be other
wise. Constituencies naturally look out for a member who
they think will represent them well when first elected, and
cannot, except in rare cases, be expected to speculate on
what he may become in a dozen years.
After some further travelling in Germany, Stanhope
returned to England, and took his seat in the House of
Commons. His father had been long turning his attention
in that direction, for the House of Commons was then,
much more even than it is now, the natural road to be
taken by any one who, not born a peer, wished to arrive
at a great position in the State. That assembly is doubtless
much changed and improved since the day when so keen
an observer as Chesterfield could write as follows : —
" To bring this directly to you ; know that no man can make
a figure in this country but by Parliament. Your fate depends
upon your success there as a speaker ; and, take my word for it,
that success turns much more upon manner than matter. Mr.
Pitt, and Mr. Murray, the Solicitor-General, uncle to Lord
Stormont, are beyond comparison the best speakers ; why ?

30 CHESTERFIELD [1879
only because they are the best orators. They alone can
influence or quiet the House ; they alone are so attended to, in
that numerous and noisy assembly, that you might hear a pin
fall while either of them is speaking. Is it that their matter is
better, or their arguments stronger, than other people's ? Does
the House expect extraordinary informations from them ? Not
in the least ; but the House expects pleasure from them, and
therefore attends ; finds it, and therefore approves." (Letter
ccxi.) " The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one, too,
is short and easy. Take of common sense quantum sufficit, add
a little application to the rules and orders of the House, throw
obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a
large quantity of purity, correctness, and elegancy of style.''
(Letter cclxxii.)
It may be that no orator of our day has equalled the
elder Pitt in his highest flights, but good speaking, of the
kind just below the highest, has increased so much, that a
man who was satisfied with the amount and kind of
exceUence which Chesterfield prescribed would not stand
out from his fellows enough to obtain any great name.
Again, the vast variety of business which the House of
Commons has accumulated in its own hands requires for
its proper transaction a far greater amount of special know
ledge than was requisite to meet the comparatively simple
exigencies of Chesterfield's day, and the men who have
that special knowledge are respectfully hstened to, even
when they speak detestably.
Still, after all allowance has been made for the change of

i879] THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 31
circumstances, there remains a great deal of truth in
Chesterfield's remarks. A musical well-managed voice, and
a graceful manner of speaking, go very much further with
the House of Commons than is at all generally supposed by
those who are not intimately acquainted with it. Of
course, it would be easy to mention men on both sides of
politics who have had very great success in spite of the
possession of almost every defect against which Chester
field warned his correspondent ; but I suppose there are
few men who have been long familiar with it, who would
not say that adequate abilities accompanied by the sort of
charm which a man like the late Lord Herbert had in so
supreme a degree, would advance a man in the House of
Commons more quickly than the most commanding genius,
unaccompanied by that charm.
The letters which can properly be cahed educational end
with that of 27th November 1754, number cclxxix., in
the fourth volume, and those which extend from 1756
to Philip Stanhope's death, in 1768, are at once of less
interest, and far fewer in number.
Chesterfield's labours turned out only very partially
successful, but they failed precisely where he expected them
to fail. In 1748, he had written to his son: "I will tell
you, sincerely, my hopes and fears concerning you. I
think you will be a good scholar, and that you will acquire
a considerable stock of knowledge of various kinds : but I

32 CHESTERFIELD [1879
fear that you neglect what are caUed htUe, though in truth
they are very material things ; I mean gentleness of manners,
an engaging address, and an insinuating behaviour; they
are real and solid advantages, and none but those who do
not know the world treat them as trifles. I am told that
you speak very quick and not distinctly ; this is a most un
graceful and disagreeable trick, which you know I have told
you of a thousand times ; pray attend carefully to the correc
tion of it. An agreeable and distinct manner of speaking
adds greatly to the matter ; and I have known many a very
good speech unregarded, upon account of the disagreeable
manner in which it has been delivered, and many an
indifferent one applauded, for the contrary reason." (Letter
cxv.) This was exactly what happened. Philip Stanhope
turned out an extremely well-informed, nay, learned man ;
but he showed no aptitude whatever for oratory, all but
breaking down in his maiden speech, while he was quite
remarkable for the want of those manners of which his
father had said to him, very early in the day, that "though
the last, and it may be the least ingredient of merit," they
were, however, "very far from being useless in its com
position." It would have been vain to argue in favour of Chester
field's method from the accident of its having succeeded in
the case of Philip Stanhope, and it is equally vain to argue

i879] LES CLASSES DIRIGEANTES

33

against it from the accident of its having partially failed
with him. It must be judged on its own merits, but it
would be very interesting to learn from some critic who,
like Chesterfield, had directed great affairs, what, if any, are
its weak points, other than those which, however important,
are not of its essence, and to which I have pointedly called
attention at the outset of these remarks.
If Chesterfield's method, with the large modifications
which have been suggested, is not the best educadon for a
statesman before he is old enough to take part in polidcs,
then which is the best ?
That is a question which les classes dirigeantes in all
countries had better ask and answer wisely, if they are not
ere long to be contemptuously thrust aside by the new
social strata as les classes digerantes. Let them show that
they are fit to lead, and they will continue to do so for
many a long day, at least in England. They have wealth
and hereditary predisposition in their favour ; why should
they not add to these advantages a reasonable amount of
taking trouble ?
When every other avocation is beginning to discard mere
rule of thumb, perhaps a little more systematic training for
the most dignified of all avocations would not be wholly
amiss. From time to time some political genius appears
who seems so great that no training would have made him
greater. That, however, is probably an optical illusion,
VOL. I. E

34 CHESTERFIELD [1879
produced by the atmosphere of admiration through which
we gaze on him. Even in medicine we hear of wonderful
things being done by irregular practitioners. An orthodox
physician said disparagingly of one of these who was
attending a friend of mine ^ the other day, " Ce n'est pas un
medecin, c'est un guerisseur ! " We may smile at that, but
none the less do we usually prefer that our medical
attendants should have been educated for their profession.
' Jules Simon.

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD,
1847-1850
Our President,! whose will should be law to all of us,
having suggested that I shoirid contribute a short paper,
it has struck me that a few reminiscences of Oxford,
as I knew it, might not be altogether unacceptable, more
especially as the recently published Life of the" late
Master of BaUiol has drawn a good deal of attention
to the college of which I became a member, under his
auspices, half a century ago.
The Oxford of my undergraduate days was the old,
unreformed Oxford. It would be strange indeed if I
were to regret it, for I took an active though humble
part, by vote and voice in Parliament and elsewhere,
in altering it, almost from foundadon to summit. I
should, nevertheless, be the last to deny that it had
many charms.
^ Lord Reay, under whose guidance this Society, one of whose
objects is to bring together students of the French and Scottish Univer
sities, was first started.

36 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
The Oxford on which I looked for the first time as a
boy of sixteen, in the summer of 1845, was that which
was described by Matthew Arnold in one of the most
beautiful prose passages which that great poet — to me
the most sympathetic of all the singers who have lived
in our time — has left behind him.
" Beautiful city ! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
the fierce, intellectual life of our century, so serene !
" There are our young barbarians, all at play ! And yet,
steeped in sentiment as she is, spreading her gardens to the
moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchant
ments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal
of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty — in a word —
which is only truth seen from another side, nearer perhaps,
than all the science of Tubingen ! Adorable dreamer, whose
heart has been so romantic, who hast given thyself so
prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine,
only never to the Philistines ! Home of lost causes, and
forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible
loyalties ! What example could ever so inspire us to keep
down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so
save us from that bondage to which we are all so prone, that
bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on the
death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and
nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of
sight behind him — the bondage of ' was uns alle bandigt. Das
Gemeine ' ! She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly
drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son, for
she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers.
Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the
Philistines compared with the warfare which this queen of

1897] FIRST VISIT TO OXFORD 37
romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will
wage after we are gone ? "
My stay in Oxford on the occasion of my first visit was
a very brief one, and the incident of it which dwells
most in my mind is my having made, on a lovely June
morning, when the wild roses were in flower in the
hedges, the pilgrimage of Littlemore, whither the great
magician, who had so long riveted on himself and his
university so much of the attention of educated
England, had retired to meditate on the past and the
future. This reconnaissance of mine was made in the beginning
of the long vacation, when the colleges were all empty,
and I saw no one save Mr. Coxe, the very learned second
in command at the Bodleian Library, who showed me some
of the treasures under his charge.
Next year I returned to Oxford for about a fortnight,
a little earlier in the year, and saw something for the
first time of undergraduate life, the dominant idea of
which appeared to be, for the moment, that, as the
weather was extremely hot, and as the work of the term
was over, the whole duty of man consisted in drinking
through long straws the then recently introduced American
drink known as "sherry cobbler."
I was present at the ceremonies of the Commemoration,
which _ have been so often described; but almost the only

38 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
other event of any interest which I can recall, is hearing
a sermon of no particular note from Dr. Pusey, whom
the secession to Rome of the recluse of Littlemore,
in the autumn of the previous year, had left the
undisputed head of the High Church party in the
Anglican communion.
I returned to Oxford in the January of 1847, to read
with a tutor, and matriculated at Balliol on the 17th
March. It was a sufficiently absurd caprice of destiny
which took me thither. I ought to have gone to University
College, and have become the pupil of Arthur Stanley,
of all men then alive the one whom I should have most
liked to have had for my guide, philosopher, and friend.
I need not detail the circumstances which prevented this,
but it was no fault either of his or mine, and it was on
his recommendation that various formalities were waived,
and I became a commoner of Balliol.
Few incidents worthy of chronichng occurred during
this period, but I see I have noted a remarkable sermon
on Rev. iv. 6-8 by Jowett, which was preached on what
was known as Assize Sunday, in the presence of the
judges and the Bar of the Oxford circuit. I observe
that I entered in my diary at the time that it was
" admirable " ; but I beheve it excited a good deal of
remark amongst old-fashioned persons, who complained
of its containing "pantheistic views of the Apocalypse,"

i897] BALLIOL 39
whatever that may mean. I also heard about the same
time a sermon by Stanley on St. John, which was after
wards published, and helped, save the mark, to earn
for him the reputation of a heretic ! Times are changed !
it would now be thought as harmless a composition as
could well be dehvered from any pulpit.
I went into residence at Balliol on the 14th of October
1847. It was not then the beautiful college which it
now is. Most of the buildings which were then standing
belonged to a bad period, and one of them was, I re
member, irreverently but not infelicitously described as
resembling "a bad old inn." In spite of these dis
advantages, Balhol occupied the first place amongst
its sister societies, thanks chiefly to the reforms in
troduced by its very shrewd but equally eccentric
master. Dr. Richard Jenkyns.
The tutors were, for the most part, men of considerable
ability. Among them were Lake, who later became
Dean of Durham ; Temple, the present Archbishop
of Canterbury ; Lonsdale, whose chief function was
the delivery of lectures in chapel ; Riddell, who would,
if he had not died too soon for his fame and his
friends, have been one of the first Hellenists in England.
Last, but not least, there was Jowett, to whose special
care I was assigned. His Life, as I have already
mentioned, has been lately written ; but it may be

40 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
doubted whether his biographers have quite succeeded
in conveying to the outer world any adequate explana
tion of the extraordinary influence which he exerted,
and which increased through ever-widening circles during
the whole of his hfe. I should despair of succeeding
at all where they have not wholly succeeded, even if
I had been able to explain the phenomenon to myself
I saw him very frequently during the whole of my stay
at Oxford, and never had the shadow of a shade of a
difference with him. I never heard him say any of the
rather acrid things with which he has been credited ;
but, on the other hand, I cannot say that I gained very
much from him. The truth is, I did not care in the
least for any of the subjects in which he was interested,
save the liberalising of Anglican theology, while he cared
just as little for the subjects that chiefly attracted me ;
and yet^and yet — I too fell, to a great extent, under
the spell, and remain under it to this day. I suppose
it formed part of the atmosphere of the place, and that
it took hold of me without my being conscious of it.
The only definite thing I can point to are his addresses
delivered to his pupils the evening before they received
the Communion, which it was customary to do once a
term. One of these occupies the first place in the
collection of his sermons, pubhshed soon after his death.
I heard that delivered twice — once in the autumn of

i897] JOWETT

41

1847 and again in the May of 1850 — and I suppose
it would be difficult to address young men in a wiser
or better way. I attended a great many lectures by
him on St. Paul's episdes, but I cannot say that I
carried away anything from them of the shghtest value.
He was engaged at the dme in maturing his own ideas
for the work which he produced some years later, and
in which there is a great deal that is excellent; but it
is not to be compared for one moment, and stih less
were the primi pensieri on which it was founded, to
Renan's volume on St. Paul in the Origines du
Christianisme. Whatever may have been the use of occupying the
minds of young men destined for the priesthood with the
confused reasoning of that great man of action, whom the
Positivists grotesquely enough consider to have been the
founder of Christianity, but who might, not unjustly, be
described as the grandfather of Protestantism, it was an
odd training for men who were destined for the Bar, the
Senate, or other secular pursuits. I remember that, after
Jowett had been discoursing with infinite subtlety on the
meaning of the word "nomos," in St. Paul, one of these
remarked : " It appears to me that, according to Jowett,
' nomos ' has seven senses in St. Paul's writings — in the first,
it means God ; and in the seventh, it means the devil ! "
I ought to add, that Jowett gave me some good hints
VOL. I. F

42 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
about simplicity in writing. " No man of your age," he
said, " hardly any man of mine, ought to have a formed
style." To my thinking, he himself wrote better in Latin
than he did in his own tongue. It used to be a real
delight to hear him turn a passage of Ruskin, for example,
into Ciceronian prose. One of my companions at his Latin
prose lectures was a son of the great navigator Parry, who
died as Bishop of Dover, and who had a most happy knack
of Latin writing. Yet in every case, good as he was, he
was over-trumped by the lecturer.
If I were to add that some of Jowett's lectures on the
history of Greek philosophy, of which I only heard a very
few, appeared to me interesting, I should be at about the
end of all I can say.
The whole system of college lectures, as they were in
those days, was utterly bad — most of them indeed were
a cruel waste of time. Those of us who meant to work,
would have done much better if we had been reading
quietly in our rooms, under the general direction of the
tutors, rather than attending lectures, which were usually
lectures only in name, and followed the catechetical method
which is appropriate for schools, but very inappropriate for a
university. In my first term I made an effort to attend some of the
professorial as distinguished from college lectures. I went
to one of Cardwell's, the Professor of Ancient History, about

1897] LECTURES 43
Athens in the time of Socrates, and to several of Cramer's,
the Professor of Modern History, on the Thirty Years' War ;
but the hours, the examination system, and the whole
arrangement of the curriculum, made it so difficult to attend
professorial lectures, that I was soon obliged to leave them
out of my plan of study.
I have said that I did not get much good even from
Jowett's lectures, but I got more good from them than
from any others. I did a little elementary mathematics
with Temple, but that was not a subject in which I ever
had the slightest interest. I attended a lecture of Riddell's
on the Agamemnon of .^schylus, first-rate from the
point of view of the merely verbal scholar ; and I attended
many lectures on the Ethics of Aristotle, by a worthy
man long since dead, which might have been described by
the well-known lines —
" Mr. Parker made the case darker,
Which was dark enough without."
The same individual, however, introduced me to Polybius,
of whom I had never before read a line. That was a good
deed, which will, I trust, be counted to him for
righteousness. To return to Jowett. His real importance began after
I had left Oxford. The foundation of it was laid by his
extraordinary devotion to those pupils in whom he took a

44 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
special interest, and his unsparing pains in helping such
of those, lying outside his more intimate circle, as desired
his assistance in Latin and Greek composition. It was
advanced by the literary reputation which he gained by
his work on some of St. Paul's epistles, as well as by his
contribution to Essays and Reviews, while it was pro
digiously increased by the persecution to which he was
subjected during the "Sixties." I remember being asked
in a country-house, by one of his opponents, not foolisher
than a great many others, whether it was true that he used
to sit at his window gnashing his teeth as the men went to
chapel ! And a person of supreme political importance
talked hardly less absurdly to me about him.
I believe his popularity with the undergraduates rather
declined after he became Master of Balliol, and an
altogether prosperous person ; but his most enduring fame
will rest on what he did in that capacity. He was, I
apprehend, the greatest head of a college who ever lived,
but before he became so I had left Oxford for more than
twenty years, so I can only speak as a distant though
interested spectator.
I have somewhere seen it asserted that the year of
Revolution did not find much echo in Oxford. That
statement requires qualification. Some of my friends were
certainly very much interested ; and as for myself, I am
afraid the wars of 1848 and 1849 occupied my attention

1897] THE VEAR OF REVOLUTION 45
at least ten times as much as did those of Greece and Rome.
More especially was I fascinated with all the details of the
Hungarian struggle, thanks to the accident of my having
spent most of the summer of 1847 in various parts of the
Austrian empire. I have always thought myself singularly
fortunate in having walked across the old boat-bridge which
connected Pesth with Buda, and in having paid toll on the
same, as being a stranger, and therefore on a level with the
Alisera contribuens plebs, which alone paid taxes in that
land where the nobilis or freeman had so many privileges.
That took one back to a state of things not very dissimilar
in some respects to the Ancien Regime.
I copy a handbill which amused us in those days : —
" Liberty ! Equality ! Fraternity 1
" Citizen Academicians,
"The cry of Reform has been too long unheard. Our
Infatuated Rulers refused to listen to it. The term of their
tyranny is at length accomplished.
" The Vice-Chancellor has fled on horseback. The Proctors
have resigned their Usurped Authority. The Scouts have
fraternized with the Friends of Liberty.
"The University is no more. A Republican Lyceum will
henceforth diffuse light and civilization.
"The Hebdomadal Board is abolished. The Legislative
Powers will be entrusted to a General Convention of the whole
Lyceum. "A Provisional Government has been established. The

46 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
undersigned citizens have nobly devoted themselves to the task
of Administration. (Signed) Citizen Clough, President of the Executive
Co??imittee.
SEWELL.
BossOM (Operative).
John Conington.
Wrightson (Queen's).
" Floreat Lyceum."
Clough was, of course, the poet, whose early death closed
a career which had been at its outset of such transcendent
promise. Conington was the great Latinist, who began as
a Radical, to end as a rather extreme Conservative in
Church if not also in State. Sewell was the very clever
and extremely silly Anglican leader, of whose contribu
tions to the Quarterly Lockhart used to say : " They teach
nothing, they mean nothing, they are nothing — but they go
down like bottled velvet." He too it was who, when he
stopped half-way and did not go over to Rome with the
chiefs of his party, had turned against him his passion for
most unscientific and absurd derivations, by its being said
that his name was derived from Suillus, a little pig, because
he did not go the whole hog ! I am not sure that there is
any classical authority for the word suillus; if not, the
statement is all the better as an imitation of his wild work
with etymology. He was brother of Miss Sewell, whose
writings, the Experience of Life, Amy Herbert, and the

1897] FENCING AND WALKS 47
rest, were so great a boon to the young of the " Forties "
and " Fifties.'' Bossom was, if my memory serves me right,
a very fat porter at Brazenose.
The athletic craze, which has done not a little to
counteract the good influences so potent at Oxford since
the beginning of 1851, was not an important element in the
Oxford which I knew. There was plenty of amusement of
various kinds— many men, indeed, did nothing but amuse
themselves — but their pursuits were manly, not boyish.
FootbaU and the like had been left behind at school by all
save a very few. Boating was the favourite pastime of the
great majority, and a very good one, save for those who
took to racing, and often, I am afraid, suffered in after-life
from over-exertion. My own amusements were fencing and
walks. Archibald Maclaren, who was our via'itre d^armes,
had been trained in the schools of Bertrand and Raimondi.
He was an excellent fencer, had seen a good deal of French
life, and was something of a poet. Towards the middle of
the " Fifties " he wrote a book called The Fairy Family,
which contained some pleasant verse. From my walks
I obtained not only a great deal of pleasure, but much
more instruction than I did from all the college lectures
I attended. The real advantage indeed of a residence in Oxford, as
it was from 1847 to 1850, consisted, it seems to me, almost
wholly in the benefits one gained by the constant intercourse

48 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
with men of ability about one's own age or a little older.
From the first moment I went into residence I deliberately
laid myself out to know as many of these as possible. It
was not till long years afterwards that I read the words of
that wisest of the children of men, Balthasar Gracian,
" Make teachers of your friends " ; but I can most assuredly
claim the merit of having been his unconscious disciple
during all the time I spent on the banks of the Isis.
Looking back to my diary for the autumn of 1847, I see
that I had already then made the acquaintance of several
men whom it was a great privilege to know, in addition to
having renewed a boyish friendship, formed in Edinburgh
many years before, with George Boyle, later the Dean of
Salisbury, whose delightful Recollections have been so
widely read. Prominent amongst these men was Patteson,
who was murdered in the South Seas, when Bishop of
Melanesia, and who was an ideal specimen of the very best
results of Anglican teaching; and another with whom I
became gradually very intimate was Henry Smith, decidedly
in my judgment the most remarkable man who has made
Oxford his home during the last half-century. I do not
think Jowett at all exaggerated his merits, in the following
extract from a communication which he sent me when I
was Governor of Madras : —
" Since I received your letter, you and I have lost one of our
dearest friends — to me, one whose loss makes life sensibly

i897] HENRY SMITH

49

different. I have thought a good deal about him since his
death, and he seems to me, perhaps, the most remarkable man
I have ever known. He was such an extraordinary combination
of the speculative and the practical, and also of abandon and
self-control, of the philosopher and the man of the world, also
of kindness, with a sort of playful cynicism, as well as of other
opposite qualities. In practical life his great aim was to keep
people together, which he accomplished with the most marvellous
versatility. He was very little known, considering his real
eminence ; but in the chorus which has burst forth since his
death, I find competent judges speaking of him and Gauss as
the two greatest mathematicians of the century. We rejoiced
in his light for a season ! "
It would be impossible, however, to enumerate all the
men from whom I learned a great deal at Oxford in tete-a-
tete walks, and I must pass on to other subjects.
The Union, as the great Debating Society is called, is
an excellent institution. I only knew one man who did
what I think many would have done wisely to do, treated
it, that is to say, as the main object of his undergraduate
life, considering his regular college work as a mere unim
portant detail. This was KnatchbuU Hugessen, with whom
I afterwards sat in the House of Commons for many years,
and of whose political course I could not sometimes entirely
approve ; but who owed to his devotion to the Union that
readiness of speech which gave him his first start in the
Lower, and which, if all tales be true, rather over-mastered
its possessor in the Upper House. In those days he was a
VOL. 1. G

50 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
Tory of the Tories, Protectionist, and what not. The best
speaker, however, of my day was Lomer of Oriel, a strong
Liberal, who died early.
I myself spoke but rarely, and invariably upon foreign
or Indian questions, which then, as always, interested me
more than any others. My first speech was delivered in
support of a motion by Morier, who died as ambassador at
St. Petersburg, in favour of diplomatic relations with
Rome. Looking back at sixty-eight upon my life at eighteen,
I can see that a great deal of my energy was misdirected.
I find numerous such entries as this : — " 19th October 1847.
— Gave in some of the Lotus-eaters (Latin hexameters) and
a piece of Latin prose to Jowett.'' A similar entry on the
23rd October. A similar one on the 6th November. On
the 24th, " took Greek iambics to Jowett,'' and so on, and
so on. For all the direct or indirect good I got for the
purposes of life by such exercises, it seems to me I might
just as well have been playing bowls or doing worsted-work.
Our reading, too, for the final examination was not very
profitable. The following was the list of books which
along with Logic I took up for my degree: Aristode's
Ethics, Aristotle's Politics, Butler's Sermons, Thucydides,
Herodotus, the First Decade of Livy, the Histories of
Tacitus ; Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Sophocles ; Four Plays
of yEschylus, the Trilogy, and the PerscR ; Four

1897] FAILURE OF EYESIGHT 51
Plays of Aristophanes, the Birds, Frogs, Knights, and
Acharnians. "Very excellent books too," some one wih say; but then
the more important portions of them all — save the first
three — I had read, for the most part, at school ; I had passed
when I went to Oxford through a very sufficient classical
curriculum, and should have done infinitely better for my
self if I had given the whole of my time there to modern
studies. That, however, was perfectly out of the question.
The University in those days recognised nothing save
classics and mathematics. Modern languages, science, and
the other studies, which are now encouraged, found no place
whatever in its examinations. A man who "otiosely
imbibed modern literature," to use the phrase of a well-
known tutor of those times, instead of working for the
regular examinations, would have been either set down as a
mere idler, or have been ill-looked upon at such a college as
Balhol. During my first year I quite fell into the way of the
place, and worked pretty steadily, with a view to going in
for high honours at the end of my course. A very serious
eye complaint, by which I was attacked in the summer of
1848, and from which I have suffered ever since, made that
impossible, and I determined eventually to go into the
schools as soon as possible, taking what honours I could.
By making pretty extensive use of the eyes of others I

52 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
secured a second, and got through a reasonable amount —
if not of reading, yet of hearing — outside the recognised
limits of academic study.
The Oxford of the last three years of the fifth decade of
this century will be characterised by the future historian
of the University as lying mid-way between two very
interesting periods. The first fervour of the movement of
1833 had exhausted itself The most brilliant men whom
it had brought to the front — Newman, Faber, and W. G.
Ward — had found in 1845 or 1846 their natural place in
the bosom of the Roman Church.
The activity of those of their disciples who did not follow
them over the Rubicon had been transferred to London
and other large towns, or to country parsonages. The
Liberal Party, on the other hand, though growing gradually
stronger, was not yet strong enough to do very great things.
I cast in my lot with it at the Union and elsewhere from
the first moment I went up ; but I had friends also in the
opposite camp, and my Oxford may be said to have been
a compound of about one-third of the Lyra Apostolica,
to two-thirds of Clough, Stanley, and Matthew Arnold.
The publication of J. A. Froude's Shadows of the Cloud
was one of the incidents of my first term.
It takes me a long way back to think that the opinions
propounded in that book, or in the Nemesis of Faith,
which appeared a year or so later — I do not speak of their

1897] REFORMS AND DRAWBACKS 53
scandalous setting — should have made such a sensation as
they did. We have wandered pretty far since then ; and
no doubt in a hundred ways Oxford has improved. The
burden of clericalism, which lay so heavy upon it from 1830
to the end of 1850, has been hfted. Nevertheless there is
a great deal of reform, and perhaps some wise reaction, still
to be accomplished, though I fear it must be preceded by
a radical change in the instruction given in our schools. I
confess I have my doubts whether the great influx into the
University of men belonging to classes different from those
which frequented it fifty years since has been of much
advantage. Of course it is an excellent thing that men of
great ability, born in the humbler ranks, should have an
opportunity afforded them through University foundations
to play at the gold instead of the silver or copper tables of
Ufe. That is good for them, and good for the State ; but
surely it is manifest folly to draw to the University large
numbers of men who have not great ability, but who learn
there the works and ways of their social superiors, when
they ought to be acquiring the kind of knowledge which
might enable them to earn their living, and to be useful
members of society. I read lately an article in the Fort
nightly Review, entitled " Our Gentlemanly Failures," which
was full of wisdom, and put the point I am now making
exceedingly well. Every year adds to the number of
"nice young men," quite well-behaved, not wholly ignorant

54 SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD [1897
of Latin and Greek, excellent cricketers, and all the rest of
it ; but perfectly useless, condemned to stand all the day
idle because no man has hired them, and that for the very
sufficient reason that they cannot do anything better than
anybody else. I think I can best put my view by saying
that I am all in favour of making ladders by which gifted
youths may climb from obscurity to the high places of
learning ; but quite opposed to making inclined planes, by
which youths, not gifted above their fellows, may easily
proceed a little way up, only to look round in a bewildered
way asking, " Why have we come here, and what shall we
do next ? "
I began these remarks, however, not with a view to
discuss the Oxford of 1897, which I freely admit to be on
the whole immensely superior to my Oxford, but to put
together a few stray observations about the Oxford of 1847
and the years immediately following it ; an Oxford which is
as dead as is the whole state of things that existed in
Western Europe on that memorable day when the first shot
was fired before the Hotel Guizot.

SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS"
In the month of December i860. Count Cavour, after
speaking very highly of the late Mr. Senior, added : " But
since he has taken to keeping a kind of journal, he has
neglected more serious things." The remark, which was
made to the present writer, struck him as showing how little
the great Italo-Genevese, whose personal acquaintance with
England was much slighter than many people suppose,
reahy knew about us and our deficiencies. Mr. Senior was
no doubt an excellent political economist, and served the
public well in many ways, but the other things which he
did were things which many could do well, whereas no man
of his generation evinced any aptitude for keeping up a con
stant connection between the most intelligent portion of
French and English society, by carefully reporting the con
versations of the first for the benefit of the second. His
manuscript journal remained, during his hfe, in what our
neighbours call a demi-jour de publicite, but none the less
did they exercise considerable influence in forming the
65

56 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
opinions of persons who could give effect to their opinions.
Since Mr. Senior's death, his journals have for the most part
reposed upon their shelves, but sufficient changes have
occurred to entitle his daughter to lay a small portion of the
valuable materials which she possesses before a wider
public. A few years hence many Conversations may see the
light, which it would not now be proper to publish; but
what is at present given to us is so interesting that it
may well afford occupation to the reader for some time
to come.i
It has often been said by persons who had access to Mr.
Senior's journals, that their value was much diminished by
the fact that his foreign friends knew that their conversation
would be reported, and by their having an opportunity of
correcting the manuscript before it was circulated. That is
true to some extent, but not to a very great extent. Most
men usually say what they think, only putting on a mask
occasionally ; and having heard many of the people whom
Mr. Senior used to see, talk, on many occasions, when they
were perfectly at their ease, I can afifirm that he very
well represented the general drift of what they were in
the habit of saying. A better founded criticism is that
of some other persons, who point out that Mr. Senior
had little dramatic power, and that all the sayings of his
' Many more volumes of the Conversations have been published
•ince — all interesting.

i878] THIERS 57
friends have passed through the alembic of his own mind,
thereby losing a good deal in point and briUiancy. That
is true enough, but Mr. Senior's object in recording the
conversations which he heard was rather political than
hterary, and it is as a contribution to political history
that the book, of which I am about to speak, should be
regarded. One of the most important parts of it, and the first
to which I shall call attention, consists of a series of
lectures, " privatissima " as they would have been called
in Berlin, delivered by M. Thiers upon his own history,
of which Mr. Senior gives the following account : —
"London, March 8, 1852. — During the last two months I have
seen much of M. Thiers. Allusions are often made to his
political life, and he is so disgusted at my ignorance that at
last he has undertaken this part of my historical, or rather
biographical, education. He thinks that in nine or ten con
versations he can give me an outline of it, and of course I am
dehghted to hear a very interesting story from a very accom
plished narrator." ^
Under the date of November 30, 1852 we have the follow
ing entry, which may be taken as a satisfactory indication
that Mr. Senior had succeeded in throwing accurately upon
paper the views of the illustrious lecturer.
" I called on M. Thiers at eight this morning.
1 Vol. i. p. I.
VOL. \. H

S8 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
" Lady Ashburton had read to him in French the beginning of
my report of our conversations in the spring ; about, he thought,
fifty pages. He admitted its general accuracy."
" Thiers. — There are some few things that require correction,
not because they are important in themselves, but because, the
report having passed through my hands, I become responsible
for what I am made to say, and inaccuracies in slight points,
which would be immaterial \i you alone had to answer for them,
ought not to be passed over by me." ^
We will first look at the evidence which is furnished to
us of M. Thiers' ideas of the duties of an administrator.
Would it be easy to conceive a higher standard than that
which he lays down in the foUowing passage ?
" Thiers. — When I was preparing for war in 1B40, 1 sat every
day for eight hours with the Ministers of War, of Marine, and
of the Interior. I always began by ascertaining the state of
execution of our previous determinations. I never trusted to
any assurances if better evidence could be produced. If I was
told that letters had been despatched, I required a certificate
from the clerk who had posted them or delivered them to the
courier. If answers had been received, I required their pro
duction. I punished inexorably every negligence, and even
every delay. I kept my colleagues and my bureaux at work all
day, and almost all night. We were all of us half-killed. Such
a tension of mind wearies more than the hardest bodily work.
At night my servants undressed me, took me by the feet and
shoulders, and placed me in my bed, and I lay there like a
corpse till the morning. Even my dreams, when I dreamt,
were administrative. To do all this, a man must have an iron
' Vol. i. p. 126.

1878] THIERS 59
will, an iron body, and, what is rarer than either, indifference
to the likes and dislikes of those about him, for he is sure to be
hated ; there is only one exception, and that is in the case of
a general. A good military administrator is the idol of his
troops, because they feel that their comfort and even their
safety is the result of his care and of his energy ; he is their
providence. But the labours of the civilian are unknown to
those who profit by them. The sailors at Toulon did not know
that it was owing to me that their ships were well stored and
victualled." '^
There spoke the man of untiring energy who in extreme
old age rushed round Europe to try to find allies for
France; but in the next few extracts, in which M. Thiers
exhibits himself not as an administrator, but as a statesman,
we shall see the victim of his own evil teaching, the anti-
international man, who asked, quite in good faith, on that
celebrated journey, " Against whom are you making war in
France ? " and received from the great German historian to
whom he put the question, the terrible answer, " Against
Louis the Fourteenth ! "
If there ever was a cause which should have commanded
the sympathies of aU intelligent and all generous minds, it
was that of the Spanish revolutionists of 1820. They had
risen against the very worst of tyrants, and they had con
ducted themselves with great moderation. If there was a
nation in the world on which they had a claim, it was
France. And here is the cynical account which a soi-disant
1 Vol. i. p. 136.

6o SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
liberal Frenchman, thirty years after the event, gives of his
share in the disgraceful expedition of the Due d'Angouleme,
without being able to plead for his conduct the slightest
tincture of religious sympathy with the clerical party, or
any regard for the Bourbon family on either side of the
Pyrenees : —
" In 1822 I was a young man, very poor, supporting myself
by writing in the Constitutionnel. Mignet was one of my col-
laborateurs ; La Fayette and Manuel were the political men
whom I most consulted. The Spanish expedition was proposed
— the expedition with respect to which your Canning came
forward in the character of yEolus and threatened to scatter
the invaders by enchaining the tempests. La Fayette and
Manuel declared that the expedition ought to fail, and would
fail ; that a French army would not march to prevent an inde
pendent nation from shaking off an intolerable tyranny ; and
that, if it did attempt such an enormity, the Spanish nation
would rise en masse and destroy it, as it had destroyed the
more formidable invasions of Napoleon.
" I maintained that the government in sending the expedition
acted wisely, both for the interests of the throne and the
interests of the nation ; that it was essential to the safety of
France that Spain should be under her control ; that if Spain
continued constitutional — that is to say, if the feelings
of the people were to influence her policy — the antipathy
of the Spaniards towards the French would make her a
rival or an enemy instead of an ally ; that it was the duty,
therefore, of every French government to put down every
Spanish constitution ; that the expedition, instead of being
opposed, would be popular with the army, to which it offered
both fame and revenge ; that it would meet with no serious

1878] THE SPANISH EXPEDITION 6i
resistance in Spain, and would establish the Bourbon throne
by giving to it the prestige of political success and military
glory. And I offered to ascertain the feelings of the troops
then forming \\'hat x^as called the sanitary cordon— and that
afterwards became the invading army— by travelling to the
Pyrenees and mixing with the officers and men in their tents
and cantonments.
" My offer was accepted, and I traversed the whole line from
Perpignan to Bayonne. I found both officers and men in the
disposition which I expected — delighted with the prospect of a
campaign and amused by the niaiscrie of those who thought
that any ideas of liberty, or of international law, or of moral
responsibihty, would prevent their marching wherever they
were ordered.
" Talleyrand heard of my mission and of its results, and wished
to see me. I was presented to him at M. Lafitte's ; he joined,
or professed to join, in La Fayette's fears of a formidable
Spanish resistance. He said — what, by-the-bye, was not true —
that he had always dissuaded Napoleon's invasion, and had
predicted its failure ; and he added that he fully expected a
similar result now.
" I said that the Spaniards would not resist this invasion pre
cisely because they had resisted the former one, that they now
knew by experience what it was to fight a disciplined army
with guerillas, and that no mere political objects would induce
them to suffer again the miseries of insurrectionary war. It
was on this occasion that I said : ' L'Espagne est une Vendee
6it\ntt,' un mot qui ff fortune. This conversation was an era
in my political life. It procured for me the intimacy of Talley
rand, and, what was of more importance to me, the principal
direction of the Constitutionnel, then the greatest political organ
in France."
If this frank avowal should obtain for M. Thiers the

62 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
hatred of all good Spaniards, the next extract which I
shall make should be equally serviceable to his memory
in Italy.
In a conversation on the subject of the expedition to put
down the Roman Republic, a transaction hardly less
infamous than the expedition of twenty-six years before into
Spain, M. Thiers observed to Mr. Senior, who had just
returned from Rome : —
" I do not believe a word that was told you by any Roman.
No Italian is to be trusted — least of all an ItaHan Liberah . . .
It was not for the sake of the Roman people, it was not for the
sake of the Pope, it was not for the sake of CathoHcism, that we
went to Rome. It was for the sake of France ; it was to plant
the French flag on the Castle of St. Angelo ; it was to maintain
our right to have one half of Italy if Austria seized the other.
Rather than see the Austrian eagle on the flagstaff that rises
above the Tiber, I would destroy a hundred constitutions and a
hundred religions. I repeat, therefore, that we, the planners
of the Roman expedition, acted as statesmen."
His radically wrong conceptions of the causes of national
greatness are well shown in the next passage which I shall
quote, a passage which will, however, appear to our own
Chauvins to be " written reason " : —
" France has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before her.
If her ambition deserts her, if she thinks of nothing but peace
and wealth, if she surrenders to others the first place in influence
and in arms, and desires merely to be at the head of literature,
and art, and civilisation, she will not long preserve that ad-

1S78] LA VILLE DIABOLIQUE 63
vantage. Military and political superiority carries with it every
other pre-eminence.
"Three hundred years ago the first power in Europe was
Spain. The consequence was that her literature, her habits,
and her language were everywhere diffused and copied. She
lost her political greatness, and every other greatness fell with
it. Venice, as long as she was a great naval power, was the
queen of Italian art. She produced no Titians after she ceased
to rule the Adriatic. When France is no longer feared she
will no longer be admired. When Paris is no longer ' la ville
diabolique,' from which eruptions containing a great deal that
is good, but perhaps more that is bad, flow over Europe,
Madame Barenne will no longer be able to make Mrs. Senior
and Madame Thiers pay for a cap three times what it is worth.
Fashion will fly after power ; not to the Thames — {or you will
not be our heirs — but to the Neva." ^
France has for seven years been acting on the opposite
principle, dragging with her through much of that time her
Old Man of the Sea, from whom she was only relieved in
1877. Never has she had such a period of prosperity.
The only blot on it has been the waste of money in absurd
and exaggerated military preparation, which will either be
simply thrown away or wiU entail a renewal of calamity.
The following extract from a conversation of i860 shows
the speaker's prescience and knowledge of what was going
on beyond the Rhine.
" Thiers. — I cannot understand the Prussian system. From
18,000,000 of population they are raising 500,000 soldiers. It
' Vol. i. p. 167.

64 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
is as if with our 36,000,000 we had 1,000,000 soldiers. They
are ruining their finances, ruining their industry, and their
great army will be a bad one. I fear that Prussia is on the
eve of a great disaster. We have made an important improve
ment in our military system. We have supplied every depot
with clothes and shoes on the largest war footing, and they are
to be constantly kept complete and ready." ^
My next quotation will exhibit at once M. Thiers' courage,
cleverness, and want of scruple. He is narrating his share
in the unwise attempt at restricting the suffrage, which so
much helped the conspirators of the 2nd of December.
"Thiers. — My plan was received with great favour ; but doubts
were suggested as to its practicability. Would the people bear
it? Changarnier, whom we called to our councils, answered
for one of two things — either the submission of the people,
which he thought probable, or their being crushed by the force
at his command if they resisted. Would the Assembly pass
it ? Would they venture to legislate for the express purpose
of excluding the poor ? ' The Gauche,' I answered, ' if it con
sisted of men of parliamentary habits, and was under good
leadership, would certainly be able to prevent its passing. But
we will say that our object is to exclude, not les classes pauvres,
but la vile multitude. These words will drive the Montagne
mad ; they will frighten all the moderate party out of their
wits, and we shall pass the law in a storm.' ' And who,' they
repHed, ' will devote himself to the furious, unforgiving hatred
of the Rouges by calHng them " la vile multitude ? " ' ' That,' I
said, ' I take on myself " ^
M. Thiers' views on free trade are so well known that it
' Vol. ii. p. 326. ^ Vol. i. pp, 76-7.

1878] THIERS AS ART CRITIC 65
is not worth while to restate them ; but they crop up from
time to time in these conversations, and remind the reader
that his influence was almost exclusively for evil, as well on
the strength of France as on the uses to which she put her
strength. Many of those to whom he was familiar as a parliamentary
speaker, administrator, and statesman, are not aware that he
had given great attention to art, and many who know that
fact do not know the remarkable conclusions at which he had
arrived. How much the world lost by his not being able
to devote his whole strength to this subject, may be
gathered from the following observations : —
" Senior. — Do you put France as high in art as in science
and in arms ?
" Thiers. — Certainly I do, with the exception of painting, in
which we are nothing. Where is there Gothic architecture like
that of our cathedrals ? Where is there a classical building
equal to the fagade of the Louvre ?
" Senior. — What think you of the facade of the great temple
of Pffistum ?
" Thiers. — ^That is a glorious monument, but not equal to the
Louvre. If we go to the arts which depend on language, where
is there eloquence like that of Bossuet ? Where is there a
depth of intelligence like that of Moli^re? Where is there
poetry like that of Racine ? The choruses of Esther and
Athalie are to all other compositions like a Raphael Virgin to
one of Guercino or Guido.
" Senior. — Do you put Racine above Shakespeare ?
"Thiers.— I cannot compare him with Shakespeare, whom I
VOL. I. I

66 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
read only in translations ; but I put him above Homer ; I put
him above Virgil, whom he most resembles ; I put him, in
short, above all that I know. "
Such are a few of the passages which throw light on the
darker side of the man whom all France lately delighted to
honour, honouring thereby much that is bad in her past, but
honouring also the daring, versatility, resource, abundance,
and brightness which are amongst her many virtues.
The future historian will in all likelihood pronounce
much the same verdict on M. Thiers' character and life
which Mr. Carlyle long ago pronounced on the earlier of
his two great works : —
" It has, for these last seven or eight years, a wide or even
high reputation ; which latter it is as far as possible from merit
ing. A superficial air of order, of clearness, calm candour, is
spread over the work ; but inwardly it is waste, inorganic ; no
human head that honestly tries can conceive the French
Revolution so. A critic of our acquaintance undertook, by way
of bet, to find four errors per hour in Thiers : he won amply on
the first trial or two. An d yet readers (we must add), taking all
this along with them, may peruse Thiers with comfort in certain
circumstances — nay, even with profit ; for he is a brisk man of
his sort, and does tell you much, if you knew nothing." 1
The most interesting thing in the whole series of conversa
tions with M. Thiers is the account which he gave of his in
terview with the President when the news of Novara came
' Carlyle, Essays, vol. iv. p. 120.

1878] COUSIN 67
to Paris, but it is too long to quote. It is almost as strik
ing as Hekekyan Bey's description of his visit to Mehemet
Ali the night that Napier was before Alexandria ; and that,
which appeared in a fragment of Mr. Senior's Egyptian
journals, published in the Fortnightly Review, is worthy of
Tacitus. Although, however, M. Thiers is the protagonist of these
volumes, so many other actors appear on the scene that no
more space can be given to him.
Another remarkable figure who is constantly meeting us
in Mr. Senior's pages is M. Cousin, and there is a certain
poetical justice in so much of the unwisdom of that famous
personage being preserved, with the most friendly possible
intentions, by one on whom his criticisms were not always
of a too amiable kind. The opinions which are recorded
are often eminently characteristic. Here is a specimen : —
"May loth, 1856. — CousiN. — No Frenchman can be satisfied
with the present state of France. We are still confined within the
limits to which we were reduced when we were a conquered
people, when Europe, in a blind spirit of vengeance, thought
that she could not trample us down too deeply. We are still
without a northern frontier ; Prussia is only three days' march
from Paris." ^
On the other hand, there occur occasionally passages
which show more insight, while they are eminendy hke the
man. Here speaks the biographer of Madame de Sable,
^ Vol. i. pp. 92-3.

68 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
who said to an Enghshman when he asked him whether he
meant to go to a fancy-ball where dresses of the seven
teenth century were to be worn, " No ; I trust to meet these
ladies one day, but elsewhere."
"May 2otk, 1853.— Cousin. — Where do you think is French
honour, French integrity, French generosity, to be sought for ?
Among the vieilles marquises of the Faubourg St. Germain ?
You will not find there much knowledge or much curiosity,
much acquaintance with what has been, or much interest in
what is ; but you will find kindness, simplicity, patriotism,
truth, disinterestedness, friendship, domestic affection — in short,
all the virtues, and I fear all the prejudices, of an aristocracy." ^
Nothing is more curious than the way in which Cousin
won and kept his position in Paris, and that amongst persons
of whom numbers must have known how little there was that
was valuable or real under his showy exterior. I remember an
eminent man who is still alive telling me that he once went to
see M. Cousin when he was engaged in bringing out his Plato.
Presently he began to declaim most eloquently upon the
extraordinary difficulty of translating the Timczus. After
working himself into a passion, he suddenly looked up, and,
checking his flow of eloquence, said : " Oh, I beg pardon.
I forgot it was you who translated it ! " His visitor was one
of the younger men ^ to whom he had applied to aid him in
the task for which he got the credit.
M. Cousin was a philosopher by profession, but of ah the
1 Vol. i. p. 183. 2 juigg Simon.

1878] COUSIN 69
innumerable pages which he has left upon philosophical as
distinguished from historical or literary subjects, I should
like to know, from some competent authority, how many
have any sort of real permanent value. And yet for years
and years he was a literary, and to a great extent a social,
dictator. If any one would see to what an extent that was
the case, just let him turn to the paper upon Cousin, re
printed in i860 in Renan's Essais de Morale et de Critique.
It is easy to see how completely the keen and delicate
perception of the reviewer was wounded by the insincerity
and superficiality of the reviewed; yet what respect, what
compliments, what infinite care to veil every little objection
in a mist of pleasant things ! Amongst many admirable
observations in that paper is one that the essentially French
characte: -.'M. Cousin's mind is a great bar to his being
appreciated in foreign countries. In this respect, and not
in this only, he resembled M. Thiers, from whom, in many
respects, he differed so widely. But the measure of the
disadvantage which a foreigner has in criticising M. Cousin
is well given by the next sentence in M. Renan's essay :
" If you translate M. Guizot's History of Civilisation into
German or English, the translation will not be very inferior
to the original ; but would it be the same with the lectures
of M. Villemain ? Certainly not. Those exquisite studies
would lose part of their grace and of their Atticism, which
is so seductive to us.''

70 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
I daresay they would; but an Englishman could read
twenty pages of Villemain's writing with intense pleasure
for one of Cousin's. It was the same with his conversation.
Villemain's conversation was the very best I ever had the
good fortune to hear, and that as well when he was in
society as when one was alone with him. It is unlucky that
Mr. Senior seems to have lived but little with one so well
worth reporting, although at the same time I do not think
Mr. Senior would have caught, or at least reflected to others,
the peculiar charm of his conversation. Here is one of the
few pieces of it which occur in these volumes : —
" Villemain. — In many things we have gone back. Before
the Revolution we were a reading people. One sees from the
autobiographies of that time, from those of Marmontel for
instance and Rousseau, that even the inferior bourgeoisie were
educated. Every country town had its literary circles ; many
of them had academies in which not only the sciences, but the
great writers of France and of Italy, were studied. We were
not so engrossed by the serious cares of life as to disregard its
ornaments. Now the time that is not devoted to the struggle
for wealth or power, to place-hunting or to money-making, is
spent at the cafe or the theatre. No one reads anything except
the newspapers ; and not much even of them is looked at,
except Xhefeuilleion.^
These remarks must be taken with a good deal of
qualification. I recollect, only a few years after this
conversation took place — I think in i860 — Michelet's
' Vol. i. p. 221.

1878] JASMIN 71
telling me that the ouvriers were taking to read and buy the
old French classics, under the impression that it was
chiefly through the education received from them that the
black coats were their superiors. Since the war of 1870
the taste for reading seems to have increased very greatly
in France. Even at such a place as Oran in Africa I have
been told by a bookseller that his sales were far greater than
before that event, and the dispersion all over the French
provinces of the excellent series known as the Bibliothlque
Nationale is another noticeable fact.
Amongst the few people whose conversations might
perhaps have been omitted with advantage, in these
volumes, is M. Leon Faucher, of whom we had more than
enough in Mr. Senior's journals which appeared ini87i.
He died in 1854, and is now as forgotten as, on the whole,
he deserves to be.
At page 1 74 of the first volume occurs one of the slips
which the editor, who has done her work very well, ought
to have corrected. Jasmin, the barber of Agen, was not
a Basque poet, but a Gascon poet. When the audience at
Madame de Circourt's hstened for four hours and a half,
with books in their hands, to him reciting his verses, they
performed no doubt a remarkable feat, but still a possible
one. By the help of French translations we could all make
shift to hsten to Gascon verses for an hour or so, but
Heaven forbid that we should attempt the same thing if

72 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
the recitation were in Basque! Does not Mrs. Simpson
know that the devil himself, after having spent seven years
in the study of that agreeable idiom, had only mastered the
words for " yes " and " no " ?
If it had been Lamazou, singing some of the wild Basque
songs which he used to bring in by way of contrast to his
Bearnais ones, that would have been another matter, for
they were extraordinarily beautiful. But the idea that
Madame de Circourt, of all people, should have exposed
her guests to the fearful ordeal of four and a half hours of
Basque recitation gives one a cold shudder.
This gifted and admirable woman figures a good deal
in these two volumes, which belong for the most part to the
period of her life before the terrible accident which made
her a hopeless invalid during all her later years. Some of
us, who are of the generation after Mr. Senior, only knew her
in that phase, and she was so charming then, that it is
hardly possible to imagine that she could ever have been
more charming, even in the fulness of her activity and health.
Her husband, M. Adolphe de Circourt, is one of the few
persons still alive of whose conversation some fragments
appear in these pages, and all he says here, as all he
says elsewhere, proves him to be one of the best informed
of men. It was of him that Lamartine said, " If I were
a king, I would sell my library and buy Circourt."
There are no wiser words in this book than those

1878] CIRCOURT ON ENGLAND 73
spoken by him in the salon of Madame de Rauzan, another
invalid who gathered round her all that was best in Parisian
society, and whose good qualities are happily continued in
her descendants.
" Circourt. — The missions of England have been many. One
was to introduce into the world a representative government,
another was to give it free trade, another is to keep alive for
happier times the embers of liberty that still remain in Europe.
But your great mission is to found empires, to be a magna
m,ater virum, to scatter wide the civilised man. Fifty years
hence the United States will be more populous, richer, and
more powerful than any European community. Two hundred
years hence Australia will be a greater nation, or system of
nations, than the present United States. Three or four
hundred millions of men, the most energetic in the world, will
then speak English. French, Italian, and German will be
dialects as comparatively insignificant as Dutch and Portuguese
are now. Those who desire wide and permanent fame should
write in English." ^
If these volumes had been published before the Franco-
German war, most people would have turned first to the
conversations with Madame Cornu about Louis Napoleon.
Her mother was dame de compagnie to Hortense, and the
two children were brought up like brother and sister. Even
now her observations will be read with the greatest interest,
but I cannot do more than call attention to them, and cite
' Vol. i. p. 411.
VOL. I. K

74 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
two passages, to the first of which Solferino and Sedan have
given a grim importance.
" Thursday, April I'&th, 1859. — I called on Madame Cornu.
" Madame Cornu. — Louis Napoleon is dehghted with the
war. A war to drive Austria out of Italy, in which he should
command, has been his dream from boyhood. He said to me
once at Ham : ' I trust that some day I shall command a great
army. I know that I should distinguish myself I feel that I
have every military quality.' ' Is not experience,' I answered,
'necessary?' 'Great things,' he replied, 'have been done by
men who had very little of it. By Cond^, for instance. Perhaps
it would be better for me to die in the belief that I am fitted to
be a great general than to risk the experiment. But I will try
it if I can, and I believe that I shall try it.' " ^
In the second, after strongly expressing her opinion that the
late Emperor was really the son of the King of Holland,
whom he much resembled in person and in tricks of
manner, Madame Cornu goes on to say : —
" Louis Napoleon was an attractive child. He was mild and
intelligent, but more like a girl than a boy. He is a year older
than I am ; when we quarrelled he used to bite, not to strike.
He used to say to me : ' Je ne t'ai jamais battue.' ' Non,' I
answered, ' mais tu m'as mordue.' He was shy, and has con
tinued to be so. He hates new faces ; in old times he could
not bear to part with a servant, and I know that he has kept
ministers whom he disliked and disapproved only because he
did not Hke the 'embarras' of sending them away. His great
' Vol, ii. p. 228,

1878J MADAME CORNU 75
pleasures are riding, walking, and, above all, fine scenery. I
remember walking with him and Prince Napoleon one fine
evening on Lansdowne Hill near Bath. The view was
enchanting ; he sat down to admire it. ' Look,' he said, ' at
Napoleon ; he does not care a farthing for all this. I could sit
here for hours.'
" He employed me some days ago to make inquiries for him in
Germany in connection with his book. Mocquard wrote me a
letter of thanks. Louis Napoleon added to it, in his own hand,
these words : ' Ceci me rappelle les bont^s qu'avait Madame
Cornu pour le prisonnier de Ham. Les extremes se touchent,
car les Tuileries c'est encore une prison.' When the Duke of
Reichstadt and his own brother lived, he used to rejoice that
there were two lives between him and power. What he would
have liked better than empire would have been to be a rich
country gentleman in a fine country, with nothing to do but to
enjoy himself" ^
Mr. Senior was in Paris in 1854 when the discussion
came on in the Corps Legislatif, with reference to the
prosecution of M. de Montalembert on account of the
publication, or alleged publication, of a letter which gave
offence to the Imperial Government ; and his report of the
speech which the great orator delivered on that occasion
bears remarkable testimony to his powers of memory.^ The
name of Montalembert was naturahy much in the mouths
1 Vol. ii. p. 337.
^ The testimony of Lord Odo Russell, who heard the speech, is
invoked by Mr. Senior in favour of his accuracy. I believe that Lord
Arthur would be equally willing to attest the accuracy of Mr. Senior's
reports of conversations held in his presence.

76 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
of men at this time, and Mr. Senior records several very
bitter things that were said about him. The remarks of
Lamartine, more especially, will give persons unacquainted
with France some sort of idea of the ferocity with which
eminent public men in that country criticise each other.
Montalembert's criticisms upon Lamartine, if Madame
Cornu's informant could be depended upon,^ were not
more amiable. Now, however, that they are both gone,
their mutual hostility is but of small importance. Some
few of the political acts of Lamartine will be remembered
by posterity, as, for example, his opposition to the bringing
back the bones of Napoleon from St. Helena, which vivified
with fatal effect the accursed Bonapartist legend, and his
putting aside the red flag in 1848; but he wih be known
chiefly, in the centuries that are to come, as the author of
some pages which appeal to the universal human heart.
The same fate is reserved for Montalembert, but destiny
has been perhaps even kinder to him. The Life of St.
Elizabeth will long survive the great speech on the Sonder-
bund ; but the Montalembert of Pisa, reading aloud the
manuscript of his St. Elizabeth, which another and even
more gifted hand has traced, wiU probably survive the
book itself, as much longer as it wiU survive the memory of
his political life.
Another very interesting character to whom we are in-
' Vol. i. p. 323.

i878] DANIELE MANIN 77
troduced is Daniele Manin, with whom Mr. Senior appears
to have been pretty intimate. The following conversation,
which took place between them on the 17th of May 1856,
ought to be comforting to English Liberals in 1878 when
their prospects look so black.
" In the present state of Italy (said Manin) a political life can
not be a happy one. A public man has to endure shame and
remorse if he serves the despots ; chains, or poverty, or exile if
he serves his country.
" I never deceive my friends by hopes of happiness or of fame,
or even, as far as they are concerned, of success, except ultimate
success ; but generations may perish in obtaining it.
" Senior. — By success you mean independence ?
" Manin. — By success I mean not merely independence, but
unity ; and by unity I mean a single political organ, be it a
monarch, or a senate, or a congress, with power to direct against
the common enemy the force of the whole Italian nation."'
In little more than fourteen years from the time when
these words were spoken, the whole gigantic work, which
Manin thought might take generations, was done and
ended. Parma was gone, Modena was gone, Tuscany was
gone, Austria was gone, Naples was gone, the States of
the Church were gone ; and nearly all this had taken not
fourteen years, but only a decade, to accomplish.
Among the less known dramatis personce of this book is
Chrzanowski, a Pole, who had served first under Napoleon,
1 Vol. i. p. 84.

78 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
then in the Russian army, had taken part later in the
insurrection of his countrymen in 1831, had been employed
by our Embassy in Turkey, and had commanded at
Novara. He was a man upon whose reputation rested,
justly or unjustly, in the opinion of many of his own
countrymen a sort of shade; but he had unquestionably
great ability, and his criticisms both upon the Crimean
and Italian wars, which fill many pages of these volumes,
may still be read with profit.
Here is one of many true and curious remarks scattered
up and down amongst them — a remark well worth re
membering in these times : —
"June 1855. — Chrzanowski. — Russia always gains by time :
a barbarous country is not affected by loss of men, or even of
money, as a civilised one is. Taxes, conscriptions, requisitions,
and devastation are submitted to in Russia as the cold and
snow are submitted to. Her rough rude capital is quickly
replaced, and she has always the resource of bankruptcy. You
cannot really weaken her but by dismembering her, and that
you have not courage to attempt, or even to propose to your
selves as your object."
And here is another on which one would like to hear the
opinion of military men who know modern war on the
great scale : —
"June 1st, 1855. — Russian Army. Chrzanowski. — Of an
average regiment not three per cent, are reaUy brave, and fifty per
cent, would run away if they could; forty-seven per cent, would not

1878] mErimEe 79
run, but they lose their presence of mind ; and if they do serve
long enough for doing it well mechanically, they fire wildly,
load with the ball before the powder, or leave the ramrod in
the gun, and do not hear, or do not understand, the word of
command. "
If this was true when it was spoken, is it likely to be
less true now that the weapons of destruction have become
much more perfected, when 7,000 men, just the amount of
the Indian troops brought by us at so great a cost to Malta,
can be destroyed in thirty-three minutes, as actually
happened to the Russians before Plevna ? And has not
this consideration some bearing on the question of
volunteer versus conscript armies or universal military
service ? If the higher kind of physical courage is so
much less common in armies than is sometimes supposed,
are not the chances great that more of it will be found
amongst those who choose soldiering for their profession
than amongst those who are forced into it ? and had not
the French military critic, who came to the conclusion that
the English were really a much more military nation than
the French, something to say for his opinion ?
Readers of M. Mdrim^e's charming novelettes will find
him, a little further on in the book, in a new character.
"May Zth, 1857.— M^RIMl^E.- 1 am somewhat fatigued with
my exertions of yesterday. I breakfasted with the Court at
Villeneuve I'Etang, and we amused ourselves with what you
call romping, and we desjeux innocents. The Empress and her

8o SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
ladies occupied a hill with a steep slippery slope, the gentlemen
tried to mount it, and were repulsed by nosegays and parasols,
till at last the Emperor threw himself, when half-way up, on all
fours, scrambled to the top, made way for himself and his
followers, and established himself 7naitre de la position. The
display of pretty feet was charming, all the more so to
us who have not seen a lady's foot for the last four years.
The Rouges give him a spine complaint ; I never saw a man
stronger or more active." '
The next passage I shah quote shows M. M^rimde, in a
very different capacity, as the keen, clear-headed watcher of
events. Senior has asked him whether France was likely to
interfere with a Spanish Republican movement. The date
is 14th May 1857.
" No ; at least if the crisis occur, as it probably will, during the
reign of celui-ci. I had a long conversation with him on my
last return from Spain. When I talked of the fall of Isabella
and the succession of the Duchess of Montpensier, his eye
glistened, but it resumed its usual calm fixedness when I
described the unpopularity of the Bourbons and the probability
of a Republic. The example of a Republic, as the Spaniards
would manage it, will be rather a warning than a temptation to
France. " Senior. — Will they be able to manage one at all ?
" M^RIM^E. — Yes, by means of their municipal and provincial
institutions. Our Republics fail because our centralisation has
deprived us of the habit, and therefore the power, of self-
government. What we call a Republic is merely exchanging
the despotism of the Tuileries for the despotism of the Hotel de
1 Vol. ii. p. 141.

1878] mErimEe on SPAIN 81
Ville. Spain is less centralised than even England ; every
province, every town, every village has its aristocracy, its
democracy, its representative assembly, its local pride and
patriotism, and provides roughly enough for its own administra
tion. If her neighbours will let her alone, she will naturally
crystalUse into an aggregate of municipalities Hke Switzerland,
under the nominal sovereignty of a Cortes at Madrid ; she will
have no army, no fleet, no railroads, except those which are
made for her during the monarchy, no trade, no colonies, no
influence in Europe ; she will be weak, obscure, quiet, and
prosperous." '
Things did not turn out exactly so in 1873; but respice
finem is a maxim which may be recommended to those who
are too confident that something of the kind may not yet
take place on the other side of the Pyrenees. Good judges
speak well of the disposition and abilities of Alfonso XIL,
but how difficult it will be for him to hold his own in Spain
if the Republic consolidates itself in France ! His reign is
a compromise between two extreme and active opinions.
Both of these are powerful in Spain, and the current of
affairs in Europe is running strongly in favour of the more
powerful of the two.
At page 250 of the second volume there is a conversation
about Louis Napoleon in which Guizot says a good deal that
has not much value, but in the course of which Mr. Senior,
who usuaUy keeps himself studiously in the background in
' Vol. ii. p. 159.
VOL. I. L

82 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
these diaries, makes a very true observation. " It is re
markable," he says, " that Louis Napoleon, with his name
and his excellent manners, should have made such little
way in London society." It is indeed remarkable. I
remember Mr. Dickens frankly confessing to me that
although he had seen a great deal of the late Emperor when
an exile, he was never struck by anything he said except
once, when " he thought he gave rather a clever account of
his having been had up at Bow Street." Mr. Dickens
mentioned, however, that the late Lord Lytton had taken a
different view, and had shown him a note written by him
self in which he formed a very accurate estimate of the man,
long before he became famous.
A Httle further on we come to the foUowing account of
Madame Recamier by Madame Mohl, which ought to send
the reader to her agreeable biography of her friend.
"When I first knew her in 1831 she was fifty-three. Her
complexion was still fair, but her colour, which had been
briUiant, was gone. Her hair had been dark, but turned grey
very early. Her eyes were black and both bright and soft.
Her figure, fine in youth, but never slim, was dignified, though
not tall. She was still pretty rather than handsome, though I
have known women keep their youthful looks much later. She
was anxious to please, and had as much frankness as is com
patible with that anxiety. With great softness and attractive
ness of manner, she had something about her which repelled
familiarity. No one ever took a liberty with her. A clever
little girl of seven years old, whom I took to see her, asked me

1878] SIR HENRY ELLIOT 83
if she was related to the Queen. 'Why,' I said, 'do you
ask ? ' ' Because,' she answered, ' she looks like a queen.'
" She read much, and contrived to do so by having regular
hours on which no one intruded. Her door was not open till
half-past two, and then only to Chateaubriand. At about four
came other intimate friends, and later in the evening the
general circle. It was one of the few houses in which you could
hear a subject sifted. She liked discussion, not indeed to take
much part in it, but to hear it. In modern conversation you get
to the bottom of nothing, the most interesting questions are
taken up and thrown down again not half-examined. At
Madame Recamier's any subject that deserved it was gone into,
and at times it would be taken up again the next day. She
would put forward opinions which she had heard, or remembered
to have heard, on the same subject, which she had recollected
in the night." '
The foUowing is interesting as reminding us that the
name of Sir Henry EUiot, who has been so much abused by
unthinking Liberals in our days, because he did not shriek
as loudly as they liked against Turkey in 1876, was equally
and with far more reason disliked by the Conservatives of
Europe half a generation ago, when he was carrying further
the wise and generous pohcy of Lord Minto's mission in
Italy :—
" Montalembert. — Look at your blue book on the affairs of
Naples. Garibaldi has done nothing more than put in action
the language of Lord John Russell, the language which Mr.
Elliot, the envoy, keeps repeating, and the Secretary of State
' Vol. ii. p. 293.

84 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
keeps re-echoing, that there is neither law, nor justice, nor
prudence, nor common humanity in the Neapolitan Govern
ment ; that its follies, its vices, and its crimes are driving it to
rapid and merited ruin. You print all this, and your agents, or
Garibaldi's, or Victor Emmanuel's, spread it through Italy.
Garibaldi's piracy is one of its first and most natural con
sequences. Your excuse, I suppose, is that you could not
remain silent spectators of the atrocities of the Neapolitan
Government. How came you to be silent spectators of the
atrocities of the French Government in 1852 and 1858 ? If Lord
Normanby and Lord Cowley reported as fully and as faithfully
as Mr. Elliot has done, they told quite as frightful a story.
Why did no one think of printing and re-echoing in parliament
their accounts ? But your sympathies are only with Italians.
You think any government good enough for us." '
Presently we come to a talk with a man whose name has
since been much before the world in connection with recent
events in Turkey. Could the root-differences between the
Eastern and "Western way of looking at things be better put
than they were by Ahmed Vefyk in this passage ?
"Senior. — How does the climate of Paris agree with you ?
" Vefyk. — I have not had a fair experience of it, for the three
months during which I have been here have been, I am told,
exceptionally bad. But what I complain of is the mode of life.
I am oppressed, not by official duties — they are easy : Turkey
has few affairs^but by the social ones. I have had to write
fifteen notes this morning, all about trifles. In Turkey life is
sans gene J if a man calls on you, he does not leave a card ; if
' Vol. ii, p. 311.

1878] AHMED VEFYK 85
he sends you a nosegay, he does not expect a letter of thanks ;
if he invites you, he does not require an answer. There are no
engagements to be remembered and fulfilled a fortnight after
wards. When you wish to see a friend, you know that he dines
at sunset ; you get into your caique, and row down to him
through the finest scenery in the world. You find him in his
garden, smoke a chibouque, talk or remain silent as you Hke ;
dine, and return. If you wish to see a minister, you go to his
office ; you are not interfered with, or even announced ; you
lift the curtain of his audience room, sit by him on his divan,
smoke your pipe, tell your story, get his answer, and have
finished your business in the time which it takes here to make
an appointment — in half the time that you waste here in an
ante-chamber. There is no dressing for dinners or for evening
parties ; evening parties, indeed, do not exist. There are no
letters to recei\e or to answer. There is no post-hour to be
remembered and waited for, for there is no post. Life glides
away without trouble. Here everything is troublesome. All
enjoyment is destroyed by the forms, and ceremonies, and
elaborate regulations, which are intended, I suppose, to increase
it or to protect it." ^
Constantinople is the last outpost towards the West of the
Eastern view of life, and much that has been going on in
that region during the last three years is really the outcome
of two radically different ways of looking at this world and
its affairs. Like the old Egyptians, hke the Chinese, to
some extent even like the Greeks in their best days, Ahmed
Vefyk looks upon most of our pursuits as httle more than
• Vol. ii. p. 347.

86 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
vulgar interruptions. He stands about half-way in feeling
as he does in geographical position between us
" Spent ones of a workday age "
and the Hindoo ascetic whom our great Anglo-Indian poet
has described, watching the procession of the Prince of
Wales at Delhi, and murmuring to himself,
" Fanciful shapes of a plastic earth —
These are the visions that weary the eye :
These may I 'scape by a luckier birth.
Musing, and fasting, and hoping to die !
" Wlien shall these phantoms flicker away
Like the smoke of the guns on the wind-swept hill,
Like the sounds and colours of yesterday,
And the soul have rest and the air be still ? "
In the year 1852, Mr. Senior paid a short visit to Brussels,
where he had several very interesting conversations. One
of them was with M. Quetelet, the well-known savant. It
will be found in the first volume. One portion of what
this distinguished man said requires to be commented upon
as being likely to confirm people in a commonly held but
erroneous opinion.
Mr. Senior had just said that he was going to Holland — a
project which, by the way, he did not carry into effect.
"Quetelet. — It will be an interesting but a melancholy tour.
You will see a great nation gradually, but unceasingly, declin
ing. They are still very rich — richer than we are — but their
wealth is diminishing. They still retain a considerable trade,

1878] HOLLAND 87
but every year some of it leaves them. They want the enter
prise, the rapidity, the versatility, which is necessary to modern
commerce. Their tariff was once comparatively liberal ; but
as they have retained it unaltered, while their neighbours are
diminishing protection and abandoning prohibition, it is now
comparatively restrictive. In 181 5, in the violence of their
reaction against the political tyranny of France, they resolved
also to emancipate themselves from its literary despotism, and
to write only in Dutch. As no one reads Dutch, they are
become the Chinese of Europe, beHeving, and perhaps truly,
that they possess great poets, orators, and philosophers, whom
nobody else has heard of Then their political position is bad,
and is getting worse. The great Orange family has sadly
degenerated. We were not inclined to think highly of the first
king, except as to his powers of money-making, which were
remarkable. He retired from business with a larger peculium
than has ever been amassed in a single reign. His successor
was in every way inferior to him, and this man is much worse
than his father. The Chambers are getting into opposition, and
the opposition is taking a turn which may easily be pushed too
far, that of economy. They are starving the public service and
the military defence of the kingdom. I very much fear an
outbreak, and perhaps a return to the old republic." ^
My own impressions were entirely different from M.
Quetelet's at the time he spoke, and are entirely different
now. I have seen HoUand in 1S47, 1852, 1862, and 1875.
Each time she has seemed to roe more prosperous than the
time before. M. Quetelet did not count either with the
good sense of the Dutch people or with the influence upon
' Vol. i. pp. 100, loi.

88 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
them of a great man — the great man who is alluded to at
p. 90 by King Leopold, who justly observed that he had
" excellent character and sense." I should think he had !
Is it not, however, amusingly illustrative of our want of
interest in Dutch affairs that Mr. Senior speUs the name
Thorbech ? I fear it is but too possible that even one who
had seen the cities and known the minds of so many
men had never reahsed to himself the greatness of one
of the wisest Ministers of his time, John Rudolph
Thorbecke. After all, for those who have the last infirmity
of noble minds, it is surely better to be twentieth in Rome
than first in a village !
Thanks to many causes, but not least to him, I was able
to say, writing in 1866, that " Holland was adopting one
after another all those steps which have been the glory of
our own legislation in the last five-and- thirty years " ; and
since that time others, who seized the torch from his dying
hand, have carried on the good work.
I wish Mr. Senior had gone to HoUand, or that some one,
who had his turn for recording conversations, would go
there now. I am convinced that he would come back and
teU us that although it is quite true that there are a great
number of rich persons in Holland who think more about
keeping what they have than of increasing their fortunes,
it is as far as possible from being true that that country
is declining, or even stationary ; that its sounder heads are

1878] KING LEOPOLD 89
perfectly at their ease about German aggression, thinking
that if at some future period it happened to suit Holland
and her great neighbour to enter into closer relations, into
closer relations they would enter, but that many things
would have to be changed before a state of circumstances
arose which could make that desirable. The attitude of
the best Dutchmen towards their country is well repre
sented by the last paragraph of a most sensible pamphlet,
by M. Halverhout, which lies before me : —
" Byron dans une lettre de 1813 ecrit : ' The Dutch have taken
Holland, Orange boven ! '
" Eh bien ! ce cri nous ralliera k I'heure du danger, car
' Frangais ne daigne. Anglais ne puis,
Prussien ne veux, Neerlandais je suis.'" ^
A conversation between Mr. Senior and King Leopold at
this period shows that the European Nestor did not under
stand better than his neighbours the connection of Mr.
Cobden's ideas, and missed accordingly the real signifi
cance of that great man. It illustrates, too, the way in
which Mr. Cobden's over-confidence in the good intentions
of France — which was only a part of the tendency, from
which he was not free, to forget disagreeable facts —
damaged his influence as weU abroad as at home.
" King Leopold. — Your Manchester school is a very
' It would be difficult, I fear, to say as much good of Holland in
1902 as it was only just to say in 1878.
VOL. I. M

90 SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
dangerous one. Economy and retrenchment are good things,
but not as the bases of a party. If Cobden and his associates
merely injure the public by refusing to give you the means of
obtaining the services of the best men, they may do harm, but
not irreparable harm ; but if they refuse you the means of
national defence, there is no saying what mischief they may do
to you and to Europe. I cannot keep my temper when I find
them talking about the honour or the friendly feelings of
France. A Frenchman has no honour when what he thinks the
glory or the interests of France are concerned. And as for
friendly feelings, there is no hate so bitter as his hatred of
England. Rely on it that, if this tyranny lasts, you will be
attacked. Even the other day Jerome made a violent and anti-
English speech to the Senate, which the journals were not
allowed to publish. And do not fancy that you can withstand
good disciplined troops with militiamen, or coastguard, or rifle
clubs. I know what a militia is. There could not be braver or
more zealous volunteers than those who turned out with me to
resist the Dutch ; but I could not keep them together when
opposed even to second-rate professional soldiers. I fear that
this is the turn which democracy is taking with you, and it is a
fatal one." '¦
Every one will turn to the account of the visit to M.
Guizot at Val Richer, a sort of political idyl ; and the talk
with Lamoriciere about Algeria, with Horace Say about
the Hotel de ViUe in February 1848, with M. de
Beaumont about his life in the country, with M. Mohl
about Germany a quarter of a century ago, with Count
Flahault about Wagram, with Lamartine about the French
^ Vol. i. p. 95. '

1878] LAMARTINE 91
Academy, with Corcelle about Mezzofanti's skull, with
Lafifite the Comtist about the Empire, with Chevaher
about the Commercial Treaty, with Ristori about acting,
with Rossini about the Grand Duke of Tuscany, are only
a mere fraction of those which I should advise no one
to omit.
A less grave personage than Mr. Senior would probably
have noted more of the anecdotes which are always flying
about in Paris ; but he has preserved a few, such as
the following : —
"A. — The other day Persigny said to the Emperor: 'Si
Votre Majeste laisse I'Imperatrice entre Fould et Magnan, elle
sera comme le Christ entre les deux larrons.' ' Peut-etre,'
answered the Emperor.
" Senior. — Who were present?
"A. — Only three persons — the Emperor, the Empress, and
Persigny. " Senior. — Then how do you know that the story is true ?
" A. — Because Persigny told it to me the same evening." '
"De Witt. — When Lamartine was in power he used to jot
down indiscriminately hints for his poems and hints for his
administration. In a paper containing among other things a
list of prefects was found the word 'David.' M. David
appeared, therefore, in the Mo?iiteur as prefect, and Lamartine's
secretary came to him to ask M. David's address. Lamartine
was sorely puzzled. The name certainly was there, but he
could not teU why. At last he recollected that he had put it
down as a memorandum of some allusion to King David, to be
1 Vol. ii. p. 255.

92 .SENIOR'S "CONVERSATIONS" [1878
introduced into a Meditation. So a notice appeared in the
Moniteur nominating A. B. a prefect in the place of M. David,
' appeld k d'autres fonctions.' " ^
The extracts which have been selected will give the
reader a fair idea of the amount of interest which he
wiU find in this book, if he uses it for the purposes
for which it was intended. Mr. Senior never supposed
that, in recording these conversations for the perusal of
his friends, he was giving them the key to a treasure-house
of wisdom. He meant, I apprehend, to show people here
what was being said in Paris and elsewhere by a certain
number of intelligent and often eminent men, differing
very much from each other, and talking often, to speak
plainly, most frightful nonsense. The drawback of his
system was, of course, that his diaries could hardly be^
read with advantage, when he returned from abroad,
except by those who knew a good deal about the countries
in which he had been staying, and the men whom he had
seen. But then the diaries went chiefly, at first, into the
hands of people who did know a good deal about these
things ; and now that they are given to a wider public,
they will doubtless find some new readers who have
this same advantage, while the lapse of time will have
helped most people to see who talked sense, and who
talked foolishness. ' Vol. ii. p. 383.

1878] TOCQUEVILLE 93
They are extremely easy reading, and the politician who
does not gain enough from them to make it worth his while
to make them his companion for a couple of holidays,
must be either fearfully superior to his fellow-creatures
or just a trifle stupid.
I trust they may recall attention to the two volumes of
her father's diaries, published in 187 1 by Mrs, Simpson,
under the title oi Journals in France and Italy — a coUection
not by any means equal in interest to that which is now
given to us, but still extremely well worth reading — and to
the correspondence and conversations with Tocqueville,
one of the most charming books of our generation, the
book which Mr. Bagehot, whose memory will live in the
recoUections of those who knew him weU as one of the
wisest and most gifted Englishmen of these days, used to
take down when he wanted a pleasant half-hour.

MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION
OF OUR TIMES
The Life of Cardinal Manning has probably excited
more attention than any book of a serious character
which has appeared in this country for some time. So
much indeed has been said about it that it seems hardly
worth while to discuss its contents at any great length ; but
it is, perhaps, not undesirable to make its publication an
occasion for sketching in outline the Catholic reaction of
our times, and of enquiring how far it has succeeded and
how far it has faUed.
The eighteenth century, which Castelar, looking back
through the long vista of years to the Christian era, has
called " the humanitarian century par excellence," saw the
end of many injustices and of many foUies. The amount
of human happiness in Christendom, just before the French
Revolution broke out, was probably greater than at any
previous period, and the amount of virtue too ; for Turgot
was quite right when he said : " Many who pass for good-
94

1896] THOMAS WARTON 95
for-nothing people amongst ourselves would have been
thought very Capuchins a hundred years ago." All this
improvement, however, had been foUowed in the last decade
of the century by great catastrophes ; and these had been
worst in what was, on the whole, the most advanced of
European countries. The storm which had burst over
France had destroyed a great deal that deserved to live,
along with not a litde that richly deserved to be improved
off the face of creation. Great as had been the corruption
of the French Church, and pitiable as had been its short
comings, it ought to have the credit of much of the heroism
and most of the resignation, which shone so conspicuously
among the victims of the Revolution in all ranks of society.
It was natural, accordingly, when that tyranny was overpast,
that the minds of men and women should turn once again
towards the ideas which had done so much for some of
the most tried of their contemporaries, and that their
thoughts should find ere long literary expression. The
literary reaction against the despotism of what Carlyle
would have called the arithmetical understanding, which
in the first half of our " excellent and indispensable "
eighteenth century measured everything by a foot-rule,
began in England. Thomas Warton's History of
English Poetry has sometimes been considered as the
first work which turned the current, and carried men's
thoughts back to antiquity ; but in truth it is difficult to fix

96 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
on any one name or any one moment for the birth of
Romanticism. Suffice it to say that it was already in the
air soon after the eighteenth century had passed its
meridian. From England it found its way to France and
Germany, to lie hidden underground until after the great
political cataclysm which was approaching, but none the
less destined to play a most important part in the story of
the age that was immediately to succeed that world-shaking
event. A German historian, quoted by Mr. Wilfrid Ward in the
second volume of the life of his father, dates the commence
ment of the Catholic reaction in France from the pubhca-
tion in the first year of the century of Chateaubriand's
Atala. Perhaps he is right; but some would be
inclined rather to fix on the year 1802, when the Genie
du Christianisme appeared. It is difficult to under
stand how this book should have made the impression
which it did. It had, however, the enormous merit of
freshness. The subject with which it deals had never been
treated quite in the same way before, and it was offered to
the eyes of many readers, to vfhom not a few of its doctrines,
which had been stale truisms to their fathers, were new
discoveries. There still remained, too, a considerable
number of persons who, having been attached by the heart
even more than by the head to the old religion before the
evil days, had grown doubly attached to it during the

1896] JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 97
terrible years in which they lost its consolations altogether,
or could only obtain them amidst difificulties and dangers
which rendered them doubly precious.
The Concordat with Rome, which was almost con
temporaneous with the commencement of Chateaubriand's
literary career, replaced the Church — not, indeed, in its old
pre-eminence, but at least in a legal and endurable position.
Still, in those troubled times, when only the " earthquake
voice of victory " or the dirges of defeat were audible, the
philosophic side of rehgious questions excited but little
interest. It was not till four years after Waterloo that the
new movement found its statesman in the Savoyard Count
Joseph de Maistre, whose book on the Pope produced im
mense results which are felt to the present day in every
corner of the world ; for the centralising movement, begun
by him, destroyed eventually the old GaUicanism, and
brought that added strength to the Papacy which was
advertised to all the ends of the earth by the Vatican
Council of 1870. If M. de Maistre was tbe statesman, the
Vicomte de Bonald was the philosopher of the new school,
the founder of the svstera known as traditionalism, which,
in the words of Mr. WUfrid Ward, "seeks the basis of
moral knowledge in a primitive revelation preserved by
the collective reason of mankind." He was the inspirer
of that great and irregular genius, the Abbe de Lamennais,
who. in the earlier stages of his career, went even beyond
VOL. I, N

98 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
his teacher in the fervour, not to say fury, of his
Ultramontanism. Lamennais, after a youth in which periods of rather care
less living alternated with their opposite, threw himself, as
he approached middle life, with all the impetuosity of his
Celtic nature, into the Ultramontanism of Fenelon, rein
forced by that of De Maistre. The first of his works
which produced a great sensation was the Essay on
Indifference, published in 181 7. Its success was
immediate, and for a time the French clergy thought they
had found a spokesman such as they had not had for
several generations. Ere long, however, doubts and
questionings arose. The Court, at once very clerical and
very Gallican, looked coldly upon a priest who was all too
devoted to the Vatican, and thought all too little of the
eldest son of the Church. Its attitude tended to make him
more inclined to Liberal pohtics, to fix his aspirations upon
bringing the Church into harmony, not with the king, but
with the people. Those aspirations were destined to lead
him far, to take him outside the pale of Catholicism and
into the centre of the democratic movement. The impulse
which he had given, however, to Ultramontanism lived on
in the French Church long after he had ceased to have
anything to do with it, and, in its present condition of
complete and wilhng subservience to papal authority we
must recognise, as almost more powerful than any other

1896] LAMENNAIS 99
influence, that of Lamennais as he was in the first period of
his public life. The breach between him and Rome was
brought about by the affair of the Avenir, a newspaper
founded, in the beginning of the reign of Louis Philippe,
by him and two men of whom we shall have to speak
presently — the Abbd Lacordaire and the Count de
Montalembert. These three, whose views were much
disapproved by the clerical authorities of their own country,
went to Rome, in 1832, to appeal to the Pope, but failed to
obtain any support. Lacordaire and Montalembert sub
mitted, but Lamennais, after doing so for a moment, broke
away. Submission was never much in his hne. As his
friend Sainte-Beuve remarked, " He was an eagle who
sadly required his St. John to guide and look after
him." The new movement had not been helped but hindered
by the Restoration, and it was not until after the fall of the
elder branch that it produced a great preacher. This was
the Abbe Lacordaire, who, having begun life as an advo
cate holding Voltairian opinions, was converted in 1824,
and entered Saint Sulpice, on leaving which he became
connected with Lamennais and Montalembert, went as we
have seen with them to Rome, submitted to the con
demnation, and found, ere long, the true oudet for his
splendid abilities in 1834 in the pulpit of the College
Stanislas, and in 1835 in that of Notre Dame. From that

100 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
time to his death he remained the first pulpit orator of
France, or, if surpassed by any one, then by the Jesuit Pere
Ravignan alone. In genius he was undoubtedly superior
to that very remarkable man, of whom Lord Coleridge, an
admirable judge of eloquence, said that he had opened to
him a new chapter in the human mind ; but he was inferior,
perhaps, in persuasive power. This he thought himself,
for Ravignan having said to him one day, " I hear that at
your last sermon people climbed up and sat on the con
fessionals." " Yes," was the reply, " but it is you who can
make them enter the confessionals."
It was natural that one who had such oratorical gifts as
Lacordaire should have wished to resuscitate in France the
order called into existence by Saint Dominic for the pur
pose of preaching. This he did, and he would have con
sidered it no doubt his principal work ; but, in spite of his
love of solitude, he touched life on a variety of sides.
Many will remember Matthew Arnold's account of his great
educational establishment at Sorfeze, published in 1864
under the name of A French Eton. He was elected, too
to the Assembly in 1848, and, although he soon found that
he had little in common with the politicians of the Left,
amongst whom he took his seat, he remained constant to
his pohtical principles. "I die," he said, when his end
was near at hand, "a penitent Catholic, but an im
penitent Liberal."

1896] MONTALEMBERT lol
The political orator of the movement, the chief link
between it and the stirring, active world, was the briUiant
Count Charles de Montalembert, whose outlook on things
in general was widened by his belonging to two countries,
for his mother was one of the Forbeses of Corsindae in
Aberdeenshire, and he was brought up in early life by
his excellent grandfather, the author of the Oriental
Memoirs. He threw himself into the Catholic reaction,
dreamt dreams of reconciling it with all the liberal ten
dencies of the age, and took for his motto " God and
Liberty." Not unfrequently he fell into grave mistakes,
as when he made a man, with whom he, after all, had
so little in common as Daniel O'Connell, the idol of
his youth, and gave his sanction — happily only for a
time — to the usurpation of Louis Napoleon. In the
main, however, he was, alike in public and in private,
one of the most interesting and sympathetic figures
which France has produced in our times. His admiration
for the English constitution and for hberty, as we
understand it, stood him in good stead in dealing both
with political and religious questions. Perhaps he never
rose higher than he did at the Cathohc Congress which
was held in 1863 at Mechlin, the "Rome of Flanders,"
where, amidst the applause of a great multitude who
hailed him as the "son of the Crusaders," he made an
appeal in favour of religious freedom.

to2 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
The Catholic reaction in France never possessed a
poet who continued throughout life so devoted to it
as was the preacher Lacordaire, or Montalembert, the
Parliamentary orator; but it may fairly claim the earlier
and perhaps the best work of Lamartine, who, born in
1790, had been much influenced by Chateaubriand,
and sprang into fame on the publication, in 1820, of
his Meditations.
In the high places of the hierarchy the most character
istic representative of the movement was perhaps
Dupanloup, who, having come into great prominence
when TaUeyrand was reconcUed to the Church, became
the head of St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, and brought
up there a great many members of the best French
famihes. Raised to the Episcopal dignity and en
trusted with the important See of Orleans, he was
not, from some points of view, so successful. As a
schoolmaster he was simply adored by his boys; but
his imperious nature did not fit him equally well to deal
with men, and he was far from being a favourite with
his clergy. His resolute stand against the influences
which were most powerful in the CouncU of 1870 made
him very unpopular at the Vatican, and Pius IX. has
been credited with a very bad pun directed against
him : " II est devenu dupe et un loup."
The movement, fertile as we have seen in men

1896] MADAME SWETCHINE 103
calculated to do their work " in the world's ample
witness," did not lack saints of the unlettered medijeval
type. Such was Jean-Baptiste Vianney, who, possess
ing very slender inteUectual endowments and a mere
modicum of education, succeeded by pure goodness in
making his remote parish of Ars a centre to which
thousands upon thousands resorted every year for the
purpose of confessing to him, or asking his advice in
spiritual matters. "Go," said one who had made the
pilgrimage, to a friend, " Go to Ars, and you will
learn how Christianity was estabhshed, how nations
were converted and Christian civUisation founded.
When we enjoy the blessing of being contemporary
with such a prodigy we must not pass it by with
closed eyes."
From a remote country parish on the banks of
the Saone, the name of which would be utterly unknown
to history save for the saintliness of its priest, we may
pass to the centre of the Faubourg St. Germain.
The Salon which most fully represented the best side
of the Catholic reaction during the later years of the
Restoration, during the whole reign of Louis Philippe
and far beyond its limits, was that of Madame Swetchine,
a Russian lady who had become a convert to the Roman
Church in 18 15, and who settled finaUy in Paris just
before the death of the Emperor Alexander I. It has

104 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
been admirably described by M. de Falloux in his Life
of its presiding genius, and was the instrument by which
her great and salutary influence extended itself widely
through the Society of Paris. For Madame Swetchine
was not only a highly placed and gifted woman of the
world, but a saint in the best acceptation of the term.
Lacordaire was to her almost a son, and her spiritual
daughters were many. Through one of them, as we
shall see presently, she still exerts a power which is
likely to continue for an indefinite period. After she
died, in 1857, her position was, to some extent, inherited
by another Russian lady, Madame de Circourt, who
died in 1864, and was at the head of almost the last
Salon of the old type which survived the changes of
our crowded and bustling age.
In 1850 a split took place in the Catholic camp, the
cause of division being M. de Falloux's Education BiU.
Montalembert and all the more level-headed of his friends
accepted that measure — were content, in other words, that
Catholics should take their degrees in the University — a
State and perfectly secular institution — while getting their
education in establishments directed in accordance with
their own ideas. A more fanatical section insisted that
Catholics should not only be educated, but also receive
their degrees from the Catholic institutions. These two
sections found congenial expression — the first in the review

1896] THE NEW ULTRAMONTANISM 105
called the Correspondant, and the other in the newspaper
whose narrow bigotry was — lucus a non lucendo — distributed
under the name of the Univers. The section which the
latter represented has been far the more successful of the
two, and gained a triumph in 1870. But all the best work
that has been done in the French Church has been done
by the other, from which the violent faction gained only one
adherent, in the person of the Abbd Gerbet, later Bishop
of Perpignan, who, in his earlier life one of the most
attaching of men, and described sympathetically in the
sixth volume of the Causeries du Lundi by the very
unclerical Sainte-Beuve, was drawn away from his older
associates into an alliance with the firebrand Louis Veuillot.
De Maistre's passionate and, considering the circum
stances of his life, most natural abhorrence of the French
Revolution had a curious effeci, which became more and
more observable as years went on, showing itself most
markedly in this feud between the party of the
Correspondant and the party of the Univers. The old
Ultramontanism had been the protest of the centripetal
forces of the Church against its centrifugal forces ; the new
Ultramontanism became the protest of Ultra-Conservative
forces of the Church against anything approaching to-
freedom of thought. Uhramontanism ceased to be the
antithesis of GaUicanism, which was practically dead; it
became the antithesis of Liberahsm.
VOL. I. o

io6 MANNING AND THE CATI-IOLIC REACTION [1896
From the writings of all those we have mentioned, and
from those of other lesser lights, many passages might be
cuUed which are real additions to the wealth of the world ;
but it was reserved for another to produce a work which
wiU be the best memorial to after times of the reflux of this
age towards Catholic Christianity. In i8gi the Abb^
Mugnier, the vicaire of St. Thomas d'Aquin, said : —
" Quand on ddnombrera les apologistes de ce temps, on
trouvera sans doute que c'est une simple femme, denuee de
toute pretention theologique, qui a su construire k sa foi un
monument ^ternel avec les mat^riaux les plus ddlicats, les plus
p^rissables en apparence : des sourires, des baisers et des
larmes." A truer criticism was never uttered. To many people,
and they are among the most fortunate, the little book —
which was long believed to have been only copied,
but, as many now think, was actually written by the
monk of Mount St. Agnes near ZwoUe (Thomas k
Kempis) — brings an ever-fresh stream of strength and
delight. Others, again, feel towards it as the late Mr.
Pater did, and would speak like him of the "wonderful,
inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation." Its piety is
too cloistral for them ; reading it is like breathing the air
of the mountain tops — the effort becomes oppressive.
With Mrs. Craven's Rkit d'une Sxur it is quite other
wise. Those whose lives are told therein did not live

1896] LE R&CIT D'UNE SCEUR 107
in a cloister but in the world, subject to all the vicissitudes,
the joys and the sorrows which are familiar to most of us.
Its authoress, when she was nerving herself to give to the
public a treasure so sacred as that which she possessed
in the manuscript lives and letters of her nearest and
dearest, foresaw this, and beUeved that her sacrifice
would be rewarded by drawing into the path which she
herself had trod (and which has been so well described
by her friend Mrs. Bishop in a book reviewed last year
in this journal), many whom examples of a more heroic
kind might easily have alarmed. Her success was
triumphant. Very truly did M. de Meaux, the son-in-law
of her friend M. de Montalembert, describe the book when
he wrote : —
" Qui ne connait, qui n'a relu souvent le Recit d'une Sieur,
cette histoire veridique qui debute comme un roman, le roman
le plus pur et le plus passionne tout ensemble, et s'acheve comme
une pieuse et mystique legende, ce chant d'amour, de douleur,
et d'esperance, oil tour k tour la vie parait si belle et la mort
si radieuse." Of course the atmosphere of the Recit is intensely
Catholic, but it is the purest form of Catholicism —
Catholicism which in all that relates to matters of feeling
and conduct is simply the quintessence of the religion
which was " evaporated from the ashes of Palestine."
It is a book capable of producing the most powerful

lo8 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
effects upon persons who may doubt, nay, entirely deny
most of the dogmatic assumptions upon which the lives
which it records were based; but they must be strangely
constituted who do not admit that whatever may be said of
these dogmatic assumptions, the lives themselves touch the
highest point to which human virtue can attain. The
Recit d'une Sceur is one of the by no means very
numerous books produced in our prolific century which
will be read and treasured through all the ages.
There is no difficulty in obtaining full information as to
the Catholic reaction in the France of to-day, in so far as it
touches political and social questions. Mr. Lecky, in his
great work on Democracy and Liberty, holds the balance
very fairly between the clerical and anti-clerical parties.
Nor is it at all hard to find English books in which the
views of both sides are set forth by strong supporters. The
most interesting figure, perhaps, in the Catholic ranks, at
this moment, is that of Count Albert de Mun, the second
and only surviving son of MUe. Eugenie de la Ferronays,
later Marquise de Mun, whose name and character are so
familiar to all readers of the Recit d'une Sceur. He has
many of the highest gifts of an orator, and has the
advantage of being intensely in earnest. Unfortunately,
however, he has mixed up his religious views with a strong
infusion of German sociaHsm. He wishes to go back to
the system of guilds and corporations, which were swept

1896] COUNT ALBERT DE MUN 109
away under the beneficent influence of Turgot and the
Economistes of last century. Alas ! alas ! " that way
madness hes," and the best intentions can lead to no good.
A wiser section of Catholic economists holds with Le Play
and Perin, while some great employers of labour in France
are trying, without setting before them unattainable ideals,
to reconcile the modern conditions of labour with Catholic
doctrine and practice.
We make no doubt that any one who knew well the
country districts of France at the present day could give us
many charming pictures of the working of their religion in
the life of the people of all ranks. Mr. Hamerton — by no
means a clerical writer— had much to say in praise of many
of the Cures in his neighbourhood, a few years ago, in his
excellent book Round my House ; but we know of no
work which gives such a picture as is to be found in the
Memoirs of Eugenie de GuSrin. It is much to be
doubted whether the Catholic hfe of Paris is as worthy of
admiration as it was. Writing in 1882, Mrs. Craven
said : —
" At times I feel wretchedly alone — not as all old women
must from the gradual disappearance of their contemporaries,
but in a quite different and new way. Madame Swetchine,
though she was older than I am when she died, was to the
last surrounded by younger friends, with whom she could
entirely sympathise, the colour of whose thoughts was quite the
same as hers. But that is just where the great change has

no MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
taken place, and so I understand nobody, and nobody under
stands me."
At the same time, when we are thinking of the religious
state of Paris, we should not forget that the centenary of
the Institute was inaugurated by the celebration of a mass
for the souls of its deceased members — a strange and signifi
cant epigram of events !
The Catholic reaction had not gone far in France, and
the century was still young, when a diversion was made in
its favour in an unexpected quarter — a diversion, too,
which gave it a good deal of help in extending itself over
Europe. This diversion came from the country of whose
people it had been said, with not a little truth —
" They ran sae far to get frae Rome,
That they ran oot o' Christendom ; "
and the unlooked-for auxiliary was Walter Scott. It would
be difificult to exaggerate the effect of his poetry and prose
in teaching his contemporaries to look back, with more
kindness than they had been wont to do, upon those ages
in which the Roman Church, so rudely assaUed during the
previous century, was the dominant factor ; and the works
of the great magician had all the more effect because he
had not himself the very shadow of an inchnation towards
its teaching. It was not for nothing, however, that

1896] V^ ALTER SCOTT m
Newman wrote to the husband of the heiress of
Abbotsford : —
" I have ever had the extremest sympathy for Walter Scott.
When he was dying I was saying prayers (whatever they were
worth) for him continually, thinking of Keble's words : ' Think
on the Minstrel as ye kneel.' "
The sympathy was purely instinctive, but none the less
strong. It has often been said that Coleridge did a good deal to
prepare the way for the English section of the movement,
and there is some truth in the remark, but it was to the
quasi-phUosophical and ultimately barren side of it that he
lent assistance, and his works never had any influence out
side this island. It was for England only that he was what
John Stuart MiU once called him — " a seminal mind."
The new impulse given to CathoHcism found its way
into Italy from France, via Switzerland. Its first as well as
its most widely known representative was another novehst —
Alessandro Manzoni. In his youth he shared the anti-
religious ideas of the young Italians of his time ; but about
1810 he married the daughter of a Genevese banker, was
by her induced to look more kindly upon Christianity, and
ended by carrying her with him into the bosom of the
Roman Communion. M. Marc Monnier, the writer of the
brilhant little book published in i860 and called L'ltalie
est-elle la terre des Morts 1 said that he knew of more than

112 MANNING AND THE CATFIOLIC REACTION [1896
one soul which had been kept in the Church by the ideal
priesthood which Manzoni pictured in his Promessi Sposi ;
and that novel, translated into English in the course of the
forties, was, perhaps, not without its effect in this country.
If space permitted, it would be interesting to notice the
phUosophy of Rosmini, which corresponded to the poetry of
his friend Manzoni, and the writings of Gioberti, which had
no Httle influence over Pius IX. during the earher period of
his pontificate. Neither of these teachers, however, pro
duced, or could have produced, any permanent results
either for their country or mankind. Greater men than
either of them, or than the learned and Hberal-minded
fathers of Monte Cassino, would have failed to do much for
a religious movement which, thanks to the obstinate cling
ing of the Vatican to the temporal power, must, in the
nature of things, have come into violent coUision with the
political aspirations of the Italian people. They did so, and
hence it arises that for more than a whole generation no
writer has, so far as we are aware, arisen in the Peninsula
who has done anything of much importance in the direction
in which so much, as we have seen, has been done in
France. We must now cross the Alps and look at the Catholic
reaction in the country in which the revolt against Latin
Christianity first began. The German Reformation was the
inevitable result of ecclesiastical abuses which had become

1896] MADAME DE MONTAGU 113
quite intolerable ; but the evils which it inaugurated were
neither few nor small, and it is not to be wondered at that
very serious attempts were made, by most important people,
to bring about a reunion between Catholic and Protestant.
These all, however, came to nothing, and the commence
ment of the Catholic reaction of our times in Germany
belongs to the year 1800, when F. Leopold, Count of Stol
berg, who had been Danish Minister at Berlin, and had
filled other high offices, went to Miinster and joined the
Catholic Church with all his family. He was fifty years old
when he made this change ; but any one who has read the
description of him in his brilliant youth, quoted from
Lavater in Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, will see that
it was an event which, under favourable circumstances, was
not unlikely to occur ; and favourable circumstances were
not wanting.
They came in a very agreeable shape through the society
of Madame de Montagu. She was the daughter of the
Duchesse d'Ayen, to whom, when she said that she was
hard of hearing, was addressed by Dumas, President of the
Revolutionary Tribunal in 1794, one of the most atrocious
speeches of that evil time : " Eh bien ! citoyenne, tu
conspirais alors sourdement " ; and she was sister of the
Vicomtesse de Noailles, who, advised to take some rest the
night before her execution, replied : " A quoi bon se reposer
a la veiUe de I'eternite ? "
VOL. I. p

114 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
The changes and chances of the emigration had carried
her to Holstein, and to the immediate neighbourhood of
Eutin, where Count F. Stolberg lived, and where he was in
charge of the affairs of the Duke of Oldenburg, Prince-
Bishop of Liibeck. He met Madame de Montagu first on
All Saints' Day in 1795, and her influence over him and his
family — the influence of sheer goodness not reinforced, or,
shall we say dimmed? by any aptitude for controversy —
worked so powerfuUy that in 1800 he resigned his appoint
ments, went to Miinster and joined the Catholic Church,
exciting thereby an amount of fury in the breast of the
exceUent Voss and many other people which was sufficiently
comic. This was not by any means the only instance of
effects being produced in favour of their religion by the
French hnigres ; they were not for nothing even in England ;
but it was far the most conspicuous case of a direct influence
exercised by them, and created an immense sensation all
over Germany.
The magnet which drew Stolberg to Miinster was the
Princess Galitzin, one of the most interesting figures to be
found in that part of Europe towards the end of the
eighteenth century. They had become acquainted in
Holstein, whither the Princess had gone some years before,
partly to visit the family of Matthias Claudius, best known,
perhaps, to English readers by his Rheinweinlied, but the
centre of a circle which exercised no smaU influence in the

1896] THE PRINCESS GALITZIN 115
Protestant rehgious life of the time. The Princess, although
a Catholic, became godmother to one of the children of
Caroline Claudius, who married Perthes the publisher, later
so conspicuous in the literary history of Germany. The
Princess was the daughter of a Prussian officer of high rank,
but had become the wife of a Russian diplomatist. The
life of the world did not suit her, and the pair parted with
out any quarrel, the husband pursuing his career and the
wife giving herself up first to study, then to religion. She
had a perfect genius for attracting to herself, and for being
attracted by the most remarkable men who approached her.
She was the intimate friend of Baron von Fiirstenberg and
all the very devout, though very tolerant. Catholics who
were grouped around him. She was in the most friendly
relations with Hemsterhuis, the Platonist ; with Hamann,
the Protestant mystic ; with the phUosopher Jacobi ; and
with the " strong, much toiling sage " of Weimar himself,
who had for her a very sincere esteem and about as "much
affection as he had for anybody. No account of the
Catholic reaction in Germany, however brief, could dispense
with the mention of her deservedly honoured name.
A Catholic writer has maintained that Novalis, who died
in 1 80 1, would have become a Catholic if he had lived a
little longer, having been led to this opinion more by his
private correspondence than by his published writings.
That would very likely have been so, but he certainly did

ii6 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
not make any public profession of Catholicism as did some
of the family of his biographer Tieck, although not Tieck
himself Still, the influence of Novahs's writings was more
or less in a Catholic direction. If he was not an adherent
of the movement, he was at least a friend of its friends.
Frederic Schlegel, who, like Tieck, was intimate with
Novalis, did become a Catholic, connected himself in
later life with the Austrian Court, was employed by
Metternich, and was more or less identified as weU with
the political as with the religious reaction. La Motte-
Fouque was at first much more interested in the chivalry
than in the religion of the Middle Ages ; but his later works
assuredly exercised in a greater degree, though in a less
extended circle, something of the same influence which we
have already attributed to those of Walter Scott. Both
writers helped on the movement from the outside.
Werner, the dramatist, and a whole group of artists, with
Overbeck at their head, also became Catholics.
The chivalrous and religious ideas of La Motte-Fouqufe
found themselves, in the next generation, strangely united
with other elements in the person of General Radowitz, the
brilliant friend of the briUiant Crown Prince who ascended
the throne of Prussia in 1840, and of whom Strauss very
truly said that he incarnated the nineteenth century in so
far as it denied the eighteenth. Both were amongst the
most interesting men of their age, and both failed because.

1896] RADOWITZ 117
with aU their splendid qualities, they did not possess the
power of understanding the world in which they were
living. That may seem an easy thing ; but it is one of
the most difificult. WeU did one say : " To see what is
before our eyes is almost to have genius." Both Radowitz
and his master saw clearly and felt rightly that the
nineteenth century had a great work of reparation to do ;
but they did not see that its main work would be to
carry further, though in a wiser way, the forward movement
of its predecessor.
The first remarkable product of the Catholic reaction in
the field of theology was probably Dr. Mcehler, professor
first at Tiibingen and then at Munich. He was a man
of great learning and the author of many books, one of
which, the Symbolik, was translated into English in
1843, ^nd exercised some influence on the later or
Romanising stage of the Tractarian movement. The
Symbolik is an exposition of the doctrinal differences
between Catholics and Protestants, as expressed in the
formularies of Catholics, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Anabaptists,
Quakers, Herrnhuters, Methodists, Swedenborgians, Socin-
ians and Armenians. Mcehler was opposed in his own
Church by the foUowers of Hermes, a professor of Bonn,
who took more liberal views and were, naturally enough,
condemned by the Vatican, while he raised up a much
more formidable antagonist in his fellow - professor at

ii8 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
Tubingen, the great Protestant doctor, F. C. Baur, the
coryphaeus of the theologians who are usually indicated
when men speak of the Tiibingen school. Some of
Mcehler's later writings appeared after his death, under the
care of Dr. DoUinger, whose splendid labours, prolonged to
extreme old age, have made him on the whole the greatest
ecclesiastical figure of this century. How long and well
he contended against the party which wished to make the
Roman Church not wider but narrower, how he faUed in
his efforts, partly because there was hardly enough
Christianity in Catholic Germany to support an old
Church and a new, partly because the singularly mal a
propos campaign of Prince Bismarck against Catholicism,
which has been known by the question-begging name of
the Culturkampf made the vast majority of Catholics un
willing to desert their chiefs in their difficulties, is within
the recollections of all. It was a repetition, on a far
larger scale, of the struggle with the Archbishop of Cologne
in 1837, which itself did much to reanimate sacerdotal
pretensions, and raised up, in the person of Gorres, a
champion who during the last fifteen years of his life, from
1837-1852, was a most conspicuous figure in the ranks
of the orthodox.
Of late many of the Catholics of Germany have taken a
very active part in social questions, Monsignox von Ketteler,
the Archbishop of Mainz, having led the way in that

1896] ENGLAND 119
direction about 1864. All that they have done is set
forth with great clearness by Professor Nitti, of the Uni
versity of Naples, in his book on Catholic Socialism,
which was translated into English last year. He gives us
the views of one writer after another — of Moufang, of Hitze,
of Hertling, and many others — but it all comes to very
little. So long as these authors exhort to charity, recom
mend the upper classes to provide the capital necessary to
enable working men to make a good start, and so forth,
their doctrines are quite harmless ; but when they clamour
for a return to the exploded economical methods of the
Middle Ages, they waste their labour and their readers'
patience. It is time, however, that we should cross the narrow seas,
and concentrate our attention upon England.
The Catholic reaction on the Continent had no direct
effect in this country until some time after 1833. The
yearning towards the past, which began to manifest itself
at Oxford in the course of that year, was of purely English
growth, and arose partly from the shock that had been
given to Conservative opinion by the passing of the Reform
Act, and partly from a long series of antecedent circum
stances, of which we must give a summary account.
The great Elizabethan compromise, which created the
Church of England as we know it, left in its system many
fragments, good and bad, of the old religion. Amongst the

120 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
former there was not a little of very unobtrusive piety, some
aspects of which, as seen in the community of Little
Gidding in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, were
so pleasantly recalled to our own age in the pages oijohn
Inglesant. If the Anglicans of that type had been more
numerous and less connected with a bad political system,
we might have been spared many of the excesses of
Puritanism and many of the scandals of the Restoration.
AU through the bad reigns of Charles II. and James II.
there was a considerable amount of the best kind of
religious life. Evelyn's Diary, amongst other things, is
there to prove it. Again, however, it had the misfortune
to be too closely connected with the wrong side in pohtics.
Mr. John Stuart Mill, who, during the last years of his life,
lived much near Avignon, said to an English friend : " The
immense majority of the best and most respectable people
in France are attached to the Church, but they are
paralysed by being connected with a pohtical party which
is impossible." Much the same was the fate of the excellent
men and women to whom we are alluding, after 1688 and
still more after the accession of the House of Hanover,
when they slipped out of sight.
While this stream of tendency glided down its always
hidden and sometimes subterranean channel, another, not
wholly unlike it, yet differing in many essential ways, rose
to the surface and pursued a chequered course which is

1896] THE CHRISTIAN YEAR 121
even now far from being concluded. This was the move
ment initiated by the Wesleys, the elder brother supplying
the energy and the organising ability, the younger the
higher and more permanent element. His religious poem
called Catholic Love, recalled by Dean Stanley to the
recollection of our generation, rises very high indeed, and
is destined probably to much more general recognition than
it has ever yet obtained. We may be very sure that the
good and wise man whom we have just named was think
ing, at least, as much of the indirect as of the direct results
of the Methodist movement when he placed upon the
monument of the two famous brothers in Westminster
Abbey the significant words : " God buries His workmen,
but carries on His work."
For some considerable time that movement attracted
more persons who took a serious view of life than any other
in this country, either within or without the Church of
England. It had, however, many glaring defects, and it
was a good day for English-speaking mankind when the
other stream of tendency to which we have referred came
once more to the surface with the publication of the
Christian Year. That remarkable little book, though
it only appeared in 1827, was really, for the most part,
composed at a considerably earlier period. It reflects
better than anything else that has ever appeared the
essentially Anglican form of piety of which we have
VOL. I Q

122 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
spoken, and had much more influence than any other
agency in preparing the way for the Tractarian movement.
Tractarianism, however, gathered into itself several other
elements, notably aU that was best and most cultivated
in the Evangelical party. It has been remarked, we believe
with truth, that none of the old High Churchmen went
over to Rome. The forward impulse — the impulse which
connected the purely Anglican reaction with the great
European Catholic reaction — came from the men who were
heirs in the Church of England, not of Hammond,
Andrewes, and Hooker, but of the two Wesleys. Very
soon, however, the two streams mingled, and from 1833 to
1845 they flowed together. There is a scene which must
be known to many of our readers, where, under the Church
of MariahUf at Passau, the Inn, the Danube, and the Ilz
unite. It may well recall to the mind of the traveller the
story of the Oxford movement. Keble was the Inn, Pusey
was the Ilz, and Newman was the Danube, for it was his
force and genius that determined the course and the colour
of the waters. The green Inn, the black Ilz, are con
founded in its flow.
Many people know the witty question of Archbishop
Whately : " Why do they call these new opinions ' Pusey-
ism?' Why don't they caU them 'Newmania?'" but
very few, before the publication of the fragmentary but
exceedingly interesting autobiography of Isaac Williams,

1896] PUSEY 123
knew that Pusey's name had been connected with them by
a pure accident. Newman and his curate, it appears, were
walking one day when they met Dr. Pusey, who took
Newman to task for being so hard on the " Pecuhars," the
name which he and his friends at that time apphed to the
Evangelicals. Newman said : " If you think we ought to
concUiate them, why do you not write a tract to that
effect? We shall be delighted to publish it." " No, no ! "
said Pusey, " I don't want to be one of you." Newman saw
the reason of this, and, with a view to preventing Pusey
being made responsible for opinions which he did not hold,
agreed that his tract should be published with his name.
It appeared with his initials, E. B. P. The Record
noticed it, violently attacked Pusey, and connected his
name with the whole movement.
Pusey was a very learned and very worthy man who had
a prominent position in Oxford, alike as being a professor,
and as belonging to an ancient famUy settled not far from
the place. If his intelligence had been equal to his
virtues, the part he would have played in the history of the
Anghcan Church would have been that of the first of the
Oxford Broad Churchmen — the spiritual father of Dean
Stanley and of Jowett. He had spent some time in Ger
many, acquired some knowledge of its theology, and written
a book which rather fluttered the dove-cots. He was, how
ever, with all his merits, essentially narrow-minded, quite

124 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
unable to rise to the height of his opportunities, and he has
accordingly had the strange fortune of securing a niche in
history from his connection with a movement which, during
its most interesting period, resolves itself chiefly into a
chapter in the life of another. That other was one of the
most distinguished men whom England has produced in our
century. John Henry Newman was not learned, even
according to the modest standard of Oxford sixty years ago.
By comparison, not with such giants of erudition as F. C.
Baur, but even with his young pupil David Strauss, he was
but poorly equipped to enter the theological arena. He
beheved, however, every word he said. He had poetical
power of a high order, poetical power which is not fairly
represented by what he has left in verse, good as some of
that is, but which penetrated his whole being, and gave him,
in conjunction with some other of his inteUectual charac
teristics, a mastery over the English tongue, such as
few in any age have been privUeged to possess. In addition
to all this he was a saint, and had that magical influence
over others which has been often observed but never ex
plained, but to which has been given the convenient
epithet of "the dasmonic." This man, so peculiarly en
dowed, appeared in Oxford just at the right moment, when
some one was wanted to incarnate in himself everything that
had been most Oxonian since the outbreak of the great Civil
War, before that citadel of "lost causes and impossible

1896] NEWMAN 125
loyalties " surrendered at discretion to the modern spirit in
the later decades of the nineteenth century. We must go
back to the Middle Ages to find the name of any teacher
who exerted so extraordinary an influence as he did — an
influence ever gradually increasing from 1833 till he re
tired to Littlemore ten years afterwards. Often and well
as he has been described, it remained for Matthew Arnold,
who was never one of his followers, to paint the picture of
him which will be longest remembered.
"Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition,
gliding in the dim afternoon Hght through the aisles of St.
Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing
of voices, breaking the silence \\'ith words and thoughts which
were a religious music — subtile, sweet, mournful ? 1 seem to
hear him still, saying : ' After the fever of life, after weariness
and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretful-
ness, struggling and succeeding ; after all the changes and
chances of this troubled, unhealthy state — at length comes
death, at length the White Throne of God, at length the
Beatific Vision.'"
Even after he had preached the sermon known as the
"Parting of Friends," which, although in its finest parts
little more than a cento of passages from the Bible, stands
in the first rank of compositions of its class, the insigni
ficant building in which he resided at Littlemore was the
centre of the thoughts of a large portion of his fellow-
countrymen — a place of pilgrimage. After ages may think

126 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC -REACTION [1896
that all this was strangely exaggerated. They wUl indubit
ably recognise the fact that the main stream of the
religious history of the world was not flowing through
Oxford, and that the story of what was passing there was
only the story of a backwater, destined, no doubt, after
many wanderings to unite with the main stream further
down its course, but still a backwater. Nevertheless,
England being what she was from 1833 to 1845, the Oxford
movement was of the greatest possible moment in her
development. The two most important sides of Newman's mind were
admirably represented by the two most remarkable of the
disciples who foUowed him from Oxford to Rome. His
extraordinary dialectical subtlety was perfectly reflected
in W. G. Ward, his tenderness and susceptibility to the
influence of the beautiful, in Frederick Faber. The first of
these has been drawn to the life in the really consummate
biography of him recently produced by his son, a most
difficult piece of work executed to perfection.
If ever there was a man who ought not to have gone
to Oxford, William George Ward was that man. Oxford
as then constituted could not develop any of his great
gifts. His education should have been directed by some
strong-headed man of the world — by Lord Brougham for
choice. Under such guidance he might have become a
most useful man in his generation. As it turned out, he

1896] FABER 127
spent his energies in trying to build fortresses out of
dreams even more unsubstantial than the mists of the
morning. Nature never meant him to be a theologian at
all ; but, if he was to be a theologian, he ought to have been
educated like Strauss at Blaubeuren and Tiibingen. With
facts to work upon he might have done much good, and
gained an honoured place amongst the theologians of
Germany. In England he was thrown away. His
splendid intelligence was, to a great extent, a wasted
force. Very different was the record of the other disciple whom
I have just named. His intellect was nothing like so
powerful as that of Ward. It was in many respects very
defective, but he was born at the right time, in the right
country, and did, if not exactly, yet pretty nearly, what he
was fitted for. He has not been so fortunate in his
biographer. His life was written by another Oratorian,
Father John Bowden, and not at all badly written ; but
written rather for the use of people who agreed with him in
opinion than of the general public. Faber, however, was
a person calculated to excite much interest even outside
the circle of those who agreed with him in opinion. He
had hardly ceased to be an undergraduate, when Words
worth, who was assuredly not given to disparage his own
gifts, said to Mr. Aubrey de Vere, " I have never known
any one who had so good an eye for nature as I have

128 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
myself, with the exception of a young man who was here
last year, Frederick Faber, and he has a better;" while
later, when he accepted the living of Elton, the same great
authority wrote to him, " I cannot say that you are wrong ;
but England loses a poet." In any biography of him his
remarkable poetical gifts ought to be brought much more
prominently forward than has been done by Father
Bowden. In his verse, as in his innumerable devotional
works, he permits himself the wildest and craziest flights.
His style is too often flamboyant gone mad. AU that is
true enough, but the sacred fire is there nevertheless.
The Shadow of the Rock, which is not a hymn at all,
but is bound up in his volume of Hymns, much of
which is pure rubbish, is one of the finest religious poems
in the language, worthy to be placed by the side of the
Second Day of Creation, by his Cambridge friend Mr.
Whytehead. Why, by the way, has no one published an
anthology under some such title as the " Poetry of the
English Branch of the Catholic Reaction ? "
With the departure of Newman from the Anglican fold
went half the glamour of the movement. In the summer
of 184s it was the most natural thing in the world for a boy
of sixteen, visiting Oxford for the first time, to walk out
to Littlemore merely to see its church and the very humble
dwelling to which Newman had temporarily retired.
That was the time which was so admirably described

1S96] OXFORD IN 1S45 129
in 1885 by the Archbishop of Armagh, always happily
inspired when he writes of his University : —
'' A city of young life astir for fame.
With generations each of three years' date —
The waters fleeting, yet the fount the same —
Where old age hardly enters thro' the gate.
" Forty years since ! Thoughts now long over-blown
Had just begun to quicken in the germ.
We sat discussing subjects dimly known
One pleasant evening of the Summer Term.
" So question came of aU things new and old.
And how the Movement sped, and where should lead ?
Some, peradventure, scorn'd, but more wax'd bold.
And boldly flaunted their triumphant creed.
" Grave grew the talk, and golden grew the gloom ;
The reason might be weak, the voice was strong.
Outside, by fits and starts from room to room.
Boy call'd to boy, Hke birds, in bursts of song.
" And ' Hail the hour,' they cried, ' when each high morn
England, at one, shall stand at the church gate.
And vesper bells o'er all the land be borne.
And Newman mould the Church, and Gladstone stamp
the State.' "
By 1847 all this had changed, and the chances were that
an eager youth who found himself then in Oxford would
have been much more interested by Arthur Stanley's
sermons on the Apostolic Age, which were then being
VOL. I. R

130 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
preached in St. Mary's, than by any other ecclesiastical
event of that time. For Arthur Stanley was the man
who, by the pubUcation of the Life of Arnold, began
the new Liberal movement, which was to draw into it most
of the best intelligence of the place even more completely
than had been done by its predecessor. Next year an
other influence came to carry the thoughts of young men
away from theological controversies. This was the
revolutionary agitation which so rapidly spread over
Europe and made politics the chief subject of men's
thoughts. A sort of ecclesiastical truce succeeded in the
University to the battles of former years, and the work of
those who, having gone a long way with Newman, did not
follow him across the Rubicon, was transferred to other
spheres, Church of Oriel, Dean Church, as he later
became, the highest and purest intelligence amongst
Newman's immediate friends who remained behind, wrote
in his old age as foUows : —
"It is not my purpose to pursue further the course of the
movement. All the world knows that it was not, in fact, killed,
or even much arrested by the shock of 1845. But after 1845, its
field was at least as much out of Oxford as in it. As long as
Mr. Newman remained, Oxford was necessarily its centre,
necessarily even after he had seemed to withdraw from it.
When he left his place vacant, the direction of it was not
removed from Oxford, but it was largely shared by men in
London and the country. It ceased to be strongly and promi-

1896] MANNING 131
nently Academical. No one, indeed, held such a position as
Dr. Pusey's and Mr. Keble's ; but though Dr. Pusey continued
to be a great power at Oxford, he now became every day a
much greater power outside of it ; while Mr. Keble was now
less than ever an Academic, and became more and more
closely connected with men out of Oxford, his friends in
London, and his neighbours at Hursley and Winchester. The
cause which Mr. Newman had given up in despair was found
to be deeply interesting in ever new parts of the country, and
it passed gradually into the hands of new leaders."
The first of those whom Dean Church enumerates were
the Wilberforces and Manning. Felix opportunitate mortis,
he did not live to read the Life of the last mentioned, of
which we must now give a sketch as an episode in the
story of the Catholic reaction.
Henry Edward Manning, born in 1807, although
a man of irreproachable life, had, whUe at Oxford,
no very special interest in religious matters. He left
the University before the fateful year 1833, and before
the commencement of the Tract movement. His opinions,
when he took orders and for a long time afterwards,
connected him with the Evangelical party. That party,
however, at this period was very different from what it
afterwards became. In those days its members were
mainly occupied with what they would have described as
"personal religion," and in various works of benevolence.
It was not till the Tract controversy began to wax hot
that they became violent and persecuting, very domini

132 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
canes, barking through more than a whole generation at
every one who did not repeat their shibboleths. Manning
grew more closely connected with this way of thinking
by marrying a lady whose family belonged to it, and with
whom he passed what were probably the most harmless
and happy years of his long and busy life. After her
death he was thrown back upon his immediate work
as a clergyman, and became an anxious student of the
literature which was then pouring in a continuous stream
from Oxford, gradually modifying his religious views in
accordance with it. He became rather intimately ac
quainted with Newman, but always remained outside the
Oxford movement proper — the movement which was
inspired and directed from Oriel. Soon his abihties and
other very considerable gifts attracted the attention of
his bishop ; he was made archdeacon, and threw himself
into the work of the diocese of Chichester with great
earnestness. He reknit his Oxford relations with Mr.
Gladstone, as weU as with Mr. Sidney Herbert, and was
soon exceedingly well known in the High Church circles
of London. During this period he was being carried
forward on a full tide of success, and would undoubtedly
have become a bishop ere many years had gone by.
Already, however, doubts of the Anglican position had
begun to assail his mind, and the Roman Church had
begun to attract him. He struggled against it long

1896] MANNING 133
and fiercely, even preaching at Oxford on a fifth of
November so violent an anti-Catholic sermon that
Newman, who had then retired to Littlemore, refused to
see him. On the day in 1845 i" which it was first
rumoured in London that Newman had actually gone
over, he said to a friend, " I daresay the rumour is quite
true, and Newman wiU end like Blanco White." More
and more shattered, however, did his own convictions
become. He used all his influence to prevent others
going over to Rome, till at length the decision of the
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the Gorham
controversy, and the silly outcry about the so-called Papal
aggression, broke down his last defences, and he too
capitulated. No one who knew him only as an acquaintance
in the world can read this portion of his history without
thinking more highly of his conscientiousness. He had
everything to lose and positively nothing to gain, save peace
of mind, by taking the step which he did take. Yet his
reasons for going over were about the worst that could be
put forward. He was not carried over by a tempest of
feeling. He went over because a series of baseless illusions
had gradually come to seem to him more coherent than a
serious of equally baseless illusions to which he had been
clinging. It is interesting to observe how Manning, no less
than Newman, suffered from having been brought up

134 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
without the slightest knowledge of natural science. In
a letter dated 6th October 1845, addressed to Robert
WUberforce, he says : —
" But it seems to me that our theology is a chaos ; we have
no principles, no form, no order, or structure, or science. It
seems to me inevitable that there must be a true and exact
intellectual tradition of the Gospel, and that the scholastic
theology is (more or less) such a tradition ; we have rejected
it, and substituted nothing in its room. Surely divine truth is
susceptible, within the limits of revelation, of an expression
and proof as exact as the inductive sciences. Theology must
be equally capable of a history and philosophy, if we had a
Master of Trinity to write them."
It evidently never occurred to Manning that the history
of the Sciences with which Whewell dealt was the history
of the gradual acquisition by the human race of the know
ledge of a mass of facts useful for the purposes of man's
life here below, and as to which certainty could be
arrived at by the steady working through the ages of
man's ordinary faculties; while the history of theology
could be nothing more than the record of the various
opinions which men had held at various times about a
variety of deeply interesting subjects, as to which they
could not reach anything like certainty by the operation
of their ordinary faculties. Theological speculation has
been and continues to be of the greatest importance
in the development of the race ; for the higher the

1896] THEOLOGY 135
prevailing religion becomes — the more it draws into
itself all that is best in our nature, the more it calls
to its assistance all that is sublime or tender in art,
all that is most exquisite in poetry, all that
is most elevating in the contemplation of the material
universe and the human microcosm — the better will
be its effect upon conduct. To ask, however, from
theological speculation the same sort of certainties
which we get amidst the lower order of facts with
which our limited inteUigence is amply sufficient to
deal, is to ask from it what, in this world, it cannot give.
That is a thought which has been present to the mind
of many who would never admit it in so many words.
Even Newman wrote as his own epitaph : " Ex umbris
et imaginibus in veritatem."
Manning, when he joined the Roman Communion,
did not make the mistake which was made by another
distinguished Oxford convert who went over rather later,
and instead of entirely identifying himself with his new
friends, set to work to be even more troublesome to
them than he had been to those with whom he had
broken. Manning was a born politician, and saw in
stinctively alike where the central force of his new
Church resided, and what would be best for his own
interests. The whole tendency of things, as we have
already remarked, since Lamennais first appeared upon

136 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
the scene, had been to exalt the authority of the Pope
as against that of the Episcopate, and a fortiori to sap
the Gallican or national idea. Hence Manning, in
whom ambition, which had been dormant, during his
last years in the Church of England, once more awoke,
aUied himself most closely with Cardinal Wiseman, and
made himself useful to his ecclesiastical superior in
innumerable ways, more especially by establishing at
Bayswater the house of the Oblates of St. Charles Bor
romeo, a congregation of secular priests, who received
their name from offering themselves to their bishop for
any work in which he might see fit to employ them. It
is made clear by a long and important letter from
Cardinal V/iseman to Father Faber (quoted at the com
mencement of vol. ii. of Mr. PurceU's book) that
Cardinal Wiseman stood sadly in need of this kind of
assistance — an assistance which he could not receive,
thanks to their peculiar rule, from the Oratorians to
whom he had at first appealed. The new convert made
himself likewise personally agreeable to his chief "How
has it come about," said a young priest to Mr. W. G.
Ward, " that the Cardinal likes Manning so much better
than many of his old friends — above all, Archbishop
Errington ? " " The reason," was the reply, " is quite simple.
Cardinal Wiseman has two sides — the lobster-salad side
and the supernatural side. Errington will insist on

1896] THE ERRINGTON AFFAIR 137
seeing only the lobster-salad side, while Manning wUl
insist on seeing only the supernatural side. No wonder
Wiseman prefers him.''
The name of Archbishop Errington is associated with two
long intrigues, with which Manning was only too much
connected, and which are detailed at portentous length by
his biographer. His account of them must surely appear to
his own co-religionists a most unnecessary washing of
dirty linen in public, and we need not enter into them at
any length.
Doubtless there were similar moves and counter-moves
from the other side. Mr. Purcell teUs us, indeed, in a
sentence or two, that there were ; but it is one thing to say
that, and another to give us, with ruthless exactitude, a
faithful transcript of all the little manceuvres of the man for
whom he professes so much esteem. Had the similar per
formances on the other side been recorded with equal
minuteness, we should have had a grave pendant to that
exceedingly amusing little book by M. Gustave Droz, Un
Paquet de Lettres, in which a politician and a priest, both
equally unscrupulous and both exceedingly clever, played
diamond cut diamond, the victory remaining with the holy
man. The good people at the Vatican and their English aUies,
as described by Mr. Purcell, only acted after the approved
fashion of priests in all lands. The records of many an
VOL. I. s

138 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
Indian law court would certainly furnish forth excellent
Brahminical parallels to the dramatis personce of the little
comedy which ended in the summer of 1865 by Pio Nono
raising his eyes to heaven, and declaring that a voice from
thence had said, " Put him there ! put him there ! " — him
being Manning, and there being the Archiepiscopal See of
Westminster. The fin mot of the whole pitiful business is given in
an extract from a letter written to Manning by his cat's-paw
at the Vatican, Monsignor Talbot, printed by Mr. Purcell
on pages 220 and 221 of vol. h. of his second edition : —
" A/)/ policy vi'as never to propose you directly to the Pope,
but to make others do so ; so that both you and I always can
say that it was not I who induced the Holy Father to name
you, which would lessen the weight of your appointment. This
I say, because many have said that your being named was all
my doing. I do not say that the Pope did not know that I
thought you the only man eligible, as I took care to tell him
over and over again what was against all the other candidates,
and, in consequence, he was almost driven into naming you.
After he had named you, the Holy Father said to me, 'What a
diplomatist you are to make what you wished come to pass ! '
Nevertheless, I believe your appointment was specially directed
by the Holy Ghost. When I consider that all the cardinals,
with the exception of Reisach, from prudential motives, were
against it ; that Dr. Kirby and the Irish College, Nardi, Dr.
Neve, Mgr. Weld, and almost all the English in Rome opposed
it, I cannot but see the hand of God. Every free Mass I
offered up for you ; but at the same time I told them all that

1896] WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS 139
I thought you had no chance, in order to silence them. And
I did not tell them an untruth, as I did not think the Holy
Father would have had the moral courage which it required to
name you against so much opposition.
" I have many more things to tell you about this matter, but
I shall wait till we meet."
This letter, so astounding to most people, will not, we
think, appear so astounding to those who have lived in
the higher clerical society which surrounds the Vatican.
Worldliness and other-worldliness are woven together after
a truly remarkable fashion in the minds of some of the
excellent bishops and archbishops in partibus, who not
seldom exchange their views with a very engaging frankness
even in the presence of persons to whose spiritual
allegiance they make no claim.
Mr. Purcell detaUs at wearisome length all the phenome
nally foolish action, taken by the unhappy victim of his
biographical assiduities, in the struggle to prevent young
Catholics of wealth and position obtaining the advantage of
an Oxford education. All we can say in his favour is that
he was not quite so imbecile as Cardinal Barnabd, the head
of Propaganda, whose astonishing reception of the English
Catholic petition on that subject was one of the nine days'
wonders of the last generation. Manning's view— or, per
haps we should rather say, his desire to echo opinions which
found most favour at Rome — was one of the things which
brought him into disagreeable relations with Newman, of

140 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
whom it is clear that from first to last he was frantically
jealous. A story is told that when that eminent man dedi
cated his Grammar of Assent to Serjeant Bellasis — " In re
membrance of a long, equable, sunny friendship " — the
printer sent back the words transformed into, " a long
squabble and funny friendship." That may be true or
false, but no phrase could better have described the rela
tions of the great Oratorian and the Archbishop of West
minster, as detailed in Mr. PurceU's by no means edifying
fourteenth chapter. A highly disagreeable correspondence
ended in the pair promising to say Masses for each other.
Is this, perhaps, the proper formula in the highest ecclesi
astical circles for conveying the sentiments which are more
bluntly set forth in the first lines of Browning's Soliloquy in
a Spanish Cloister ?
The culminating point of Manning's greatness was the
Vatican Council of 1870, where he exerted himself with
consummate skill and some effect in making the worse
opinions prevail over the better. What he did or did not
do is, however, of little moment, and those who care
about it will find it fully set forth in Mr. PurceU's pages.
We must, however, make one correction, as it touches the
fair fame of a far wiser man than the Archbishop of
Westminster. Nothing could be more natural than that Mr. Purcell,
who knew only what Mr, Odo RusseU had said or written

1896] ODO RUSSELL 141
to Manning, should have imagined him to have been
devoted to the doctrine of Papal infaUibility. Mr. Odo
RusseU's friends know that he looked at the Council purely
objectively. His duty was to keep his Government fully in
formed as to what had happened, was happening, and was
likely to happen. This he did with the greatest care and
with that extraordinary aptness to be right, which is the
first merit of a statesman. From first lo last he saw that
the doctrine of infallibUity would be proclaimed, and as the
CouncU went on, he became more and more persuaded that
for the Roman Curia its proclamation was a matter of hfe
and death. As a philosopher, all his sympathies were
with Dollinger and Acton — with the group of highly
cultivated men and women who fought as long as they could
against the proclamation of the dogma. He knew that
their time would come, but that that time was yet far away,
and never doubted for an instant that the Pope, backed by
a huge majority composed largely of very unintelligent
bishops, would overpower and bring to nought the opposi
tion of a handful of German and other sages ; though
doubtless there was more brain-power in that handful than
in all their opponents put together. It was not Mr. Odo
RusseU's business to instruct his Government as to the
merits of the questions open between such persons as
Dr. DoUinger and Dr. Manning, but it was his business to
tell it what was going to happen. This he did faithfuUy,

142 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
and the same line which he took in his public despatches
he equally took in his private letters, many of which lie be
fore us as we write. He had the keenest interest alike in
the opposition and in the bishops who yelled at Strossmayer,
" Nos omnes te damnamus." The former included some of
his intimate friends, but he knew perfectly well from first
to last that their chances of success were quite infinitesimal.
He looked at the battle from a watch-tower high above the
contending parties, and described how the day was going
without a shade of prejudice or passion.
In 1875 came the richly earned reward of aU Manning's
zeal and labours. He was made a cardinal, taking his title,
not a little to his satisfaction, from the church so closely
associated with the ecclesiastical history of England — the
church of St. Gregory the Great, on the CcEhan Hill. In
1878, however, the old Pope died, and another entered into
the inheritance which his unwisdom had done so much to
impair. Leo XIII. was kind to Manning, but the days in
which he enjoyed exceptional favour were gone by.
He met with a good deal of opposition from influential
cardinals and the administration working under them, in
matters of business which he had much at heart, As time
went on, too, he could not but perceive the hopelessness of
maintaining the struggle for the restitution of the temporal
power. His tone on that subject, once so confident,
altered and altered, tUl at last he found himself in almost

1896] SOCIAL QUESTIONS 143
direct opposition alike to his own old self and to the policy
of the Vatican. Shut out from further activities in the
sphere of ecclesiastical politics by the change of his own views
about the temporal power and the relation of the Papal to
the Italian Government, as well as by the change of the
personnel at the Vatican, the resUess mind of the Cardinal
turned to social questions at home, and he threw himself
into one agitation after another with all his old zeal. Alas,
however, the curious ignorance of facts and of the realities
of things, which had been the bane of his Hfe, followed him
into this field also. His intentions were often exceUent ;
but he never got anything quite right. He wanted to help
on the cause of temperance ; but it may be doubted how
far he did it any good by his well-meant exaggerations.
He plunged into the furious controversies connected with
the dock strike, without having taken the trouble to acquaint
himself with the position of the dock proprietors, whom he
believed to be rolling in riches when they were very much
more than half ruined. He always took a superficially kind,
gushing view of things, and his public utterances about
social matters, as recorded by his biographer, are melancholy
ehough. How much of all he did and said arose from
good nature, how much from senility, how much from want
of knowledge, and how much from the love always strong in
him, digito monstrari, we leave to be settled between his
successor and his surely too cruel friend, Mr. Sydney

144 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
Buxton, in whose Temple of Fame he has a niche only a
little lower than Mr. Parnell. An alliance between the
Roman Church and democracy no doubt floated before his
mind, as it will long continue to do before those of other
ambitious ecclesiastics. It is, however, save for very
limited purposes and short periods, a vain imagination.
Many eddies on the surface of the democratic movement
make in favour of priestly power ; but the deep main
stream is running quite in an opposite direction. Religion,
if it is to remain a great force in the world, must ally itself
with aU that is highest and best in humanity, not with the
very passions which it exists to oppose.
Father Burke, the great Dominican orator, saw more
clearly than did Manning what would come of stimulating
the predatory instinct of the worst portion of the masses
and making himself the ally of their misleaders. "You,"
he said, when on his death-bed, to an English nobleman,
"have some influence with the Vatican. For God's sake
get the Pope to appoint good bishops, or Ireland is lost
to the faith."
It is pleasant to note that as Manning grew older he
grew much more amiable, and the excellent doctrine of
invincible ignorance was stretched by him very far, to the
advantage of those of his countrymen who were outside
the Roman pale. This must be borne in mind by those
who estimate either the man or the movement with which

1896] EFFECTS OF AGE 145
he was connected. Then, too, it should be remembered that
by bringing the Roman branch of it into connection with
the lives of multitudes who belonged to entirely different
schools of religious or irreligious thought, he probably
made them, as well as himself, more tolerant. He effected
likewise some good by his constant endeavour to raise the
standard of the secular or — as he would have preferred
to call them — the pastoral clergy under his charge. At
the same time it is far from certain that he would not
have done better, both for his own fame and for many of
the ideas which he most cherished, if he had become
an Anglican bishop or archbishop, and worked on the same
lines as he worked on at Chichester, with just so much
concession to wiser and more liberal views as the increas
ing enlightenment amongst the Anglican clergy would have
forced upon him. For, after all, the real work of the
Oxford movement has been done within the Church of
England. None of those who went over — not even Newman
— has produced, or will produce, any very permanent effect
on the mighty organisation which they joined. It has
moved, and wiU move, by its own laws, little affected by
anything they have brought to it ; whereas those who did
not go over (although personally far less able and interesting
than some who did) have by their united efforts produced
immense effects — effects to which Manning himself bore
very generous testimony.
VOL. I. vT

146 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
His criticism is creditable to all concerned ; but we, look
ing at the matter, so to speak, at a different angle, attach
more importance to a remark made by Jowett to the late
Lord Arthur RusseU : " We Liberals must admit," he said,
as they came together out of a church in Oxford, "that if it
had not been for the High Church movement, Enghsh life
would have lost a great deal of beauty and richness."
There is, of course, no denying that many of the men, whose
memories are most cherished in High Church circles, were
exceedingly narrow and exceedingly ignorant of many
things which they ought to have known. It is enough to
say that they looked rather askance at Thirlwall, distrusted
Milman, and persecuted both Stanley and Jowett — the four
greatest ornaments of the Anglican Communion during the
thirty years after Newman left it. But, when we have
made all deductions, just compare the English churches of
the present day and the society which takes much of its
tone from them with the English churches and the society
of even fifty years ago, not to say before the publication of
the Christian Year — the first dawn of the new morning.
Go to such a place as " St Peter's in the docks,'' and see
what an island of civilisation has been created by a Ritualist
clergyman in the very roughest part of London. And what
has been done there has been done in hundreds and
hundreds of places up and down the land. If the 1833
movement did nothing else, it rescued the country districts

1896] ORIEL 147
of England from the sort of society which is described by
Miss Austen, in reading whose works we are often seduced
by the marvellous skill of the artist to forget the ghastly
dreariness of the world in which she Hved. Other
influences have aided the work which Oriel began, and
aided it most powerfully ; but honour to whom honour is
due — Oriel did begin it. Let us be grateful to it for all the
good it has brought about, and forget as much as possible
its errors. But let us by no means forget that if either the
Anglican or the Roman Church is to keep its place in the
world, it must not lose its hold over the educated. No wise
man wiU ask either of these great organisations to unsay
what they have said. " L'Eglise CathoHque," said Voltaire,
" est infaillible, et I'Eglise Anglicane n'a jamais tort ; " but
there is all the difference in the world between conserving
old formulas and applying them in a consequent and
rigorous manner. The Catholic Church is by way of being
very unbending in matters of doctrine ; but have none
of us ever assisted at a Catholic funeral where, when
they sang "In Paradisum deducant" we have felt that the
religious opinions of the deceased were as wide and as wise
as the most latitudinarian of mortals could desire ? Both
Rome and England must take account of the vast number
of facts which have been acquired for humanity since their
dogmatic statements were caUed into existence. Both
must give ever-increasing heed to the results which have

148 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
been arrived at chiefly by the scholarship of Germany. We
in England are specially bound to do so; for the whole
movement, which culminated in the labours of the Tiibingen
school in connection with the new, as of Wellhausen and so
many others in connection with the Old Testament, began
in this country. The first to move in that direction was
the group of men who sprang out of the school of
Locke. All German theology and biblical criticism worth
any attention descended either directly from them
through Reimarus, or indirectly through the efforts that were
made, first by Semler and Ernesti, then by a whole legion of
successors, to save the old Lutheran orthodoxy by giving up
points which were no longer tenable. The views that have
been returning to us during the last forty years from
beyond the Rhine, immensely purified, had their origin in
the very crude ideas of these Englishmen of the early
eighteenth century. England, as we saw at the commence
ment of this paper, was the mother of Romanticism. Eng
land was also the mother of Free Thought. Both at Oxford
and Cambridge there are now men in the high places of the
Church who seem to understand that it is their mission to
take a first step in fusing together the movement towards
enlightenment and the movement towards hohness of life
— the Catholic reaction and the desire to look facts in the
face. Dean Stanley best represents, in the recent past, the
minghng of the two streams in the Church of England;

1896] DEAN STANLEY 149
but he was, perhaps, too exclusively under the influence of
the writings of Ewald abroad, and was thrown, by the cir
cumstances of his hfe, too much into antagonism with the
High Church party at home, to do more than foreshadow
that union of two widely different tendencies which must
come about in the fulness of time, if we are ever to
imitate the wisdom of Owen, the epigrammatist, who wrote
the hne : "Seu vetus estverum diligo sive novum ;"
which was taken, by the way, as its motto by the Home
and Foreign Review. A curious letter has been published
from Jowett to Stanley, in which the former advised his
friend to write no more short books, but one great final
book on theology, reconciling the old and the new. It was
well-meant but bad advice; the time had not come, nor
was Stanley the man to do it. Another friend of the
illustrious Dean's wrote more wisely : —
" Ay me ! 'Tis deaf, that ear
Which joy'd my voice to hear ;
Yet would I not disturb thee from thy tomb,
Thus sleeping in thine Abbey's friendly shade,
And the rough waves of life for ever laid !
I would not break thy rest, nor change thy doom.
Even as my father, thou —
Even as that loved, that well-recorded friend —
Hast thy commission done ; ye both may now
Wait for the leaven to work, the let to end.

150 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
" And thou, O Abbey grey !
Predestined to the ray
By this dear guest over thy precinct shed —
Fear not but that thy light once more shall burn.
Once more thy immemorial gleam return,
Though sunk be now this bright, this gracious head !
Let but the light appear
And thy transfigured walls be touch'd with flame —
Our Arthur will again be present here.
Again from lip to lip wiU pass his name."
The light wUl be long in returning if the fatuous advice
which is sometimes tendered to the Anglican Church is
ever taken, and she is tempted to exclude from her pale
either those who love all too much the Lion of Rome or
those who love all too much the Bear of Geneva.
Her strength is to sit stiU ; and to say in most contro
versies, "I don't know.'' Church establishments have
many drawbacks, and will doubtless eventually disappear;
but the English Establishment has two immense, though
accidental, advantages— first, that it is impossible to make
her formularies consistent with each other ; secondly, that
her supreme tribunal consists mainly of elderly lawyers,
whose attitude towards most ecclesiastical disputes wUl
usually be one of slightly cynical impartiality.
It may well be hoped that English scholarship and
English good sense, when once allowed free play on these
subjects, may produce even better results than have been

1896] RENAN 151
produced beyond the Rhine. It will be a long process.
To sift the true from the false opinions, the wise from the
unwise practices of nineteen hundred years, is no small
undertaking. Oxford and Cambridge, with their long
habits of reverence, and with the new accession of light
which has characterised their history in the last four
decades, may well be destined to complete the work which
was begun in Leipzig and Halle a hundred and fifty years
ago. The only sustained and serious attempt hitherto
made to bring the two streams of thought into connection
was made in France by Ernest Renan, whose works are full
of such passages as the foUowing : —
" Jouissons de la liberty des fils de Dieu ; mais prenons
garde d'etre complices de la diminution de vertu qui mena-
cerait nos societes, si le Christianisme venait k s'affaiblir. Que
serions-nous sans lui ? Qui remplacera ces grandes ecoles de
serieux et de respect telle que Saint-Sulpice, ce minist^re de
devouement des Filles de la Charite ? Comment n'etre pas
effraye de la s&heresse de cceur et de la petitesse qui en-
vahissent le monde ? Notre dissidence avec les personnes qui
croient aux religions positives est, apres tout, uniquement
scientifique ; par le cceur nous sommes avec elles ; nous
n'avons qu'un ennemi, et c'est aussi le leur, je veux dire le
mat&ialisme vulgaire, la bassesse de Fhomme int^resse,"
Renan would, if the influence of St. Nicholas du Char
donnet had been the only one to which his youth was
subjected, have become, in virtue of his strong poetical
feeling, one of those very neo-Catholics, "cent fois

152 MANNING AND THE CATFIOLIC REACTION [1896
heretiques sans le savoir," whose position he so much
criticised. If he had been destined for a lay career, he
might easily have imbibed a great deal of German learning
about the Bible and the early Christian centuries without
finding it necessary to break with the Church. It was quite
another matter to become a priest and to teach, year out
and year in, as things which it was absolutely necessary to
believe, doctrines which had become to him merely inter
esting products of the human mind working upon facts, the
bearing of which it had only imperfectly understood. The
Catholicism which he had learnt from the Breton priests
was a system from which nothing could be removed without
the whole edifice crashing down ; and so it did crash down.
But he retained a very strong affection for all that he had
left, in so far as it could be disjoined from vain wisdom
and false phUosophy. Unfortunately, however, Renan in
herited not only the Breton gravity and " Nostalgie de
I'lnfini," but also a large dose of Gaulois vivacity and more
than mischievous gaiety. Nor did he debar himself from
publishing to the world things which would have been
much more in place in the works of a scholar of the seven
teenth than of a religious teacher in the nineteenth century.
It was not for nothing either that he had lived in the Paris
which is described in the Journal of the Goncourts. This
frequent want of seriousness and the excursions which he
made into regions of speculation, where the ideas of the

1896] OUTCOME OF THE REACTION 153
wisest are mere dream-shadows, sadly damaged his authority,
and prevented his being able to exercise the influence which
he might otherwise have done.
We are stUl very far away from the synthesis that must
eventually bring together sane ideas about Jewish and early
Christian history with the practice which has been evolved,
mainly through the action of the Catholic Church, through
so many centuries. When the time has come for it, Renan
wUl be recognised, after making the fullest allowance for
his mistakes, as one whose work was, in intention at least,
mainly, if prematurely, constructive.
What, then, may we say, has been the outcome of the
Catholic reaction up to this time ? It seems to have been
this. In so far as it was directed towards bringing back
under the sway of authority any portion of the territory that
had been conquered by human reason, it has been an utter
failure. History and Science have entirely emancipated
themselves. On the other hand, in so far as its efforts have
been directed to conserve or to revive all that was good in
the past, a high standard of conduct, a devotion to noble
and unselfish ends, a keen appreciation of art, of poetry, of
gentleness and beauty of life, it has been, and is destined to
be, an ever-increasing success. The region of its real and
permanent success, however, has been confined to the
domain of private conduct. The civil power in all lands
more and more resents any sort of ecclesiastical dictation ;
VOL. I. u

154 MANNING AND TPIE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
and in the times upon which we are entering, the Churches
— at least, of the West — far from attempting to impose their
wUl upon the State, will, we hope and believe, be content to
deprecate all political interference in the concerns of the
soul, maintaining their own freedom, but in no way inter
fering with that of others.
There will be, of course, many currents and counter-
currents. Some writers — Professor Nitti, for example —
attach great importance to the alliance between the Catholic
Church and the Socialists, which they observe in various
countries of Europe. That alliance, however, can hardly
continue very long.
Priests who are thinking more of personal success than
of principle, from Manning at one end of the scale to
such of the Irish clergy as sympathised with the aims and
means of the Land League, would be ready enough to ally
themselves with Sociahsm ; but a religion which is based
upon the proposition that everything ends here, and that
the part of all wise men is to get, while they are here, at
whatever cost, as much of the goods of this life as possible,,
cannot remain in indissoluble alliance with a religion which
is based on the proposition that the present life is a mere
state of probation, that death is the true janua vitcB, and
that man will be judged in the next world according to his
conformity to or divergence from the standard of living
which it has enjoined through nineteen centuries.

1896] THE REUNION OF CHRISTENDOM 155
Things have not moved in the direction hoped for by
Dollinger. The reunion of Christendom will never come
about on any dogmatic basis, however simple. It could
only come about by all sects consenting to treat dogmas
as things of minor importance, and to concentrate their
attention upon good works. Persons who had come to very
different dogmatic conclusions might surely accept a
thousand practices, and treat with respect a thousand
opinions which they did not share. A controversialist of
the destructive school may prove irrefragably that this or
that doctrine held by this or that section of the Christian
world is without an historical basis. He may prove, for
example, that we know next to nothing of the Mother of
Christ ; but in doing so he does not prove that the reverence
paid to the Madonna in Catholic countries has been any
thing short of a gigantic boon to mankind. It is not the
part of a wise man to denounce or ridicule any dogma
unless it can be shown to have an evil effect. Some which
are generally held both by Catholics and Protestants have
such an effect; but the immense majority have not; and
the tendency of things in the last generation, both amongst
Protestants and Catholics, has been to let the more
mischievous dogmas fall a good deal into the background.
The appearance in England of such a phenomenon as the
Metaphysical Society, at which all the questions lying at the
root of religion and philosophy were considered absolutely

156 MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION [1896
open, and where authority had no voice, was a very signifi
cant circumstance. At its meetings any one might have
found himself sitting with Manning on one side and
Huxley on the other ; but from first to last there never was
the shadow of a misunderstanding between the opposite
poles of opinion, and when its meetings ceased, everybody
thought more kindly of the opinions of everybody else.
That is the only kind of reunion of Christendom that is to
be anticipated for generations — perhaps for centuries — to
come.

THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY.i
The Dining Associations of London are not the least
remarkable feature in its highly complex society. Their
name is Legion, but four are more peculiarly interesting,
from their long history and the number of men, famous in
various sections of national life, who have taken an active
part in them. These are The Club, founded in 1764 by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, assisted by Burke, Johnson, and Gold
smith; the Literary Society, founded in 1806, of which
Wordsworth and Rogers were original members ; GriUion's,
founded in 181 2 for the purpose of keeping socially united,
men of diametrically opposite politics ; and the Dilettanti
Society, which forms the subject of the volume we propose
to notice.
The exact date of its foundation has not been ascertained,
but in all probability it was December 1732. The first
' History of the Society of Dilettanti. Compiled by Lionel Cusl,
M.A., and Edited by Sydney Colvin, M.A. London : MacmiUan and
Co. 157

158 THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY [1898
minute-book belongs to the spring of the year 1736. In
May of that year there were forty-six members, most of
them young men of fashion, who had made the grand tour,
usually under the guidance of some more or less discreet
personage in holy orders. Several of these Mentors were
among the earliest members, such as Robert Hay, who died
as Archbishop of York, and Arthur Smyth, who became
Primate of Ireland. It may be guessed, however, that
these divines did not impart much of their seriousness
to their companions, when we mention that Sir Francis
Dashwood, more perhaps than any one else, gave the tone
to their gatherings. Bred in the school of Bolingbroke, he
wandered over Europe, and obtained everywhere an un-
edifying fame, while on his return to his own country he
scandalised a not too prudish age by being the High Priest
of Medmenham Abbey. Later in life he atoned in various
ways for these strange doings ; but his best title to such
gratitude as posterity may see fit to accord to him certainly
comes from the fact that he was for fifty years a member of
the Society of DUettanti, and that he supported, if he did
not even suggest, some of its best enterprises. Other
original members of importance were the Earl of Middlesex,
who became Duke of Dorset; Sir Hugh Smithson, the
ancestor of the Dukes of Northumberland; Sir Andrew
MitcheU, who was Minister at the Court of Frederick II. ;
Thomas VUliers, the first Earl of Clarendon; and Sir

1898] THE EARL OF SANDWICH I59
Charles Hanbury WUliams. Ere long another name, too,
famous in later days, was added to the Society by the
election of the Earl of Sandwich ; but of him, too, there is
a great deal of good to be said, which the authors of this
work most properly bring before us, especially reminding
us that he was the chief supporter of Captain Cook, and
richly deserved to give his name to the Hawaiian Islands.
His intimate friend, John, Duke of Bedford, the first Earl
of Leicester, and Robert D'Arcy, Earl of Floldernesse, who
joined the DUettanti in 1745, when he was Ambassador to
Venice, were also elected at an early period.
Mr. Lionel Cust and Mr. Sydney Colvin, the joint authors
of the work under review, the one being described on the
title-page as compiler, the other as editor, after setting forth
in adequate detail the facts most essential to be known
about the original members of the Society, and their
immediate successors, proceed to give an account of their
manners and customs. Some of them were not of the
best, as may be learnt from Horace Walpole and others.
These, happily, have long vanished away, but the Society
has kept on foot many quaint practices which it would have
been a thousand pities to have discarded, A full descrip
tion of these will be found in the second chapter. In it the
reader will find, amongst other particulars, that one of the
rules, ere traveUing became so general, was that no one
could be proposed unless by a member who had been

i6o THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY [1898
personally acquainted with him or her in Italy. After a
certain election, however, it was discovered that the
proposing member had met his friend not in Italy, but in
Avignon. Thereupon two resolutions were passed : —
(i) That it is the opinion of the Society that Avignon is in
Italy.
(2) That no other town in France is in Italy.
It does not appear that the members availed themselves of
the permission, implied in the above-mentioned rule, to
propose ladies.
Established chiefly with a view of bringing together
persons whose tastes were simUar, the members of the
Dilettanti Society, even in very early days, did more than
dine together. They helped on the building of West
minster Bridge, they did something with but moderate
success to establish an Italian Opera, took the first steps
towards creating the Royal Academy, and as far back as
1761, on the motion of Sir Francis Dashwood, they passed
a resolution which was the beginning of all efforts made
in England towards enriching this country with a gallery of
casts. L'appitit vient en mangeant, and the Society, after interest
ing itself in promoting the fine arts at home, turned its
attention to larger enterprises, having the same general pur
pose, abroad. The fourth chapter opens with a succinct

1898] FIFTH PERIOD OF GREEK PIISTORY 161
but clear account of the progress of the study of classical
archaeology in England from the middle of the seventeenth
century onwards. Much good work had been done and much
enthusiasm expended in other countries, from the commence
ment of the Renaissance onwards, in studying the archaeology
of Italy ; but the archaeology of Greece was all but a sealed
book tiU an English nobleman, the Earl of Arundel, turned
his attention to it. He had worthy followers or rivals in
the famous Duke of Buckingham, Lord Pembroke, and
others, nor did the study, interrupted for a time by the
Civil War, ever die out amongst Enghshmen of position and
property. Many individual members of the Dilettanti
Society had occupied themselves with it before 1764, but it
was in that year that the Society as a body threw into the
scale a weight so decisive that an eminent German savant.
Professor Kruse, foUowed by Michaehs, divides the history
of Greece into five periods, of which the foundation of the
Dilettanti Society is the fifth. And he is quite right in
doing so, because it cannot be sufficiently insisted on that it
is the history of the mind of Greece, its poetry, its philosophy,
its art, which is important. Its political history has been
viewed through misleading media, and its value for after-times
wildly exaggerated. It was in 1764 that the Society sent
Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Chandler, Mr. Revett, and Mr. Pars
to Asia Minor, where, as well as in Attica and the Morea,
they coUected a great deal of most precious material, much
VOL. I. X

i62 THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY [1898
of which was published in 1769 under the title of Ionian
Antiquities, a second volume of which appeared a good
many years later. The Society also assisted the publication
of Dr. Chandler's Travels and the Antiquities of Athens by
Athenian Stuart, whose house, built in St. James's Square
on Greek lines for Lord Anson, bears witness to its
architect's careful study of his models, no less than to the
inapplicability of that kind of architecture to our climate
and mode of life.
Gradually the first members of the Society vanished
from the scene, their last survivor being the Earl of
Bessborough, who lived to 1793. It was still fuU of
young men of fashion, but a rather graver tone began
to prevail, though Charles Fox, who became a member
at twenty, hardly tended to increase its gravity. It was
connected with The Club not only through Sir Joshua
Reynolds, who became a member of the Dilettanti in
the very year in which he founded that institution, but
through, amongst others, Bennet Langton, Topham
Beauclerk, Colman, Garrick, and Viscount Palmerston.
The last-named passed his life in pursuits widely different
from those of his famous son, but was very active in his
own line as a collector, finding a happy hunting-ground
in Paris even in the midst of the Revolution. The
archaeological and artistic work of the Society attracted
to it such men as Sir William Hamilton, Sir George

1898] SIR EDGAR BOEHM 163
Beaumont, Mr. Charles Townley, Sir Henry Englefield,
and Mr. Payne Knight, of all of whom brief sketches
are to be found in these pages. Reynolds became its
painter in 1769. It was not till ten years later that
Sir Joseph Banks was elected a member, but he took
the most active part in all the proceedings of the
Society, and was treasurer and secretary for eighteen
years. In the days of Dashwood and Sandwich the
Dilettanti were content, as we have seen, to set on foot
explorations and to promote archKological work. In
their later stage individual members did a good deal
of writing themselves, sometimes with good success, some
times not, and in their less happy moments they led the
Society into scrapes. Payne Knight was the great offender
in this way, for he it was who committed it to the worst
mistake it ever made — its opposition to the wise and
admirable work of Lord Elgin in rescuing from ruin the
marbles which bear his name. Before the recent war
showed the civihsed world what the Greeks were,
proposals were sometimes made to restore to them
the treasures of the Parthenon. The judgment of most
judicious people as to these proposals was neatly summed
up in a reply which was made by the late Sir Edgar
Boehm to a young Member of Parliament, who asked him
what he thought about a Motion he intended to make
in favour of restoring the precious monuments we had

i64 THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY [1898
saved for mankind. " If you succeeded," said the
sculptor, " I would curse you with my dying breath."
We may draw a veil over the errors into which Payne
Knight led his friends, and remember only that he did
a good day's work when by his Travels in Sicily he
led Goethe to visit that island. The Society was much
more happily inspired when it published Select Specimens
of Antient Sculpture in the Collections of Great Britain, and
when its members vied with each other, as they did
through the closing decade of the eighteenth century, in
importing treasures from Italy, many of which passed from
the coUections of Townley, Cracherode, and others into
the British Museum.
We will not attempt further to pursue the history of the
Dilettanti, although the seventh and eighth chapters, which
bring it down to our own times, are as interesting as any
of their predecessors. The ninth and last chapter con
tains a full account of the pictures in the possession of
the Society, and now to be seen in the lower room of the
Grafton Galleries, where the dinners, at present, take place.
A great many of the portraits are reproduced in the volume
before us, including the two great Sir Joshuas, which became
weU known to the public while they were temporarUy
deposited in the National Gallery. An appendix contains
a list of the members from 1736 to the end of last year.
In a book of this sort, minute, even pedantic, accuracy

1898] NEW ORGANIZATIONS 165
is highly desirable, and we should advise those who are
responsible for it to have it carefully revised, if a new
edition of the letterpress is called for. With the exception,
however, of trifling errors, we see nothing to find fault
with, and we can only congratulate Mr. Cust and Mr.
Colvin upon having made a valuable addition to our
libraries. We could wish that they had not dressed so
choice a volume in a hideous suit of buckram, but
perhaps they desired to encourage artistic bookbinding
by forcing every one to submit his copy or copies to
one of its more eminent professors. That is the most
charitable explanation which we have heard, and we trust
it is as correct as it is charitable.
The conditions amidst which the Dilettanti Society now
finds itself are very unlike those amidst which it had its
origin and grew to maturity through two generations. Travel
was then the luxury of the wealthy ; it has now become
comparatively cheap. Numbers of new organisations are
at work in classical lands far more specialised and far
more suited than the Dilettanti Society to add to the
world's knowledge, each in its own department. One
is especially devoted to Hellenic studies in Greece ;
another ransacks Egypt for Greek manuscripts ; Asia
Minor has been carefuUy explored by an Aberdeen
Professor, and so on. Under these circumstances, the
Society has no call to send out new expeditions or to

i66 THE DILETTANTI SOCIETY [1898
publish huge illustrated works. Its best friends would
like to see it long remain a clasp uniting together the
principal persons connected with the various organisations
now working to increase our knowledge of the art and
literature of Greece and Rome, such of them at least as
have their roots in British soil. They would like to see it
able to say with regard to every sensible effort of this kind,
" Pars," if not " Pars magna fui." An enthusiastic member
once declared in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone that
the Dilettanti had founded the Italian Opera, the Royal
Academy, and the British Museum. That was an in
correct and exaggerated statement, no doubt, but still the
Society had much to do, directly and indirectly, with all
these three institutions, and we trust that in the future, as
in the past, it may be zealous of all good works which come
within or near the edge of its province.

THE CLUB
In 1896 a Society which had long existed in Pembroke College,
Oxford, and which took its name from Dr. Johnson, determined
to celebrate its 500th meeting by a festival, at which Dr. Bar
tholomew Price, who was then at the head of the College, took
the chair, and many visitors from London were invited. Ex
tremely interesting addresses were delivered by Canon Ainger
and others ; Mr. Austin Dobson read a poem written in honour
of the occasion, full of his usual grace and charm, and altogether
we passed a delightful evening. I was asked to attend in my
capacity of Treasurer of The Club with which the great Doctor
was so closely connected, and took, in reply to the toast of
my health, the opportunity of stating some facts about it. I
said : —
"Professor Saintsbury's admirable speech to which we
have just listened, so flattering to the already venerable insti
tution which I have the honour to represent, and so all too
flattering to me, brought to my mind many things of which
I should like to speak. As, however, it is in my capacity of
Treasurer of the Club that you have drunk my health, and
as the Treasurer is the custodian of the records of that
body, you wUl, of course, wish me to confine myself to its
affairs. And first, you wiU be glad to hear that it is in
excellent health and spirits. It held its last dinner on the
9th of this month, and elected on that occasion its 216th
I6T

l68 THE CLUB [1896
member. Seeing that it was founded in the year 1764,
that gives an average of a good deal less than two elections
a year. Last year, however, there were an unusual number
of deaths — Lord Selborne, Mr. Huxley, Mr. Reeve, and
Lord Leighton having all left our ranks between the first
meeting of 1895 and the first of 1896.
" We have elected this season Lord Peel, Mr. Asquith,
Mr. Pember, and Professor Jebb. Our numbers are now
thirty-eight. They cannot, by our statutes, pass beyond
forty. " It is commonly supposed that Dr. Johnson was the
founder of The Club, bur that is not quite so. Sir
Joshua Reynolds was our founder; but Dr. Johnson, Mr.
Burke, his father-in-law Dr. Nugent, Mr. Bennet Langton,
Mr. Topham Beauclerk, Dr. Oliver Goldsmith, and Mr.
Anthony Chamier, then Under Secretary of State, were aU
original members. For the first few years, unluckily, no
records were kept, and the earliest note in our books of the
members present at a meeting belongs to the 7 th April
1775, when Mr. Charles Fox was in the chair, and
Beauclerk, Boswell, Chambers, Gibbon, Johnson, Langton,
and Reynolds were amongst those present. For many
years the names were only entered by a clerk, but on the
ist of AprU 1788 the practice was introduced that the
chairman of the night should sign the list of those members
who were present and absent. The chairman that night
was Boswell. Dr, Johnson's last appearance at The Club

1896] RECORDS i6g
was four years before this, so that we have not his signature
in our books at all. The last of the original members to
go over to the majority was Bennet Langton, who died in
1801. On 17th July 1832, it was arranged that every
member present should sign his name after dinner, and
that practice has been continued to the present time. The
Father of the Club, as it now exists, is the Duke of ArgyU,
who was elected on the 17 th June 1851, Mr. Gladstone
comes second, having been elected six years afterwards.
"You may remember that Dr. Johnson and Boswell spent
their time on the rather dreary road which leads from
Strichen to Banff, in trying whether they could find some
member of The Club, as then constituted, to fill each
Professorship in the University of St, Andrew's, They did
so, much to their own satisfaction ; but I think we could
now make a hst not at all inferior to theirs. First, I must
admit one or two deficiencies. Though we have some
most competent authorities on Art, we have no one quite in
the position of Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom painting was
to have been confided. Then we have no one who
approaches Sir William Jones in wide knowledge of
Eastern languages. We have not Mr. Burke to teach
Politics, but we have the present Prime Minister, and the
Prime Minister before him, ready to give valuable pre
lections on that subject, five other present or recent
Cabinet Ministers ready to lend a hand ; and an ex- Viceroy
VOL, I. Y

170 TPIE CLUB [1896
of India, Lord Lansdowne, reinforced by Sir Alfred Lyall,
ready to talk good sense about that great dependency,
instead of the raging and rampant nonsense in which Mr.
Burke, great man as he was, too frequently indulged. We
have no one at all to teach Celtic Antiquities, which were
assigned to Mr. Vesey ; but then I gather from a notice in
Dr. Birkbeck HiU's most valuable edition of Boswell that
he knew nothing whatever about them ; nor have we
any one to teach Scotch Law, which Boswell was to have
done, but his father would, I am afraid, have asserted that
he knew hardly more of that subject than Mr. Vesey did
of Celtic Antiquities. Sir William Chambers was to teach
English Law. He was a most respectable judge, but I
think Lord Herschell and Lord Davey would bring to the
work a good deal more authority. Mr. Chamier was to
teach Commercial Politics. I think Mr. Goschen's ex
perience is both wider and deeper. ¦ Bennet Langton was
to be Professor of Greek. I suspect he would have made
but a poor substitute for Jebb. Beauclerk was to teach
Natural Philosophy, but he was not exactly on the intel
lectual level of Lord Kelvin. Garrick was to teach
Oratory, and I have no doubt he would have done it
extremely well. I suppose, however, that the three things
in the way of oratory best worth hearing in our times have
^been Bright speaking to some thousand people, Mr.
Gladstone replying in the House of Commons at mid
night, and the Duke of Argyll addressing the House of

1896] PAST AND PRESENT 171
Lords at five o'clock in the afternoon, the red benches
filled below, and the galleries filled above. Well, of these
masters of eloquence, the last two both belong to our body,
and I daresay their lectures would be at least as useful as
would have been those of the great actor. Dr. Nugent was
to take care of Medical Science, but I ain sure Sir James
Paget would command the confidence of the profession
more fully than he did. Goldsmith was to have taken the
department of Poetry and Ancient History. I would divide
them between Acton and Courthope, not a little I
imagine, to the advantage of their students. Colman was
to have been the Professor of Latin, but I am confident
that he never was so good a scholar as Sir Robert Herbert
or Sir George Trevelyan. Divinity was to have been
halved between Bishop Percy of the Reliques and Dr.
Johnson. We have two Bishops, your own diocesan of
Oxford and the Bishop of Peterborough ; while if it was
thought necessary that a layman should take part in the
teaching, Mr. Gladstone would, when not otherwise engaged,
certainly be ready with a set of lectures on Butler, on
Anglican Orders, or, indeed, on almost any subject which
the theologian has to consider. Lecky and Walpole would
be much more efficient expounders of Modern History than
Lord Charlemont, and Lord Acton would be always there
to supplement them. Professor York-Powell, himself a great
master of history, wiU bear me out when I say that no English
man has ever surpassed Lord Acton in his knowledge of it.

172 THE CLUB [1896
" We could, you see, supply very well the Professorships
which Johnson and BosweU discussed on the Strichen road,
and we could supply several others of which they did not
think. The Art of War might be taught by the two
commanders who know it both by theory and practice
— the one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman — the
Due d'Aumale and Lord Wolseley. The mystery of
Diplomacy might be taught by Lord Dufferin and
Sir Henry EUiot; Botany by Sir Joseph Hooker, the
first systematic botanist in the world ; Palaeography by Sir
E. Maunde Thompson; while the whole realm of the
animal creation might be surveyed and explained by Sir
WiUiam Flower. I am far from having exhausted the list
of our members, though I have doubtless gone a long way
to exhaust your patience. What I have been able to say
about The Club as it exists at this moment, might have
been as truly said by my predecessor, Mr. Henry Reeve, by
his predecessor. Dean Milman, or by any one who filled
before them the office of Treasurer, so that I am justified,
I think, in asserting that the institution in which Dr.
Johnson took so much interest, has not suffered at the
hands of his successors.
" We have to-morrow our last dinner for the season, and
I shall feel much pleasure in reporting how kindly the
health of The Club has been proposed, and how cordially
it has been drunk by this distinguished company."

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF THE HOUSE
OF COMMONS, 1858-1881
When I received, some time ago, a welcome invitation
to come down and address my old friends, I had no
difficulty on fixing upon a subject, for it was clear that
in addressing an Elgin audience, I coul<^l speak upon one
subject only, upon the long period in which we stood to
each other in the relation of Constituents and Re
presentative. In treating that subject I shall look at it
only as a chapter in our recent history, with the eyes of a
careful observer of men and things, not with those of a
mUitant politician.
It is forty years well told since I first, in December
1857, came' before you as a candidate, and we began the
political connection which lasted through five-and-twenty
sessions. When that connection commenced, the question
before the country was, whether or not the time had come
for altering the machinery by which our great vassal
Empire in the East had been governed, since the passing of
1T3

174 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
Mr. Pitt's famous Act ? Much heat was evoked during the
discussion, and many bad reasons were given for doing a
very sensible thing ; but, in the end, the views which you
held, in common with the great majority of the electorate,
received the sanction of Parliament, and a simpler piece of
machinery was substituted for the India House and the
Board of Control, whose physical remoteness from each
other — the one being situated in the middle of the com
mercial quarter of London, the other in the heart of the
political quarter— sufificiently reflected the inconveniences
of the old system. I have had, as you know, much to do,
since those days, with the Government of India, at the
India OflSce, in the House of Commons, in India itself;
and while feeling the greatest respect and regard for
the Great Company, I have no doubt that the change,
which you then all wished for and sent me to support,
was a wise one.
When I entered Parliament, the reins of power were
held by Lord Palmerston. That eminent man was not, at
any portion of his career, as much admired in Scodand
as he was latterly in England. I remember the late Lord
Stanhope saying to me in 1865 that south of the Trent a
candidate, who wished for an easy victory, might save
himself the trouble of making a speech, and simply say
"Palmerston." He had, nevertheless, in 1857, your
support and the support of the best Liberal opinion north

i898] DEFEAT OF 1858 175
of the Tweed, so that you fully approved one of the first
votes I gave in the Session of 1858, when his Government
was overthrown, thanks to the not too scrupulous
manoeuvre executed by the then Lord Derby, on the night
of Mr. MUner Gibson's amendment.
The result, however, was not very important, and
perhaps, on the whole, salutary, since it gave time for the
healing of the feud or feuds in the Liberal Party which had
been intensified by the China vote and the China dissolu
tion in the beginning of the previous year. With the full
support of the re-united Liberal Party, and with much
support from the more moderate section of the Con
servatives, Lord Palmerston returned to power after the
dissolution of 1859, and retained his ascendancy untU his
death. The Derby Government of 1858-9 was considered, by
friends and foes ahke, a mere stop-gap, and beyond carry
ing through Parliament a Bill for the Government of
India, founded upon resolutions which had obtained
favour with both sides, it did little in the way of legislation.
Reasonable men of aU shades of opinion had seen for a
long time that the Property Qualification for Members of
Parliament, which did not exist in Scotland and had no
practical importance anywhere, ought to be got rid of, and
that the still more foolish prejudice which prevented Jews
from sitting in the House of Commons should go the

176 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
way of other follies. Both these salutary changes belong
to the period of Conservative Office; but both were fore
gone conclusions when the Conservatives came in.
By a happy chance the wisest man they had in their
ranks, the last Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley, had to take
the initiatory steps in starting the new Government of
India. It was under his auspices that appeared the
Queen's Proclamation, which has been so much talked
of since, and forms a sort of Indian Magna Charta. Lord
Stanley did another thing, in connection with India, which
may look to some a matter of trifling importance, but which
an ex-Governor of Madras may be permitted to think of as
much more momentous than many changes that occupy a
large space in our ordinary histories. He sent Mr., or, as
he is now. Sir, Clements Markham to South America, to
devise means by which the Cinchona tree might be trans
planted to India, a very difficult enterprise, for it was
jealously guarded by many dragons. When I tell you that
Cinchona is almost a specific against the most deadly form
of malarial fever and that, unless the aid of Cinchona is
invoked, malarial fever kills far more people in Southern
India than cholera does even in a cholera epidemic, you
will understand why I think that an apparently trifling act
was more important than the winning of a good many
battles. The Conservative Government was peculiarly unlucky

1898] PALMERSTON RETURNS TO POWER 177
in finding itself in Downing Street at a moment when
European questions were being agitated, with regard to
which it, naturally and necessarily, took a view opposed to
that held by the majority of its countrymen. It took its
stand upon the treaties which followed the Napoleonic wars,
whUe most Liberals had no objection to see some of these
treaties torn up. The best observers of contemporary
affairs had thought, for some time, that war between
Austria and France was all but inevitable, and when, on
the first day of 1859, the rumour ran from capital to capital
that the Austrian Ambassador had been badly received at the
Tuileries, it was universally believed, although as a matter
of fact it was not true. I was not aware that it was not true
till long afterwards, when M. de Hubner, the Ambassador
in question, whom I knew extremely well in the last decade
of his life, told me that what the Emperor Napoleon really
said to him was : " I trust you will assure the Emperor
that although our Ministers have some subjects of
difference, my personal regard for him is as high as
possible." Nevertheless the erroneous account of what
had passed, circulated by an indiscreet person who was
present, was only a presage of coming events, and we
aU had these events much in our minds when you sent
me back to the House of Commons in 1859, and when
we gave effect to the wishes of our Constituents by re
placing Lord Palmerston in office.
VOL. I. z

178 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
The first important measure of the new Government
was the Commercial Treaty with our nearest neighbours,
which I as your representative strongly supported. I had
of course much rather have seen that treaty backed by the
best intelligence of France expressing itself through a
representative Assembly. This, however, was out of the
question ; the best intelligence of France had then nothing
whatever to do with its so-caUed representative Assemblies,
and the legal maxim, that no one is bound to perform
impossibilities, holds good in politics no less than in
jurisprudence. The conclusion of that treaty was the great
glory of the year i860. It was a most admirable measure,
and paved the way for a great advance throughout Europe
towards commercial freedom, the prospects of which looked
exceedingly good even as late as 1875, though much ground
has been since lost. It was one of the most striking
victories of reason over unreason which our times have
seen, and it would be very unfair not to give much credit
for it to the enlightened views of the then Emperor of the
French. Unfortunately, hovfever, those who knew that
personage best knew that he was utterly undependable, and
they did wisely who, while giving him full support in his
commercial policy, pushed on the Volunteer movement
and fortified our coasts against a surprise which, if he had
thought It to his advantage, he might at any time have
attempted. Even as late as 187 1, when he was a prisoner

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 179
at Wilhelm shohe, he tried to intrigue with Germany against
this country, which was so soon to afford him his last
asylum. The gravest pre-occupation of Statesmen in 1861 was the
commencement of the American Civil War, which nearly
led, as you wUl recoUect, just at the time when the country
was saddened by the death of the Prince Consort, to the
outbreak of hostilities between us and the Northern
States. People in this part of the island were not, I think, ever
so much interested in the details of the American conflict
as they were in some places further South. Neither fervid
Northern nor fervid Southern partisans were ever numerous
amongst you. I suppose there is no one in this country
who would not rejoice to see the alliance between the
United Kingdom and the United States of which many
have talked and written since Mr. Chamberlain made his
now famous speech ; but it takes two to make an alliance.
No doubt, in the Eastern part of North America, we have
numerous friends, and amongst the more highly educated
portion of the population friends as strong and as wise as
we could possibly desire ; but in the South and West, more
especially in the Central West, I am afraid the state of
feeling is very different. Let us hope that the better
elements in the country may overcome the Jingoes. A
really good understanding between the United States and

i8o THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
this country, to say nothing of an aUiance, would go far to
solving half the political problems of the planet.
The Session of 1862 did litde in the way of adding
important measures to the Statute Book ; but it is a very
interesting one to look back upon, on account of the number
of subjects reviewed during its course, the discussion on
which prepared the mind of the country for changes that
had to come. A debate about the duel between the two
American monsters the Monitor and the Merrimac, marked
the first swell of that great wave of opinion which has made
the vessels we were so proud of, when the fleet sailed from
Spithead in 1854, as obsolete, for all practical purposes, as
the galleys which fought at Actium. A debate about
military expenditure in the Colonies helped on the salutary
change which came about a few years later, when they were
called upon to take a greater share in their own defence.
There was an exceedingly briUiant tournament over the
affairs of Italy, in which the enemies of that country, who
had brought it on, were scattered and overthrown, and which
was illustrated by one of the best speeches I ever heard
Mr. Gladstone deliver. Mr. Horsfall, then member for
Liverpool, brought forward a resolution of the greatest
possible importance on the subject of beUigerent rights at
sea, a subject about which the next century will assuredly
hear a good deal. The Abolition of Purchase in the Army
was helped on by a speech from Lord Stanley. Altogether

iSgS] RELIGIOUS LIBERTY iSi
we may say of it what Mill said of Coleridge and of
Bentham : " It was a Seminal Session — ' It taught the
teachers.' "
The general character of the Session of 1863 was simUar
to that of its predecessor, but with this difference, that the
questions which were most discussed related chiefly to
rehgious liberty. The same Liberal influences, which were
beginning to affect pubhc opinion so powerfully outside,
penetrated to the House of Commons, rather more quickly
than such influences sometimes do, when powerful interests
and prejudices are banded together against enlightenment.
The proposal, for instance, to get rid of some of the silly
tests which hampered the English Universities was freely
discussed, and a controversy commenced, which, after raging
for seven years, was at last settled finally and conclusively
in favour of common sense. Then the worst of aU Irish
abuses, the iniquity of the State Church, was, for the first
time for many years, made a subject of sharp animadversion.
I remember Sir Thomas Erskine May, a very able man, and
one of the keenest observers of the course of English politics,
saying to me, after I had made an attack upon that Institu
tion : "You wiU win, but it wiU take you twenty years."
The destinies were kinder to us than he hoped. It took us
only six years to win.
These were only two out of a number of subjects of the
kind which were debated. At the time I regretted very

i82 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
much that the Government was not prepared to do more in
the direction in which I wished to move, and chafed not a
little when Sir George Cornewall Lewis, for whom I had a
very great veneration, and who sympathised in some respects,
as I was aware, with the views of us younger men, said to
me shortly before his death : "What can you expect us to
do as a Government ? Public opinion is not at present in
favour of these changes, and we could effect nothing."
More than a generation has passed since, and I now see that
he was right and that the impatience of "us youth" was
wrong, though in the highest degree natural. Many opinions,
which in 1863 were held by the great majority to be
pestilent heresies, are now so generally received that, if one
has occasion to state them, one is accused of dispensing
commonplaces and platitudes ! That is the way Humanity
moves forward. The great Spanish orator, Castelar, was well
inspired when he said, apostrophising Queen Christina : —
"Ah, Madam! it is thus that History advances! The men
who were yesterday great hopes are to-morrow hardly recol
lections ; the world goes on devouring in its feverish activity
idols, crowns, dynasties."
One of the subjects which interested us most in 1864
was the question whether this country should or should not
take part with Denmark against Germany. An accident had
made me give some attention sixteen years before to the
controversy which brought these two Powers into coUision,

1898] THE DANISH WAR 183
first in 1848 and again in the year of which I am speaking,
and I had no doubt from the outset as to the line I ought
to take. I spoke on the opening night of the Session, and
thanked my kind friend, the then Speaker, Mr. Evelyn
Denison, for allowing me to be the first to break a lance on
the unpopular side.
Lord Palmerston's curious superstition, which was shared
by a large number of members of the House of Commons,
that Germany was a land chiefly inhabited by "nebulous
professors," brought us very near the verge of a great and
calamitous folly, whUe the Danes had a good right to com
plain of the half-comfort and half-support from England,
which helped to make them engage in a contest in which
(if they had fully grasped the fact that they would stand
alone) they might perhaps not have engaged at all.
It is pleasant to think that, since the conclusion of that
struggle, the Danish people, as a whole, in spite of the
mischief-making efforts of a turbulent minority, has shown
so much good sense. Count Heydebrand-Lasa, who visited
me at Madras, the first envoy sent by the victors to Copen
hagen after the war was over, told me that nothing could
exceed the courtesy and good taste with which he was
received by the upper classes, and that, although it was not
quite the same with the rest of the population, still that on
the whole everybody behaved very well. I do not think
there is any country in Europe in which so much has been

l84 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
done by the Government in recent years to call out the
energies of the nation, more especially in the rural districts.
That is why many Danish agricultural products can be sold
cheaper than our own in our home markets.
It should be remembered that on the last Palmerston
Government fell the onerous duty of working out the
legislation which had to be carried through before the
system inaugurated by the Act placing India under the
direct government of the Crown could be made effective.
This was done under the superintendence of Sir Charles
Wood, who was aided by two excellent lieutenants, the
present Lord Northbrook, who was his political, and Mr.
Herman Merivale, who was his permanent Under Secretary.
We all know and admire the first, who is still with us ; but
Mr. Herman Merivale, who was one of the ablest men of
his generation, was very little known outside the most
intelligent coteries of London Society. Sir Charles Wood,
not successful as an expositor, was an exceedingly able
head of an office, and thoroughly deserved the peerage
which he later obtained. It should further not be for
gotten, to the credit of the Palmerston Government, that
it set on foot several reforms, which developed later into
considerable proportions. In two of these, belonging to
the year 1861, I took a very special interest. The first of
them was the appointment of a Commission to enquire
into the management of the principal public schools, all of

iSgS] COMMISSION ON THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 185
which wanted a great deal of looking into. Very con
siderable and very beneficent changes have been made
since, though there is still a great deal to be done ; but
that Commission was the beginning of them aU.
The second was the appointment of a Select Committee
to enquire into the Diplomatic Service. That, too, was a
commencement of most salutary change ; but in those days
some influences, utterly unlike those of the present, held
sway at the Foreign Office, and it required the appointment
of yet another Committee in the next decade, of which,
being at the time in charge of Indian affairs in the House
of Commons, I was not a member, to do what was
necessary. It was before that last Committee that Odo
Russell, later Lord Ampthill, who, of all the English
Diplomatists I have known, came nearest to my ideal of
what the perfect English Diplomatist should be, said the
wisest things that have been said, in our times, about the
profession which he so much adorned. I have always, as
you know, attached the greatest possible importance to our
having a first-rate Diplomatic Service, no less than an
incomparable Navy and an adequate Army. I see and
rejoice in the great improvement that has taken place, of
late years, in that branch of our national affairs. Men
enter it much better prepared, and although something
remains to be effected, much of it will be effected by the
mere efflux of time. Few things have pleased me more
VOL. I. 2 A

i86 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
than that when I had left Parhament and was starting
for India, Lord Odo Russell came to the farewell dinner
my friends gave me, intimating that he did so, not only on
private grounds, but because he wished to mark his
recognition of the very strong interest in, and regard for,
the Diplomatic Service I had shown during the whole of
my service as your member.
The Parliament of 1859 was not specially memorable —
still, it did what the bulk of its constituents wanted. It
supported the liberation of Italy as strongly as it knew how.
It prevented us taking sides with the South in the
American Civil War. It prevented our becoming involved
too deeply either in the Polish or the Schleswig-Holstein
troubles. It saw us through a very difificult and stormy
time without landing us in any disaster. Its presiding
genius died in a good old age soon after it had gone over
to the majority. He would have been eminently unsuited
for the years that were to follow, but he was perfectly
suited for those in which its lot was cast.
Palmerston left little or no mark upon our internal
politics. It is as a Foreign Minister that he must be
judged. In that capacity he was undoubtedly animated
by excellent motives, pursued some wise objects, and was
especially to be commended as well for his courage as for
the chivalrous way in which he stood by his subordinates,
even when they had erred in carrying into effect what they

1898J PALMERSTON 1S7
believed to be his wishes. He had a strong belief in
parliamentary Government as the least bad system under
which nations, at the particular stage of development which
Europe had reached in his day, could be managed; but
his devotion to that idea was all too absolute. He
" meddled and made " much more than an English
Minister should, and he was extremely Ul-informed upon
some matters about which it was his duty to know a great
deal, the state of Germany for instance. His dislike and
distrust of the Emperor Nicholas led to the first of our
insensate wars in Afghanistan, and his violent opposition
to the Suez Canal was another grave blot upon his
statesmanship. Nevertheless, every one to whom the
destinies of this country were confided would be the
better for some infusion of his Civis Romanus temper.
It is easy to have too much of it, for foolish Jingoes
swarm in every street ; but it is also easy to have too
litde. He knew well sometimes also how to give way when it
was wise to do so, as he showed when he brought in the
Conspiracy Bill. We have been seldom nearer war with
France, since 18 15, than we were immediately after his
Government was defeated upon that measure in February
1858, and we were not then in anything like so strong a
position with regard to national defence as we are now.
Only a few months before him there passed away a man

l88 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
who was at the opposite pole of opinion. If you could
have taken all that was best in each of them and combined
it, you would have had an almost perfect specimen of
the best kind of Enghsh Statesman. By the union of
Cobden's wide-reaching general views with Palmerston's
immense knowledge of the actual facts of European
relations, nearly all their respective errors and deficiencies
would have been corrected. Palmerston had next to no
principles. Cobden, the first great "international man,"
was terribly ignorant of the countless ins and outs, the
jealousies, the fears, the crazes, the interests, the loves and
the hatreds which are omnipotent in deciding whether a
particular course, however much recommended by right
reason, is possible or impossible. He was, nevertheless,
a very wise and a very great man. Perhaps the gravest of
his inteUectual defects was his tendency to look too far
ahead, to fix his eyes upon a distant future, and to ignore
too much the conditions of the world which immediately
surrounded him. Speaking to you in the year 1862, I said
in addressing you with reference to a parliamentary duel
between him and Lord Palmerston : —
" Towards the end of the Session there were several sharp
passages of arms between Lord Palmerston and Mr. Cobden,
and on the ist of August, in a very thin House, they engaged
in a regular single combat. There they stood, unreconciled
and irreconcilable, the representatives of two widely different
epochs, and of two widely different types of English life. The

1898] COBDEN 189
one trained in the elegant but superficial culture which was
usual amongst the young men of his position in life at the
beginning of this century, full of pluck, full of intelligence, but
disincHned, alike by the character of his mind and by the habits
of official life, from indulging in political speculation, or pur
suing long trains of thought, yet yielding to no man in applica
tion, in the quickness of his judgment, in knowledge of a
Statesman's business, and in the power of enlisting the support
of what has been so truly called ' that floating mass which in
all countries and in all times has always decided all questions.'
The other derived from nature finer powers of mind, but many
years passed away before he could employ his great abihties
in a field sufficiently wide for them, and he has never had the
official training which is perhaps absolutely necessary to turn
even the ablest polidcian into a Statesman. There he stood,
an admirable representative of the best section of the class to
which he belongs, full of large and philanthropic hopes and full
of confidence in his power to realise them, yet wanting in
pliability of mind, and deficient in that early and systematic
culture which prevents a man becoming the slave of one idea."
I did not then fuUy understand the connection of Mr.
Cobden's views. It was not till several years later that I
came to comprehend them, thanks to conversations with
the late Sir Louis Mallet, who was his right-hand man in
the negotiations at Paris connected with the Commercial
Treaty. I have no hesitation in saying that Sir Louis
Mallet's exposition of his great master's ideas is far more
valuable than any piece of writing which Mr. Cobden left
behind him, and I would most strongly urge every one
whom my words can reach and who cares for the wider

iQo THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
issues of politics, to read it in the form in which it has been
published by the Cobden Club and re-pubUshed by its
author's son, himself a man of high promise, Mr. Bernard
Mallet. Sir Louis Mallet's paper. The Political Opinions of
Richard Cobdeii, did the same sort of service to him that
Dumont did to Bentham. Heaven help any man who
attempts to read the great Jeremy in the English original ;
but in the lucid French of his quasi-translator he becomes
at once thoroughly intelligible.
It is quite the right thing nowadays to sneer at
Cobden and the Manchester School, whatever exactly that
very loose phrase may mean; but the truth is that
Cobden's views have had much more effect upon the views
of many of the public writers who run him down than they
are at all aware of For some years back both our political
parties have, when in power, usually followed, in all that
relates to foreign affairs, very much the course which
Cobden would have approved. Much folly has been
talked by irresponsible persons about intervening here
or intervening there ; but the conduct of successive Govern
ments has been wise. They have dropped the lecturing
tone in addressing civilised foreign States. They have
ceased, to a considerable extent, to identify British interests
with old-world systems of policy, and have kept their
attention as much fixed, as the foolishness of some of

1898] THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL 191
their supporters would allow them, upon near and obvious,
as distinguished from remote and doubtful, national objects.
This has been the case even in Africa, for (although I
personaUy have the greatest doubt as to whether some of.
the acquisitions which now occupy so much of the time of
our Foreign Office at home as well as of our Embassies at
Berlin and Paris, are likely to bring us any advantages
commensurate with the trouble which we bestow on them)
it is the absence of a disposition on the part of other
countries to meet us half-way which has prevented the
general acceptance of the maxim that national inter
dependence, not independence, should be the aim of all
wise Statesmen. If there ever appeared any effective desire
on the part of either France, Germany, or the United
States to arrive at a cordial understanding with us, there
would be no want of disposition on this side to meet them
more than half-way; but these three countries are all
cursed with Protection, and the first two with Militarism
into the bargain. These things are the absolute negation
of every sane maxim of foreign policy.
It is no blame either to us or to Mr. Cobden that we
cannot in Foreign affairs carry his maxims into effect. You
may bring your horse to the water, but you cannot make
him drink ; and until saner ideas have their perfect work
in Paris, Berlin and Washington, we must, stupid and
barbarous as it is, think only too much about the necessity

192 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
of meeting force by force. Happily we have now an
incomparable Navy, and are far on the road to have an
adequate Army.
There is one country in our relations with which our
people, and, I fear, some members of our Government,
have a good deal to learn — I mean Russia. All through
our political connection I urged the expediency of having a
better understanding with that country. As far back as
1866 I said in my Studies in European Politics : "To me
it seems that the Governments of England and of Russia,
if directed by wise counsels, ought not to be rivals, but a
support each to each in Asia." I returned to the subject
when I addressed you at Peterhead in December 1867,
whUe, in 1868, I again put forward the same opinions, in
my Political Survey, which was dedicated to you.
In it I said, amongst other things : " But there is another
way of looking at the whole matter. Is it quite so sure
that Russia must be always hostile to this country ? Is it
not possible that there may come a time when we shall
understand each other in Asia and strengthen each other's
hands?" I have never been able to see, and I do not
see now, why this should be impossible. For twenty
years, since our own rulers allowed Sir Henry Rawlinson,
the best of servants, to become the worst of masters at
the India Office, we have, from an exaggerated fear of
Russia, been playing into her hands by advancing into

1898] RUSSIA 193
regions far removed from our true base — the sea, and in
which she must, thanks to her geographical position,
increase in strength far more rapidly than we. It looks as
if we were going to commit over again the very same
mistake in China. No power that we can exert can by
any possibility prevent Russia sooner or later doing
what she pleases in the northern part of that country.
Northern China wiU be Russian to all intents and
purposes one of these days, unless some marveUous
revolution takes place among the Celestials, and that
day wiU come, not in my time, but assuredly in the time
of many who are now inhabitants of this City. We had
much better make up our minds to it and, thinking of
Wei-ha-Wei as of quite secondary importance, concentrate
our strength upon other parts of the country infinitely
more valuable to us ; above aU upon the neighbourhood
of Hong-Kong and the course of the Yangtse, In 1869
I remarked to you that the long valley of Assam points
like a finger towards China, and that sooner or later
a line of communication would be completed between
India and Shanghai, This I said and say, although
perfectly aware of the immense difficulties which will have
to be encountered among the great mountains on our
extreme North-Eastern Frontier, Circumstances in the
last few years have planed away many of the difficulties
which prevented our coming to an understanding with
VOL. I. 2 B

194 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
Russia in the nearer East, and I think that nothing is
wanting to bring our two countries closer to each other
save the lack of knowledge. "All battie," said Carlyle,
"is misunderstanding," and certainly much of it is.
Ever since Russia ceased, with the Emperor Nicholas, to
assert a quasi-suzerainty over Continental Europe, no
real interests on either side have kept us asunder. I
think that it would be well if all young Members of
Parliament could be forced to visit Russia. Moscow is a
great eye-opener. There are few things for which I am
more grateful than for having gone thither in 1863.
To return, however, to the sequence of events — from
which I advisedly diverged to speak of some matters
of present political but not of party interest — it was in the
nature of things that Lord Russell should succeed Lord
Palmerston, and equally in the nature of things that his
Cabinet should bring in a Reform Bill.
Looking back at the events of 1866, I find nothing to
change in the opinions which I laid before you on October
3rd in that year. The whole business connected with
the Reform Bill was piteously mismanaged. The Govern
ment acted unwisely in bringing in a Reform BUI at aU in
the first year of a new Parliament, and its two principal
members gave the impression — perhaps quite an erroneous
one — that they were thinking more. Lord Russell of his
past, and Mr. Gladstone of his future, than of what was

THE REFORM BILL OF 1866 195
really best for the country at that precise moment.
Foolish, however, as was the action of the Government,
it was surpassed by the pure idiocy of that section of its
party which became known by the nickname of the
AduUamites. The measure of the Government, though
launched inopportunely, was quite harmless, and would
have settled the question for, perhaps, half a generation ;
but the defeat of the BiU raised up a very unpleasant
agitation, and, after an amount of skirmishing and counter-
skirmishing in the Session of 1867, led to changes which
would have come much better rather later. That, how
ever, was past praying for when once Mr. Lowe and those
who followed him had done their mischievous work. It
was clear then that it would be necessary to go a great
deal further than Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone had
proposed to go ; and so we did, but I am sure the immense
majority on both sides agreed with me when, speaking
on the Scotch Reform Bill of 1868, I said that every one
had been conjugating : " I don't want, you don't want, he
does not want to do it,"
In the midst of the rather dreary skirmishing about the
ins and outs of the Reform Bill, there passed into law a
measure for the confederation of most of our Colonies in
North America into the Dominion of Canada, It is quite
possible that the Act which brought that about may, in
after times, be considered one of the most important

196 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
things which happened during the Conservative inter
regnum from 1866 to 1868, but as it had no bearing upon
the state of parties, and as men's minds were then much
occupied by party differences, it did not attract as much
attention as the momentous consequences, which may
ultimately result from it, might have entitled it to do.
People in Great Britain, who cared for politics at all, were
thinking for the most part either about the impending
extension of the franchise and the spread of the Fenian
conspiracy in Ireland, or were occupied with the immense
and fateful events which were either acted on or closely
concerned the Continent of Europe. To these three
years, you will remember, belonged the Seven Weeks' War
and the earth-shaking Battle of Koniggratz, the resurrection
of Hungary, the departure from and return of the French
to Rome, the tragic end of the Emperor Maximihan, and
much else that was calculated to excite the imagination
and stimulate the thought of all who thought about public
affairs. Moral and political earthquakes followed so
rapidly upon each other that the framing of a Constitution,
which could only, under the most favourable circumstances,
lead to great results after a good many years had passed
away, had little in it to arrest or concentrate observation.
The three Sessions of 1866, 1867, 1868 must be thought
of as a sort of hyphen between the old time and the new.
The new came with the advent to power of Mr. Gladstone

iSgS] GLADSTONE I97
towards the end of the last-named year. Hitherto that
eminent man had made his mark chiefly as a great
financial reformer, and I suppose, a hundred years hence,
his fiscal legislation and the marvellous speeches which
accompanied it wiU be considered his most enduring claim
to a high and honoured niche in the history of the
Victorian age. Of all the speeches I heard him deliver I
should be inclined to give the first place to one on the
Taxation of Charities, belonging to the year 1863, and
really touching the highwater mark which expository
eloquence could reach. But as Prime Minister in his
first Administration he also accomplished an immense
amount of useful work. The Disestablishment and
Disendowment of the Irish Church, the Abolition of
Purchase in the Army, together with the re-creation of our
military force by the CardweUian reforms, and the laying
broad and deep the foundation of elementary education
through the whole of Great Britain, were splendid achieve
ments, achievements which by no means stood alone.
The one fault of that Government, as I did not see then
but do see now, was that it did too much ; not too much
for men who looked at politics from the Liberal point of
view, but for the men who being neither Liberals nor
Conservatives, and caring very little about politics at all,
are really omnipotent in politics, because by lazily inclining
to one side or the other at election times they just make

198 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
the whole difference. For that class Mr. Gladstone and
his coUeagues from 1868 went too fast, and suffered
accordingly ; not that they could have done otherwise, for
if they had not gone as far and as fast as they did they
would have lost the support of the men who could be
depended upon to work hardest for them, and as a matter
of fact they did lose the support of a good many of that
class, especially amongst the English Nonconformists,
by not going further than they did.
The Cabinet was in no way to blame for the loss of the
driving-power behind it which it sustained before it had
completed its fifth year of office; but it was to blame for
allowing its chief to surprise it into a great tactical mistake
at the commencement of its sixth year of office.
The dissolution of 1874 was a very unwise proceeding.
Like most members of the Liberal Party, I supposed at the
time that the Prime Minister had taken the necessary steps
to ascertain the probabilities of the struggle to which he
committed us, and was not a little surprised when I found
he had been so woefuUy mistaken. When the memoirs of
that period are published I presume their readers will know,
more accurately than I, at least, do now, on what his
calculations were founded, or whether there were any
calculations properly so-called at all. 1 mentioned when
speaking at Banff, ten years ago, a curious circumstance,
which is worth repeating : —

1898] THE DISSOLUTION OF 1874 199
" The first time I chanced to come across the late Lord
Iddesleigh, then Sir Stafford Northcote, after the Liberal overturn
of 1874, I said to him : 'Well, here is a pretty change since we
last met, and I hear you were one of the few who foresaw it.' ' Oh
no ! ' he replied. ' I did not foresee it. I thought that if you
went on to the end of the Session and then dissolved, we
should have a majority, but I never dreamt of anything in the
least like this. Although I did not, however, Disraeli did. On
Friday, the 23rd January, he was coming up by the Great
Western Railway to attend a meeting of the Trustees of the
British Museum next day, when a man I know and who knew
him, got into the carriage. In the course of conversation my
friend said : " Well, what do you think of the future ? " "I am
sure I don't know," answered Disraeli, " it all looks very dark.
If I were the Prime Minister I would bring in the quietest
set of measures I could, dissolve at the end of the Session, and
take my chance ; but he is such a strange man that for all
I know he may dissolve to-morrow, and if he does he will
smash his party to pieces.'" That is, as we know, precisely
what he did."
Whatever may be the explanation of this wild coup
d'etat its results were most pitiable. 1 The Liberal Party
came back to Westminster so weak that for six years it
could exercise hardly any direct influence on public
affairs. The " Dog's Nose Parliament," as it was wittily
caUed, from the influence in its composition of the Liquor
interest, was one of the least good we have had in modern
' May we hope that Mr. Morley's Life of Mr. Gladstone may do
something to clear away the doubts raised by the late Lord Selborne's
revelations ?

20O THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
times. The years of its pilgrimage were weary, though,
alas ! not few, and the only real interest which they
brought to reasonable people, over and above the interest
which we all feel when there is a question whether we are
going to be upset or not by a coachman, was the con
templation of the works and ways of that coachman.
The Parliament of 1874 was even more completely
that of Mr. Disraeli than its predecessor was that of his
illustrious rival. It was his stepping-stone to the position
which he occupied in the eyes of so many when he
returned from Berlin and borrowed, to apply to his own
achievements, the phrase which Burke used with reference
to a very different transaction, " Peace with Honour.''
"Yes," said some one, "a Peace which passeth aU understand
ing, and such Honour as is found among  " Well ! I
won't finish the quotation. Few, I suppose, who sat in it
remember with any pleasure the 21st Imperial Parliament,
defiled as it was by obstruction and other evil things,
except in so far as it gave to Mr. Disraeli a fair field
and much favour. He began his work as Prime Minister
very quietly, passing round the word to his colleagues :
"Do anything you like, provided you do not get us into
a scrape.'' For some time they acted on this hint. Some
harmless Bills, enabling and permitting this or that, were
brought in and passed. I do not remember anything
blameworthy being done, save the carrying through

1898] THE PARLIAMENT OF 1874 201
Parliament of the Pubhc Worship Regulation Bill, which
was not technically, though it was substantially, a Govern
ment measure. It was intended to enable one set of
enthusiasts in the English Establishment to cut the throats
of another set which was supposed to be weak enough to
make that possible. I thought at the time that it would
do more mischief than it actually did, though whatever
it did do was mischief Happily it soon became a dead
letter, and little is now heard of it. Ere long, however,
circumstances occurred in the East of Europe which
attracted first the attention, then the sympathies of
the country, and an attempt was soon made by a section
of the Liberal Party, as I thought very injudiciously, to
turn this sympathy to political account in a sense hostile
to the Government, The result was that Mr. Disraeli
was led to take a more antagonistic attitude towards the
Christian races of the Balkan peninsula than was at all
prudent. That false step again led him to play up to the
foohsh suspicion of Russia which lay deep in the English
mind, thanks to Lord Palmerston, and many others, some
his friends, and some, like Mr, Urquhart, his bitter foes.
Once started on this course, the Prime Minister threw
over aU the patience and all the prudence which had
distinguished him during the earlier part of his Govern
ment, fell back on the dreams of his youth, and was once
more the Disraeli of Tancred.
VOL. I. 2 c

202 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
I am not using a metaphorical but a perfectly accurate
expression, for not only did I show at the time ' that all
that was distinctive in his Foreign policy, during those
years, is to be found in that very bright and agreeable
novel, but he himself avowed to a friend of mine that he
was reading it " not for amusement but for instruction."
The strange thing is not that large numbers of unthinking
people, who like the excitement of being on the verge of
war, applauded to the echo all the fanfaronade which drove
some of his best colleagues from the Cabinet, but that
there are still hundreds of thousands, especially in England,
who think of its author as a great master of Foreign affairs.
I was coming up from the country to London on the
19th of AprU last when my attention was arrested by a
large crowd close to Westminster Abbey. Presently I saw
that it surrounded the statue of Lord Beaconsfield, and that
the whole of the pedestal was covered with primroses. How
strange are the alternations in the estimates of pubhc men.
I well recollect a time, some thirty years since, when Lord
Beaconsfield was far more unpopular with his own followers
than he was with us. We looked at him with some kind
ness and a sort of amused wonder, always saying to our
selves, " What will he do next ? " Those were the days when
a well-known Conservative member closed a discussion with
some Liberals about the respective merits of their leaders by
' Foreign Policy, MacmiUan & Co., London, 1880.

1898] LORD BEACONSFIELD 203
the characteristic words : " AVell, well, I prefer our
scoundrel to your lunatic." The simple souls who bring
primroses to his statue imagine that he was a great and
serious Imperialist statesman ; yet no competent person, I
suppose, would now deny that nearly every really important
step which he took in Foreign affairs was a huge blunder.
Does any living creature, not in an asylum or deserving to
be sent thither, think that he did wisely in doing his best
to commit us to the defence of the Asiatic provinces of
Turkey against Russia ? Does any one think that he did
wisely in saddling us with Cyprus, or in getting us into the
Afghan War, which cost some twenty mUlions, effected
nothing worth effecting at all, and has left a legacy of
mischief of which we are far indeed from having seen the
end. All that we have done since we departed from the wise
pohcy of Lord Lawrence on the North-West Frontier has
been a mistake. Some of the steps on the downward road
have been made inevitable by previous steps. That I do
not deny, but the whole policy from the first has been
radically unsound. One of its many bad effects has been
the recent war, which has certainly not redounded to the
credit of our statesmen, although it has brought deserved
honour to many officers and privates, not least to our native
auxiliaries. The meaning of the whole series of disastrous
blunders which have been made since, twenty years ago, in

204 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
defiance of all the best opinions, we advanced to Quetta, is
simply this, that the soldiers at Simla captured the civilians,
and made more than one Viceroy the prey of their bow and
of their spear. I cannot blame the soldiers : they looked at
the matter from a purely professional point of view.
Lawyers, clergymen, doctors, all look primarily, and must
look primarily, at matters from a professional point of view ;
but I do blame the Viceroys, who had no such excuse.
You wiU often hear it said that a wave of Mussulman
fanaticism was the cause of the recent complications which
have lost us so much blood and treasure. It was not with
out its effect. Those who have lost relatives and friends
may thank the Greeks and their folly for a good deal. If
they had not rushed into a war without the slightest shadow
of excuse, and aUowed the Mussulman to believe that he
was once more going to defeat the Christian, we should
have been spared much trouble ; but, if our own fatuous
" forward policy " had not teased and excited the tribes, the
fanatics would not have had material on which to work.
How could any one, who knew the facts, imagine that
Lord Beaconsfield could be a good authority on Foreign
Affairs ? There is no mystery about Foreign Affairs, and
no great amount of genius required to manage them weU ;
but two things are necessary, in the first place a level head,
and in the second, a great knowledge of facts. A man may
have a very brilliant genius and yet manage a shipping

1898] FOREIGN AFFAIRS 205
business or raUway business, or any other business
abominably, if he has not taken the trouble to obtain an
acquaintance with its details. Now, the most briUiant man
who ever lived could not obtain an acquaintance with
Foreign Affairs without spending a great deal of his time
abroad. This Lord Beaconsfield never did. He traveUed
a little, as a young man, but then for years and years he
gave himself up to quite different pursuits. He knew
nothing whatever about the materials with which he had
to work when he was dealing with Foreign questions.
Lord Salisbury, who became his Foreign Minister when
Lord Derby left the Cabinet, knew more than his chief, but
for many years after he entered Parliament he showed a
quite inconceivable skill, as I remember once pointing out to
you, in taking exactly the opposite side from that on which
Destiny eventually ranged itself During the last few years
he seems to be quite a changed man. I can trace no
difference worth speaking of between his Foreign policy now
adays and the Foreign policy which finds favour with those
who have given most attention to it amongst his opponents,
unless, perhaps, that he has, if I rightly understand some of
his recent utterances with regard to Eastern Europe, swayed
a little more to the side opposed to traditional ideas than
I should quite approve.
The Crimean War occurred, as you know, before you
sent me to Parliament, so I had no responsibility even for a

2o6 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
single vote in connection with it. I am, however, by no
means prepared to admit the doctrine that it was a mistake
from beginning to end. What I do think is that if we were
to set Turkey on her legs again, as we did, it was most
assuredly our duty to see that she reformed thoroughly her
system of Government. That was what was wished by some
to whom all the circumstances were familiar, by the late Lord
Strangford for instance ; but it was not done, and we all
know what troubles its not having been done has brought
upon the world. Again, the state of things which we see in
Germany, Austria, and Italy is not that which Liberals at
one time hoped for ; but it is at least very much better than
what we saw when, just before the Crimean War, the
Reaction was triumphing all along the line from the shores
of the Baltic to the SicUian Sea. I am not an enemy — I am,
as you know, a friend of Russia, but not of Russia bolster
ing up, as she did before the Crimean War, all that was most
evU in Continental Europe. Few people now remember
the words in the Emperor Nicholas's proclamation when his
Armies entered Hungary in 1849 : "God is with us.
Hear ye people and be conquered, for God is with us."
That might be taken as the motto of his whole European
policy till his heart broke in the great ruin of 1855. This
proclamation and the policy which it represented was the
explanation of the feeling of most Liberals throughout
Europe about the Crimean War.

1898] THE PRIMROSE

207

The most successful thing that the Beaconsfield Govern
ment did with reference to its Eastern policy was the
purchase of the Suez shares. I did not approve of it at the
time, and I said so. Even now it seems to me to have
made a very bad precedent. It would be unfair, however,
not to admit that it has been a great financial success, and
the Minister who effected it deserves whatever credit is to
be got from that fact.
I daresay the time will come when we shall know how
far Lord Beaconsfield had any special devotion to the
primrose, which certainly to most people seems curiously
unlike the sort of thing he usuaUy admired. A distinguished
botanist, however, has lately discovered that the primrose,
which we have been accustomed to think a singularly
modest and retiring plant, has really a very different
character. There is a small district of England which is
the only part of our Island in which the true oxlip grows.
It consists of a little ring of territory, where Essex,
Suffolk, Herts, and Cambridge meet. The distinguished
botanist to whom I have alluded, and who is the great
authority on the oxlip, believes that the masterful and
intriguing primrose has driven the oxlip from all its other
haunts in this country, and that it is making a last stand
there. I express no opinion upon this very interesting
theory, but, when I met with it, it seemed to throw a new
light upon the relations of Lord Beaconsfield to a flower

2o8 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
which has become so closely connected with his name, that
when I was walking one day with his former colleague, the
last Lord Derby, at the foot of Primrose Hill, in London, he
said to me : " It's God's mercy that they haven't re-
christened it Mount Beaconsfield,"
And yet man is such a foolish creature that all this
nonsense about Lord Beaconsfield and the primrose, lead
ing as it did to the creation of a fantastic but powerful
political organisation, has had a good side. South of the
Tweed it has in many places brought different classes of
Society together in a quite new way. Young England has
grown old with the Duke of Rutland, who in his early days
was its most typical personage, and played under the name
of Henry Sidney a part in the first of the three novels which
did so much to make Mr. Disraeli's fame in the Forties. In
the work of the Primrose League, however, a good many of
the aspirations of Young England have met their fulfilment,
and what were considered the dreams of a few young men
have been reahsed, while their best representative still lives
amidst general regard and respect. Lord Beaconsfield's
reputation, considered with reference to his action in Foreign
Affairs, will assuredly not stand high with posterity, but he
had very considerable influence, not directly, but indirectly,
in our internal affairs. You may search the Statute Book
in vain to find measures which those who are not misled by
the mere show of things would ever dream of attributing to

1898] SYBIL 209
his initiative. His abiding influence in our internal affairs
came through his books.
Unlike his great opponent, whose extraordinary grasp of
details was one of his most marked characteristics, Mr.
Disraeli never knew, or cared to know, more than was
actually necessary for the moment about even the most
important BiUs. When the great Reform Measure of 1867
was going through the House, he got up, from day to day,
just as much as he thought would be overtaken during the
next sitting. He had a great master to instruct him, and
generally learnt his lesson sufficiently well. On one occa
sion, however, he was asked a question to which he gave
a fluent reply. When he had sat down he said to Sir John
Karslake, who was next him on the Treasury bench, " I
suppose that's all right." Karslake was obliged to explain
that it was all wrong, whereon he consigned his Mentor to
the infernal gods, adding, " I said exactly the words he told
me." I need not say that he was quite mistaken : the
admirable and most accurate public servant, to whom he
referred, was entirely blameless.
No, it is not by anything which he effected through his
direct action, either at home or abroad, that Lord Beacons
field will survive. It is, as I said, by his books. I think
he will live much longer as a writer than he will as a states
man. Sybil more especially is a very memorable per
formance. Mr. Disraeli possessed, when he wrote it, a good
VOL, \, 2D

210 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
deal of information not then the property of the public,
communicated to him, I believe, chiefly by Mr. Duncombe,
which enabled him to give a too true picture of some of the
phases of Enghsh life at that period. This gives it a
peculiar value, apart from its very great merit in other
respects. It is exceedingly funny to hear Lord Beaconsfield
talked of at Primrose League meetings as an Imperiahst
Statesman, in the sense of a statesman who had a great
interest in the Empire as a whole. About India, which is
surely an important portion of our Empire, he knew next to
nothing ; while about the Colonies he knew next to nothing,
and cared even less. He was an Imperialist in the sense of
liking to play and to make this country play a great and
noisy part on the European stage, but in no other.
Still, with all his faults, he was a very interesting man,
the most interesting man probably who has taken an active
part in the English politics of our time — in this sense,
that he kept the attention both of friends and foes on the
stretch more than any one else. His patience was colossal,
and not less colossal was his confidence in himself When
he had hardly put his foot on the first step of the political
ladder he replied to Lord Melbourne, who asked him.
What were his aspirations? "To be Prime Minister of
England, my Lord," Hardly less admirable, in its way,
was the perfect frankness with which he avowed his utter
want of political principle — not as being unfaithful to any

1898] LORD RONALD GOWER 211
higher light, but as one who had come to the dehberate
conclusion that principle in politics was out of place, as
much out of place as it would be in a game of chess. No
one, I think, who watched him, as I did very closely for
more than twenty years, could avoid having a certain regard
for him, or hear without great sympathy that when the
character of the elections of 1880 became clear, he had
said to a young man belonging to his own party who was
driving him from a country-house to the station, "I daresay
all this is to you a rather agreeable excitement ; to me it is
the end of all things ! "
Very touching is the account of a visit to Hughenden, a
few months later, given in the last pages of Lord Ronald
Gower's very agreeable Reminiscences. Lord Ronald
describes the old man, sitting before the fire, talking about
long dead friends, and murmuring as a conclusion to the
whole matter, " Dreams, dreams, dreams ! "
It was high time, however, that the crushing defeat of
1880 should come. A keen observer had said some time
before it came : " Lord Beaconsfield has taken John BuU to
Cremorne, and the old fellow rather likes it ; but there wUl
be a morrow to the debauch I " That there was, with a
vengeance I Mr, Gladstone returned to office with a tre
mendous majority behind him, and for a moment it looked
as ,if he was going to be as powerful as he was twelve years
before; but the conditions were very unlike those of 1868.

212 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
Then there was a great arrear of Legislation about which the
Liberal Party cared, and cared much. In 1880 there was a
good deal that wanted being done, but very little on which
the Liberal Party had set its heart. It was willing enough
to give Mr. Gladstone a free hand about Ireland and
various other matters, but it would have supported him
nearly as well if he had adopted, with regard to most of
them, a policy essentially different.
I was myself sent to the Colonial Office, which I found a
most deeply interesting department, and my time in which
I look back to with the keenest pleasure. Like the vast
majority of the public, I knew nothing about its mechanism
until I became connected with it, and was surprised to
find that far from being, as some usually well-informed
persons supposed it, behind the times, and inefificient, it was
indeed very much the reverse, well-equipped, and well-
manned. It is the fashion of the day to talk a great deal about our
Colonies, They fill a far larger space in our thoughts than
they used to do. That is quite right. When people talk,
however, of the great direct assistance we may derive from
them, I am not sure that they are not cheating themselves
with false hopes. If I saw them anxious to move
far and fast in the direction of Free Trade or anxious to
co-operate with us, at all in proportion to their means,
for their own defence, I should be more hopeful about

iSgS] THE COLONIES 213
our future relations. Whatever these may ultimately
be, at least we can congratulate ourselves that, since
transportation was put an end to, the influence of this
country upon their destinies has been wholly good, and that
many agencies of civilisation are working amongst them
with increased strength from year to year.
Two foolish words have been creeping of late into the
language, and are to be found in the columns of even
important journals. They are Big-Englanders and Little-
Englanders. Now, no sensible man is either one or the
other ; but all sensible men are Strong-Englanders ; in other
words they wish the United Kingdom to retain the high
place it has long had amongst the nations of the world, and
to improve, if possible, its position relatively to that of
others ; but how this should be done is a question open to
much debate. Sometimes it should be done by extension
of territory and the assuming of new responsibilities, some
times it should be done by a diminution of responsibihties ;
and an abandonment of territory. Every separate proposal
should be carefuUy studied on its own merits, and no
general rule can be applied. Of late we have been expand
ing our territory very rapidly. In the year 1880, being then
at the Colonial Office, I used the following expressions in
making a speech to you at Peterhead : —
" Let me try to bring home to you in a few sentences the size
of our Empire, British India is, you know, as big as England,

214 THE HOUSE OP COMMONS [1898
France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Turkey, and, to cut a long
story short, nearly the whole of Continental Europe put together,
without Russia. Well, but British India is about the size of the
single Colony of Western Australia, and the Australian island
continent, every inch of which is ours, is about three times as
big as Western Australia, and if you take up the whole of that
huge island continent and put it down on the top of the
Dominion of Canada, to which have been added, since we came
into office, all the North American Dominions of the Crown
which did not already belong to it, except Newfoundland, it
could stand, colossal as it is, like a cup upon a saucer. And,
after you have put aside the Dominion of Canada and the five
gigantic colonies which make up Australia, you have still some
forty colonies over and above, ranging from mere specks, like
Heligoland, which would make a moderate gendeman's park,
through places like many of the West India islands, which are
about the size of a good nobleman's estate, up to New Zealand,
which is somewhat bigger than the British Isles, and South
Africa, on which you might drop New Zealands about
and yet have plenty of room to spare. But great as is
the variety of size, still greater is the variety of the
material conditions of life, from the cold of the Arctic and
Antarctic regions to the heat of the Equator ; from the immense
unbroken mass of land through which the telegraph runs to
Adelaide, to the shores of the almost innumerable islands be
longing to this or that Colonial group, which are scattered
about the globe ; almost innumerable, I say, and the
expression will not be thought exaggerated when I remind
you that even Mauritius, which itself is smaller than Surrey, has
sateUite dependencies all over the Indian Ocean,"
Since that date, however, though we have got rid of
Heligoland, we have added to our dominions something

iSgS] THE ADDITIONS TO THE EMPIRE 215
more than 2,000,000 square miles, or, in other words, we
have increased them by more than twice the amount of that
portion of the Indian Empire which was under the direct
Government of the Queen in 1880. I do not say that it
has been wise or unwise to do so. In some cases I am
persuaded that it has been wise. My only point, however,
is that such a rate of increase requires the thoughtful sus
tained attention of statesmen and a clear answer to the
question : Is the proposed acquisition really likely to make
for our advantage ? In all such matters I think there is a
great advantage in having a firm piece of writing — a piece of
writing from which such words as " prestige," by which the
cunning gull, the imbecUe, should be rigorously excluded.
I think that in 1882, to take a concrete example of an
increase of responsibility, we were perfectly right in going to
Egypt. The safety of the isthmus transit was in danger.
We cannot tolerate anarchy on our Indian route, and we
cannot allow barbarism to come too near that route. It must
be perfectly safe, but as to all questions beyond that, I
should like to hear every one of them discussed clearly and
temperately from the point of view of the people of the
United Kingdom. Do they stand on the whole to gain
more or lose more by all the no doubt most admirable work
we are doing in Egypt, by all which it seems likely we are
going to do between Assouan and the Great Lakes, between
the Great Lakes and the Indian Ocean?

2i6 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
So on the other side of the Continent I Are these ac
quisitions of territory in the Niger regions likely to advance
our legitimate interests, and if so, how ? I do not say they
are not, but I do say that there is a great deal of loose
argument and wild talking about them. We have been
possessed for a long time of some of the most glorious
tropical possessions on the face of the planet — the West
India Islands. They are nearly all on the verge of
bankruptcy. What reason is there to suppose that
Continental tropical possessions, much less suited for
occupation by a maritime power, and also inhabited by
negroes, will be very valuable ? I don't deny it, but like
the Cornishmen in the ballad, " I would know the
reason why."
As to the Irish policy, which occupied so much of the
time of the Legislature during the Session of 1880, and its im
mediate successor, I will say nothing, wishing to keep far
away from matters of present or recent party strife. I
suppose that the Land Bill, which was passing through the
House of Commons when I left it in the June of 1881, has
not turned out a successful piece of legislation ; but even
after I had left Parliament, and was already in India, Mr.
Gladstone's general Irish policy seemed to me to unite a
due measure of firmness with an anxious endeavour to con
ciliate. One of the strongest of his speeches against Mr.
ParneU was made in the autumn of 188 1.

1898] MR GLADSTONE'S SURRENDER 217
When I had once left England I soon found, although
my friends kept me extremely well supplied with informa
tion, what a different thing it was to be close to the centre
of affairs and to have to wait for three weeks before one
could receive any details. It would have been idle to have
attempted to do more, even if I had been less busy, than to
have kept myself acquainted with the very broadest out
lines of our parliamentary affairs, and I never dreamt of
doing so. What struck me most was, I think, the extra
ordinary ill-luck which attended the Government. It
seemed always to be, as I said at the time, playing dice with
some evil power which invariably threw sixes. At length
came its fall in the summer of 1885, and the election which
followed, on which I cannot think that those who brought it
about can look back with much satisfaction. Any errors or
worse which they committed were, however, soon surpassed
by what was, as I thought, one of the most astounding
blunders ever made by a political leader, the fatal sur
render, by which was broken up that Liberal Party which
had for two generations been the instrument of such a vast
amount of good.
Like many of my friends, I never hesitated for a moment.
To have gone into an alliance with Mr. Parnell and his
followers, whether right or wrong for others, would have
meant for me the renunciation of all the sentiments and
most of the opinions on which my political life had been
VOL. I. 2 E

2i8 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
founded. To me, as to so many more, the resolution we
then took has meant retirement from active politics and the
breaking up of many old connections. It was a heavy price
to pay, but it had to be paid I From being outside active
politics, however, though I know far less than I used to do
of what is passing, I am enabled perhaps to look with more
impartiality at the doings of both parties than was possible
while I was in the milee, and I think, on the whole, things
are going pretty well. The party in power is, no doubt, too
strong ; we should be the better for having a larger and less
divided Opposition. I should hke to see the questions on
which, as of old, I continue to take most interest — Foreign,
Indian, and Colonial ones — more fully debated than they
are at present.
I hear the Gladstonian leaders a good deal blamed for
not having a distinctive policy ; but I do not quite see how
the party of change and movement can have much of a
distinctive policy unless the country really wants large
changes. But does it, and if so in what direction ? All
sensible people think the House of Lords might be much
improved ; but who has got a definite scheme for its
improvement on which any considerable number of persons
are agreed? There is a good deal of vague socialistic
feeling about, less than there was a few years ago, yet a
good deal; but that is a blind aUey that leads nowhere,
and many supporters of the Government are, I daresay.

1898] THE PRESENT PARALYSIS 219
quite as wiUing to blunder their way along it as are their
opponents. The difficulties of getting any BiU through
the House of Commons, unless there is a strong tide of
public opinion running behind it, might well be allowed
to excuse the chief persons of the Opposition for not
attempting more.
Here is the kind of thing which the present system of
unhmited chatter is always bringing about. A quarter
of a century ago the Administration then in power en
trusted to a lawyer of great abihty the consolidation of
all the criminal law of England into one single Bill. The
work was admirably done. It was canvassed by first-rate
and keen-eyed judges, appointed for the purpose, and
was at length finally approved. There, however, it lies
in some pigeon-hole of the Home Office, aU the trouble
and expense which went to its creation having been
expended in vain. Its author afterwards became a judge,
sat for many years on the Bench, retired on a pension,
and is now dead.
The present paralysis is the reductio ad absurdum of
parliamentary government, and can only give satisfaction
to those who think we have arrived at a perfect state,
which is, alas ! very far indeed from being the case.
There is plenty to be done, outside all questions that
divide parties, if only the instrument for doing it were
not so terribly clumsy — a pubhc meeting of nearly 700

220 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS [1898
members, varying in composition from minute to minute,
checked at distant intervals by another even more
anomalous than itself — is that the last word of human
wisdom apphed to politics?
Alike among the Ministerialists and the Members of
the Opposition there is abundance of ability and patriotism.
Things would be simpler if only the latter could disengage
themselves from their disastrous associations, burying
them in the grave of the gifted man whom they and we
have lately lost, and over whom so much deserved and so
much undeserved panegyric has been poured forth.
Things, I said, are going pretty well, not ideaUy weU.
I should not put the present Government on a level with
Mr. Gladstone's first, but I think I should put it above
his second ; and I am not a prejudiced witness, for I was
a member of both, and in former days, as I have reminded
you, I disagreed about as much as possible with the present
Prime Minister. I think, however, he has learnt a great
deal in a life which has been one of strenuous effort
continued through nearly seventy years, and he has amongst
his colleagues some men of conspicuous abiUty, who look
at affairs through spectacles very different from his, in
cluding two. Lord James of Hereford and the Duke of
Devonshire, with whom I almost invariably agreed, while
we were in the House of Commons together. As long
as they hold with him I think the country will get on

1898] THE GOVERNMENT 221
satisfactorily. I do not consider the Government has been
to blame in its Chinese pohcy, though you wiU have
gathered from things I have said in the earlier part of
my address that both in that and in their policy on the
North-West frontier of India I should like to see evidence
of a much more complete grasp of all the conditions of
the problems with which they are dealing, than is apparent
to my sight.
I have, however, I fear, exhausted even your splendid
patience, nor can I venture to make any excuse, save the
very lame one that I once, in December 1867, addressed
you at not less length when speaking at Peterhead about
Foreign Affairs, and I think the chances are very much
against my ever having an opportunity of speaking to
you again in this City, which was so long the centre of
my thoughts, and with so many of whose inhabitants who
are gone, as weU as with some who stiU are with us, I
have so many pleasant associations — associations which
grow stronger as the clock is about to strike three-score
years and ten.

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