My acquaintance with Mr. Bevan, however, and even that with Lord Houghton, were but minor experiences as compared with another meeting of a similar yet contrasted kind. At the time of which I speak there was one British author whose influence as a philosophic moralist eclipsed that of any of his contemporaries. This writer was Carlyle. His fame was then at its highest, and the moral consciousness of ultrapolite drawing rooms was being stirred to its well-dressed depths by his attack on "the dandies" in his book, Sartor Resartus, which many earnest and ornamental persons were accepting as a new revelation. I was myself sufficiently familiar with its pages, and, though some of them roused my antagonism, I could not deny their genius. One morning, during a brief visit to London, I received a note from Mr. Froude the historian, asking me to come to luncheon, and I duly arrived at his house, not knowing what awaited me. I presently learned that he was going to introduce me to Carlyle, and, as soon as luncheon was over, he walked me off to Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt, unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his first act was to move across the room to the fireplace and light a "churchwarden" pipe by sticking its head between the bars. As I watched him perform this rite, I noticed that close to the fender was a pair of very dirty slippers. To me these things and proceedings were so many separate shocks, the result of my reflections being this: If you represent fame, let me represent obscurity. But worse was still to come. It was presently proposed that we should all go out for a walk, and as soon as we were in the open air, the philosopher blew his nose in a pair of old woolen gloves. I here saw at once an illustration of the chapter in Sartor Resartus in which the author denounced what he christened "The Sect of the Dandies," as described and glorified by Bulwer Lytton in Pelham. Illustration could go no farther.



The very next famous man whom I met after this glimpse of Carlyle I met a little later at Torquay. The famous man was Lord Lytton himself. He was dining at Chelston Cross, and, owing to some lady's defection, I was actually his nearest neighbor. I saw in him everything which the spirit of Carlyle hated. I saw in him everything which was then in my opinion admirable. All the arts of appearance, conversation, and demeanor which in Carlyle were aggressively absent were in him exhibited in a manner perhaps even too apparent. I was indeed, despite my reverence for him, faintly conscious myself that his turquoise shirt stud, set with diamonds, was too large, and that his coat would have been in better taste had the cuffs not been of velvet. But it seemed to me that from his eyes, keen, authoritative, and melancholy, all the passions, all the intellect, and all the experiences of the world were peering. To have sat by him was an adventure; to have been noticed by him was not far from a sacrament.

Before very long, and likewise at Chelston Cross, I became acquainted with his son, "Owen Meredith," afterward Viceroy of India. Having heard that, like him, I was touched with the fever of the Muses, he at once showed me signs of an amity which ended only with his life. Treating me as though I were a man of the same age as himself, he would take my arm, when wandering in the Froudes' shrubberies, and describe to me the poems to the production of which his future years would be consecrated, or ask me to confide to him my corresponding ambitions in return. Like most poets, he was not without personal vanities; but never was a man more free from anything like jealousy of a rival. To praise others was a pleasure to him as natural as that of being praised himself.

To some of the celebrities associated with my youthful days I was introduced, as I have said already, not at Torquay, but at Oxford. There was one, however, whom, though essentially an Oxonian, I first met at Torquay. This was Jowett, the renowned Master of Balliol, to whose college I was destined to be subsequently either a disgrace or ornament. Jowett was frequently at Torquay, having a sister who lived there, and he was specially asked to luncheon at Chelston Cross to inspect me and see how I should pass muster as one of his own disciples. His blinking eyes, the fresh pink of his cheeks, his snow-white hair, and the birdlike treble of his voice, have been often enough described, and I will only say of them here that, when he took me for a walk in the garden, I subconsciously felt them—I cannot tell why—to be formidable. He inquired as to my tastes and interests with a species of curt benignity; but to my interest in poetry he exhibited a most disconcerting indifference, and I felt during the whole of our interview that I was walking with a mild east wind. In this he was a marked contrast to Ruskin, Robert Browning, and certain others—especially to "Owen Meredith"—men between whom and myself there was at once some half-conscious bond. There are no estrangements so elusive, and yet so insuperable, as those which arise from subtle discords in temperament. And yet in certain individual acts, to which I shall refer presently, Jowett treated me, when I was safely settled at Oxford, with much sympathetic good nature. But these and other Oxford experiences shall be reserved for another chapter.



CHAPTER V

EXPERIENCES AT OXFORD

Early Youth at Oxford—Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne, and Ruskin—Dissipation of an Undergraduate—The Ferment of Intellectual Revolution—The New Republic

My experiences at Oxford I may divide into two groups—namely, those belonging to the social life of an undergraduate, and those consisting of the effects—philosophical, moral, or religious—produced in an undergraduate's mind by the influence of academic teaching.

As to my social experiences, my recollections are, on the whole, pleasurable, but they are somewhat remote from anything that can properly be called scholastic. They are associated with the charm of certain cloistered buildings—with Magdalen especially, and the shades of Addison's Walk; with country drives in dogcarts to places like Witney and Abingdon; with dinners there in the summer evenings, and with a sense of being happily outside the radius of caps and gowns; with supper parties during the race weeks to various agreeable ladies; and with a certain concert which, during one Commemoration, was given by myself and a friend to a numerous company, and for which the mayor was good enough to lend us the Town Hall.

From the incubus of mere collegiate discipline I was perhaps more free than nine undergraduates out of ten. At the time when I matriculated there were within the college precincts no quarters available; and I and a fellow freshman who was in the same position as myself managed to secure a suite of unusually commodious lodgings. That particular partnership lasted only for a term, but subsequently I and two other companions took the whole upper part of a large house between us. We were never what is called "in college"; we rarely dined in Hall, having, besides a good cook, a very good dining room of our own, where we gave little dinners, much to our own contentment. We had, moreover, a spare bedroom, in which on occasion we could put up a visitor. One visitor who stayed with us for some weeks was Wentworth. Little things remain in the mind when greater things are forgotten; and one little incident which I remember of Wentworth's visit was this. Those were days when, for some mysterious reason, men, when they smoked, were accustomed to wear smoking caps. Wentworth had one of Oriental design, which he would somehow attach to his head by means of a jeweled pin. One evening when he was adjusting it the light caught his features at some peculiar angle, and for a fugitive moment his face was an exact and living reproduction of one of the best-known portraits of Byron.

Another incident belonging to this same order of memories occurred during one of the race weeks. About half past ten one evening, accompanied by three companions, I was making my way along a rather ill-illuminated street. My three companions were feminine, and the dresses of two of them—triumphs of the latest fashion—were calculated to arrest attention as though they were so much undulating moonlight. Suddenly I was aware that a strange voice was addressing me. It was the voice of a proctor, who, attended by several "bulldogs," was asking me, with a sinister though furtive glance at the ladies, what I was doing, and why I was not in cap and gown. I could see in his eyes a sense of having very neatly caught me in a full career of sin. I explained to him that Mrs. L., wife of one of the greatest of the then university magnates, and her two charming daughters had just been so kind as to have had supper with me, and that I was seeing them back to All Souls'.

To return, however, to the first week or fortnight which saw me and my original housemate established as full-blown freshmen; I cannot for the life of me remember by what steps we entered on any course of formal instruction, but he and I were told with very surprising promptitude that we should, without loss of time, give a breakfast to the Balliol Eight. We did so, and never before had I seen on any one matutinal tablecloth provisions which weighed so much, or disappeared so rapidly.

Not many days later I found myself at another breakfast table of a very different character, in the capacity not of host, but guest. The host on this occasion was Jowett, who asked me to breakfast with him in order that I might meet Browning. Browning by some one or other—I think it was James Spedding—had been shown certain manuscript verses—precious verses of my own. He had sent me a message of a flattering kind with regard to them, and he now held out both his hands to me with an almost boisterous cordiality. His eyes sparkled with laughter, his beard was carefully trimmed, and an air of fashion was exhaled from his dazzling white waistcoat. He did not embarrass me by any mention of my own performances. He did not, so far as I remember, make any approach to the subject of literature at all, but reduced both Jowett and myself to something like complete silence by a constant flow of anecdotes and social allusions, which, though not deficient in point, had more in them of jocularity than wit. He was not, perhaps, my ideal of the author of "Men and Women," or the singer of "Lyric Love" as "a wonder and a wild desire"; but there the great man was, and when I quitted his presence and found myself once more in undergraduate circles I felt myself shining like Moses when he came down from the mount.

I was subsequently enveloped in a further reflected glory, due also to Jowett's kindness—a kindness which survived many outbursts of what I thought somewhat petulant disapproval. I received from him one day a curt invitation to dinner, and presented myself, wondering mildly to what this mark of favor could be due. But wonder turned to alarm when, on entering the Master's drawing-room, I discovered in the dim twilight no other figure than his own. His manner, however, though not effusive, was civil, and was certainly fraught with no menace of any coming judgment on my sins. We exchanged some ordinary observations on the weather and kindred topics. Then, looking over his shoulder, he uttered a half-audible word or two, which, being plainly not addressed to me, must have been addressed to somebody else. Presently, out of the shadows, a somebody else emerged. This was a person remarkable for the large size of his head, his longish hair, his insignificant stature, and his singularly sloping shoulders. I was introduced to him without catching his name. Dinner was announced forthwith. It was evident that, except for myself, this person was to be the sole guest. In the candlelight of the dinner table I realized that this person was Swinburne.

The dinner passed off pleasantly. Swinburne showed himself an intelligent, though by no means a brilliant, talker; and as soon as we had returned to the drawing room, where we drank a cup of coffee standing, Jowett, who had some engagement, abruptly left us to finish the evening by ourselves. On Swinburne the effect of the Master's disappearance was magical. His manner and aspect began to exhibit a change like that of the moon when a dim cloud drifts away from it. Of what we discussed at starting I have not the least remembrance, but before very long Swinburne was on the subject of poetry. His observations at first consisted of general criticisms. Then he began to indulge in quotations from various poems—none of them, I think, from his own; but, however this may have been, the music seemed to intoxicate him. The words began to thrill me with the spell of his own recitation of them. Here at last I realized the veritable genius who had made the English language a new instrument of passion. Here at last was the singer for whose songs my ears were shells which still murmured with such lines as I had first furtively read by the gaslight of the Brighton theater. My own appreciation as a listener more and more encouraged him. If he began a quotation sitting, he would start from his chair to finish it. Finally he abandoned the restraints of a chair altogether. He began, with gesticulating arms, to pace the room from one end to the other, reciting passage after passage, and appealing to me, who managed to keep pace with him, for applause. "The most beautiful lines that Tennyson ever wrote," he exclaimed, "were these, from 'Maud':

"And like silent lightning under the stars She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest.

"Yes," he went on, "and what did the dream-Maud tell her lover when she had got him? That the salvation of the world depended on the Crimean War and the prosecution of Lord Palmerston's policy." Finally he strayed into quotations from Sidney Dobell, a writer now hardly remembered, with one of which, describing a girl bathing, he made the Master's academic rafters ring:

"She, with her body bright sprinkles the waters white, Which flee from her fair form, and flee in vain, Dyed with the dear unutterable sight, And circles out her beauties to the circling main."

He was almost shouting these words when another sound became audible—that of an opening door, followed by Jowett's voice, which said in high-pitched syllables, "You'd both of you better go to bed now."

My next meeting with Swinburne took place not many days later. He had managed meanwhile to make acquaintance with a few other undergraduates—all of them enthusiastic worshipers—one of whom arranged to entertain him at luncheon. As I could not, being otherwise engaged, be present at this feast myself, I was asked to join the party as soon as possible afterward. I arrived at a fortunate moment. Most of the guests were still sitting at a table covered with dessert dishes. Swinburne was much at his ease in an armchair near the fireplace, and was just beginning, as a number of smiling faces showed, to be not only interesting, but in some way entertaining also. He was, as I presently gathered, about to begin an account of a historical drama by himself, which existed in his memory only—a sort of parody of what Victor Hugo might have written had he dramatized English events at the opening of the reign of Queen Victoria. The first act, he said, showed England on the verge of a revolution, which was due to the frightful orgies of the Queen at "Buckingham's Palace." The Queen, with unblushing effrontery, had taken to herself a lover, in the person of Lord John Russell, who had for his rival "Sir Peel." Sir Peel was represented as pleading his own cause in a passionate scene, which wound up as follows: "Why do you love Lord John Russell, and why do you not love me? I know why you love Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is profligate. I cannot be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be profligate." Then followed the stage direction, "Exit for ze Haysmarket." In a later act it appeared that the Queen and Lord John Russell had between them given the world a daughter, who, having been left to her own devices, or, in other words, to the streets, reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded some respectable rank. Under these conditions she becomes the object of much princely devotion; but the moral hypocrisy of England has branded her as a public scandal. With regard to her so-called depravities nobody entertains a doubt, but one princely admirer, of broader mind than the rest, declares that in spite of these she is really the embodiment of everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he says, "have done everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she looked at the sky she murmured 'God,' and whenever she looked at a flower she murmured 'mother.'"

The vivacity and mischievous humor with which Swinburne gave his account of this projected play exhibited a side of his character which I have never even seen mentioned, and the appreciation and surprise of his audience were obviously a great delight to him. He lay back in his chair, tossed off a glass of port, and presently his mood changed. Somehow or other he got to his own serious poems; and before we knew where we were he was pouring out an account of Poems and Ballads, and explaining their relation to the secrets of his own experiences. There were three poems, he said, which beyond all the rest were biographical: "The Triumph of Time," "Dolores," and "The Garden of Proserpine." "The Triumph of Time" was a monument to the sole real love of his life—a love which had been the tragic destruction of all his faith in woman. "Dolores" expressed the passion with which he had sought relief, in the madnesses of the fleshly Venus, from his ruined dreams of the heavenly. "The Garden of Proserpine" expressed his revolt against the flesh and its fevers, and his longing to find a refuge from them in a haven of undisturbed rest. His audience, who knew these three poems by heart, held their breaths as they listened to the poet's own voice, imparting its living tones to passages such as the following—

This is from "The Triumph of Time":

"I will say no word that a man may say, Whose whole life's love goes down in a day; For this could never have been, and never, Though the gods and the years relent, shall be."

This is from "Dolores":

"Oh, garment not golden but gilded, Oh, garden where all men may dwell, Oh, tower not of ivory, but builded By hands that reach heaven out of hell."

This is from "The Garden of Proserpine":

"From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free; We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea."

Then, like a man waking up from a dream, Swinburne turned to our host and said, nervously, "Can you give me another glass of port?" His glass was filled, he emptied it at a single draught, and then lay back in his chair like a child who had gone to sleep, the actual fact being, as his host soon recognized, that, in homely language, he was drunk.

Drink, indeed, was Swinburne's great enemy. He had, when I met him at Balliol, finished his own career there more than twelve years ago; but he had since then been a frequent guest of the Master's, who treated him, in respect of this weakness, with a watchful and paternal care. When I dined with him at the Master's Lodge there was nothing to tempt him but a little claret and water. The consequence was that afterward he was brilliant as the burning bush till he finally went in his sober senses to bed. He was not, I think, intemperate in the sense that he drank much. His misfortune was that a very little intoxicated him.

I associate my early days at Balliol with yet another memorable meeting. One of the most prominent and dignified of the then residents at Oxford was Sir Henry Acland, who, as a Devonshire man, knew many of my relations, and had also heard something about myself. He was a friend and entertainer of men of all sorts of eminence; and while I was still more or less a freshman he invited me to join at his house a very small company in the evening, the star of the occasion being a university lecturer on art, who was just entering on his office, and whose name was illustrious wherever the English language was spoken. He, too, knew something about me, having been shown some of my verses, and to meet him was one of my cherished dreams. Only half a dozen people were present, and from a well-known portrait of him by Millais I recognized his form at once. This was Ruskin. He had sent me, through Lord Houghton or somebody, a verbal message of poetic appreciation already. I was now meeting him in the flesh. The first thing in him which struck me was the irresistible fascination of his manner. It was a manner absolutely and almost plaintively simple, but that of no diplomat or courtier could be more polished in what was at once its weighty and its winning dignity. Such was his charm for the elect; but here again comes the question of temperament. Between Ruskin and Jowett there was a temperamental antipathy. An antipathy of this kind is a very different thing from any reasoned dislike, and of this general fact Ruskin and Jowett were types. I was myself another. Just as Jowett repelled so Ruskin attracted me. During my later days at Oxford I grew to know Ruskin intimately, and my sympathy with his genius never lost its loyalty, though for a long time certain of his ideas—that is to say, ideas relating to social politics—were to me barely intelligible, and though, when they became intelligible, I regarded them as perversely mischievous.

But beneath these social experiences, many of them sufficiently frivolous, and all of them superficial in so far as their interest related to individuals, Oxford provided me with others which went to the very roots of life. Of these deeper experiences the first was due to Jowett, though its results, so far as I was concerned, were neither intended, understood, nor even suspected by him.

The most sensational event which occurred during my first term at Balliol was the suicide of one of the undergraduates. He was a poor Scotch student of a deeply religious character, who had found, so his friends reported, that the faith of his childhood had been taken from him by Jowett's skeptical teachings, and who had ended by cutting his throat with a razor in Port Meadow. Jowett preached his funeral sermon—the only sermon which I ever, so far as my recollection serves me, heard preached in Balliol chapel by himself or by anybody else. Jowett, who on the occasion was obviously much moved, chose for his text the story of the woman taken in adultery, and of Christ's challenge to her judges, "Which of you will dare to assault with the first stone?" The course of his argument was curious. He began with examining the passage from the standpoint of verbal scholarship, the gist of his criticism being that its authenticity was at least doubtful. From this argument he diverged into one of wider scope, insisting on how much is doubtful in what the Gospels record as the sayings of our Lord generally, from which illuminating reflection he advanced to one wider still. It was as follows: Since we know so little of what Christ really said about God, how much less can we really know of the nature of God himself; of what he loves, condemns, or, in his infinite mercy, pardons?—the moral being that we ought to cast stones at nobody, and should in especial refrain from condemning our departed brother, who, for anything which we knew to the contrary, might be just as acceptable to God as any one of ourselves.

All my impressions of Jowett as a religious teacher were summed up in my impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very much more nebulous, or what many would describe as nil. A story used to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who confessed to him that his deepest trouble was his failure to find anything which accurate reason could accept as a proof of God's existence. Jowett did not utter a word till he and the young man parted. Then he said, "Mr. Smith, if you can't find a satisfactory proof of God's existence during the next three weeks, I shall have to send you down for a term." Had I been in the young man's place I should have retorted, "And pray, Mr. Jowett, what satisfactory proofs are you able to adduce yourself?"

But, in speaking of Jowett thus, I am not wholly, or even mainly, speaking of him as a single individual, I speak of him mainly as a type, exceptional indeed on account of his signal intellect, but otherwise representing a moral and mental attitude which was common not only to the teaching body of Balliol, but also to the age in general, in so far as its traditional temper had been influenced by scientific knowledge. Nearly all the Balliol dons—even those who never spoke of religion—seemed to start with the same foregone conclusion, that the dogmatic theology of the churches was as dead as the geocentric astronomy. They assumed this, just as Jowett did, on what purported to be scientific grounds, and yet when they sought, as he did, to put in the place of this some solemn system of quasi-scientific ethics, their attempts seemed to me to exhibit the same absurdity with which Jowett's constructive teaching had first made me familiar. Their denials of everything which to me had been previously sacred appalled me like the overture to some approaching tragedy. Their confident attempts at some new scheme of affirmations affected me like a solemn farce.

Some foretastes of the new gospel had, as I have said already, been vouchsafed to me at Littlehampton by Mr. Philpot. I now saw what logically the new gospel implied. The sense of impending catastrophe became more and more acute. I felt like a man on a ship, who, having started his voyage in an estuary, and imagining that a deck is by nature as stable as dry land, becomes gradually conscious of the sway of the outer sea, until, when he nears the bar, showers of spray fall on him, he perceives that the bows are plunging, and at last the percussion of waves makes the whole vessel shudder.

Such, then, were the effects on me of the religious liberalism of Oxford, and in this respect, as I now see, looking backward, my condition was temperamentally the same as it had been when I was still under the tuition of superorthodox governesses. In those days any questioning of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the miraculous events recorded in it seemed to me, as it did later, to be at once absurd and blasphemous. There was, however, even then, something which to me seemed no less absurd than "the infidel's" attack on the dogmas of Christian orthodoxy—for I knew that "the infidel" existed—and this was the manner in which the Anglican clergy defended them. I was always, when a child, looking forward each week to the Sunday sermon, in the hope of finding some portions of it which I could either mimic or parody. I remember one sermon in particular, which the preacher devoted to a proof of God's existence. My own mental comment was, "If anything could make me such a fool as to doubt this self-evident truth, your arguments and the inflections of your voice would certainly make me do so." I heard another preacher indulge in a long half-hour of sarcasm at the expense of "the shallow infidel, who pointed to the sky and said, 'Where are the signs of His coming?'" In those days we were required by a governess to write out the morning's sermon as a pious discipline in the afternoon. This sermon I reproduced with a series of pictures in the margin, one of which represented the "shallow infidel" exploring the sky through a telescope, which he did his best to steady by holding it against the stem of a palm tree. And yet so literally true did all orthodox doctrines seem to me that I believed a member of my family to have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost by kissing a New Testament and swearing that one of the nursery maids had mispronounced some word—an imputation which she had indignantly denied.

This dual mood, as renewed in me by Oxford influences, differed from its earlier and childish form in the fact that my sense of the absurdities distinctive of modern religious thought acquired a wider range and went deeper than I had at first anticipated. The absurdities of which I was conscious as a child were those of the arguments by which the orthodox clergy endeavored to defend doctrines which were then for myself indubitable. At Oxford I became conscious of an absurdity to which as a child I had been a stranger—namely, the absurdity of the arguments by which men who repudiated orthodoxy altogether endeavored to establish in its place some purely natural substitute, such as the "enthusiasm of humanity," a passion for the welfare of posterity, or a godless deification of domestic puritanism for its own sake. In addition to this second absurdity a third gradually dawned on me. This was the absurdity, common to all parties alike, of supposing that, if the cardinal doctrines of religious orthodoxy were discredited—namely, that the human soul is immortal, that the human will is free, and that a God exists who is interested in the fortunes of each soul individually—these doctrines, in disappearing, would take away with them nothing but themselves alone; the actual fact being that they are known to mankind generally not so much in themselves as in their indirect effects on that plexus of moral, emotional, and intellectual values on which all our higher interests in the drama of life depend.

Thus, in whatever direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to the reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurdity of one kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted to the riddle of life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a moment's serious criticism; and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines could be defended in such a way that in all their traditional strictness they could once more compel assent, life, in the higher sense of the word, would—such was my conviction—soon cease to be tolerable.

The only human being at that time who held and publicly expressed views similar to my own, so far as I knew, was Ruskin. Of the riddle which I found so importunate, he did not profess to have discovered any adequate solution of his own. On the contrary, he confessed himself a victim of a tragic and desolating doubt, but he did boldly proclaim that until some solution was found the men of the modern world were of all men the most miserable. Take, he said, the belief in immortality, which, according to some men, is a matter of mild indifference. It is really a belief which affects our whole conception of the human race. Consider, he said, the carnage of war, with its pile of unnumbered corpses. It must make some matter to us whether, according to our serious belief, each man has died like a dog, and left nothing in the way of a personal existence behind him, or "whether out of every Christian-named portion of that ruinous heap there has gone forth into the air and the dead-fallen smoke of battle some astonished condition of soul unwillingly released."

Here, it seemed to me, was the true voice of reason and challenging passion combined—a voice which would not say "peace when there was no peace," and which I missed altogether in Jowett and the Oxford liberals generally. Jowett always regarded me as a mere dilettante and an idler, who was bound to disgrace Balliol by coming to grief in the schools, and he was, I think, mortified rather than pleased when I won, in my second year, the Newdigate prize for poetry.



But mine was certainly no mere idler's mood; and whatever Jowett may have thought of me when he heard of my giving parties to ladies, of my driving them out to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary, from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book was The New Republic, with regard to which in this place a few words may be apposite.

The form of nearly every book is more or less fashioned on some model or models. My own models in the case of The New Republic were The Republic of Plato, the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, and the so-called novels of Peacock. All these books introduce us to circles of friends who discuss questions of philosophy, religion, art, or the problems of social life, each character representing some prevalent view, and their arguments being so arranged as to have, when taken together, some general and coherent meaning. Many of Peacock's characters are taken direct from life, and in this respect I made myself a disciple of Peacock. My characters in The New Republic were all portraits, though each was meant to be typical; but the originals of some—such as Lady Ambrose, the conventional woman of the world—were of no public celebrity, and to mention them here would be meaningless. The principal speakers, however, were drawn without any disguise from persons so eminent and influential that a definite fidelity of portraiture was in their case essential to my plan. Mr. Storks and Mr. Stockton, the prosaic and the sentimental materialists, were meant for Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Mr. Luke was Matthew Arnold. Mr. Rose was Pater. Mr. Saunders, so far as his atheism was concerned, was suggested by Professor Clifford. Mrs. Sinclair was the beautiful "Violet Fane"; and finally—more important than any others—Doctor Jenkinson was Jowett, and Mr. Herbert was Ruskin. All these people I set talking in polite antagonism to one another, their one underlying subject being the rational aim of life, and the manner in which a definite supernatural faith was essential, extraneous, or positively prejudicial to this.

To all the arguments advanced I endeavored to do strict justice, my own criticisms merely taking the form of pushing most of them to some consequence more extreme, but more strictly logical, than any which those who proclaimed them either realized or had the courage to avow. Thus when Doctor Jenkinson descanted in his sermon on the all-embracing character of Christianity, I made him go on to say that "true Christianity embraces all opinions—even any honest denial of itself." By this passage Browning told me that Jowett was specially exasperated, and Browning had urged on him that such a temper was quite unreasonable. I think myself, on the contrary, that Jowett had an excellent reason for it, this reason being that Jowett's position was false, and that my method of criticism had brought out its absurdity. Here indeed was the method employed by me throughout the whole book, except in the case of Ruskin, and there the method was inverted. Just as I sought to show that Jowett's principles, if carried far enough, ended in absurdity, so did I seek to show that Ruskin's principles, despite their superficial absurdities, ended, if carried far enough, in the nearest approach to truth which under modern conditions of thought and knowledge is possible. In my effort to give point to what were really my own underlying convictions, I wrote The New Republic six or seven times over, and in doing so it became clearer and clearer to me what my own convictions were. They ended in an application of the method of a reductio ad absurdum to everything; and this fact I finally indicated in the words of a Greek epigram which I placed as a motto on the title-page: "All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for all the things that are arise out of the unreasonable."

Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could, after which I would address myself to the project of finding a foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When, however, The New Republic had been completed and given to the world, I felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another—The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the sublime service of Humanity—of that "Grand Etre," so he says to her, "which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress to consist of you and me." The New Paul and Virginia was followed some two years later by Is Life Worth Living? a formal philosophical treatise, in which the values of life and their connection with religious belief, the methods of fiction being abandoned, were submitted to scientific analysis. These three books represent the compound results produced by the liberalism of Oxford on a mind such as my own, which had been cradled in the conservatisms of the past. But meanwhile I had left Oxford behind me, and the death of my father and other family events which occurred about that time left me free to determine my own movements, the consequence being that thenceforward the months of what is called "the season" found me year by year in London from Easter till the approach of August. Of my early experiences of London, and of the kind of life I lived there, I will now give some brief account, not disdaining the humble aid of gossip.



CHAPTER VI

THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY

Early Experiences of London Society—Society Thirty Years Ago Relatively Small—Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in Small Societies Only

Comparing London society as it was when I first knew it with what it has since become, I should say that its two most distinguishing features were its then comparative smallness and its practically unquestioned position. Its position was mainly founded on the hereditary possession of land, its nucleus being the heads of more or less ancient families whose rent rolls enabled them to occupy London houses and play an agreeable and ornamental part in the business of entertaining and being entertained for the few months called "the season." Certain qualifications in the way of family being given, mere personal charm and accomplishment would often secure for their possessors a high place in its ranks. Indeed, such qualifications were by no means always necessary, as was shown in still earlier days by the cases of Moore and Brummell; but, on the whole, the social conditions then prevalent in London coincided with what, in the country, I had known and accepted, when a child, as part of the order of Nature. Of society as represented by a definite upper class, the basis was still inheritance in the form of inherited land.

This was no mere accident. It was a fact definitely explicable in terms of statistical history. At the time of the battle of Waterloo, outside the landed class there did not exist in England five hundred people whose incomes exceeded L5,000 a year. The landed class was typically the rich class of the country. The condition of things since then has in this respect been reversed. During the sixty years succeeding the battle of Waterloo business incomes exceeding L5,000 a year had increased numerically in the proportion of one to eight, while since that time the increase has been still more rapid. On the other hand, not only has the number of the large agricultural landlords shown no increase whatever, but since the year 1880 or thereabouts their aggregate rental has suffered an actual decrease, having fallen in the approximate proportion of seventy to fifty-two. This shrinkage in the fortunes of the old landed families, except those who were owners of minerals or land near towns, and the multiplication of families newly enriched by business, were, when I first knew London, proceeding at a rate which had never been known before. It was, however, slow in comparison with what it has since become, and the old landed families, at the time to which I am now alluding, still retained much of their old prestige and power, as is shown by the fact that the leaders of both political parties were still mainly drawn from the limited class in question. It is shown with even greater clearness by facts more directly presenting themselves to the eye of the ordinary observer.

One of these is the aspect which thirty years ago was presented by Hyde Park during the season at certain hours of the day. Thirty years ago, for an hour or two before luncheon and dinner, its aspect was that of a garden party, for which, indeed, no invitations were necessary, but on which as a fact few persons intruded who would have been visibly out of place on the lawn of Marlborough House. To-day this ornamental assemblage has altogether disappeared, and its place has been gradually taken by a miscellaneous crowd without so much as a trace even of spurious fashion left in it. Thirty years ago Piccadilly in June was a vision of open carriages brilliant with flowerlike parasols, high-stepping horses, and coachmen, many of whom still wore wigs. To-day these features have been submerged by a flow of unending omnibuses which crowds fight to enter or from which they struggle to eject themselves. Fashionable hotels have succumbed to the same movement. Of such hotels thirty years ago the most notable were commonly described as "private"—a word which implied that no guests were received who were not known to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials. Claridge's, until it was rebuilt, was an establishment of this description. An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the mere chance latchkey of wealth, no more obtain access to such hotels as these than he could make himself to-day a member of some exclusive club by placing the amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall porter.

But society, as it was in this relatively recent past, did not differ from that of to-day merely in the fact of having been absolutely less numerous and of less multifarious origin. It differed in the effects which a mere restriction of numbers, coupled with inherited wealth and a general similarity of antecedents, has on the quality of social intercourse itself. In societies which are small, and yet at the same time wealthy enough to secure for their members as a whole a monopoly of varied experience, and invest them with a corporate power which cannot be similarly concentrated in any other cohesive class, these members are provided, like the believers in some esoteric religion, with subtle similarities of tastes, behavior, and judgment, together with daily opportunities of observing how far, and in what particulars, individuals belonging to their class conform or do not conform to them. These are constant provocations to refinements of mutual criticism which give life and conversation a zest not attainable otherwise. Finally a society which is small enough to possess such common standards, and whose position is so well established as to pervade it with a sense that no standards are superior to its own, tends to make manners perfectly simple and natural which could otherwise be approached only by conscious effort or affectation.

The result of such conditions, in so far as they prevailed in London when London life became first familiar to myself, was that society, in the narrower sense of the word, was taken in a spirit more serious than that which it excites to-day. To say nothing of ambitious hostesses who vied with one another in the entertainment of guests whose very names had a ring of importance when printed in the Morning Post, society was, even for men of conspicuous talent—such, for example, as Lord Houghton, Augustus Savile, and Hayward—a matter as serious as politics, or any war not of the first importance. To men like Christopher Sykes and Kenneth Howard it was very much more engrossing. Thus, at a luncheon party which I remember, a lady who had just reached London from Scotland asked, by way of conversation, "What is going on to-night?" Lord Houghton, who was one of the guests, answered, with all the gravity of a judge summing up the evidence at a murder trial: "The only event of to-night is the ball at Grosvenor House. There's nothing else worth mentioning." "The ball of to-night," I heard him say on a similar occasion, "will be Lady Harriet ——'s. That is sure to be good, for Lady Harriet knows nobody, so she can't ask the wrong people, and her list of invitations is in the hands of Augustus Savile." One of the cleverest hostesses of that time, Lady G——, denounced to a friend the impertinence of a "society paper" which had ventured to describe one of her entertainments as "political"; and she had actually been to the trouble of writing to inform the editor that her parties were fashionable gatherings and not political menageries. The then Lord Orford, a man of the highest literary culture, who professed to despise society, and very rarely entered it, said that his own idea of real happiness was "to go nowhere, and yet to be asked everywhere."

The seriousness with which society was taken, and the fear of its judgments entertained even by many of its most conspicuous members, was illustrated in a way now oddly belated by the celebrated "Lady A.," as she was called, who occasionally lent her house in Hertford Street for the month of August to her niece, Mrs. Marcus Hare. To this act of kindness she attached one strict condition—namely, that the blinds of the front windows should always be drawn down, lest anyone should suspect that she—Lady A. herself—was guilty of remaining in London when the fashionable season was over. A well-known social philosopher, Lady E—— of T——, gave me in my early days an ultraserious lecture on the principles by which a young man should be guided when beginning to form acquaintances in a world like that of London. Her advice was almost identical with that which, in Bulwer Lytton's novel, Pelham, is administered to the hero by his mother. "You should be specially careful," said Lady E—— to me, "as to people with whom you dine. Some are remarkable for their chefs, some for the importance of their company. There are all sorts of differences which a young man has to learn. There are some evening parties," she said, "at which it will be enough for him to be merely seen; and, with very few exceptions"—this was her concluding counsel—"you should never be seen at a ball in a two-roomed house—a house, for example, like the houses in Eaton Place."

Another sort of social philosopher, in his own way equally typical, was Hamilton Aide, who united to the life of society the cultivation of art, and was equally serious in his combined devotion to both. He was a musician, a poet, a singer of his own songs in a voice perfectly modulated. He was also as a painter in water colors one of the most distinguished amateurs of his time. His landscapes, indeed, and his sketches of old houses and gardens, Scotch castles, and the seclusions of Italian villas, were in themselves poems; and when he entertained the world—a world very carefully chosen—the attention of his guests was divided between his music and his great portfolios. His bachelor's quarters provided him with an appropriate background. His writing table was dominated by something resembling an altarpiece—namely, a large and ingenious rack, on which was arranged a battalion of invitations to balls and dinner parties; and his blotting book was flanked by two delicate volumes, one being a libro d'oro in the shape of a bulky visiting list, the other being a list of his engagements from day to day. He and his accomplishments were a finished work of art between them. But in a larger world his development would have been no more possible than the development of an orchid in the middle of a crowded street.

And the same is the case with regard to society generally. There are certain accomplishments which a small society tends to develop, and which a larger society does not. Among these the art of conversation is prominent, especially when it takes the form of wit, or becomes the vehicle of certain kinds of humor. I may further illustrate this general observation by mentioning a few individuals, of whom three at least are still well known by name, not to society only, but also to the world at large. These are Constance, Duchess of Westminster; Caroline, Duchess of Montrose, and the Duchess of Somerset, who, as Lady Seymour, was the heroine of the Eglinton Tournament. These ladies were all remarkable for the peculiar magic of their voices and for a peculiar sense of humor which their voices managed to indicate, and which gave its quality to their general views of life. They none of them laughed audibly, but the voice of each was a sort of laugh in solution, and this would produce a sense of laughter in others, even though in the words of the speaker herself there was no special felicity.

The Duchess of Montrose, by the mere tone in which she mentioned a name, would often convey a whole criticism of the person named; and though her topics and language were not infrequently of a kind which caused austere censors to reprehend, and even to avoid, her, yet if such censors found themselves by chance in her company, they would one and all be listening to her before five minutes was over.

The Duchess of Somerset's voice had the same spell of ambushed laughter in it, but she was a far greater mistress of the actual arts of language, if "art" be a word appropriate to the exercise of natural genius. I was asked by her daughter, Lady Guendolen Ramsden, to help her in compiling a volume of family memoirs, which would, so we hoped, have comprised a number of the Duchess's letters; but most of these had to be discarded as not suitable for publication, because of the numerous sketches contained in them of various friends or connections, which were drawn with a wit and precision worthy of Miss Austen herself in her least merciful moments. One specimen, however, may be given without compunction. She was describing a visit paid by her to a well-known country house, and mentioned that among the company were a prominent statesman and his wife, the former of whom was dear to caricaturists on account of his superabundant figure. "Sir —— and Lady —— are here," she wrote. "She is expecting; but he shows it most."

Here are examples of conversational or descriptive art which, in a large and mixed society, would, even if possible, be hardly so much as perceptible. I may take as two other examples Sophy, Lady Roden, and Lady Dorothy Nevill. Unlike Lady Dorothy, whose chronicled sayings have made her a public character, Lady Roden was known only to a small circle of intimates. She was a daughter of Byron's celebrated friend Mr. Hobhouse, subsequently Lord Broughton, and had received something of a really classical education under the semipaternal auspices of Thomas Love Peacock. Hence her conversation had a certain natural crispness which enabled her to indicate by touches, however light, any oddities of demeanor or conduct on the part of friends or acquaintances to persons whose standards were more or less like her own. There was a silly young woman who, after several years of matrimony, was ambitious of pushing her conquests beyond the matrimonial limits; and with this object in view did her best to be visible driving about with a succession of guiltlessly apathetic admirers. "Poor Mrs. P——," said Lady Roden. "She takes far more trouble in attempting to ruin her reputation than most women do to preserve it; but all her attempts are vain."

Lady Dorothy's charm in conversation was due to an adventurous whimsicality, perfectly natural, which was absent from Lady Roden's. She saw everything through a medium of unexpected analogies. She was one day asked in my hearing whether she had enjoyed herself at a Marlborough House garden party. "My dear," she said, "half of the people there I had never seen before in my life, and of those whom I had seen, I thought that half had been safe in Kensal Green." On another occasion, having been at a fancy ball—balls were a kind of entertainment which she very rarely frequented—and having been asked by a friend for an account of it, she replied: "By far away the most remarkable figure was ——. There she was—I don't know what she called herself—Diana in front, and George the Second behind."

But of the conversational art which flourishes in small societies only I could find the best examples, not among women, but among the men of what was then an expiring generation—men whose manners had been formed in a society smaller still. Alfred Montgomery was a wit of this classical type, and may be taken as representing others, all of whom, when I knew them, were verging on old age. These men, though free from any trace of pedantry, were never guilty of slang, unless slang was used intentionally for the purpose of humorous emphasis. Their conversation, if taken down verbatim, would have afforded perfect specimens of polished yet easy English. A lady of great wealth (who has long since been dead, but who shall nevertheless be nameless) had been for a time under some sort of social cloud, many influential people having virtuously refused to notice her. Toward the end of her life, however, the most august of all possible influences had raised her to a position of such fashionable brilliance that a great ball given by her had been the chief event of a season. Lady Roden asked Alfred Montgomery some question as to who had, and who had not, been there. "When a woman like Mrs. —— gives a ball of that kind, it is," he said, "an act of revenge quite as much as an act of hospitality. She takes far more pleasure in thinking of the people she has not asked than in thinking of those she has."

Certain other examples of conversational art occur to me which I associate with a form of entertainment now a thing of the past. Of London life as it had been long before I knew it, a notable feature, constantly referred to in memoirs, had been the breakfast party. It had before my time nearly, but had not quite, disappeared. It was so far kept alive by Lord Houghton, at all events, that a breakfast at his house in Bruton Street is one of my own early recollections. The repast began at ten and lasted for half the morning. There must have been about twenty guests. Two of them were "lions," whose hair was more remarkable than their speech. The rest were men of some sort of social eminence, who seemed to find the occasion not wholly congenial; and, in spite of the efforts of the host, conversation had a tendency to languish till a topic turned up which was then attracting public notice. This topic roused one of the guests—a seasoned man of the world—from a mood of apparent apathy into one of such humorous animation that soon the rest of the company were holding their breaths to listen to him. The topic in question was a volume of scandalous memoirs which had lately been published by Rosina, wife of the first Lord Lytton, for the purpose of attacking a husband from whom she had long been separated. The guest to whom I am now alluding caught the attention of everybody by confessing to an intimate acquaintance with the ways of this caustic lady, and proceeded to illustrate them by a series of amusing anecdotes of which I recollect the following:

Bulwer Lytton, as he then was, was candidate for one of the divisions of Hertfordshire, and speeches were being delivered from the hustings by supporters of local influence—among others by Lord Cowper. Lord Cowper was still speaking when something appeared at his elbow in the likeness of the candidate's wife. "Now, Billy Cowper," she said, "we've listened to you long enough. Sit down, and let me speak. You propose, gentlemen, to send my husband to Parliament. I am here to tell you that Parliament is not the proper place for him. His proper place," she said, pointing to the ground, "is below; and when you have sent him there, he will learn something of what he at present knows nothing. That something is Justice."

On another occasion, speaking in more moderate tones, she observed to a circle of acquaintances: "My husband is a man who has been born out of his due time. He ought to have been born nineteen hundred years ago. Had he been born then, he would have been Judas Iscariot. He would have betrayed his Master; he would have taken the thirty pieces of silver; but then he would not have hanged himself—far from it. He would have sat down and written the Epistle to the Ephesians."

On another occasion she told the following story of him. He was, so she said, in London, and she, having been left in the country, had written to propose joining him. He had at once replied begging her not to do so, but to leave him a little longer in the enjoyment of philosophic solitude. "When I heard that"—so she confided to a friend—"I set off for London instantly; and there I found him with Philosophic Solitude, in white muslin, on his knee."

"Perhaps," added the narrator, "even less agreeable to the delinquent would have been, had he heard it, her description of his physical appearance. Alluding to the fact that his head was undoubtedly too large for his body, she said, 'My husband has the head of a goat, and he has the body of a grasshopper.'"

But of all the men who, in the way of conversational wit or otherwise, figure in my memory as types of a now vanished generation, the most remarkable still remains to be noticed. This was the second Duke of Wellington. Even to those who knew him only by sight he was memorable, on account of his astonishing likeness to the portraits or statues of his father. He had not, or he had not chosen to cultivate, the talents which mainly lead to distinction in public life, but by the small circle of those who were intimate with him during his later days he was known for a humor, a polished wit, and a shrewdness which made him, of all possible companions, one of the most delightful. I knew him intimately myself as far as my age permitted. I often stayed with him at Strathfieldsaye, not only when he had parties, but also when, as sometimes happened, we were together for a week alone. On these latter occasions I had all the mornings to myself, and every afternoon I took with him long walks, during which he poured forth his social or other philosophies, or else told me stories of his father so pointed and numerous that, had I written them down, I might then have compiled a life of him which would form a very interesting supplement to those which exist already. I never, in the course of these walks, experienced a dull moment.

The only great entertainment at which I ever encountered him was a dinner party of his own given at Apseley House. During one of such visits which I paid him at Strathfieldsaye he told me that very soon he would have to give a party in London in honor of the King of the Belgians. The party was to be a large dinner, and he asked me to be one of the company. The time arrived. The King of the Belgians for some reason failed to come, but everything had been arranged in an appropriate manner for his reception. As a spectacle the table was noteworthy. It was covered with gold plate—a historic monument to the great hero of Waterloo—which consisted of figures of soldiers, horses, palm trees, camels, artillery, and other military objects symbolical of his various campaigns; and gold plate at intervals all round the table was supplemented by triumphal wreaths. The duke told me afterward that all these decorations were due to his own forgetfulness. He had for years been accustomed to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo by a banquet to certain officers who had been present at it, and who still survived; but the number of these had already been so reduced that he had determined to discontinue the celebration. In fixing, however, a day for the dinner now in question, he had entirely forgotten that the date ultimately chosen was none other than the day of the great battle. His servants had concluded that, in honor of Belgian royalty, he was giving one more repetition of the Waterloo banquets of the past. Everything had been arranged accordingly; and I was thus present at a function which will never take place again.

But it was not at such functions that his real character displayed itself. This only came out in intercourse of a much more private kind, as would happen at Strathfieldsaye when he entertained parties of not more than ten people. When I was present on such occasions I was usually the youngest—by far the youngest—member of the company. Of the rest I may mention as examples Lady Dorothy Nevill, Alfred Montgomery, Sir Hastings Doyle, Lord Calthorpe, Sir St. George Foley, Lady Chesterfield, and Mr. Newtons, the courtly police magistrate, called by his friends "The Beak." And here—to repeat in substance the observation which I have made already—what always struck me was the far greater polish of manner that prevailed among these my elders than any which was cultivated among my own, the then rising, generation. In such an atmosphere the Duke's special gifts were at home. He never strained after effect. His words seemed to crystallize into wit or poignant humor before he had time to reflect on what he was going to say. But these qualities were perhaps seen at their best in tete-a-tete encounters or correspondence. At all events, it is from such occurrences that illustrations of them can be most readily drawn.

He had often spoken to me of his dislike of anything in the nature of jobbery, and this was once brought out in a very characteristic way by a passage at arms between himself and Lady St. Helier. Lady St. Helier had written to him to ask him if, as Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, he would make one of her friends a magistrate. The duke promptly replied that her friend was an entire stranger to him, and that he never made appointments of that kind as a favor to some third party. There the matter rested for a week or two, at the end of which period she received the following note from him:

DEAR LADY ST. HELIER.

You have treated me extremely ill. I have made inquiries about your friend, and I find he is part-proprietor of—here he named a certain place of amusement—which I learn is frequently used as a place for assignations of a very reprehensible kind.

Lady St. Helier's immediate reply was this:

MY DEAR DUKE.

I have nothing more to say. You are acquainted with such matters so much better than I am.

Not long afterward he met her on somebody's doorstep, and she, who was taking her departure, greeted him with some slight frigidity. He merely looked at her with a momentary twinkle in his eye, and said, "I think you had me there." Some days later she received yet another letter from him, which consisted of these words:

DEAR LADY ST. HELIER.

The deed is done. God forgive me.

A further encounter took place of something the same kind—the duke himself told me of this—from which he emerged the victor. He had, he said, received a letter from Lady Herbert of Lee, in which she begged him to contribute L100 toward the total required for the restoration of some Catholic church, and his answer had been as follows:

DEAR LADY HERBERT.

I shall be very happy to give you the sum you name, for a purpose so excellent as yours. At the same time I may say that I am myself about to restore the Protestant church at Strathfieldsaye, and I do not doubt that you will aid me by sending me a similar sum. Only, in that case, I think no money need pass between us.

In a kindred vein was his answer to another application, addressed to him, in formal terms, by a committee of the inhabitants of Tiverton. When the first duke was merely known as a soldier, the Tivertonians had begun to erect, on a neighboring hill near Wellington, a monumental column in his honor; but subsequently, when he came to show himself to the British public, not as a great general, but as an obstinate and intolerable Tory, the Radical Tivertonians refused to carry on the work farther. The column was left unfinished, as it stands at the present day; and the second duke, many years later, was petitioned, for the credit of the neighborhood, to finish it at his own cost. His answer to the petitioners was, so he told me, this:

GENTLEMEN.

It I were to finish that monument it would be a monument to nothing. As it stands, it is a monument to your own ingratitude.

Strathfieldsaye may have been in old days the scene of many political incidents. The latest was one at which I myself was present. The heroine of it was Miss Meresia Nevill, Lady Dorothy's daughter, who afterward achieved renown as a luminary of the Primrose League. She was then in her novitiate only, and the duke one morning whispered to her that he would give her a lesson in oratory. I was asked to be present at it, but otherwise it was to be strictly secret. Accordingly after breakfast she, I, and the duke met by appointment in the library. The doors were locked, and Miss Nevill, who had brought some memoranda with her scribbled on a half-sheet of letter paper, was told by the duke to take her stand on the hearth rug and give him a specimen of her powers by declaiming what she proposed to say, he himself being seated on a sofa watching her. "Now," he said, "begin." Bashfully consulting her notes, and speaking with apologetic rapidity, Miss Nevill began to murmur, "My lords, ladies and gentlemen." "No!" ejaculated the duke; "my dear young lady, no! Mouth it out like this: "My lords—ladies—and—gentlemen." Don't say it as if you were saying your prayers." In this humorous but most admirable advice there was no great verbal brilliance; but his tendency to verbal brilliance showed, on one occasion at all events, how capable it was of translating itself into the highest form of literary art. A favorite amusement of his was making translations from Horace. Among the passages which had specially provoked this enterprise was one the Latin of which is so terse and pungent that it has often been pronounced untranslatable. It is the passage in which Horace describes true happiness as that of the man who, looking back from to-morrow, is able to say, "I was really alive all yesterday." Dryden's pithy version of it is to the effect that the sole true happiness is that of the man:

Who, secure at eve, can say, "To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day."

The duke's version was on a yet higher level than this, embodying in it a concentrated pungency and a curiosa felicitas which were quite in the vein of Horace, but contain a thought not present in the original. They were comprised in these few words:

Happy if only I enjoy My rival's envy for a day.

It is true this specimen of the duke's wit in literature does not bear directly on the question of wit in social conversation; and yet it may lead the mind to questions which are very closely akin to it. The felicity of the duke's translation has a very close resemblance to the curiosa felicitas of Pope—for instance, in his "Characters of Women" and his celebrated satire on Addison. Nearly all Pope's satires are addressed, if not to a small society, yet at all events to a small public, and outside that limited body they would have neither vogue nor meaning.



CHAPTER VII

VIGNETTES OF LONDON LIFE

Byron's Grandson and Shelley's Son—The World of Balls—The "Great Houses," and Their New Rivals—The Latter Criticized by Some Ladies of the Old Noblesse—Types of More Serious Society—Lady Marian Alford and Others—Salons Exclusive and Inclusive—A Clash of Two Rival Poets—The Poet Laureate —Auberon Herbert and the Simple Life—Dean Stanley—Whyte Melville—"Ouida"—"Violet Fane"—Catholic Society—Lord Bute—Banquet to Cardinal Manning—Difficulties of the Memoir-writer—Lord Wemyss and Lady P—— —Indiscretions of Augustus Hare—Routine of a London Day—The Author's Life Out of London

The few portraits and anecdotes which I have just sketched or recorded are sufficient, let me say once more, to illustrate two general facts. They indicate the way in which society owes much of its finer polish to it. They emphasize the fact that, when I first knew it myself, it was very much smaller than it has since then become, and, though divided into sections even then, was very much more cohesive. Let me pass from this latter fact to some of my own experiences as connected with it.

For young men who are already equipped with influential friends or connections, a society which is relatively small and more or less cohesive is in some ways more easy of access than one which is more numerous, but in which, unless their means are ample enough to excite the competitive affection of mothers, they are more likely to be lost. In this respect I may look on myself as fortunate, for my circle of acquaintances very rapidly widened as soon as, having done with Oxford, I began to stay in London for more than a week at a time, and secured a habitation, more or less permanent, of my own. While I was first looking about for one which I thought would be suitable, Wentworth returned the hospitality which I had previously shown him at Oxford by putting me up for a fortnight at his house on the Chelsea Embankment, and during this visit an incident took place which, if merely judged by the names of the few persons concerned in it, might be thought picturesquely memorable.

Students of Robert Browning may recollect a short poem of his which begins with the following lines:

And did you once see Shelley plain? And did he stop and speak to you? And did you answer him again? How strange it seems and true!

My own answer would be, I did not see Shelley plain, but I did the next thing to it. Sir Percy and Lady Shelley—the poet's son and daughter-in-law—were Wentworth's near neighbors, though he never had met either of them. Lady Shelley had been an old friend of my mother's, and I took him one day to tea with her. To the wife of Shelley's son I introduced Byron's grandson. What event could seem more thrilling to any one whose sentiments were attuned to the music of Browning's verses? What really happened was this: Lady Shelley said to me some pleasant things about my mother; we all of us lamented the prevalence of the east wind, and then, having recommended her crumpets, she discussed with Wentworth the various large houses lately built in the neighborhood. At this juncture the drawing-room door opened and the son of the author of "Prometheus Unbound" entered. He was a fresh-looking country gentleman, whose passion was private theatricals. Close to his own house he had built a little private theater, and the conversation turned thenceforward on the question of whether a license would be necessary if the public were admitted by payment to witness the performance of a farce in the interest of some deserving charity.

By the time I left Wentworth's roof I had arranged to share with two Catholic friends a suite of rooms at a private hotel in Dover Street. Both belonged to well-known Catholic families, and had ready access to the world of Catholic gayety, especially in so far as this was represented by balls. One of them, through his skill as a dancer and his buoyant vivacity in conversation, was in much wider request. By the agency of Augustus Savile and others—of "social fairies" (as Lord Beaconsfield called them), such as the Duchess of Sutherland, whom I had known well at Torquay—cards for balls and parties, in quickly increasing numbers, found their way to myself likewise; while in other directions doors were opened also which led to a world of a more serious aspect and character.

Of balls I need say little except to observe that I went to a great many, and so far followed the advice of Lady E—— of T—— that I did not often find myself at a ball "in a two-roomed house." For this the principal reason was that, even from my childhood, I was wanting in any inclination to dance, and thus preferred many-roomed houses in which persons who were so disposed could sit out and converse, the very fact that a ball was in progress being hardly so much as perceptible. In this connection I may observe that, during my earlier days, the principal balls were still to a certain extent those which were given in houses famous for their traditions and their magnitude, such as Devonshire House, Bridgwater House, Stafford House, and so forth; but already things were in this respect changing. Newly established families, or families in the act of establishing themselves, had begun to outdo the "great houses" in their lavish expenditure on this kind of entertainment. The center of social gravity was in this respect being shifted. As an illustration of this fact I remember some curt observations made by two ladies who were in the act of bringing out their daughters. Both belonged to families of historical and high distinction, but their means were not equal to their dignity. One of them said, "If I want to take out my daughter, I have generally to go to the house of someone who is not a gentleman." Another said: "I don't care for London any longer. It seems that the only people who are giving balls to-day are people whose proper business would be to black my boots." Utterances of this kind, though of course greatly exaggerated, were straws which showed the direction in which the wind was blowing.

Let me turn from the world of balls to a milieu which is less frivolous, and take certain ladies as types of tendencies which then prevailed in it. It will be enough to mention four, whose houses represented society as, in some ways, at its best. I refer to Mrs. William Lowther, Lady Marian Alford, Louisa, Lady Ashburton (whom I thus group together because their isolated and commanding dwellings stood practically in the same row), and Lady Somers. All these were women of the highest cultivation. They were devoted to art. Mrs. Lowther was herself an artist. Mrs. Lowther and Lady Ashburton, though thorough women of the world with regard to their mundane company, were remarkable for a grave philanthropy which they sacrificed much to practice. Indeed at some of their entertainments it was not easy to tell where society ended and high thinking began. This could not be said of Lady Somers or of Lady Marian. Though in artistic and intellectual taste they equaled the three others, the guests whom they collected about them were essentially chosen with a view to the social charm which wit, manners, or beauty enabled them, as if by magic, to communicate to the passing moment. And here it may be observed conversely that in a world like that of London the art of society depends not on choice only, but also, and no less, on an equally careful rejection, and is for that reason beset by peculiar and varying difficulties. Of these difficulties Lady Marian herself once spoke to me. They had, she said, been lately brought home to her by certain of her friends who had been urging her to give a ball—a suggestion which, for the following reasons, she found herself unwilling to entertain. "It is impossible," she said, "to give a successful ball in London without being very ill-natured to a large number of people. Many of those who would think they had a right to be asked would—though on other occasions no doubt welcome enough—be as much out of place in a ballroom as a man would be in a boat race who could not handle an oar." But she was, so she added, going to make an attempt at reviving a kind of entertainment to which no such difficulties would attach themselves. During the months of the coming winter she proposed to send out cards to all her more intimate acquaintances; announcing that she would always be at home after dinner on a certain day each week, and begging them to give her their company whenever, and as often as, they pleased. A certain number of people—all of them agreeable and distinguished—responded to this appeal; but their number rarely exceeded fifteen or twenty, and Lady Marian was at length bound to admit that the competitive attractions developed by the enlargement of social life were such as to render a revival of the salon impossible, even among acquaintances so carefully chosen as her own.

I may, however, advert to another lady who in a certain sense succeeded where Lady Marian failed; but she succeeded by basing her salon on a noticeably different principle—namely, that of inclusion, whereas that of Lady Marian was selection. The passport to her drawing-rooms was fame—even fame of the most momentary kinds—and as fame is the meed of very various activities, not all her own charm was sufficient on some occasions to prevent her company from being a clash of illustrious rivals rather than a reunion of friends.

Of a clash of this kind I was once myself a witness, though nobody at the moment divined that there was a clash at all. The scene was not in London, but at the lady's house in the country, where a few guests were staying with her for the inside of a week. Two of these guests were poets; we may call them Sir E. and Sir L. The visit coincided with the time of Tennyson's last illness, the reports of which became daily more alarming. The two poets evinced much becoming anxiety, though this did not interfere with the zeal with which one day at luncheon they consumed a memorable plum tart. Next morning neither of them appeared at breakfast; and when both of them remained in their bedrooms for the larger part of the day I came to the prosaic conclusion that the plum tart had been too much for them. Next morning came the news of Tennyson's death. The two bards remained in their cells till noon, after which they both reappeared like men who had got rid of a burden. The true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected, was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which the country had just suffered—compositions implying a suggestion on the part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed. Our hostess and the other guests saw them off at the station, and as the train went on, the elegists were seen waving independent adieux, one from a first, the other from a third-class carriage. The successor to the late Laureate was Mr. Alfred Austin.

I knew Alfred Austin well; and a few words with regard to him may not be inappropriate here. Though his poetry has not commanded any very wide attention, he had more of true poetry in him than many people imagine. He had all the qualifications of a really great poet except a sustained faculty for writing really good poetry. He had a sound philosophic conception of what the scope and functions of great poetry are; and it would be possible to select from his works isolated passages of high and complete beauty. But, if judged by his poetry as a whole, he seems to have been so indolent or so deficient in the faculty of self-criticism that for the most part he suffered himself to be content with language which resembled an untuned piano, his performances on which were often calculated to affront the attention of his audience rather than to arrest and capture it. He once or twice asked me to make his works the subject of a critical and comprehensive essay. With some diffidence I consented, and accomplished this delicate task by picking out a number of his best and most carefully finished passages, which showed what he could do if he tried, and how far by pure carelessness he elsewhere fell short of the standard which he himself had set. For example, from his "Human Tragedy" I quoted the following lines, one of which refers to Rome as a place where "Papal statues arrogantly wave"; while in another, describing a headlong stream, he says with the utmost complacency that:

The cascade Bounded adown the cataract.

I pointed out that no conceivable feat was so absolutely impossible for a statue as that of "waving," and that, a cataract and a cascade being practically the same thing, it was impossible that the former could manage to bound down the latter. My practical moral, as addressed to the Laureate, was, "Be just to yourself, and the public will be just to you," and the compliment implied in one part of this criticism did much to mitigate the unwelcome tenor of the other.

Many interesting people I used to meet at the house of Mr. Froude the historian. Among these were two relatives of Mr. Froude's second wife—namely, Henry Cowper, one of the most charming conversationalists of his time, Lady Florence Herbert, and, through her, her well-known husband, Auberon. Auberon Herbert was a most singular character. He represented a movement of thought which has since then taken other directions, and would probably now be associated with some form or other of socialism. In one sense he was certainly no socialist. On the contrary, he was an ardent champion of individual freedom, as opposed to the tyranny of the state. He even contended that all taxation should be voluntary, and actually started a journal, mainly written by himself, in support of this agreeable doctrine. He was, however, yet more pertinacious as an advocate of what is now called "the simple life." His wife shared, though she slightly perhaps tempered, his opinions; and when they first set up house together they insisted that all their household—the domestics included—should dine at the same table. After a week's experience, however, of this regime, the domestics all gave warning, and the establishment was reconstructed on a more conventional footing. This counter-revolution had been accomplished before I knew him, and my intimate acquaintance with him began at a great shooting party given at Highclere Castle by Lord Carnarvon, his brother. Neither I nor he were shooters, and while battues were in progress, and guns were sounding daily at no very great distance, he walked me about the park, declaring that modern castles which stood for nothing but the slaughter of half-tame birds were examples of a civilization completely gone astray. In order that I might see what, shorn of its earlier eccentricities, was his personal ideal of a reasonably ordered life, he asked me to stay with him for a week at his own home, Ashley Arnewood, in Hampshire, on the borders of New Forest. In due time I went. His dwelling among the woodlands was of very simple construction. It was a small farmhouse bisected by a flagged passage giving access to four rooms. On the right as one entered was a kitchen, on the left was an apartment which he dignified by the name of a museum, its sole contents being fragments of ancient British pottery which had been dug up in the neighborhood and were here carefully arranged on a large disused mangle. Beyond, and opposite to one another, were a dining room so limited in size that one end of the table abutted on a whitewashed wall, and a sitting room, luxuriously warm, which was furnished with several deep and remarkably comfortable chairs. The carpets consisted of rough coconut matting, and draughts in the bedrooms were excluded by rough red blankets, which did duty as curtains. The evening repast was almost obtrusively a tea rather than a dinner, though, in deference to my own presumably unconverted appetite, I, and I alone, was provided with some kind of meat. I could not help feeling at times that for my host and hostess alike this practice of "the simple life" represented a sacrifice to their principles rather than a complete enjoyment of them, for on several occasions before bedtime they both confessed to a sensation of acute hunger, and made an expedition to some mysterious region from which they returned with substantial parallelograms of bread.

Through the Antony Froudes I also made acquaintance with Lecky, whose nervous shyness in conversation was in curious contrast to his weighty style as a writer, and also with Dean Stanley and Whyte Melville the novelist. Between the two latter there might seem to be little connection, but I was asked to meet them at a little dinner of four, Whyte Melville being specially anxious to ask the Dean's advice. This was not, however, advice of any spiritual kind. Whyte Melville was thoroughly at home in the social world and the hunting field, and had made himself a great name as an accurate describer of both, but he was now ambitious of achieving renown in a new territory. He was planning a novel, Sarchedon, a story of the ancient East, and was anxious to learn from the Dean what historical authorities would best guide the Homer of Melton and Market Harborough in reconstructing the world of Bel and Baylon.

In speaking of novels I am led on to mention an authoress whose fame was concurrent with Whyte Melville's, and whose visions of modern society were not altogether unlike his own visions of Babylonia. This authoress was "Ouida." Ouida lived largely in a world of her own creation, peopled with foreign princesses, mysterious dukes—masters of untold millions, and of fabulous English guardsmen whose bedrooms in Knightsbridge Barracks were inlaid with silver and tortoise shell. And yet such was her genius that she invested this phantom world with a certain semblance of life, and very often with a certain poetry also. In some respects she was even more striking than her books. In her dress and in her manner of life she was an attempted exaggeration of her own female characters. For many years she occupied a large villa near Florence. During that time she visited London once. There it was that I met her. She depicted herself to herself as a personage of European influence, and imagined herself charged with a mission to secure the appointment of Lord Lytton as British Ambassador in Paris. With this purpose in view she called one day on Lady Salisbury, who, never having seen her before, was much amazed by her entrance, and was still more amazed when Ouida, in confidential tones, said, "I have come to tell you that the one man for Paris is Robert." Lady Salisbury's answer was not very encouraging. It consisted of the question, "And pray, if you please, who is Robert?" In a general way, however, she received considerable attention, and might have received more if it had not been for her reckless ignorance of the complexities of the London world. In whatever company she might be in, her first anxiety was to ingratiate herself with the most important members of it, but she was constantly making mistakes as to who the most important members were. Thus, as one of her entertainers—"Violet Fane"—told me, Ouida was sitting after dinner between Mrs. ——, the mistress of one of the greatest houses in London, and a vulgar little Irish peeress who was only present on sufferance. Ouida treated the former with the coldest and most condescending inattention, and devoted every smile in her possession to an intimate worship of the latter. When, however, she was in companies so carefully chosen that everybody present was worthy of her best attention, and so small that all were willing to give their best attention to her, she showed herself, so I was told, a most agreeable woman. Thus forewarned as to her ways, I found that such was the fact. I gave for her benefit a little luncheon party at the Bachelors' Club, the only guests whom I asked to meet her being Philip Stanhope and Countess Tolstoy (now Lord and Lady Weardale), Lord and Lady Blythswood, and Julia, Lady Jersey. Ouida arrived trimmed with the most exuberant furs, which, when they were removed, revealed a costume of primrose color—a costume so artfully cut that, the moment she sat down, all eyes were dazzled by the sparkling of her small protruded shoes. In a word, she quite looked the part, and, perceiving the impression she had made, was willing to be gracious to everybody. As we were going upstairs to the luncheon room, this effect was completed. Lady Jersey laid a caressing hand on her shoulder and said: "You must go first. The entertainment is in honor of you." Ouida was here at her best. No one could have been more agreeable and less affected than she.



Her latter years were overclouded by poverty. This was due to her almost mad extravagance—to her constant attempts, in short, to live up to the standards of her own heroines. Had she acted like a sensible woman, she might have realized a very fair fortune. She had many appreciative friends, who gave her considerable sums to relieve her at various times from the pressure of financial difficulties; but they realized in the end that to do this was like pouring water into a sieve. Somebody gave her L250 in London to enable her to pay her hotel bill; but before a week was over she had lavished more than a hundred in turning her sitting room at the Langham Hotel into a glade of the most expensive flowers. She died, in what was little better than a peasant's cottage, at Lucca. Among the ladies to whom she had been introduced in London was Winifred, Lady Howard of Glossop. A year or so later Ouida wrote me a letter from Florence, saying, "Your name has been just recalled to me by seeing in the Morning Post that you were dining the other night with Lady Howard of Glossop, one of my oldest friends." This is an example of the way in which her imagination enabled her to live in a fabric of misplaced facts, for the person through whom she became acquainted with Lady Howard was none other than myself. The next letter I had from her was to say that she was dedicating one of her later books—a volume of essays—to me. The letter did not reach me till after many delays, and I often regret the fact that before I was able, or remembered, to answer it she was dead.