Another authoress well known to me, of whom I have made mention already, was the beautiful "Violet Fane," who, under that pseudonym, published many volumes of poetry. Her actual name was Mrs. Singleton. She afterward became Lady Currie. I first knew her before my London days began, and I dedicated The New Republic to her. She was the center of a group of intimates, of whom those who survive must connect her with many of their happiest hours. No one could have combined in a way more winning than hers the discriminations of fashionable life with an inborn passion for poetry. She was perfect in features, slight as a sylph in figure, and her large dark eyes alternately gleamed with laughter and were grave as though she were listening for a voice from some vague beyond. Many of her phrases, when she was speaking of social matters, were like rapiers with the tip of which, as though by accident, she would just touch the foibles of her nearest and dearest friends, the result being a delicate puncture rather than the infliction of a wound.

She first became known as a poetess by a small volume of lyrics called From Dawn to Noon, in which, if, as some say, poetry be self-revelation, her success, according to certain of her censors, was somewhat too complete. The same criticism was provoked by her second volume, Denzil Place, a novel in blank verse interwoven with songs. Whatever her censors may have said about it, this, from first to last, was a work of real inspiration. Few who have read it will have forgotten the song beginning:

You gave to me on that dear night of parting So much, so little; and yet everything,

or will have failed to recognize the musical ear of one who has given us the liquid melody of two such lines as these:

The tremulous convolvulus whose closing blue eye misses The faint shadow on the dial that foretells the evening hour.

At all events, whatever her merits as a poetess, she was something like a living poem for a certain group of friends, of whom I happened to be one. This group comprised men such as Wilfrid Blunt, Lord Lytton, Philip Currie, Hamilton Aide, Frederick Locker, Clair Vyner, Sir Baldwin Leighton, and others, all of whom had in them a natural appreciation of poetry, while some of them were poets themselves. With a more or less intimate, though loosely formed, group like this my memory associates many small gatherings, which generally took the form of dinners, either at "Violet Fane's" own house in Grosvenor Place, or at Hurlingham, or at the "Star and Garter," or at Vyner's house among its gardens and woods at Combe, where we would linger, forgetful of time, and feeling no inclination to join any larger company.

But of all the worlds which, within the world, were more or less self-cohesive and separate, that in which I felt myself most at home was the Catholic. At any entertainment given at a Catholic house the bulk of the guests—perhaps three-fourths of them—would be Catholics. These would be people so closely connected with one another by blood or by lifelong acquaintance as to constitute one large family. Well-born, well-bred, and distinguished by charming and singularly simple manners, they were content to be what they were, and the Darwinian competition for merely fashionable or intellectual brilliance, however prevalent elsewhere, was, with few exceptions, to them virtually unknown. Yet whenever anything in the way of formal pomp was necessary, they were fully equal to the occasion. The well-known dinners given by Mrs. Washington Hibbert, at which four-and-twenty guests would be seated round a huge circular table, would fill Hill Street with swaying family coaches, on whose hammercloths crests and coronets maintained an eighteenth-century magnitude which the modern world was abandoning, while on certain ecclesiastical occasions Catholic society could exhibit a stateliness even more conspicuous.

On one of these latter occasions I was, as well as I can remember, the only non-Catholic in the company. This was a great luncheon party given by the then Lord Bute in honor of Cardinal Manning. Lord Bute, who was in many ways the most learned of the then recent converts to Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of Lothair in Lord Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart from its peculiar sequel, like a page of Lothair translating itself into actual life.

The Butes were at that time living at Chiswick House, which they rented from the Duke of Devonshire. The house is a good example of that grandiose classicality which we associate with the eighteenth century, and the saloon in which the guests were assembled provided them with an appropriate background. They were something like thirty in number, and comprised some of the greatest of the then great Catholic ladies. Lord Beaconsfield himself could not have chosen them better. Indeed his Lady St. Jerome was actually there in person. When I entered there was a good deal of talking, and yet at the same time there was something like a hush. I divined, and divined correctly, that the Cardinal had not yet arrived. The minutes went slowly on; the appointed hour was past. At length a sound was heard which seemed to emanate from an anteroom, and presently a figure was solemnly gliding forward—a figure slight, emaciated, and habited in a long black cassock. This was relieved at the throat by one peeping patch of purple, and above the throat was a face the delicate sternness of which was like semitransparent ivory. The company parted, making way for the great Churchman, and then a scene enacted itself which cannot be better described than in the words written many years previously by the author of Lothair himself. "The ladies did their best to signalize what the Cardinal was and what he represented, by reverences which a posture-master might have envied and certainly could not have surpassed. They seemed to sink into the earth, and slowly and supernaturally to emerge."

When the banquet was over, and the guests were taking their departure, our host begged me to remain, so that he and I and the Cardinal might have a little conversation by ourselves. We were presently secreted in a small room or closet, and our little talk must have lasted till close upon six o'clock. I half thought for a moment that this might be a planned arrangement so that then and there I might be received into the Roman fold. Matters, however, took a very different course. Under the Cardinal's guidance the conversation almost immediately—how and why I cannot remember—turned to the subject of Spiritualism, and he soon was gravely informing us that, of all the signs of the times, none was more sinister than the multiplication of Spiritualist seances, which were, according to him, neither more nor less than revivals of black magic. He went on to assert, as a fact supported by ample evidence, that the devil at such meetings assumed a corporeal form—sometimes that of a man, sometimes that of a beautiful and seductive woman, the results being frequent births, in the prosaic world around us, of terrible hybrid creatures half diabolic in nature, though wholly human in form. On this delicate matter he descanted in such unvarnished language that the details of what he said cannot well be repeated here. Of the truth of his assertions he obviously entertained no doubt and such was his dry, almost harsh solemnity in making them that, as I listened, I could hardly believe my ears. Our host, though a model of strictly Catholic devoutness, was, so he told me with a smile when the Cardinal had taken his departure, affected very much as I was. The impression left on both of us was that, in the Cardinal's character, there must have been a vein of almost astounding credulity—a credulity which would account for the readiness with which, as a social reformer, he adopted on many occasions the wildest exaggerations of agitators.

I was subsequently invited to call on him at the Archbishop's house in Westminster. During the interview which ensued he revealed intellectual qualities very different from those which had elicited a furtive smile even from a Catholic such as his host at Chiswick. We spent most of the morning in discussing the ultimate difficulties, philosophical, historical, and scientific, which preclude the modern mind from an assent to the philosophy of Catholicism. He displayed on this occasion, a broadness and a balance, if not a profundity of thought, in which many theologians who call themselves liberals are wanting. He spoke even of militant atheists, such as Huxley and Tyndall, without any sarcastic anger or signs of moral reprobation. He spoke of their opinions, not as sins which demanded chastisement, but simply as intellectual errors which must be cured by intellectual refutation, rather than by moral anathemas, and the personal relations subsisting between him and them were relations—so I have always understood—of mutual amity and respect.



Of another prominent Catholic, Wilfrid Ward, the same thing may be said. As a Catholic apologist he was a model of candor and suavity. He was, moreover, a most agreeable man of the world, among his accomplishments being that of an admirable mimic. He was, however, best known as an exponent of Catholic liberalism; and, since I am here concerned only with recollections of social life, to dwell on him longer would carry me too far astray.

Out of this last observation there naturally arises another, which relates to anecdotes or short sketches of individuals as a method of social history. For certain reasons the scope of this method is limited. In the first place, the persons whose doings or sayings are commemorated must be persons who, by their position or reputation, are more or less self-explanatory to the ear of the general reader. They will otherwise for the general reader have very little significance. They must also for the most part be dead, so that their susceptibilities may not be wounded by a too free allusion to their doings. Further, the anecdotes told of them must not be to their disadvantage in any way which would wound the susceptibilities of the living. These mortifying restrictions are, for all those who respect them, a deathblow to the most entertaining, perhaps the most instructive, part of what the memoir-writer has to tell. During the last ten years of his life the late Lord Wemyss amused himself by writing memoirs of his own distinguished activities, and on repeated occasions, when I stayed with him for a week in Scotland, he asked me to run my eye over a number of chapters with a view to seeing if any passages which might give offense had been left in them. A certain number of such had been already struck out by himself, but I very soon found that a considerable number remained. "God bless my soul!" he exclaimed when I pointed them out to him. "You are perfectly right. Let me have a blue pencil instantly." Lady P——, a witty woman of the widest European experience, attempted a similar task. She, too, asked me to look at what she had written, deploring the fact that all the most amusing parts had passed through the fire to the Moloch of an almost excessive caution. Here again I pointed out to the writer passages which had escaped the sacrifice, and which the living would certainly, even if not justifiably, resent—which they would, indeed, resent in exact proportion to their accuracy.

An example of the results which may be achieved by a memoir-writer who neglects this caution is provided by Augustus Hare. Hare was a man possessed of many accomplishments. Like Hamilton Aide, he was a very remarkable artist. He was also a great teller of stories, and a master in the craft of improving whatever truth there might be in them. By birth and otherwise he was well and widely connected, and was a familiar figure in many of the best-known houses in England. He was an indefatigable writer of memoirs, and of all such writers he was incomparably the most intrepid. The possibility of offending others, even though they might be his hosts and hostesses, had no terrors for him. I was once staying at a country house in Sussex when a new book by him appeared, and had just been sent down from Mudie's. I had twice seen its back on a table, and meant to have looked at it in my bedroom before dressing for dinner; but whenever I tried to secure it for my own perusal it had disappeared. I heard someone casually say, "Everybody in the house is reading it." I could not but wonder why. I managed to secure it at last, and set myself to find out the reason. It did not take long to find. Hare, a year before, had been staying in that very house—a house famous for the material perfection of its equipments. "The servants here," so Hare wrote and printed, "are notoriously more pampered than those in any other house in England, and their insolence and arrogance is proportionate to the luxury in which they live." On another occasion he recorded a visit to Castle ——, the family name of the owners being C——. He summed up his gratitude to his entertainers in the following pithy sentence, "Except dear Lady ——, I never could stand the C——s." Another of his entries was as follows. Having migrated from the Stanhopes' at Chevening to a neighboring old house in Kent, he wrote, "What a comfort it is, after staying with people who are too clever, to find oneself with people who are all refreshingly stupid!" If it were not for the danger of lapsing into indiscretions like these—indiscretions of which Hare seemed altogether unconscious—interesting anecdotes might be here indefinitely multiplied.

Even so, however, such anecdotes, no matter who recorded them, would be simply so many jottings which owed their continuity to the fact that, like the stones of a necklace, they happened to be strung on the thread of a single writer's experiences, and in no two cases would this thread be altogether the same. My own experiences of the social life of London, as I knew it in my earlier days, will perhaps best be described in more general terms. In such terms, then, let me speak of it as, foreshortened by time, it now presents itself to my memory.

For me, in my earlier years, the routine of a London day was practically much as follows. A morning of note-writing—of accepting or refusing invitations—was succeeded by a stroll with some companion among the company—the gay and animated company—which before the hour of luncheon at that time thronged the park. Then, more often than not, came a luncheon at two o'clock, to which many of the guests had been bidden a moment ago as the result of some chance meeting. A garden party, such as those which took place at Sion House or at Osterly, would occupy now and again the rest of an afternoon; but the principal business of every twenty-four hours began with a long dinner at a quarter past eight, or sometimes a quarter to nine. For any young man who took part in the social movement, dinner would be followed by two or by more "At Homes." Then, when midnight was approaching, began the important balls, of which any such young man would show himself at an equal number, and dance, eat quails, or sit with a suitable companion under palm trees, as the case might be; while vigilant chaperons, oppressed by the weight of their tiaras, would ask one another, "Who is the young man who is dancing with my daughter?" Finally, if the night were fair, young men, and sometimes ladies, if their houses were close at hand, would stroll homeward through the otherwise deserted streets, while the East, gray already, was being slowly tinged with saffron.

If the life of those who play a part in a London season is to be judged by what they do with themselves during a London season itself, it might be reasonably asked (as it is asked by morose social critics) how any sensible people can find such a life tolerable. To this question there are several answers. One is that no society of a polished and brilliant kind is possible unless special talents and graces, wide experience, knowledge, and the power that depends on knowledge, enter into its composition and support it in a peculiar manner which does not prevail elsewhere. This fact, however, will be but partly intelligible unless we remember that it is based on, and implies, another—namely, that the society which is identified with the life of a London season represents for those who figure in it, not life as a whole, but merely one phase of a life of which the larger part is of very different kinds, and which elsewhere exhibits very different aspects.

This observation specially applies to the days when London society was in the main an annual assemblage of old-established landed families, whose principal homes were in the country, and whose consequence was derived from their rural, not from their urban, associations. Their houses in the country were constantly filled with visitors. Society, in a certain sense of the word, surrounded them even there. But it was a society differing in its habits, and even in its constitution, from that which formed itself in London, and of the total lives of most of the persons, composing it, London life represented not more than a quarter. For me, my own annual life as a Londoner rarely exceeded three months out of twelve. Except for these three months, my habits, as they formed themselves after my father's death, were for a long time these: Of the nine other months I spent about two in Devonshire, where by this time, through inheritance, a new home was open to me—Lauriston Hall, overlooking Torbay, whose waters were visible from the windows through a screen of balustrades and rhododendrons. I generally wintered abroad—for the most part on the Riviera—and the rest of my time was occupied in country visits at home, from the South of England and Ireland to the borders of Sutherland and Caithness.

During the months of the London season my immediate preoccupations, superficially at all events, were, no doubt, those of an idler; but even during such periods, as I presently shall have occasion to mention, serious thoughts beset me almost without cessation. Even experiences of human nature which were flashed on me at balls and dinners, through that species of mental polygamy of which society essentially consists, helped me to mature projects which I executed under conditions of greater calm elsewhere. In the following chapter I shall speak of country houses, describing the atmosphere and aspect of some of those which were best known to me, and which I found most favorable to the prosecution of such serious work as I have accomplished in the way of philosophy, of fiction, and of direct or of indirect politics.



CHAPTER VIII

SOCIETY IN COUNTRY HOUSES

A Few Country Houses of Various Types—Castles and Manor Houses from Cornwall to Sutherland

The pleasantest form of society in country houses—I speak here for myself—is not to be found on occasions such as that of a great shooting party or a party for a country ball, but rather in gatherings of a smaller and more intimate kind.

As an illustration of my own views in this respect, I may mention an incident which may appeal, perhaps, to the sympathies of others whose tastes or distastes are like my own. I was asked to stay in Shropshire with some friends whom I knew so intimately that they did not care how they treated me; and on this occasion they had treated me very ill. As I was approaching my destination by way of a little local line, I was surprised at seeing on the platform of one station after another an extraordinary amount of luggage, together with a number of footmen and unmistakable ladies' maids. What could be the meaning of this? At last the question occurred to me: Can it be possible that some county ball is impending, and that my dear friends mean to take me to it? My surmise was but too correct. "Why," I asked my hostess, "didn't you tell me? I would have come when this ball was over." "Yes," she said, "I know that. That's why I did not tell you. We sha'n't let you off, don't think it." I answered, in tones of resignation: "Well, what must be must be." There the matter dropped, till the night of the ball arrived, and the ladies went upstairs to make themselves ready for the festival. I went upstairs likewise, but my proceedings differed from theirs. I took off my coat, lay down on my bed, and covered myself completely in the folds of a great fur rug. Presently came a voice at the door—that of my hostess—saying, in tones of command: "Are you ready? Be quick! We must be going." "I can't come," I answered. "I'm in bed." My hostess saw that I had got the better of her. I heard her laugh the laugh of confessed defeat. As soon as the sound of her wheels told me she was off the premises, I put on my coat, went down to the library, read a novel by the fire, and when she and her friends returned I had a most charming supper with them at three o'clock in the morning.

The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the houses to which I am now alluding—some of them great, others relatively small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present owners—have been houses which represented for me that old order of things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family traditions and associations—elements rooted in the soil of a national and immemorial past—such were the factors by which the life of these houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits—many of them very bad—on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses, except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fashion would be absent, while persons obscure in London would be here in their natural element. Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong resemblance to Catholic society in London.

But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context. Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward. What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?

Further, let me observe this—I have here an eye on my own case in particular—that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life, the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact—the very important fact—that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a disturbance.

Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as many of such houses as most people; but no one person can know more than a limited number of them; and even of this limited number I, in a volume like the present, can mention only a few. I will take them in the order in which for geographical or architectural reasons they most readily recur to my own memory. I may begin with two which deserve to be coupled together on account of the positions which they occupy—namely, the extreme northeast of Great Britain in one case, and the extreme southwest in the other. I allude to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, and St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall.

The whole population of the great county of Sutherland is hardly so much as two-thirds of the population of Wimbledon, and, except for some minute portions, was, prior to certain recent sales, a single gigantic property. Dunrobin Castle, with a million silent acres of mountain and moor behind it, looks down from a cliff over the wastes of the North Sea, but is on the landward side sheltered by fine timber. At the foot of the cliff are the flower beds of an old-world garden. The nucleus of the house is ancient, but has now been incrusted by great modern additions, the Victorian regime expressing itself in windows of plate glass. But through the plate glass on one side is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside the dining room. So remote is this great house from any center of modern industry that the carts, dogcarts, and wagonettes used by the estate and the family were built and repaired by a staff of men on the premises. My first visit to Dunrobin was in the days of the Duchess Annie. The duke was away on his yacht, but during my visit he returned, and the duchess and I went to meet him at the station—a private station in the grounds. Those were the early days of agrarian agitation in the Highlands—an agitation which was vehemently applauded by the Radical press of London. One Radical correspondent reported in tones of triumph that the duke had been openly cursed by his tenants on his own private platform. The nonsensical nature of such statements is sufficiently illustrated by what happened on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke, not with curses but with welcome; and as soon as he had descended from the train an old woman rushed from the throng and very nearly embraced him. "You dear old woman," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, "you dear old woman, how glad I am to see you again!"

St. Michael's Mount, though less remote than Dunrobin from the modern world in some ways, is more visibly separated from it in another, being, except at times of low tide, an island. It crowns and incases the summit of a veritable island rock. The entrance to it is by a tower the bases of which seem to descend from above and meet the visitor halfway as he toils up a path apparently made for rabbits. Having mounted a hundred stairs, the adventurer is in a comfortable hall, above which are the dining room, once a monkish refectory, and an ancient church, now used as a private chapel. One door of this hall gives access to a large drawing-room, one of whose walls and whose fireplace have been carved out of the living rock. Another gives access to a billiard room, below which the Atlantic breaks at a depth of two hundred feet, and whose granite balconies are grazed by the breasts of ascending sea birds.

Both these houses, which would constantly suggest to me, when I stayed in them, the celebrated words of Keats:

Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

are, it is needless to say, exceptions rather than types. Of the others which I may appropriately mention, a few may be taken as belonging to an exceptional class also, on account of their unusual size; and these I may again divide into genuine and ancient castles, as distinct from modern imitations on the one hand, and what are properly palatial villas of the classical type on the other; the remainder being smaller, though often of great magnitude, and commonly known by such names as "halls," "parks," or "manors."

Of more or less genuine castles I have known a considerable number, many of them much smaller than houses less ambitiously named; but, with the possible exception of Alnwick, the interior of which is undisguisedly modern, there is one which, in point of magnitude and continuity of occupation, forms a class by itself. This castle is Raby, which has never been uninhabited since the days of Stephen, when the first smoke wreaths rose from its kitchen chimney. The house is a huge block, rising at intervals into towers, with a small court in the middle of it, across which carriages drive, having passed through a tunnel of arches, and deposit their occupants in a hall, from which stairs, at both ends of it, lead to the various living rooms, among these being an upper hall more than fifty yards in length. This whole block stands in a walled area, entered by a castellated gateway and encircled by a moat, a portion of which still holds water, and in which the towers reflect themselves. When I stayed there as a guest of the Duke and Duchess of Cleveland, an atmosphere of the past not only pervaded the castle, but seemed to extend itself for some miles into the neighborhood. When I and others who had arrived by the same train issued from the station doors, the carriages awaiting us in the twilight comprised old yellow chariots, with postilions, like that of my grandfather in which I had swung myself when a child. I said to Augustus Hare, who happened to be one of the party, "One would think that we all of us were going to Gretna Green." When we approached the castle, whose towers were blots in the November evening, I felt we were approaching a castle in a child's fairy tale. In point of magnitude, combined with ancient and absolutely continuous occupation, there is, so far as my own experience goes, no private dwelling in the kingdom which excels, or even equals, Raby. The duchess kept a great album in which each of her guests was asked to inscribe some record of his or of her visit, which record was to take the form of answers to certain printed questions, or of a sketch, or some original verses. I preferred to take refuge in the last, my own metrical record being this:

Some scoff at what was, and some shrink from what may be Or is; but they all must be pleased with a place Where even what was looks enchanting in Raby, And where even what is is redeemed by Her Grace.

Apart from genuine castles of feudal type and origin, the greatest houses I have known, if regarded as architectural structures, are Blenheim, Trentham (the Brentham of Lord Beaconsfield's Lothair), and Cliveden. In this class I should, perhaps, include also Sir Robert Walpole's Houghton, where I have stayed as the guest of Cora, Lady Strafford, who occupied it for many years as a tenant, and with singular taste and knowledge so arranged the interior that every chair, sideboard, and table then in common use had been Sir Robert Walpole's own. I wrote my letters one morning in his study, at his own writing table, and using his own inkstand. The walls were lined with books, most of them presents from his contemporaries, and some of them extremely curious. I may mention one in particular. It related to the South Sea Bubble, and contained what was practically a list of the largest commercial fortunes existing then in England.

Other houses which in point of magnitude belong to the same group are Stowe, with its frontage of more than a thousand feet, Hamilton Palace, Wentworth Wodehouse, and Eaton. By those whose knowledge is greater than mine, the list, in any case small, might, no doubt, be extended. I speak here only of those at which I have myself stayed. But, in any case, no one, however wealthy, would think of building on a similar scale now. Their magnitude was useful only in days other than ours, when visitors stayed for a month or six weeks at a time, and brought with them their own carriages and the necessary grooms and coachmen. It is only on very rare occasions that such houses could be even half filled to-day; and they dwarf, rather than subserve, the only possible life that a reasonable man could live in them. Blenheim impresses a visitor as though it were built for giants. Alfred Montgomery, when staying for the first time at Eaton, could not, on coming downstairs, find his way to the breakfast room till he encountered a friend who guided him. "Good God!" he exclaimed as he entered the desired apartment, "I don't want to eat my breakfast in a cathedral." Mere magnitude, indeed, beyond a certain point is not a luxury, but an oppression. The greatest private dwelling ever erected in England is said to have been Audley End, when its original builder completed it. James I said of it, "It is a house fit only for a king"; and before it could be rendered habitable three-fourths of it had to be pulled down. Such was the verdict of experience on overbuilding in the past; and though many conditions have changed, a similar practical criticism is occasionally being pronounced to-day. Trentham is practically gone. Hamilton Palace, it is said, will soon exist no longer.

When, however, we turn to genuine castles, pseudo-castles, or houses which, large though many of them are, are small as compared with these, my memory provides me with examples of them which are scattered all over the kingdom, but of which, since they are types rather than grandiose exceptions, it will for the moment be enough to describe a few, others being reserved for mention in connection with particular circumstances.

Of castles other than the greatest, were I asked to name the most romantic which has been known to me as a visitor, and the most agreeable in the way of an ancestral dwelling, I should, I think, begin with Powis, as it stands with its rose-red walls, an exhalation of the Middle Ages, on a steep declivity among the mountainous woods of Wales—woods full of deer and bracken. Much of its painted paneling had never been, when I stayed there, touched or renovated since the time of the battle of Worcester. In a bedroom which had once been occupied by Charles I there was hardly a piece of furniture which was not coeval with himself. The dining room, as I remember it, had been frescoed by a Dutch artist in the reign of William and Mary.

In respect of mere romantic situation, the English house which I remember as coming nearest to Powis is Glenthorne, the seat of the Hallidays, which not so very long ago was thirty miles from a railway on one side, and seventeen on another. It fronts the Bristol Channel on the confines of Devon and Somerset. I have described it accurately in my novel The Heart of Life. In its general aspect it resembles my own early home, Denbury, but in some ways it is quite peculiar. In front of it is an Italian garden, below which are breaking waves, and behind it precipitous woods rise like a wall to an altitude of more than twelve hundred feet. The only approach to the house is by a carriage drive three miles long, which descends to it in zigzags from the upper world of Exmoor.

Hardly less romantic is Ugbrooke, the seat of the Cliffords, about twelve miles from Torquay, associated with the name of Dryden, who was a frequent guest there, and haunted by the Catholicism of a long series of generations. The chapel is approached through, and transmits its incense to, a library which hardly contains a book more recent than the days of the nonjurors, and I have often spent long mornings there examining the files of journals belonging to the epoch of Queen Anne, of the first two Georges, and of Pope. I have kindred recollections of Lulworth Castle in Dorsetshire, where the old religious regime so casts its spell over everything that I should hardly have been surprised if a keeper, encountered in the twilight park, had turned out to be carrying, not a gun, but a crossbow.

Of other houses connected with Catholic memories I may mention two in Yorkshire—Everingham Park and Houghton, then the respective homes of the late Lord Herries and his kinsman, Mr. Charles Langdale. Both were hereditary and absolutely unquestioning Catholics; and, strange to say, a large part of their tenantry were hereditary Catholics also. Each of these houses has a great chapel attached to it, and every Sunday processions of farmers' dogcarts would deposit their occupants at doors the decorations of which plainly showed that for these stalwart Englishmen the Protestant Reformation was no more than a dream.

But putting the question of Catholic atmosphere aside, and reverting once more to castles, I may begin with a mention of Chillingham, sheltered by the shadowy woods and surrounded by the moors of Northumberland.

As compared with Alnwick, Chillingham is a small structure. Apart from some offices added during the nineteenth century, it occupies an area measuring a hundred and twenty feet by a hundred. The outer walls are of enormous thickness, with a tower at each corner; and against these outer walls the rooms which constitute the dwelling, much less massive in their masonry, are built round a small court. They have hardly been altered since the days of Inigo Jones. When I stayed there with Sir Andrew Noble, who for many years was Lord Tankerville's tenant, the whole of the furniture seemed to have grown old with the house. The most modern contents of the bookshelves were the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose faded backs would grow young again in the flickering warmth of fires. Beneath the external windows were the box borders of a garden, and visible on distant slopes were the movements of wild cattle.

Another castle with which I was very familiar was Elvaston, near Derby, where year after year I stayed with the late Lord and Lady Harrington. Originally a red-brick manor house, it was castellated in the days of Wyatt; and though architects of to-day would smile at its artificial Gothic, it may now for this very reason be regarded as a historical monument. It is a monument of tastes and sentiments which have long since passed away. It represents not only a vanished taste in architecture, but sentiments also which are now even more remote. The Earl of Harrington, under whom the Gothic transfiguration was accomplished, seems to have regarded himself as a species of knight-errant. Round the fluted pillars by which the roof of the hall is supported—a hall which he christened "the Hall of the Fair Star"—were strapped imitation lances, and the windows were darkened by scrolls which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, or contained till lately, a curious something which is a vivid revelation of his mind. It consists of an image in plaster of Paris of his ladylove, together with one of himself kneeling at her feet and gazing at her, his hands being about to commit his adoration to the strings of a guitar. The Lord Harrington of my time, whose death is a still recent event, was associated with the huntsman's horn rather than with the strings of a troubador, and with the accouterments of the polo-field rather than with spears and lances. Lord Harrington, though his ruling passion was sport, was a man of wide information, expert as a mechanical engineer, and possessed alike in disposition and manner that rare kind of geniality which almost amounts to genius, and made all with whom he came in contact—even the Derbyshire miners—his friends.

The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly, ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail accumulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there—and this was my first introduction to Wales—for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year Lord Bute was the president. The house party on the occasion comprised only eight persons, and there was, so I gathered, no room for more. Lord Bute was by temperament a man of extreme shyness, who naturally shrank from obtruding his own person in public, but on this occasion he rose to a full sense of his obligations. He prepared and delivered an address, most interesting and profoundly learned, on Welsh musical history. He and his house party were conveyed to the place of meeting in quasi-royal carriages, preceded and followed by outriders, and for a series of nights he provided the inhabitants of the town with balls, concerts, or entertainments of other kinds. No host could have been more gracious than he. On the last night of my visit there was a gathering practically private. The heroine of this was old Lady Llanover, who, though not a native of Wales, was an enthusiast for all things Welsh. She had brought with her in her train a bevy of her own female domestics, who wore steeple-crowned hats, and also an old butler dressed up like a bard. These were all arranged on a dais, and sang national melodies; and when the performance was finished Lord Bute, with a charming smile, presented Lady Llanover with a ring. This bore on its large gem an engraving of a Welsh harp, below which was the motto in Welsh, "The language of the soul is in its strings."

Among my fellow guests at the Castle was a singularly interesting personage—Mr. George Clark of Talygarn. Mr. Clark, in alliance with Lord Wimborne, played a prominent part in the development of the Dowlais steel works, and he was at the same time one of the greatest genealogists and heraldic antiquarians of his day. I was intimate with him till his death, and have been intimate with his family ever since.

Apart from St. Michael's Mount, there are two old houses in Cornwall which year after year I visited for some part of December, proceeding thence to a third for a Christmas gathering in Worcestershire, and to a fourth—this was in Yorkshire—for the celebration of the New Year.

The Cornish houses of which I speak were Heligan, near Mevagissy, the home of the John Tremaynes, and Trevarthenick, near Truro, the home of Sir Louis and Lady Molesworth. Pale externally with the stucco of more than a hundred and fifty years ago, neither of these substantial houses has any resemblance to a castle; but the ample rooms and staircases, the dark mahogany doors and the far-planted woods of each represented in some subtle way the Cornish country gentlemen as they were in the days before rotten boroughs were abolished. Within a few miles' radius of Trevarthenick were two little agricultural townlets, hardly more than villages, which together were represented in those days by four members of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist well known as a luminary of some new school of painting. When I met him at the house of a friend he told me that he had abandoned painting, and was applying his artistic principles to the manufacture of furniture. He kindly explained to me in somewhat technical language what the principles of the new art as applied to furniture were. I apologized for my inability to understand them, and confessed to him that my own taste in furniture was not so much artistic as political, and that the kind of chair, for example, which gave me most satisfaction was one that had been made and used before the first Reform bill.

The houses already referred to as successive scenes of Christmas and New Year visits were Hewel Grange, Lord Plymouth's, near Bromsgrove, and Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, about twenty miles from York.

Hewel Grange, which has taken the place of an old house, now abandoned, is itself entirely modern. Of all the considerable houses built in England during the last thirty years, it is, so far as I know, the most perfect as a specimen of architecture. Externally its style is that of the early seventeenth century, but its great hall is a monument of Italian taste subdued to English traditions and the ways of English life. New though the structure is, the red sandstone of its walls and gables has been already so colored by the weather that they look like the growth of centuries, and whatever is exotic in the interior carries the mind back to the times of John of Padua.

To pass from Hewel to Byram was to pass from one world to another, though both were saturated with traditions of old English life. Byram, standing as it does in a territory of absolutely flat deer park, gives, with its stuccoed walls and narrow, oblong windows, no hint of intended art. Parts of it are of considerable age, but it represents as a whole the dignified utilitarianism of the Yorkshire country gentleman as he was from a hundred to two hundred years ago. Sir John himself, familiar with political office, accomplished as a classical scholar, and endowed with one of the most charming of voices, was of all country gentlemen the most perfect whom it has ever been my lot to know. He was cradled in the traditions of Whiggism, and to me one of his most delightful attributes was inability to assimilate the spirit of modern Liberalism, whether in the sphere of politics or of social or religious thought.

With Byram my memory associated two neighboring houses—Fryston, then the home of Lord Houghton, and Kippax, that of the Blands. Fryston was filled with books, and it was in my early days constantly filled with celebrities, generally of a miscellaneous, sometimes of an incongruous, kind. Sir John Ramsden told me that once, when he had been asked to dine there for the purpose of meeting some bishop whose name he could not read (for Lord Houghton wrote a very illegible hand), the most reverent of the assembled guests could hardly forbear from smiling when their host, having left them for a moment, came back bringing the bishop with him. The bishop was a negro, with a face as black as his own silk apron.

Kippax, which is close to Fryston, was, in the eighteenth century, a fairly large, but not notably large, building, but when Lord Rockingham began the construction of Wentworth the late Mr. Bland's ancestor declared that, whatever happened, he would not be outbuilt by anybody, and that Kippax, in spite of Wentworth, should be the longest house in Yorkshire. He accordingly extended its frontage by the addition of two wings, which really were for the most part a succession of narrow outbuildings masked by classical walls of imposing and balanced outline, the result being that a dwelling which is practically of very moderate dimensions confronts the world with a facade of more than seven hundred feet.

A house differing in character from any of those just mentioned is Stanway, where I have stayed as the guest of the then Lady Elcho. It variegates with its pointed gables the impending slopes and foliage of the outlying Cotswold Hills. It is a beautiful building in itself—but the key to its special charm was for me to be found in certain pictures, void of all technical merit, and relegated to twilight passages—pictures representing, with an obvious and minute fidelity, scenes from the life lived there during the times of the first two Georges. One of these shows the milkmaids going home from their work arrayed in striped petticoats, and carrying their milk pails on their heads. Others show members of the family enjoying themselves in the garden or setting out for a ride, while the clergyman of the parish, or the chaplain, is pacing one of the walks in solitary meditation, with a telescope under his arm.

At Lyme, in Cheshire, the ancient home of the Leghs, which owes its present magnificence to Leone, the Georgian architect, by whom Chatsworth was renovated, other pictures of a similar kind abound. In the days of the first Lord Newton I visited Lyme frequently, and was often late for breakfast because as I went through the passages I could not detach myself from a study of these appealing records.

Of houses no less typical of the country life of England I can give a further example without quitting the Cotswolds. I allude to Sherborne—the late Lord Sherborne was one of my earliest friends—with its two principal frontages enriched by Inigo Jones with clusters of Corinthian columns—a house still happily remote from railways and towering chimneys. The late Lady Sherborne, like the Duchess of Cleveland at Raby, kept an album, to which, whenever she could, she extorted a contribution in verse, or otherwise from her friends. My own contribution on one occasion was this—it was written at the close of a visit at Whitsuntide:

When June fevers London with riot, I regretfully dream of the day When shadow and sunshine and quiet Were alive in your woodlands in May.

I remember your oaks and your beeches. I remember the cuckoo's reply To the ring dove that moaned where the reaches Of the Windrush are blue with the sky.

Of country houses which I have known in Scotland I shall speak later, in connection with extraneous incidents. Of such houses in Ireland, of which I have known several, it will be enough to mention one. This is Tullamore in County Down, the home of Strange, Lord Roden and Lady Roden, to the latter of whom I have referred already. It is from my visits at Tullamore that most of my knowledge of Ireland, such as it is, is derived. For many successive years I spent at Tullamore most of the early autumn. There were a few other old friends whom, in addition to myself, Lady Roden was accustomed to ask for similar periods, while the company was constantly augmented by others, mostly Irish, who stayed there for several days. Among these was Mrs. Ronalds—one of the most popular of the American ladies of London, who spent most of her autumn with her daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, at Belfast. More kindly and accomplished entertainers than Lord and Lady Roden it would not be easy to imagine. Tullamore stands among great beech woods and gardens on one side of a valley, at the bottom of which, half hidden by rhododendrons, an amber-colored stream descends in waterfalls to the sea. The slopes opposite to the house are thickly fledged with larches up to a certain height, when they suddenly give place to the wildness of the Mourne Mountains. The house externally is of more or less modern aspect, but within, when I knew it, it was full of fine family portraits, books, and old collections of china, together with certain other objects which appealed to the sense of history rather than to that of art. The Rodens having been among the chief of the Orange families of Ireland, a series of cabinets which stood in a long gallery would be found on examination to contain a collection of engraved wineglasses, each of which bore the inscription "God save King William," or else "To Hell with the Pope." I remember also that a number of fine Dutch mirrors, which were plainly designed for ladies in the act of doing their hair, had been rendered useless for this important purpose by the fact that the whole of their surfaces were covered by delineations of King William on horseback, gesticulating at the battle of the Boyne.

Such sketches of the country houses that have been known to me might be very easily multiplied—houses of which, whenever I think of them, memories come back to me like the voices of evening rooks. But these will be sufficient, so far as England and Ireland are concerned, to illustrate certain portions of my life other than that of London, and I will for the moment turn from those portions to others, which were spent by me for many years not at home, but abroad.

Not long after my Oxford career was ended, a family with which I was closely connected was, in consequence of the illness of one of its members, advised by doctors to pass the winter at Cannes, and, as soon as my friends were settled there, I was asked to go out and join them. A diminutive villa next to their own was secured for me. Its windows opened on an equally diminutive garden, in which orange trees with their golden globes surrounded a spurting fountain, while, rising from the depths of a great garden below—a garden pertaining to a villa built like a Moorish mosque—were the tall spires of cypresses and the yellow clouds of mimosa trees. In this hermitage, which seemed, under southern moons, to open on a world like that of The Arabian Nights, I remained for about two months, and wrote there the later portions of my book Is Life Worth Living? Social life at Cannes had all the charm and none of the constant unrest of London, and its atmosphere so enchanted me that I spent for many years the best part of my winters on the Riviera, though I subsequently varied my program by a month or so at Pau or Biarritz, and more than once at Florence. On later occasions, of which I shall speak hereafter, I went farther afield, and saw something of what life was like in an old Hungarian castle; in the half-Gothic dwellings and arcaded courts of Cyprus; in the drawing-rooms of Fifth Avenue; and also on the shores of Lake Michigan, along which the great esplanade of Chicago now extends itself for more than eleven miles.

Of my experiences in foreign countries, just as of those in Scotland, I shall have to speak again; but I will first return to those portions of my early life which, with the exception of an annual few months in London, I spent for the most part on the Riviera, in Italy, or in Devonshire, or in country visits at houses such as those which I have just mentioned, and I will record what, beneath the surface, my life and my mental purposes in these often-changed scenes were.



CHAPTER IX

FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS

First Treatise on Politics—Radical Propaganda—First Visit to the Highlands—The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch Constituency

The sketches which I have just given of my purely social experiences may seem, so far as they go, to represent a life which, since the production of The New Republic, was mainly a life of idleness. I may, however, say, without immodesty, that, if taken as a whole, it was the very reverse of this. Whether the results of my industry may prove to have any value or not, nobody could in reality have been more industrious than myself, or have prosecuted his industry on more coherent lines.

I have already given some account of The New Republic, indicating its character, its construction, the mood which gave rise to it, and the moral it was intended to express. This moral—the fruit of my education at Oxford, and also of my experiences of society before I became familiar with the wider world of London—was, as I have said already, that without religion life is reduced to an absurdity, and that all philosophy which aims at eliminating religion and basing human values on some purely natural substitute is, if judged by the same standards, as absurd as those dogmas of orthodoxy which the naturalists are attempting to supersede. With the purpose of emphasizing this contention in a yet more trenchant way, I supplemented, as I have said already, The New Republic by a short satirical romance, Positivism on an Island, in the manner of Voltaire's Candide. My next work, Is Life Worth Living? in which I elaborated this argument by the methods of formal logic, was largely due to that wider knowledge of the world with which social life in London and elsewhere had infected me. The bitterest criticism which that work excited was based on the contention that the kind of life there analyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for that very reason—that the book was addressed only to an idle class, and that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were deducible which had any meaning for the multitude of average men. Some such objection had been anticipated from the first by myself. I was already prepared to meet it, and my answer was in brief as follows, "If life without a God is unsatisfying, even to those for whom this world has done its utmost, how much more unsatisfying must it be to that vast majority for whom a large part of its pleasures are, from the nature of things, impossible." But a closer and wider acquaintance with the kind of life in question, and the sorrows and passions masked by it, prompted me to translate the argument of the three books just mentioned into yet another form—namely, that of a tragic novel—A Romance of the Nineteenth Century.

This book was attacked by the apostles of non-religious morality with a bitterness even greater than that which had been excited in them by Is Life Worth Living? And with these critics were associated many others, who, whether they agreed or disagreed with its purely religious tendencies, denounced it because it dealt plainly with certain corruptions of human nature, the very mention of which, according to them, was in itself corrupting, and was an outrage of the decorums of a respectable Christian home. Since those days the gravest reviews and newspapers have dealt with such matters in language far more plain and obtrusively crude than mine, and often displaying a much more restricted sense of the ultimate problems connected with them. Certain critics, indeed—among whom were many Catholic priests, with the experience of the confessional to guide them—took a very different line, and welcomed the book as a serious and valuable contribution to the psychology of spiritual aspiration as dependent on supernatural faith.

Put briefly, the story of the novel is this. The heroine, who is young, but not in her first girlhood, has in her aspect and her natural disposition everything that is akin to the mystical aspirations of the saint; but, more or less desolated by the diffused skepticism of the day, she has been robbed of innocence by a man, an old family friend, and has never been at peace with herself or wholly escaped from his sinister power since. The hero, who meets her by accident and with whom she is led into a half-reluctant friendship, has at first no suspicion of the actual facts of her history, but believes her troubles, at which she vaguely hints, to be due merely to the loss of religious beliefs which were once her guide and consolation. He accordingly does his best, though deprived of faith himself, to effect in her what Plato calls "a turning round of the soul," and hopes that he may achieve in the process his own conversion also. For aid in his perplexities he betakes himself to a Catholic priest, once a well-known man of the world, and calls her attention to the immortal passage in St. Augustine, beginning, "If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth and air and heaven." But he feels as though he were the blind endeavoring to lead the blind, and the end comes at last in the garden of a Mediterranean villa, behind whose lighted windows a fancy ball is in progress. The hero, whose dress for the occasion is that of a Spanish peddler, encounters the seducer in one of the shadowy walks and is shot dead by the latter, who believes that his life is being threatened by some genuine desperado; and the heroine, draped in white, like a Greek goddess of purity, witnesses this sudden event, is overcome by the shock, and dies of heart failure on a marble bench close by.

One of the stoutest defenders of this book was Lord Houghton, who, in writing to me with regard to it, mentioned a curious incident. The villain of the piece, Colonel Stapleton, was drawn by me from a certain Lord ——, as to whom I had said to myself the first moment I met him: "This man is the quintessence of selfishness. He is capable of anything that would minister to his own pleasures." "The novel," said Lord Houghton in his letter, "requires no apology. You have made only one mistake in it. The conduct of the colonel in one way would have differed from that which you ascribe to him. For instance," Lord Houghton continued, "I once met Lord X. in Paris, and to my own knowledge what Lord X. would have done on a similar occasion was so-and-so." Lord X. was the very man from whom my picture of the colonel had been drawn.

Some years later I published another novel, The Old Order Changes, of which the affection of a man for a woman is again one of the main subjects, but it is there regarded from a widely different standpoint. I shall speak of this book presently, but I may first mention that in the interval between the two a new class of questions, of which at Littlehampton and Oxford I had been but vaguely conscious, took complete possession of my mind, and pushed for a time the interests which had been previously engaging me into the background.

This change was due to the following causes, which partly produced, and were partly produced by, one of the earlier outbreaks in this country of what is now called "social unrest." The doctrines of Karl Marx, which had long been obscurely fermenting in the minds of certain English malcontents, now began for the first time in this country to be adopted by a body of such men as the basis of an organized party—a party which they ambitiously named "The Social Democratic Federation." The main object of these persons was the confiscation of all private capital. Another agitation had been initiated by Henry George, which in this country was much more widely popular, and which had for its object the confiscation not of private capital, but simply and solely of privately owned land. Meanwhile Bright, who was certainly not a Socialist (for he defended the rights of capital in many of their harshest forms), had been attacking private landlordism on the ground not that it was in itself an economic abuse, as George taught, but that in this country it formed, under existing conditions, the basis of an aristocratic class. Finally there was Ruskin, who had, since the days when I first knew him at Oxford, been attempting to excite sympathy with some vague project of revolution by rewriting economic science in terms of sentiment which sometimes, but only on rare occasions, struck fire by chance contact with the actual facts of life. It is hardly surprising that such ideas as these, jumbled together by a mob in Trafalgar Square, took practical form, on a certain memorable occasion, in a looting of shops in Piccadilly—an enterprise instigated by men one of whom, enlightened by disillusion, has subsequently earned respect as a grave cabinet minister.

As for myself, the most pertinacious conviction which these movements forced on me was that, whatever elements of justice and truth might lurk in them, they were based on wild distortions of historical and statistical facts, or on an ignorance even more remarkable of the actual dynamics of industry, of the powers of the average worker, and of the motives by which he is actuated.

Dominated by this conviction, which for me was verified every time I opened a newspaper, I found myself daily devoting more and more of my time to the task of reducing this chaos of revolutionary thought to order. But what most sharply awakened me to the need for such a work was an incident which, before it took place, would have, so I thought, a tendency to lull my anxieties for a time rather than to maintain or stimulate them.

I had regarded the revolutionary mood as mainly, if not exclusively, an emanation from those hotbeds of urban industry in which the modern industrial system has reached its most complete development, and I pictured to myself the more remote districts of the kingdom—especially the Highlands of Scotland—as still the scenes of an idyllic and almost undisturbed content. As to the rural counties of England, I was, so I think, correct, but, as to the Scottish Highlands, the truth of my ideas in this respect still remained to be tested. To me the Highlands were thus far nothing more than a name. I was therefore delighted when one morning I received an invitation from Lord and Lady Howard of Glossop, to stay with them for some weeks at Dorlin, their remote Highland home.

Dorlin, which had been bought by Lord Howard from his connection, Mr. Hope Scott, is situated on the borders of a sea loch, Loch Moidart, and of all places in Scotland it then enjoyed the repute of being one of the least accessible. The easiest means of reaching it was by a long day's journey in a rudely appointed cattle boat, which twice a week left Oban at noon, carrying a few passengers, and reached at nightfall the rude pier of Salen, about nine miles from the house. To my unaccustomed eyes the descent from the sleeping car at Oban, with the vision which greeted them of sea and heathery mountain, was like walking into the Waverley Novels. As I followed a barrow of luggage to the pier from which the steamer started, I expected to see Fergus MacIvors everywhere. This expectation was not altogether fulfilled; but at last, when the pier was reached, I knew not which thrilled me most—the smallness and rudeness of the vessel to which I was about to commit myself or the majesty of a kilted being who so bristled with daggers that even Fergus MacIvor might have been afraid of him. Not till later did I learn that the name of this apparition was Jones; but even if I had known it then, no resulting disillusion could have marred the adventurous romance of the voyage which was now awaiting me.

It was a voyage of astonishing and, to me, wholly novel beauty. The islands which we passed, or at which we stopped, wore all the colors of all the grape clusters of the world, until these were dimmed by slowly approaching twilight, when we found ourselves at rest in the harbor of Tobermory in Mull. We waited there for more than an hour, while leisurely boats floated out to us, laden with sheep and cattle, which were gradually got on board in exchange for some other cargo. Then, with hardly a ripple, our vessel was again in motion, its bows pointing to the mouth of Loch Salen opposite. By and by, in the dimness of the translucent evening, our vessel stopped once more—I could not tell why or wherefore, till a splash of oars was heard and some bargelike craft was decipherable emerging out of the gloom to meet us. Into this, as though in a dream, a number of sheep were lowered; and we, resuming our course, found ourselves at last approaching a small rocky protrusion, on which a lantern glimmered, and which proved to be Salen pier.

Gallic accents reached us, mixed with some words of English. With the aid of adroit but hardly distinguishable figures, I found myself stumbling over the boulders of which the pier was constructed, and realized that a battered wagonette, called "the machine," was awaiting me. A long drive among masses of mountain followed. At last a gleam of waters was once again discernible. The road, rough and sandy, ran close to little breaking waves, and then, in the shadow of woods and overhanging rocks, numerous lights all of a sudden showed themselves. The machine with a lurch entered something in the nature of a carriage drive, and I found myself on the threshold of Dorlin—a lodge of unusual size, which seemed to be almost wading in the water. When the door opened I was greeted by an odor of peat smoke. An old London butler conducted me up a flight of stairs, and I was presently in a drawing-room filled with familiar figures. Besides my host and hostess and their then unmarried daughters, were Lady Herbert of Lee, Lord Houghton, the Verulams, and the most delightful of priests, Father Charles Macdonald, famous as a fisherman, inimitable as a teller of stories, and great-grandson of fighters who had died for Prince Charlie at Culloden. One guest at Dorlin, who had left just before my arrival, was the then Lord Lorne, and I was told by Lady Howard that the boatmen who had helped him to land—Catholic Macdonalds all of them—had been heard saying to one another that "not so very long ago no Campbell would have dared to set foot in the Macdonald country." Not far away there were still living at that time two old ladies—Macdonalds—whose small house was a museum of Stuart relics, and who still spoke of the Pretender with bated breath as "the King."

Here, indeed, were conditions closely resembling those to which I had looked forward. The past was once more present. The modern spirit of unrest had, so it seemed to me, retreated to some incredible distance.

Lord Houghton, Father Charles, one of the daughters of the house, and I invariably beguiled the evenings with a rubber of modest whist. Lord Houghton was to leave on a Monday morning, and as soon as the dinner of Sunday night was over he hurried us to our places at the card table for another and a concluding game. Much to his surprise and annoyance somebody whispered in his ear that Lord Howard, though an excellent Catholic, had always had an objection to the playing of cards on Sundays. "Well," said Lord Houghton, "we must get Lady Herbert to speak to him about it." Lady Herbert, hearing her name, asked what she was wanted to do. Lord Houghton explained, and she, in tones of caressing deprecation, repeated that, as to this matter, Lord Howard was afflicted with a strong Protestant prejudice. "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, taking both her hands, "what's the good of belonging to that curious superstition of yours if one mayn't play cards on Sunday?" Through her mediation the desired indulgence was granted. The game was played, but Providence nevertheless chastened Lord Houghton, using me as its humble instrument, for I won three or four pounds from him—the largest, if not the only, sum that I ever won at cards in my life.

Such episodes, imported as they were from the social world of England, were not altogether in keeping with the visionary world of Waverley, but they could not dissipate its atmosphere, charged with bygone romance. And yet it was among these "distant dreams of dreams" that my ears became first awake to the nearer sounds of some vague social disturbance of which Ruskin's gospel of Labor, as I heard it at Oxford without any clear comprehension of it, had been a harbinger.

I had been asked, when I left Dorlin, to pay one or two other visits in the Highlands farther north—to the Sutherlands at Dunrobin, the Munro Fergusons at Novar, and the Lovats at Beaufort. My route to these places was by the Caledonian Canal, and in listening to the conversation of various groups on the steamer I several times heard the opinion expressed that, sooner or later, the Highlands were bound to be the scene of some great agrarian revolution. I was well aware that the assailants of landed property, from Marx and George down to the semiconservative Bright, to whose voices had now been joined that of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, had pointed to the magnitude of the greater Highland estates as signal types of the abuses to which Highland landlordism is liable; but not till I took that journey on the steamer from Fort William to Inverness had I attached to these arguments more than an academic importance.

In the course of my ensuing visits I talked over the threatened revolution with persons of much local knowledge, especially with one of the Duke of Sutherland's agents, and Father Grant, the chaplain of the Catholic Lovats at Beaufort. They did not, it appeared to me, take the threatened revolution very seriously, and they showed me how absurdly in error the agitators were as to certain of the facts alleged by them. One of their errors consisted in their gross overestimates of what the practical magnitude of the great Highland properties was, the rent of the Sutherland property being, for instance, no more per acre than the twentieth part of an average acre in England. Father Grant, who was a learned antiquarian, mentioned as a commonplace on revolutionary platforms the statement that in the Highlands no such beings as the private landlord existed prior to the rebellion of 1745, on the suppression of which the government stole their communal rights from the clansmen, turning them into tenants at will, whom the chieftains, now absolute owners, could evict and expatriate as they pleased. No fiction, said Father Grant, himself a crofter's son, could be more absurd than this. It was absolutely disproved, he said, by a mass of medieval charters, in which were assigned to the chieftains by the Scottish Crown the fullest territorial rights possible for lawyers to devise.[1]

At the same time my informants admitted with regret that landlordism in the Highlands was liable to special abuses, an instance of which had come to the fore recently. This was the long lease acquired by a rich American of enormous areas which he converted into a single deer forest, evicting certain crofters in the process with what was said to have been signal harshness.

All this information was to me extremely interesting; but I left Scotland wishing that it had been more extensive and methodical. It had, however, the effect of stimulating me in the work to which I was now addressing myself—that is to say, the elaboration of some formal and militant treatise, in which I might not only discredit by analysis the main fallacies common to all the social revolutionaries of the day, but also indicate the main facts and principles on which alone a true science of society can be based. This work took the form of a short treatise or essay, called Social Equality, or a Study in a Missing Science. The science to which I referred was the science of human character as connected with the efforts by which wealth and all material civilizations are produced. A French translation of it was soon issued in Paris. I was also asked to sanction what I had no right to prohibit—namely, translations of it into Rumanian and Spanish. My main object was to show that, as applied to the process in question, "social equality" was a radically erroneous formula, the various efforts to which wealth is due being not only essentially unequal in themselves, but only susceptible of stimulation by the influence of unequal circumstances. The Radical doctrines to the contrary, which were then being enunciated with reckless bitterness by Bright, were taken to pieces and exposed, and the claims of mere average labor, as opposed to those of the capitalist, were in general language reduced to their true dimensions. I supplemented this volume by a criticism in The Quarterly Review of Henry George's celebrated Progress and Poverty, and Henry George himself when he came to London told Lady Jeune (afterward Lady St. Helier), without knowing that I was the author of it, that this criticism was the only reply to himself which was worth being considered seriously. I was conscious, however, of my own limitations, these relating mainly to matters of statistical fact, such as the exact proportion borne in a country like the United Kingdom by the aggregate rental of the landlords to the aggregate income of the capitalists on the one hand and that of the mass of manual workers on the other. I was conscious of being specially hampered in attempting to deal minutely with the statistical fallacies of Bright.

I was still in this state of mind a year after my first visit to Dorlin when I received a letter from Lady Howard asking me to come to them again. I went, and all the charm of my first visit repeated itself; but repeated itself with this difference—that it was no longer undisturbed. The possibility of a revolution in the Highlands had now become a matter of audible discussion even in the remote Macdonald country. The temper of the sparse population was there, indeed, not very violent, but the thought that some sort of disaffection was even there actually alive would often disturb my previous sense of peace, while the Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers, whether by way of attacking the established order or defending it, were pelting one another with statistical statements in respect of which each party seemed to contradict itself almost as recklessly as it contradicted its opponents. My own growing ambition was to get at definite and detailed information which would either support the agitators or else give them the lie, and would also provide otherwise comprehensive and specific illustrations of the general principles which I had formulated in my late volume. But as to the means by which comprehensive information of this specific kind could be collected I was still more or less at a loss; and from the vague and conflicting character of the statistics adduced it was evident that other people were in the same or in a worse condition. That the required information existed somewhere in the form of official and other records I was convinced. The problem was how to get at these and recast the information in a digested and generally intelligible form.

The necessity for doing this was brought home to me with renewed force by the fact that, when I left Dorlin, I was engaged to stay at Ardverikie with Sir John Ramsden, who was the owner, by purchase, of one of the greatest sporting territories in the Highlands, a large portion of which he was then planting with timber. The first stage of my journey from Dorlin was again Fort William, where I slept, and whence next morning I proceeded by an old-fashioned stagecoach to my destination, which lay midway between Fort William and Kingussie. We had not gone far before I heard an English voice shouting something to the passengers near in tones of great excitement. The speaker, with his black frock coat, was, to judge from his appearance, a Nonconformist English minister, who was vaguely pointing to the mountains on the left side of the road; and at last I managed to catch a few words of his oratory. They were in effect as follows: "What was there on those mountains fifty years ago? Men were on those mountains then. What will you find there now? Deer—nothing but deer." This sort of thing went on for some time, till at last the coachman, a burly Highlander, turned round on the orator and said: "I'm thinking you don't know what you're talking about. In those mountains at which you're flourishing your hands you won't find a deer all the way from Fort William to Kingussie." The orator then, so far as I was able to understand, wandered away to the question of landed property generally, and Acts of Parliament passed in the reign of William and Mary. It seemed, however, that his audience were not responsive, and he presently began descanting on the ignorance of the Highland people and their need of more education. Here, again, his eloquence was interrupted by the coachman. "Education," he exclaimed. "What you call education I call the Highland rinderpest." After this the orator was comparatively quiet.

Meanwhile the character of the surrounding landscape changed. We began to see glimpses ahead of us of the waters of Loch Laggan. Presently the loch, fringed with birch trees, was directly below the road. On the opposite side were mountains descending to its silvery surface, some of them bare, some green with larches, and upward from a wooded promontory wreaths of smoke were rising. Then between the wreaths I distinguished a tall gray tower, and something like clustered turrets. Pointing to these, the coachman pulled up his horses, and I understood him to say that at this point I must descend. A man, who had evidently been waiting, came forward from a tuft of bracken. My luggage was extracted from the vehicle and dragged down to a boat, which was, as I now saw, waiting by the beach below; and a row of some twenty minutes took me across the loch and brought me to my journey's end.

Ardverikie is a castellated building. It is something in the style of Balmoral, with which everybody is familiar from photographs. It is surrounded by old-fashioned gardens beyond which rise the mountains. Down one of the graveled paths Lady Guendolen came to meet me, accompanied by her two daughters and Mrs. Arthur Henniker, the younger daughter of Lord Houghton—these, except for Sir John, comprising the whole party. Within were paneled walls, innumerable heads of deer, and two large libraries surrounded by a crowd of books, not many of them new, but all of inviting aspect. The pleasure of meeting old friends under fresh conditions for the time put out of my head the revolutionary orator of the coach. Indeed, the only specially Highland incident talked about was connected with a neighboring minister, who was accustomed to conduct on Sundays a religious service in the dining room, and who on the last of these occasions had unintentionally, but severely, affronted one member of the household. He had begun with calling down the special blessings of the Creator on the heads of all, mentioned seriatim, who were congregated under Sir John's roof. "God bless Sir John," he began. "God bless also her dear Leddyship. Bless the tender youth of the two young leddies likewise. We also unite in begging thee to have mercy on the puir governess."

I had not been many days in the house before I discovered a certain number of books, all more or less modern, dealing with Highland conditions as they had been since the beginning of the nineteenth century. These books were written from various points of view, and some of them were extremely interesting; but in every case there was one thing for which I looked in vain. I looked in vain for anything in the nature of statistical precision, except here and there in connection with minor and scattered details. Frequent references were made, for example, to the decline of the Highland population; but no attempt had apparently been made by anyone to state by reference to extant official documents what the total of the alleged decline had been, or whether or why in some districts it had been greater or less than in others. The two voluminous works known respectively as the Old and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland were full of significant, but wholly undigested details. How should I succeed where so many others had failed? Where should I find records which would enable me to complete incompleteness and reduce chaos to some comprehensive order? One afternoon, when I found myself alone in the house, I was thinking these things over in one of the silent libraries, and staring again at the backs of books I had already opened, when, purely out of curiosity, I dragged at hazard a large and dusty volume from a row of folios which I had neglected, supposing them to be all atlases. I found that, instead of an atlas, the volume I had extracted was a copy of the huge Government Report which is commonly known by the name of The New Domesday Book. I had heard of this work before, but had never till now seen it, nor had I realized the nature of its contents. The New Domesday Book was the result of an official inquiry undertaken some ten years previously into the number, the extent, and the rental value of all the landed properties of Great Britain and Ireland. Here, I thought, was at least a large installment of the kind of evidence of which I had felt the want, and during the rest of my visit to Ardverikie I devoted every possible moment to a study of this volume.

Without going into details, it will be enough to mention the broad and unmistakable facts which The New Domesday Book disclosed, and which formed a direct counterblast, not to the oratory of the Highland agitators only, but also to the wider assertions of Henry George and of Bright. Henry George, whose statistical knowledge was a blank, had contented himself with enunciating the vague doctrine that in all modern countries—the United States, for example, and more especially the United Kingdom—every increase of wealth was in the form of rent, appropriated by the owners of the soil, most of whom were millionaires already, or were very quickly becoming so. Bright, in dealing with this country, had committed himself to a statement which was very much more specific. The number of persons, he said, who had any interest as owners in the soil of their mother country was not more than 30,000—or, to put the matter in terms of families, thirty-four out of every thirty-five were "landless." The New Domesday Book showed that the number of proprietary interests, instead of being only 30,000, was considerably more than a million; or, in other words, the number of the "landless" as Bright stated it was greater than the actual number in the proportion of thirty-three to one.

Here were these facts accessible in the thousand or more pages of a great official survey. They had doubtless received some attention when that document was issued, but the agitators of the early "'eighties" had forgotten or never heard of them; and Bright, so far as I know, never retracted his own monstrous fallacies. How, then, I asked myself, should the actual facts of this particular case be driven into the heads of the public in a politically effective form? And how should other cognate facts, such as the profits of the business employers, Bright himself being one of them, be dragged effectively into light, compared with the rental of the landlords, and be in a similar way brought home to the public consciousness? Such were the questions which came to possess my mind when luncheons were being eaten among heather by the pourings of some hillside brook, or when deer at the close of the day were being weighed in the larders of Ardverikie.

To these questions a partial answer came sooner than I had expected. On leaving Ardverikie I paid another visit to the Lovats. On joining the train at Kingussie I learned that one of the passengers was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who was, as an advanced Radical, to make the following day a great speech at Inverness. Needless to say, this speech turned out to be mainly a vituperation of Highland landlords. I mention it here only on account of one short passage. "The landlords," said Mr. Chamberlain, "have made a silence in the happy glens which once resounded with your industry"—as though every wilderness between Cape Wrath and Loch Lomond had not so very long ago resembled a suburb of Birmingham. This is a curious illustration of how readily even a man of most acute intellect may be led by the need of securing applause at all costs into nonsense which, in calmer moments, he would himself be the first to ridicule.

As an antidote to Mr. Chamberlain's propaganda another meeting was planned under the auspices of a number of the great Highland proprietors, who gathered together to discuss matters at Castle Grant (Lord Seafield's), the ideal home of a chieftain. To this conclave I was taken by my host, Lord Lovat, from Beaufort. Five chieftains were present, supported by five pipers, whose strains might have elicited echoes from the slopes of the farthest Grampians.

Before the public meeting which was planned at Castle Grant took place I had left the Lovats', being called by business to England; but I had not been long in London before an opportunity of political action was offered me, in a manner which I could not resist. My book Social Equality had, it seemed, so far achieved its object that a letter presently reached me, written on behalf of a number of students at the University of St. Andrews, asking me whether, could the requisite arrangements be made, I would be willing, at the next election, to stand as Conservative candidate for the St. Andrews Boroughs, as the present member—a Liberal—would before long retire. The proper authorities were consulted, and, the proposal meeting with their approval, I agreed to begin forthwith the needed preliminary work, on condition that if meanwhile some member of a Fifeshire family should be willing to take the place of a stranger such as myself, I should be allowed to withdraw and make room for him.

In the end such a substitute was found, and in due time was elected. Meanwhile, however, I had begun a campaign of speeches which, so I was told, and so I should like to believe, contributed to his ultimate victory. At all events they enabled me to test certain expository methods which other speakers might perhaps reproduce with advantage. As among the subjects discussed by speakers of all parties, the land question generally, and not in Scotland only, continued to hold the most prominent place, I put together in logical form the statistical data relating to it, so far as I had been able to digest them; and having dealt with them verbally in the simplest language possible, I proceeded to illustrate them by a series of enormous diagrams, which were, at the appropriate moment, let down from the cornice like a series of long window blinds. One of these represented, by means of a long column divided into colored sections, the approximate total of the income of the United Kingdom according to current imputations and the enormous portion of it taken as land rent by the owners of more than 1,000 acres as it must have been according to Bright. Another column, which was then let down beside this, represented in a similar way the rental of the larger landlords as it would be according to the principles laid down by Henry George. A third diagram followed, which showed the actual amount of land rent as disclosed by an analysis of The New Domesday Book, so that all the audience could see the farcical contrast between the false figures and the true.

As a means of holding attention, and making the meaning of the speaker clear, these diagrams were a great success, and I was invited before long to repeat my exhibition of them at Aberdeen, at Glasgow, and at Manchester. My Fifeshire speeches, moreover, through the enterprise of the Fifeshire Journal, having been put into type a day before they were delivered, were printed in extenso next morning by many great English newspapers, whereas it is probable that otherwise they would have been relegated to an obscure paragraph.[2] I may, I think, claim for my speeches one merit, at all events—that though many of them were addressed to meetings preponderantly Radical, I so successfully avoided giving offense that only on one occasion, and then for some moments only, was I ever interrupted by dissent of a discourteous kind; while, when I delivered my speech on the land question at Manchester, I was, with all hospitable amity, entertained at a banquet by members of a leading Radical club.

Various opportunities, indeed were at that time offered me of entering, had I been willing to do so, the public life of politics. But various causes withheld me. One of these causes related to the St. Andrews Boroughs in particular. My own home being either in London or Devonshire, frequent journeys to and from the east of Scotland proved a very burdensome duty, and the boroughs themselves being widely separated from one another, the task of often delivering at least one speech in each was, in the days before motors, a duty no less exhausting. Further, I felt that the business of public speaking would interfere with a task which I felt to be more important—namely, that of providing facts and principles for politicians rather than playing directly the part of a politician myself. I was therefore relieved rather than disappointed when a communication subsequently reached me from the Conservative agent at St. Andrews to the effect that the head of an important Fifeshire family was willing to take my place and contest the constituency instead of me. My feelings were confirmed by a totally extraneous incident. The severe reader will perhaps think that I ought to blush when I explain what this incident was.

[1] Father Grant, at my suggestion, published one of these Charters in extenso in The National Review.

[2] Another method which I adopted as a supplement to ordinary canvassing was a fortnightly or monthly issue of a printed letter addressed to each voter individually, which dealt with statistics and principles, every letter inviting questions, which would be dealt with in the letter following.



CHAPTER X

A FIVE MONTHS' INTERLUDE

A Venture on the Riviera—Monte Carlo—Life in a Villa at Beaulieu—A Gambler's Suicide—A Gambler's Funeral

One May morning in London, when I had just completed a fortnight of political speaking in Fifeshire, a friend of mine, Ernest Beckett (afterward the second Lord Grimthorpe), came in a state of obvious excitement to see me, and talk, so he said, about something of great importance. He had, it appeared, been spending some weeks in the south of France, and was full of a project the value of which had, so he said, been amply proved by experiment. To me at first sight it seemed no better than lunacy. I could not for some time even bring myself to consider it seriously. This project was to play a new system at Monte Carlo. It was a system founded on one which, devised by Henry Labouchere, had been—such was Beckett's contention—greatly improved by himself, and he and a companion had been playing it with absolutely unbroken success. The two, with only a small capital in their pockets, had won during the course of a week or so something like a thousand pounds—not in a few large gains (for in this there would have been nothing to wonder at), but by a regular succession day after day of small ones. They had tested the system further by applying it, after their departure, to the records, published daily in a Monte Carlo journal, of the order in which colors or numbers had turned up throughout the day preceding at some particular table. Adjusting their imaginary stakes, in accordance with the rules of the system, to these series of actual sequences, the two experimenters had discovered that their original successes were, as a matter of theory, infallibly reproduced. So certain, said Beckett, did all this seem that he would himself be in a position to secure some thousands of pounds of capital for the purpose of renewing the enterprise on a very much larger scale. He would not be able till Christmas to go out to Monte Carlo himself, and for several reasons he desired to remain at first in the background; but the capital in question would, he said, include a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of a few suitable friends, who would set to work meanwhile, and be entitled, as a business matter, to a share of the eventual profits. The coadjutors whom he had in view were myself, the late Lord Greenock, Charles Bulpett, and Charles Edward Jerningham. Moreover, as everything would depend on a correct calculation of the stakes—the amount of which at each coup would vary with the results of the coups preceding—and as this calculation would often be extremely complicated, and have in every case to be made with extreme rapidity, a good deal of preliminary practice on the part of the intending players would be necessary. Would this little group of players be, as he hoped, forthcoming? I still regarded the project as something of the wildcat kind; but I was struck by the undoubted success of Beckett's own experiments, actual and theoretical, so far; and, as the four players would at all events lose nothing, even if they gained nothing, by renewing them, I and the three others at last consented to take part in the venture.