Collections and Recollections Part 9

No image except that of a flood can convey the notion of Mr. Gladstone's table-talk on a subject which interests him keenly--its rapidity, its volume, its splash and dash, its frequent beauty, its striking effects, the amount of varied matter which it brings with it, the hopelessness of trying to withstand it, the unexpectedness of its onrush, the subdued but fertilized condition of the subjected area over which it has pa.s.sed.

The bare mention of a topic which interests Mr. Gladstone opens the floodgates and submerges a province. But the torrent does not wait for the invitation. If not invited it comes of its own accord; headlong, overwhelming, sweeping all before it, and gathering fresh force from every obstacle which it encounters on its course. Such is Mr.

Gladstone's table-talk. For conversation, strictly so called, he has no turn. He asks questions when he wants information, and answers them copiously when asked by others. But of give-and-take, of meeting you half-way, of paying you back in your own conversational coin, he has little notion. He discourses, he lectures, he harangues. But if a subject is started which does not interest him it falls flat. He makes no attempt to return the ball. Although, when he is amused, his amus.e.m.e.nt is intense and long sustained, his sense of humour is highly capricious. It is impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote which depends for its point upon some trait of baseness, cynicism, or sharp practice. He finds his tale received in dead silence, looks up wonderingly for an explanation, and finds that what was intended to amuse has only disgusted. Mr. Browning once told Mr.

Gladstone a highly characteristic story of Disraelitish duplicity, and for all reply heard a voice choked with indignation:--"Do you call that amusing, Browning? _I call it devilish_."[18]

FOOTNOTES:

[17] This was written before the 19th of May, 1898, on which day "the world lost its greatest citizen;" but it has not been thought necessary, here or elsewhere, to change the present into the past tense.

[18] I give this story as I received it from Mr. Browning.

XV.

CONVERSATION--_continued_.

More than thirty years have pa.s.sed since the festive evening described by Sir George Trevelyan in _The Ladies in Parliament_:--

"When, over the port of the innermost bin, The circle of diners was laughing with Phinn; When Brookfield had hit on his happiest vein.

And Harcourt was capping the jokes of Delane."

The sole survivor of that brilliant group now[19] leads the Opposition; but at the time when the lines were written he had not yet entered the House of Commons. As a youth of twenty-five he had astonished the political world by his anonymous letters on _The Morality of Public Men_, in which he denounced, in the style of Junius, the Protectionist revival of 1852. He had fought a plucky but unsuccessful fight at Kirkcaldy; was making his five thousand a year at the Parliamentary Bar; had taught the world international law over the signature of "Historicus," and was already, what he is still, one of the most conspicuous and interesting figures in the society of London. Of Sir William Harcourt's political alliances this is not the place nor am I the person to treat:

"Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of Man."

My theme is not Sir William Harcourt the politician, but Sir William Harcourt the man, the member of society--above all, the talker. And, although I have thus deliberately put politics on one side, it is strictly relevant to my purpose to observe that Sir William is essentially and typically a Whig. For Whiggery, rightly understood, is not a political creed but a social caste. The Whig, like the poet, is born, not made. It is as difficult to become a Whig as to become a Jew.

Macaulay was probably the only man who, being born outside the privileged enclosure, ever penetrated to its heart and a.s.similated its spirit. The Whigs, indeed, as a body have held certain opinions and pursued certain tactics which have been a.n.a.lyzed in chapters xix. and xxi. of the unexpurgated _Book of Sn.o.bs_. But those opinions and those tactics have been mere accidents, though perhaps inseparable accidents, of Whiggery. Its substance has been relationship.

When Lord John Russell formed his first Administration his opponents alleged that it was mainly composed of his cousins, and one of his younger brothers was charged with the impossible task of reb.u.t.ting the accusation in a public speech. Mr. Beresford-Hope, in one of his novels, made excellent fun of what he called "the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood." He showed--what, indeed, the Whigs themselves knew uncommonly well--that from a certain Earl Gower, who flourished in the eighteenth century, and was great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, are descended all the Levesons,[20] Gowers, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Russells, and Harcourts, who walk on the face of the earth. Truly a n.o.ble and a highly favoured progeny.

"They _are_ our superiors," said Thackeray; "and that's the fact. I am not a Whig myself (perhaps it is as unnecessary to say so as to say I'm not King Pippin in a golden coach, or King Hudson, or Miss Burdett-Coutts). I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"

From this ill.u.s.trious stock Sir William Harcourt is descended through his grandmother, Lady Anne Harcourt--born Leveson-Gower, and wife of the last Prince-Archbishop of York (whom, by the way, Sir William strikingly resembles both in figure and in feature). When one meets Sir William Harcourt for the first time in society, perhaps one is first struck by the fact that he is in aspect and bearing a great gentleman of the old school, and then that he is an admirable talker. He is a true Whig in culture as well as in blood. Though his conversation is never pedantic, it rests on a wide and strong basis of generous learning. Even those who most cordially admire his political ability do not always remember that he is an excellent scholar, and graduated as eighth in the First Cla.s.s of the Cla.s.sical Tripos in the year when Bishop Lightfoot was Senior Cla.s.sic. He has the _Corpus Poetarum_ and Shakespeare and Pope at his finger-ends, and his intimate acquaintance with the political history of England elicited a characteristic compliment from Lord Beaconsfield. It is his favourite boast that in all his tastes, sentiments, and mental habits he belongs to the eighteenth century, which he glorifies as the golden age of reason, patriotism, and liberal learning. This self-estimate strikes me as perfectly sound, and it requires a very slight effort of the imagination to conceive this well-born young Templar wielding his doughty pen in the Bangorian Controversy, or declaiming on the hustings for Wilkes and Liberty; bandying witticisms with Sheridan, and capping Latin verses with Charles Fox; or helping to rule England as a member of that "Venetian Oligarchy"

on which Lord Beaconsfield lavished all the vials of his sarcasm. In truth, it is not fanciful to say that whatever was best in the eighteenth century--its robust common sense, its racy humour, its thorough and unaffected learning, its ceremonious courtesy for great occasions, its jolly self-abandonment in social intercourse--is exhibited in the demeanour and conversation of Sir William Harcourt. He is an admirable host, and, to borrow a phrase from Sydney Smith, "receives his friends with that honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine." As a guest, he is a splendid acquisition, always ready to amuse and to be amused, delighting in the rapid cut-and-thrust of personal banter, and bringing out of his treasure things new and old for the amus.e.m.e.nt and the benefit of a later and less instructed generation.

Extracts from the private conversation of living people, as a rule, I forbear; but some of Sir William's quotations are so extraordinarily apt that they deserve a permanent place in the annals of table-talk. That fine old country gentleman, the late Lord Knightley (who was the living double of d.i.c.kens's Sir Leicester Dedlock), had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree. The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, "This reminds me of Addison's evening hymn--

'And Knightley to the listening earth Repeats the story of his birth.'"

Surely the force of apt citation can no further go. When Lord Tennyson chanced to say in Sir William Harcourt's hearing that his pipe after breakfast was the most enjoyable of the day, Sir William softly murmured the Tennysonian line--

"The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds."

Some historians say that he subst.i.tuted "bards" for "birds," and the reception accorded by the poet to the parody was not as cordial as its excellence deserved.

Another capital talker is Sir George Trevelyan. He has been, from the necessities of his position, a man of the world and a politician, and he is as ready as Mr. Bertie-Tremaine's guests in _Endymion_ to talk of "that heinous subject on which enormous fibs are ever told--the Registration." But, after all, the man of the world and the politician are only respectable parts which he had been bound to a.s.sume, and he has played them--with a.s.siduity and success: but the true man in Sir George Trevelyan is the man of letters. Whenever he touches a historical or literary theme his whole being seems to undergo a transformation. The real nature flashes out through his twinkling eyes. While he muses the fire burns, and, like the Psalmist, he speaks with his tongue. Dates and details, facts and traditions, cantos and poetry, reams of prose, English and Latin and Greek and French, come tumbling out in headlong but not disorderly array. He jumps at an opening, seizes an illusion, replies with lightning quickness to a conversational challenge, and is ready at a moment's notice to decide any literary or historical controversy in a measured tone of deliberate emphasis which is not wholly free from exaggeration. Like his uncle Lord Macaulay, Sir George Trevelyan has "his own heightened and telling way of putting things,"

and those who know him well make allowance for this habit. For the rest, he is delightful company, light-hearted as a boy, full of autobiographical chit-chat about Harrow and Trinity, and India and Holly Lodge, eagerly interested in his friends' concerns, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with enthusiasm, never bored, never flat, never stale. A well-concerted party is a kind of unconscious conspiracy to promote cheerfulness and enjoyment, and in such an undertaking there can be no more serviceable ally than Sir George Trevelyan.

Mr. John Morley's agreeableness in conversation is of a different kind.

His leading characteristic is a dignified austerity of demeanour which repels familiarity and tends to keep conversation on a high level; but each time one meets him there is less formality and less restraint, and the grave courtesy which never fails is soon touched with friendliness and frank good-humour in a singularly attractive fashion. He talks, not much, but remarkably well. His sentences are deliberate, clear-cut, often eloquent. He excels in phrase-making. His quotations are apt and novel. His fine taste and varied reading enable him to hold his own in many fields where the merely professional politician is apt to be terribly astray. His kindness to social and literary beginners is one of his most engaging traits. He invariably finds something pleasant to say about the most immature and unpromising efforts, and he has the knack of so handling his own early experience as to make it an encouragement and a stimulus, and not (as the manner of some is) a burden and a bogey. Mr.

Morley never obtrudes his own opinions, never introduces debatable matter, never dogmatizes. But he is always ready to pick up the gauntlet, especially if a Tory flings it down; is merciless towards ill-formed a.s.sertion, and is the alert and unsparing enemy of what Mr.

Ruskin calls "the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial."

Lord Salisbury goes so little into general society that his qualities as a talker are not familiarly known. He is painfully shy, and at a club or in a large party undergoes the torments of the lost. Yet no one can listen, even casually, to his conversation without appreciating the fine manner, full both of dignity and of courtesy; the utter freedom from pomposity, formality, and self-a.s.sertion, and the agreeable dash of genuine cynicism, which modifies, though it does not mask, the flavour of his fun. After a visit to Hatfield in 1868, Bishop Wilberforce wrote in his diary: "Gladstone how struck with Salisbury: 'Never saw a more perfect host.'" And again--"He remarked to me on the great power of charming and pleasant hosting possessed by Salisbury." And it is the universal testimony of Lord Salisbury's guests, whether at Hatfield or in Arlington Street, that he is seen at his very best in his own house.

The combination of such genuine amiability in private life with such calculated brutality in public utterance const.i.tutes a psychological problem which might profitably be made the subject of a Romanes Lecture.

Barring the shyness, from which Mr. Balfour is conspicuously free, there is something of Lord Salisbury's social manner about his accomplished nephew. He has the same courtesy, the same sense of humour, the same freedom from official solemnity. But the characteristics of the elder man are exaggerated in the younger. The cynicism which is natural in Lord Salisbury is affected in Mr. Balfour. He cultivates the art of indifference, and gives himself the airs of a jaded Epicurean who craves only for a new sensation. There is what an Irish Member, in a moment of inspiration, called a "toploftiness" about his social demeanour which is not a little irritating. He is too anxious to show that he is not as other men are. Among politicians he is a philosopher; among philosophers, a politician. Before that hard-bitten crew whom Burke ridiculed--the "calculators and economists"--he will talk airily of golf and ladies' fashions; and ladies he will seek to impress by the Praise of Vivisection or the Defence of Philosophic Doubt. His social agreeableness has, indeed, been marred by the fatuous idolatry of a fashionable clique, stimulating the self-consciousness which was his natural foible; but when he can for a moment forget himself he still is excellent company, for he is genuinely amiable and thoroughly well informed.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] 1897.

[20] Cromartie, 4th Duke.

XVI.

CONVERSATION--_continued_.

The writer of these chapters has always felt some inward affinity to the character of Lord St. Jerome in _Lothair_, of whom it is recorded that he loved conversation, though he never conversed. "There must be an audience," he would say, "and I am the audience." In my capacity of audience I a.s.sign a high place to the agreeableness of Lord Rosebery's conversation. To begin with, he has a delightful voice. It is low, but perfectly distinct, rich and sympathetic in quality, and singularly refined in accent. It is exactly the sort of voice which bespeaks the goodwill of the hearer and recommends what it utters. In a former chapter we agreed that the chief requisite of good conversation is to have something to say which is worth saying, and here Lord Rosebery is excellently equipped. Last week the newspapers announced with a flourish of rhetorical trumpets that he had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday.[21] Some of the trumpeters, with a laudable intention to be civil, cried, "Is it possible that he can be so old?" Others, with subtler art, professed themselves unable to believe that he was so young. Each compliment contained its element of truth. In appearance, air, and tastes Lord Rosebery is still young. In experience, knowledge, and conduct he is already old. He has had a vivid and a varied experience. He is equally at home on Epsom Downs and in the House of Lords. His life has been full of action, incident, and interest. He has not only collected books, but has read them; and has found time, even amid the engrossing demands of the London County Council, the Turf, and the Foreign Office, not only for study, but--what is much more remarkable--for thought.

So far, then, as substance goes, his conversation is (to use Mr.

Gladstone's quaint phrase) "as full of infinitely varied matter as an egg is full of meat;" and in its accidents and ornaments it complies exactly with the conditions laid down in a former chapter--a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; habitual deference to the tastes and prejudices of other people; a courteous desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a recollection that even the most patient hearers (among whom the present writer reckons himself) may sometimes wish to be speakers. To these gifts he adds a keen sense of humour, a habit of close observation, and a sub-acid vein of sarcasm which resembles the dash of Tarragon in a successful salad. In a word, Lord Rosebery is one of the most agreeable talkers of the day; and even if it is true that _il s'ecoute quand il parle_, his friends may reply that it would be strange indeed if one could help listening to what is always so agreeable and often so brilliant.

A genial journalist recently said that Mr. Goschen was now chiefly remembered by the fact that he had once had Sir Alfred Milner for his Private Secretary. But whatever may be thought of the First Lord of the Admiralty as a politician and an administrator, I claim for him a high place among agreeable talkers. There are some men who habitually use the same style of speech in public and in private life. Happily for his friends, this is not the case with Mr. Goschen. Nothing can be less agreeable than his public style, whether on the platform or in the House of Commons. Its tawdry staginess, its "Sadler's Wells sarcasm," its constant striving after strong effects, are distressing to good taste.

But in private life he is another and a much more agreeable man. He is courteous, genial, perfectly free from affectation, and enters into the discussion of social ba.n.a.lities as eagerly and as brightly as if he had never converted the Three per Cents, or established the ratio between dead millionaires and new ironclads. His easiness in conversation is perhaps a little marred by a Teutonic tendency to excessive a.n.a.lysis which will not suffer him to rest until he has resolved every subject and almost every phrase into its primary elements. But this philosophic temperament has its counterbalancing advantages in a genuine openness of mind, willingness to weigh and measure opposing views, and inaccessibility to intellectual pa.s.sion. It is true that on the platform the exigencies of his position compel him to indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispa.s.sionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle. Himself a good talker, Mr. Goschen encourages good talk in other people; and in old days, when the Art of Conversation was still seriously cultivated, he used to gather round his table in Portland Place a group of intimate friends who drank '34 port and conversed accordingly. Among these were Lord Sherbrooke, whose aptness in quotation and dexterity in repartee have never, in my experience, been surpa.s.sed; and Lord Chief Justice c.o.c.kburn, whose "sunny face and voice of music, which lent melody to scorn and sometimes reached the depth of pathos," were gracefully commemorated by Lord Beaconsfield in his sketch of Hortensius. But this belongs to ancient history, and my business is with the conversation of to-day.

Very distinctly of to-day is the conversation of Mr. Labouchere. Even our country cousins are aware that the Member for Northampton is less an ornament of general society than the oracle of an initiated circle.

The smoking-room of the House of Commons is his shrine, and there, poised in an American rocking-chair and delicately toying with a cigarette, he unlocks the varied treasures of his well-stored memory, and throws over the changing scenes of life the mild light of his genial philosophy. It is a chequered experience that has made him what he is.

He has known men and cities; has probed in turn the mysteries of the caucus, the green-room, and the Stock Exchange; has been a diplomatist, a financier, a journalist, and a politician. Under these circ.u.mstances, it is perhaps not surprising that his faith--no doubt originally robust--in the purity of human nature and the uprightness of human motive should have undergone some process of degeneration. Still it may be questioned whether, after all that he has seen and done, he is the absolute and all-round cynic that he would seem to be. The palpable endeavour to make out the worst of every one--including himself--gives a certain flavour of unreality to his conversation; but, in spite of this peculiarity, he is an engaging talker. His language is racy and incisive, and he talks as neatly as he writes. His voice is pleasant, and his utterance deliberate and effective. He has a keen eye for absurdities and incongruities, a shrewd insight into affectation and bombast, and an admirable impatience of all the moral and intellectual qualities which const.i.tute the Bore. He is by no means inclined to bow his knee too slavishly to an exalted reputation, and a.n.a.lyzes with agreeable frankness the personal and political qualities of great and good men, even if they sit on the front Opposition bench. As a contributor to enjoyment, as a promoter of fun, as an unmasker of political and social humbug, he is unsurpa.s.sed. His performances in debate are no concern of mine, for I am speaking of conversation only; but most Members of Parliament will agree that he is the best companion that can be found for the last weary half-hour before the division-bell rings, when some eminent nonent.i.ty is declaiming his foregone conclusions to an audience whose whole mind is fixed on the chance of finding a disengaged cab in Palace Yard.

Like Mr. Labouchere, Lord Acton has touched life at many points--but not the same. He is a theologian, a professor, a man of letters, a member of society; and his conversation derives a distinct tinge from each of these environments. When, at intervals all too long, he quits his retirement at Cannes or Cambridge, and flits mysteriously across the social scene, his appearance is hailed with devout rejoicing by every one who appreciates manifold learning, a courtly manner, and a delicately sarcastic vein of humour. The distinguishing feature of Lord Acton's conversation is an air of sphinx-like mystery, which suggests that he knows a great deal more than he is willing to impart. Partly by what he says, and even more by what he leaves unsaid, his hearers are made to feel that, if he has not acted conspicuous parts, he has been behind the scenes of many and very different theatres.

He has had relations, neither few nor unimportant, with the Pope and the Old Catholics, with Oxford and Lambeth, with the cultivated Whiggery of the great English families, with the philosophic radicalism of Germany, and with those Nationalist complications which, in these later days, have drawn official Liberalism into their folds. He has long lived on terms of the closest intimacy with Mr. Gladstone, and may perhaps be bracketed with Canon MacColl and Sir Algernon West as the most absolute and profound Gladstonian outside the family circle of Hawarden. But he is thoroughly eclectic in his friendships, and when he is in London he flits from Lady Hayter's tea-table to Mr. Goschen's bureau, a.n.a.lyzes at the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks's, and by dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.

The ranks of our good talkers--none too numerous a body at the best, and sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter--have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell.

For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during the last nine--in short, since he entered Parliament--that the admirable qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before that time his delightful _Obiter Dicta_ had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest.

What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect.

To "birrell" is now a verb as firmly established as to "boycott," and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it was seen that his predominant quality was strength.

An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him "The Harmonious Blacksmith," and the collocation of words happily hits off the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses. In his sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual affectation, and moral baseness, he is the Blacksmith all over. In his geniality, his sociability, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness to amuse or be amused, the epithet "harmonious" is abundantly justified.

He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the eighteenth century, in which his studies have chiefly lain. He says what he means, and calls a spade a spade, and glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps the most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people are too "cultured" to read books, though willing enough to chatter about them.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] May 7, 1897.