Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life Part 5

[Sidenote: LIFE AT MIDDLETON]

Mr. Cecil Bourke was clergyman at Middleton when I married and had two very nice sisters, but he migrated to Reading about two years later, and was succeeded by the Rev. W. H. Draper, who has been there ever since. He is an excellent man who has had a good wife and eleven children. Mrs.

Draper died lately, to the sorrow of her many friends. Some of the children have also gone, but others are doing good work in various parts of the Empire. Old Lord Strathnairn, of Mutiny fame, was once staying with us at Middleton. He was extremely deaf and apt to be two or three periods behind in the conversation. Someone mentioned leprosy and its causes at dinner, and after two or three remarks that subject was dropped, and another took its place, in which connection I observed that our clergyman's wife had eleven children. Lord Strathnairn, with his mind still on "leprousy," turned to me and in his usual courteous manner remarked, "It is not catching, I believe?"

Among other neighbours were Mr. and Mrs. Hibbert at Bucknell Manor, who had six well-behaved little daughters whom, though they treated them kindly, they regarded as quite secondary to their only son. On the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Dewar at Cotmore were perfectly good to their four sons, but the only daughter distinctly ruled the roost. Moral: if a boy baby has any choice he had better select a family of sisters in which to be born, and the contrary advice should be tendered to a female infant.

To return to our own affairs. The little girl whom we lost in April 1874 was replaced, to our great pleasure, by another little daughter born at Middleton, October 8th, 1875, and christened Margaret like the baby who lay beneath a white marble cross in the churchyard. The new little Margaret became and has remained a constant treasure. Villiers' first words were "Hammer, hammer," which he picked up from hearing the constant hammering at the tank in the new water-tower. He was very pleased with his sister, but a trifle jealous of the attentions paid her by his nurse. A rather quaint incident took place at the baby's christening. When Villiers was born, old Lord Bathurst, then aged eighty-two, asked to come and see him as he had known my husband's great-grandmother Frances, Lady Jersey (the admired of George IV), and wanted to see the fifth generation.

We asked him to stay at Middleton for the little girl's christening, and after dinner to propose the baby's health.

He asked her name, and when I told him "Margaret" he murmured, "What memories that brings back!" and fell into a reverie. When he rose for the toast he confided to the family that her great-grandmother on my side--Margarette, Lady Leigh--had been his first love and repeated, "Maggie Willes, Maggie Willes, how I remember her walking down the streets of Cirencester!" He was a wonderful man for falling in love--even when he was quite old he was always fascinated by the youngest available girl--but he died unmarried. Perhaps one love drove out the other before either had time to secure a firm footing in his heart.

Lord Bathurst told me that when he was a middle-aged man and friend of the family Sarah Lady Jersey was very anxious to secure Prince Nicholas Esterhazy for her eldest daughter Sarah (a marriage which came off in due course). She had asked him to stay at Middleton, and it was generally believed that if he accepted the match would be arranged. Lord Bathurst in November 1841 was riding into Oxford when he met Lady Jersey driving thence to Middleton. She put her head out of the carriage and called to him, "We have got our Prince!" At that time the Queen was expecting her second child, and Lord Bathurst, more occupied with Her Majesty's hopes than with those of Lady Jersey, at once a.s.sumed that this meant a Prince of Wales, and rode rapidly on to announce the joyful tidings. These were almost immediately verified, and he gained credit for very early intelligence. He was a gallant old man, and despite his years climbed a fence when staying at Middleton. He died between two and three years later.

On a visit to the Exeters at Burghley, near Stamford, we had met Mr. and Mrs. Finch of Burley-on-the-Hill, near Oakham, and they asked us to stay with them soon after little Margaret's birth. I mention this because it was here that I met Lady Galloway, who became my great friend, and with whom later on I shared many delightful experiences. She was a handsome and fascinating woman a few months younger than myself.

[Sidenote: MR. DISRAELI]

It was in this year, May 18th, 1875, that Disraeli wrote to Jersey offering him the appointment of Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen--saying, "I think, also, my selection would be pleasing to Her Majesty, as many members of your family have been connected with the Court." On May 28th he notified the Queen's approval. (It is rather quaint that the first letter begins "My dear Jersey"--the second "My dear Villiers." My husband was never called "Villiers," but Disraeli knew his grandfather and father, who were both so called.) Jersey used to answer for Local Government in the House of Lords. The Queen was always very kind to him, as she had known his grandmother so well, and told me once that Lady Clementina had been her playfellow. She was his G.o.dmother; she records it if I remember rightly in the Life of the Prince Consort, or anyhow in a letter or Diary of the period, and says there that she became G.o.dmother as a token of friendship to Sir Robert Peel--his mother's father. She declared to us that she had held him in her arms at his christening, and of course it was not for us to contradict Her Majesty: but I think that she officiated by proxy. She gave him two or three of her books in which she wrote his name as "Victor Alexander," and again we accepted the nomenclature. As a matter of fact he was "Victor Albert George" and always called "George" in the family. He had, however, the greatest respect and affection for his royal G.o.dmother, and valued her beautiful christening cup. As Lord-in-Waiting he had to attend the House of Lords when in session, and spoke occasionally--he always sat near his old friend Lord de Ros, who was a permanent Lord-in-Waiting.

I used to go fairly often to the House during the years which followed his appointment and before we went to Australia, and heard many interesting debates. Jersey and I always considered the late Duke of Argyll and the late Lord Cranbrook as two of the finest orators in the House. The Duke was really splendid, and with his fine head and hair thrown back he looked the true Highland Chieftain. Several much less effective speakers would sometimes persist in addressing the House. I remember Lord Houghton exciting much laughter on one occasion when he said of some point in his speech "and that reminds me," he paused and repeated "and that reminds me," but the impromptu would not spring forth till he shook his head and pulled a slip of paper, on which it was carefully written, out of his waistcoat pocket.

I was told, though I was not present, of a house-party of which the Duke of Argyll and Lord Houghton both formed part. One evening--Sunday evening, I believe--Lord Houghton offered to read to the a.s.sembled company Froude's account of the "Pilgrimage of Grace" in his _History of England_.

Most of them seem to have submitted more or less cheerfully, but the Duke, becoming bored, retired into the background with a book which he had taken from the table. Just when Lord Houghton had reached the most thrilling part and had lowered his voice to give due emphasis to the narrative, the Duke, who had completely forgotten what was going on, threw down his book and exclaimed, "What an extraordinary character of Nebuchadnezzar!"

Whereupon Lord Houghton in turn threw down Froude and in wrathful accents cried, "One must be a Duke and a Cabinet Minister to be guilty of such rudeness!"

Froude was rather a friend of ours--a pleasant though slightly cynical man. I recollect him at Lady Derby's one evening saying that books were objectionable; all books ought to be burnt. I ventured to suggest that he had written various books which I had read with pleasure--why did he write them if such was his opinion? He shrugged his shoulders and remarked, "Il faut vivre." When Lady Derby told this afterwards to Lord Derby he said that I ought to have given the cla.s.sic reply, "Je n'en vois pas la necessite," but perhaps this would have been going a little far.

[Sidenote: FROUDE AND KINGSLEY]

Froude and Kingsley were brothers-in-law, having married two Misses Grenfell. On one occasion the former was giving a Rectorial Address at St.

Andrews and remarked on the untrustworthiness of clerical statements.

About the same time Kingsley gave a discourse at Cambridge in which he quoted a paradox of Walpole's to the effect that whatever else is true, history is not. Some epigrammists thereupon perpetrated the following lines. I quote from memory:

"Froude informs the Scottish youth Parsons seldom speak the truth; While at Cambridge Kingsley cries 'History is a pack of lies!'

Whence these judgments so malign?

A little thought will solve the mystery.

For Froude thinks Kingsley a divine And Kingsley goes to Froude for history."

The Galloways when we first made their acquaintance lived at 17 Upper Grosvenor Street. In 1875 we occupied 17_a_ Great c.u.mberland Street--and in 1876 a nice house belonging to Mr. Ba.s.sett in Charles Street--but in 1877 we bought 3 Great Stanhope Street, being rather tired of taking houses for the season. My second (surviving) daughter Mary was born here on May 26th--a beautiful baby, G.o.d-daughter to Lady Galloway and Julia Wombwell. My third and youngest daughter, Beatrice, was born at Folkestone October 12th, 1880, and the family was completed three years later by Arthur, born November 24th, 1883, to our great joy, as it endowed us with a second son just before his elder brother went to Mr. Chignell's school--Castlemount--at Dover.

In the same month, but just before Arthur was born, our tenant at Osterley, the old d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland (Caroline), died. She was a fine old lady and an excellent tenant, caring for the house as if it had been her own. She had most generous instincts, and once when part of the stonework round the roof of Osterley had been destroyed by a storm she wrote to my husband saying that she had placed a considerable sum with his bankers to aid in its restoration. This was unexpected and certainly unsolicited, which made it all the more acceptable. We should never have thought of disturbing her during her lifetime, and even when she died our first idea was to relet the place to a suitable tenant. I had never lived there (though we once slept for a night during the d.u.c.h.ess's tenure), so had no a.s.sociations with, and had never realised, the beauty of, the place. However, after her death we thought we would give one garden-party before reletting, which we did in 1884. The day was perfect, and an unexpected number of guests arrived. We were fascinated with the place and decided to keep it as a "suburban" home instead of letting, and it became the joy of my life and a great pleasure to my husband.

[Sidenote: JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL]

I will speak of some of our guests later on, but I must first mention some of those whom we knew at Great Stanhope Street and Middleton during the earlier years of our married life. One of our great friends was the American Minister Mr. Lowell. Looking through some of his letters, I recall his perfect charm of manner in speaking and in writing. The simplest occurrence, such as changing the date of a dinner-party in 1882, gave him the opportunity of words which might have befitted a courtier of old days:

"Her Majesty--long life to her--has gone and appointed Sat.u.r.day, June 3rd, to be born on. After sixty-three years to learn wisdom in, she can do nothing better than take my Sat.u.r.day away from me--for I must go to drink her health at the Foreign Office! 'Tis enough to make a democrat of any Tory that ever was except you. I have moved on my poor little dinner to 5th. I can make no other combination in the near future, what with Her Majesty's engagements and mine, but that. Can you come then? Or is my table to lose its pearl? If you can't, I shall make another specially for you."

Before I knew Mr. Lowell personally I was introduced to his works by Mr.

Tom Hughes ("Tom Brown" of the "Schooldays") who stayed with us at Middleton at the beginning of 1880 and gave me a copy of Lowell's poems carefully marked with those he preferred. Four years later in August Lowell stayed with us there. It was a real hot summer, and he wrote into Hughes' gift these verses which certainly make the volume doubly precious:

"Turbid from London's noise and smoke, Here found I air and quiet too, Air filtered through the beech and oak, Quiet that nothing harsher broke Than stockdoves' meditative coo.

"So I turn Tory for the nonce And find the Radical a bore Who cannot see (thick-witted dunce!) That what was good for people once Must be as good for evermore.

"Sun, sink no deeper down the sky, Nature, ne'er leave this summer mood, Breeze, loiter thus for ever by, Stir the dead leaf or let it lie, Since I am happy, all is good!"

[Sidenote: T. HUGHES AND J. R. LOWELL]

This poem was afterwards republished under the t.i.tle "The Optimist" in a collection called _Heartsease and Rue_. Lowell added four additional stanzas between the first and the last two, elaborating the description and the underlying idea. I think, however, that the three original ones are the best, particularly the gentle hit at the "Tory"--with whom he loved to identify me. The "stockdoves" were the woodpigeons whose cooing on our lawn soothed and delighted him. Mr. Hughes told me that he had first made Mr. Lowell's acquaintance by correspondence, having written to him to express his admiration of one of his works. I have just discovered that in an Introduction to his Collected Works published 1891 Hughes says that Trubner asked him in 1859 to write a preface to the English edition of the _Biglow Papers_ which gave him the long-desired opportunity of writing to the author. He also told me--which he also describes in the Introduction--how nervous he was when about at last to meet his unknown friend lest he should not come up to the ideal which he had formed, and how overjoyed he was to find him even more delightful than his letters. In a fit of generosity Hughes, quite unasked, gave me a very interesting letter which Lowell wrote him on his appointment to England in 1880. It is a long letter, some of it dealing with private matters, but one pa.s.sage may be transcribed:

"I have been rather amused with some of the comments of your press that have been sent me. They almost seem to think I shall come in a hostile spirit, because I have commented sharply on the pretension and incompetence of one or two British bookmakers! It is also more than hinted that I said bitter things about England during our war. Well, I hope none of my commentators will ever have as good reason to be bitter. It is only Englishmen who have the happy privilege of speaking frankly about their neighbours, and only they who are never satisfied unless an outsider likes England _better_ than his own country. Thank G.o.d I have spoken my mind at home too, when it would have been far more comfortable to hold my tongue. Had I felt less kindly toward England, perhaps I shouldn't have been so bitter, if bitter I was."

Mr. Hughes records, again in the Introduction, that Lowell said in one of his letters during the American War, "We are all as cross as terriers with your kind of neutrality"--but he rejoices in the gradual increasing warmth of his feeling for England as he grew to know her better during the last years of his life.

While I knew him he was always most friendly, and it is pleasant to recall him sitting in the garden at Osterley on peaceful summer evenings enjoying specially that blue haze peculiar to the Valley of the Thames which softens without obscuring the gentle English landscape.

One more letter, including a copy of verses, I cannot resist copying. In July 1887 he endowed me with Omar Khayyam, and some months later I received this--dated "At sea, 2nd November 1887":

"Some verses have been beating their wings against the walls of my brain ever since I gave you the Omar Khayyam. I don't think they will improve their feathers by doing it longer. So I have caught and caged them on the next leaf that you may if you like paste them into the book. With kindest regards to Lord Jersey and in the pleasant hope of seeing you again in the spring, Faithfully yours, J. R. LOWELL."

"With a copy of Omar Khayyam.

"These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon: The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

"Fit rosary for a queen in shape and hue When Contemplation tells her pensive beads Of mortal thoughts for ever old and new: Fit for a queen? Why, surely then, for you!

"The moral? When Doubt's eddies toss and twirl Faith's slender shallop 'neath our reeling feet, Plunge! If you find not peace beneath the whirl, Groping, you may at least bring back a pearl."

He adds beneath the lines: "My pen has danced to the dancing of the ship."

The verses (of course not the covering letter) appeared in _Heartsease and Rue_.

Mr. Lowell stayed with us at Osterley in the two summers following his return. He died in America just before we went to Australia.

We knew Robert Browning pretty well, and I recollect one interesting conversation which I had with him on death and immortality. Of the former he had the rather curious idea that the soul's last sojourn in the body was just between the eyebrows. He said that he had seen several people die, and that the last movement was there. I cannot think that a quiver of the forehead proves it. For immortality, he said that he had embodied his feelings in the "Old Pictures in Florence" in the lines ending "I have had troubles enough for one." No one, however, can read his poems without realising his faith in the hereafter.

[Sidenote: MR. GLADSTONE ON IMMORTALITY]

How diverse are the views of great men on this mystery! Lady Galloway wrote to me once from Knowsley of a talk she had had with Mr. Gladstone which I think worth recording in her own words:

"The theory of Mr. Gladstone's that mostly interested me last night was--that every soul was not _of necessity immortal_--that all the Christian faith of the immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body was a new doctrine introduced and revealed by our Lord in whom alone, maybe, we receive _immortal life_. This he only _suggests_, you understand--does not lay it down--but I don't think I have quite grasped his idea of the mystery of death, which as far as I can understand he thinks Man would not have been subject to but for the Fall--not that Death did not exist before the Fall--but that it would have been a different kind of thing. In fact that the connection between Sin and Death meant that you lost immortality thro' Sin and gained it thro' Christ."

I might as well insert here part of a letter from Edwin Arnold, author of _The Light of Asia_, which he wrote me in January 1885 after reading an article which I had perpetrated in _The National Review_ on Buddhism. I had not known him previously, but he did me the honour to profess interest in my crude efforts and to regret what he considered a misconception of Gautama's fundamental idea. He continues:

"I remember more than one pa.s.sage which seemed to show that you considered _Nirvana_ to be annihilation; and the aim and _summum bonum_ of the Buddhist to escape existence finally and utterly. Permit me to invite you not to adopt this view too decidedly in spite of the vast authority of men like Max Muller, Rhys David, and others. My own studies (which I am far from ranking with theirs, in regard of industry and learning) convince me that it was, in every case, _the embodied life_; _life_ as we know it and endure it, which Gautama desired to be for ever done with.... I believe that when St. Paul writes 'the things not seen are eternal,' he had attained much such a height of insight and foresight as Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. I even fancy that when Professor Tyndall lectures on the light-rays which are invisible to our eyes, and the cosmical sounds which are inaudible to ears of flesh and blood, he _approaches_ by a physical path the confines of that infinite and enduring life of which Orientals dreamed metaphysically."

After this Mr. Arnold--afterwards Sir Edwin--became numbered among our friends, and was very kind in giving us introductions when we went to India, as I will record later.