Some Diversions Of A Man Of Letters Part 9

She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely coloured paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet and green and grey, paper that was stamped with patterns like a napkin, or frilled like a lace handkerchief, or embossed with forget-me-nots like a child's valentine. She had tricks of time-saving; always put "I" for "one,"

and "x" for "cross," a word which she, who was never cross, loved to use. "I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to live in a storm of x questions and crooked answers," she would write, or "I am afraid my last letter was rather x."

Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superst.i.tious reverence for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she "se moquait de l'orthographie comme une chose meprisable." The spelling in her tumultuous notes threw a light upon that of very fine ladies in the seventeenth century. She made no effort to be exact, and much of her correspondence was made obscure by initials, which she expected her friends to interpret by divination. From a withering denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts Mr. John Burns and "that much-abused Mr. Birh.e.l.l, whom I like." From about 1899 to 1903, I think that Lord Wolseley was the friend who occupied most of her thoughts. In her letters of those years the references to him are incessant, but when he is not "the F.M." and "our C.C.,"

she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from "Wollesley" to "Walsey." When she wrote to me of the pleasure she had had in meeting "the Abbot Guaschet," it took me a moment to recognise the author of _English Monastic Life_. She would laugh herself at her spelling, and would rebut any one who teased her about it by saying, "Oh! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be a bright specimen--like you!" When she made arrangements to come to see me at the House of Lords, which she frequently did, she always wrote it "the Lord's House," as though it were a conventicle.

One curious observation which the recipient of hundreds of her notes is bound to make, is the remarkable contrast between the general tone of them and the real disposition of their writer. Lady Dorothy Nevill in person was placid, indulgent, and calm; she never raised her voice, or challenged an opinion, or a.s.serted her individuality. She played, very consistently, her part of the amused and attentive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her letters she pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to seem, pa.s.sionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget an engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and this is how she apologises:--

"To think that every hour since you said you would come I have repeated to myself--Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then after all to go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and swear on the doorstep, and you will never come again now, really. No punishment here or hereafter will be too much for me. Lead me to the Red Hill Asylum, and leave me there."

This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was not less vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me of an anonymous letter which he once received, to which she afterwards pleaded guilty. A cow used to be kept at the back of Lansdowne House, and the animal, no doubt feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at all sorts of hours. The letter, which was supposed to voice the complaint of the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the broadest Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript: "Dang 'un, there 'ee goes again!" As a matter of fact, her letters, about which she had no species of vanity or self-consciousness, were to her merely instruments of friendship. There was an odd mingling of affection and stiffness in them. She marshalled her acquaintances with them, and almost invariably they were concerned with arrangements for meeting or explanations of absence. In my own experience, I must add that she made an exception when her friends were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them the gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled with her experiences as the neighbour of a famous African magnate, and with the remark, "Mrs. ----," a London fine lady of repute, "has been here, and has sc.r.a.ped the whole inside out of Mr. ----, and gone her way rejoicing." Nor did she spare the correspondent himself:--

"Old Dr. ---- has been here, and tells me he admires you very much; but I believe he has lost his memory, and he never had good taste at any time."

This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its bosom. Of a very notorious individual she wrote to me:--

"I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I had to wait 100 years, but everything is possible in the best of worlds, and he was very satisfactory at last." Satisfactory! No word could be more characteristic on the pen of Lady Dorothy. To be "satisfactory,"

whether you were the President of the French Republic or Lord Wolseley or the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon by Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be "satisfactory" if he did his job thoroughly. The only entirely unsatisfactory people were those who were insipid, conventional, and empty. "The first principle of society should be to extinguish the bores," she once said. I remember going with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being struck with a remark which she made, not because it was important, but because it was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves which she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of Indian cow. "What a bore for the wolves to have to live opposite a cow!" and then, as if talking to herself, "I do hate a ruminant!"

Her relations to literature, art, and science were spectacular also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker, always on the side of those things against the Philistines, but not affecting special knowledge herself. She was something of a virtuoso. She once said, "I have a pa.s.sion for reading, but on subjects which n.o.body else will touch," and this indicated the independence of her mind. She read to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for experience. When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of producing the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was then an object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English reader. Lady Dorothy had already read _L'a.s.sommoir_, and had not shrunk from it; so I ventured to tell her of _La Terre_, which was just appearing.

She wrote to me about it: "I have been reading Zola. He takes the varnish off rural life, I must say. Oh! these horrid demons of Frenchmen know how to write. Even the most disgusting things they know how to describe poetically. I wish Zola could describe Haslemere with all the shops shut, rain falling, and most of the inhabitants in their cups." She told me later--for we followed our Zola to _Lourdes_ and _Paris_--that some young Oxford prig saw _La Bete Humaine_ lying on the table at Charles Street, and remarked that Lady Dorothy could surely not be aware that that was "no book for a lady." She said, "I told him it was just the book for me!"

She read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time, with a renewal of sentiment. "I am dedicating my leisure hours to _Endymion_. What a charm after the beef and mutton of ordinary novels!" She gradually developed a cult for Swinburne, whom she had once scorned; in her repentance after his death, she wrote: "I never hear enough about that genius Swinburne! My heart warms when I think of him and read his poems." I think she was very much annoyed that he had never been a visitor at Charles Street. When Verlaine was in England, to deliver a lecture, in 1894, Lady Dorothy was insistent that, as I was seeing him frequently, I should bring the author of _Parallelement_ to visit her. She said--I think under some illusion--"Verlaine is one of my pet poets, though," she added, "not of this world." I was obliged to tell her that neither Verlaine's clothes, nor his person, nor his habits, admitted of his being presented in Mayfair, and that, indeed, it was difficult to find a little French eating-house in Soho where he could be at home. She then said: "Why can't you take me to see him in this eating-house?" I had to explain that of the alternatives that was really the least possible. She was not pleased.

Nor am I pleased with this attempt of mine to draw the features of our wonderful fairy friend. However I may sharpen the pencil, the line it makes is still too heavy. I feel that these anecdotes seem to belie her exquisite refinement, the rapidity and delicacy of her mental movement. To tell them is like stroking the wings of a moth.

Above all, it is a matter of despair to attempt to define her emotional nature. Lady Dorothy Nevill was possessed neither of gravity nor of pathos; she was totally devoid of sentimentality.

This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse to believe that the author of so many pungent observations and such apparently volatile cynicism had a heart. When this was once questioned in company, one who knew her well replied: "Ah! yes, she has a heart, and it is like a grain of mustard-seed!" But her kindliness was shown, with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with her favour. I do not know whether it would be strictly correct to say that she had the genius of friendship, because that supposes a certain initiative and action which were foreign to Lady Dorothy's habits. But she possessed, to a high degree, the genius of comradeship. She held the reins very tightly, and she let no one escape whom she wished to retain. She took immense pains to preserve her friendships, and indeed became, dear creature, a little bit tyrannical at last. Her notes grew to be excessively emphatic. She would begin a letter quite cheerfully with "Oh, you demon!" or complain of "total and terrible neglect of an old friend; I could fill this sheet of paper with an account of your misdeeds!" She was ingenious in reproach: "I cannot afford to waste penny after penny, and no a.s.sets forthcoming," or "I have only two correspondents, and one of them is a traitor; I therefore cease to write to you for ever!" This might sound formidable, but it was only one of the constant surprises of her humour, and would be followed next day by the most placable of notelets.

Her curiosity with regard to life spread to her benevolences, which often took somewhat the form of voyages of discovery. Among these her weekly excursion to the London Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I preferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced by one of these adventures among the "pore dear things" at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional humanitarian, but I suspect the "pore dear things" appreciated her listening smile and sympathetic worldliness much more than they would have done the admonitions of a more conscious philanthropist.

And, indeed, in retrospect, it is her kindliness that shines forth.

She followed all that her friends did, everything that happened to those who were close to them. She liked always to receive the tribute of what she called my "literary efforts," and was ruthlessly sharp in observing announcements of them: "Publishing again, and of course no copy for poor old me," when not a volume had yet left the binders. She took up absurd little phrases with delightful _camaraderie_; I have forgotten why at one time she took to signing herself "Your Koh-i-Noor," and wrote: "If I can hope to be the Koh-i-Noor of Mrs. Gosse's party, I shall be sure to come on Monday." One might go on indefinitely reviving these memories of her random humour and kindly whimsicality. But I close on a word of tenderer gravity, which I am sure will affect you. She had been a little tyrannical, as usual, and perhaps thought the tone of her persiflage rather excessive; a few hours later came a second note, which began: "You have made my life happier for me these last years--you, and Lady Airlie, and dearest Winifred." From her who never gave way to sentimentality in any form, and who prided herself on being as rigid as a nut-cracker, this was worth all the protestations of some more ebullient being. And there, dear Lady Burghclere, I must leave this poor sketch for such approval as you can bring yourself to give it.

Very faithfully yours, EDMUND GOSSE.

_January 1914._

II

LORD CROMER AS A MAN OF LETTERS

In the obituary notices which attended the death of Lord Cromer, it was necessary and proper that almost the whole s.p.a.ce at the command of the writers should be taken up by a sketch of his magnificent work as an administrator, or, as the cant phrase goes, "an empire-builder." For thirty years, during which time he advanced to be one of the most powerful and efficient of proconsuls, he held a place in the political world which arrested the popular imagination, and must continue to outweigh all other aspects of his character. Of this side of Lord Cromer's splendid career I am not competent to say a word. But there was another facet of it, one more private and individual, which became prominent after his retirement, I mean his intellectual and literary activity, which I had the privilege of observing. It would be a pity, perhaps, to let this be wholly submerged, and I propose to give, from my own recollection, some features of it. Lord Cromer was the author of six or seven published volumes, but these are before the public, and it is needless to speak much about them. What may be found more interesting are a few impressions of his att.i.tude towards books and towards ideas.

On the first occasion on which I met him, he was characteristic. It was some fifteen years ago, at the time when the brilliant young politicians who called themselves (or were rather ineptly called) the Hooligans had the graceful habit of asking some of their elders to dine with them in a private room of the House of Commons. At one of these little dinners the only guests were Lord Cromer and myself. I had never seen him before, and I regarded him with some awe and apprehension, but no words had pa.s.sed between us, when the division-bell rang, and our youthful hosts darted from the room.

The moment we were left alone, Lord Cromer looked across the deserted tablecloth and said quietly, as though he were asking me to pa.s.s the salt, "Where is Bipontium?" I was driven by sheer fright into an exercise of intelligence, and answered at once, "I should think it must be the Latin for Zweibrucken. Why?" "Oh! I saw this afternoon that my edition of Diodorus Siculus was printed _ex typographia societatis Bipontinae_, and I couldn't imagine for the life of me what 'Bipontium'

was. No doubt you're quite right." Nothing could be more characteristic of Lord Cromer's habit of mind than this sudden revulsion of ideas. His active brain needed no preparation to turn from subject to subject, but seemed to be always ready, at a moment's notice, to take up a fresh line of thought with ardour. What it could not endure was to be left stranded with no theme on which to expatiate. In succeeding years, when it was often my daily enjoyment to listen to Lord Cromer's desultory conversation, as it leaped from subject to subject, I often thought of the alarming way in which "Bipontium" had pounced upon me at the dinner-table in the House of Commons.

Some years pa.s.sed before I had the privilege of renewing my experience of that evening. It was not until after his retirement from Egypt in the autumn of 1907 that I saw him again, and not then for some months. He returned, it will be remembered, in broken health. He used to say that when King Edward VII. wrote out to Cairo, strongly pressing him to stay, he had replied, in the words of Herodotus, "I am too old, oh King, and too inactive; so bid thou one of the younger men here to do these things." He very soon, however, recovered elasticity of mind and body when the load of office was removed from his shoulders, and "inactive"

was the last epithet which could ever be applied to Lord Cromer. He began to attend the House of Lords, but, like a wise man, he was in no hurry to speak there till he had grown accustomed to the tone of the place. His earliest utterance (I may note the date, February 6th, 1908) we listened to with equal respect and curiosity; this was a new element from which much enjoyment might be expected.

This maiden speech was not long, but it produced a very happy impression. The subject was the Anglo-Russian Convention, of which the orator cordially approved, and I recall that a certain sensation was caused by Lord Cromer's dwelling on the dangers of the Pan-Islamite intrigues in Egypt. This is the sort of thing that the House of Lords enjoys--a man of special knowledge speaking, almost confidentially, of matters within his professional competency. During that year and the next Lord Cromer spoke with increasing frequency. There were great differences of opinion with regard to his efficiency in Parliament. I may acknowledge that I was not an unmeasured admirer of his oratory.

When he rose from his seat on the Cross-bench, and advanced towards the table, with a fine gesture of his leonine head, sympathy was always mingled with respect. His independence and his honesty were patent, and his slight air of authority satisfactory. His public voice was not unpleasing, but when he was tired it became a little veiled, and he had the sad trick of dropping it at the end of his sentences. I confess that I sometimes found it difficult to follow what he was saying, and I do not think that he understood how to fill a large s.p.a.ce with his voice.

He spoke as a man accustomed to wind up the debates of a council sitting round a table, rather than as a senator addressing the benches of Parliament.

He was interested in the art of eloquence, and fond of criticising in private the methods of other speakers. He had a poor opinion of much studied oratory, and used to declare that no one had ever convinced him by merely felicitous diction. Perhaps he did not sufficiently realise that his own strength of purpose offered rather a granitic surface to persuasion. But no doubt he was right in saying that, coming as he did from the florid East, he found English eloquence more plain and businesslike than he left it. He used to declare that he never spoke impromptu if he could possibly help doing so, and he made great fun of the statesmen who say, "Little did I think when I came down to this House to-day that I should be called upon to speak," and then pour out by heart a Corinthian discourse. Lord Cromer always openly and frankly prepared his speeches, and I have seen him entranced in the process. As he always had a cla.s.sical reference for everything he did, he was in the habit of mentioning that Demosthenes also was unwilling to "put his faculty at the mercy of Fortune."

He became an habitual attendant at the House of Lords, and, while it was sitting, he usually appeared in the Library about an hour before the House met. He took a very lively interest in what was going on, examining new books, and making a thousand suggestions. If the Lords'

Library contains to-day one of the most complete collections of Latin and Greek literature in the country, this is largely due to the zeal of Lord Cromer, who was always egging me on to the purchase of fresh rarities. He was indefatigable in kindness, sending me booksellers'

catalogues in which curious texts were recorded, and scouring even Paris and Leipzig in our behalf. When I entered into this sport so heartily as to provide the Greek and Latin Fathers also for their Lordships, Lord Cromer became unsympathetic. He had no interest whatever in Origen or Tertullian, and I think it rather annoyed him to recall that several of these oracles of the early Church had written in Greek. Nothing in history or philosophy or poetry which the ancient world had handed down to us came amiss to Lord Cromer, but I think he considered it rather impertinent of the Fathers to have presumed to use the language of Attica. He had not an ecclesiastical mind.

Lord Cromer's familiar preoccupation with the cla.s.sics was a point in his mental habits which deserves particular attention. I have always supposed that he inherited it from his mother, the Hon. Mrs. Baring, who was a Windham. She was a woman of learning; and she is said to have discomfited Sir William Harcourt at a dinner-table by quoting Lucan in direct disproof of a statement about the Druids which he had been rash enough to advance. She sang the odes of Anacreon to her son in his infancy, and we may conjecture that she sowed in his bosom the seeds of his love of antiquity. Lord Cromer made no pretension to be what is called an "exact" scholar, but I think it is a mistake to say, as has been alleged, that he did not take up the study of Latin and Greek until middle life. It is true that he enjoyed no species of university training, but pa.s.sed from Woolwich straight into the diplomatic service.

In 1861, at the age of twenty, he was appointed A.D.C. to Sir Henry Storks in the Ionian Islands, and I believe that one of the first things he did was to look about for an instructor in ancient Greek. He found one in a certain Levantine in Corfu, whose name was Romano, and their studies opened with the odes of Anacreon. Whether this was a coincidence, or a compliment to Mrs. Baring, I do not know. This is a rather different account from what Lord Cromer gave in the preface to his _Paraphrases_, but I report it on his own later authority.

If his scholarship was not professorial, it was at least founded upon a genuine and enduring love of the ancient world. I suppose that for fifty years, after the episode in Corfu, however busy he was, however immersed in Imperial policy, he rarely spent a day without some communing with antiquity. He read Latin, and still more Greek, not in the spirit of a pedant or a pedagogue, but genuinely for pleasure and refreshment. He had no vanity about it, and if he had any doubt as to the meaning of a pa.s.sage he would "consult the crib," as he used to say. We may conjecture further that he did not allow his curiosity to be balked by the barrier of a hopelessly obscure pa.s.sage, but leaped over it, and went on. He always came back to Homer, whom he loved more than any other writer of the world, and particularly to the _Iliad_, which I think he knew nearly by heart. But he did not, as some pundits consider dignified and necessary, confine himself to the reading of the princ.i.p.al cla.s.sics in order to preserve a pure taste. On the contrary, Lord Cromer, especially towards the close of his life, pushed up into all the byways of the Silver Age. As he invariably talked about the books he happened to be reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine years ago he had a sudden pa.s.sion for Empedocles, whose fragments he had found collected and translated by Mr. Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer used to march into the Library, and greet me by calling out, "Do you know?

Empedocles says" something or other, probably some parallelism with a modern phrase, the detection of which always particularly amused Lord Cromer.

In 1908 he took a fancy to Theognis, whose works I procured for him at the House of Lords, since he happened not to possess that writer at 36 Wimpole Street. He would settle himself in an armchair in the smoking-room, his eyes close to the book, and plunge into those dark waters of the gnomic elegist. He loved maxims and the expression of principles, and above all, as I have said, the discovery of ident.i.ties of thought between the modern and the ancient world. He was delighted when he found in Theognis the proverb about having an ox on the tongue.

I suppose this was quite well known to the learned, but the charm of the matter for Lord Cromer was that he was not deterred by any fear of academic criticism, and found out these things for himself. He read Theognis as other people read Rudyard Kipling, for stimulus and pleasure. He swept merely "scholarly" questions aside. He read his _Iliad_ like a love-letter, but he was bored to death by discussions about the authorship of the Homeric epics.

In one matter, the serene good sense which was so prominently characteristic of Lord Cromer tinged his att.i.tude towards the cla.s.sics.

He was not at all like Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k, who entreated his friends to desist from mentioning anything that had happened in the world for the last 2,000 years. On the contrary, Lord Cromer was always bent on binding the old and the new together. It was very noticeable in his conversation that he was fond of setting cla.s.sic instances side by side with modern ones. If books dealt with this parallelism, they exercised a charm over Lord Cramer's imagination which may sometimes have led him a little astray about their positive value. I recall a moment when he was completely under the sway of M. Ferrero's _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, largely because of the pertinacity with which the Italian historian compares Roman inst.i.tutions with modern social arrangements.

It was interesting to the great retired proconsul to discover that Augustus "considered that in the majority of cases subject peoples had to be governed through their own national inst.i.tutions." It is scarcely necessary to point out that these a.n.a.logies form the basis of what is, perhaps, Lord Cromer's most important late essay, his _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_.

In a practical administration of India and Egypt, those oceans of unplumbed antiquity, the ordinary British official has neither time nor taste to do more than skim the surface of momentary experience. But Lord Cromer had always been acutely aware of the mystery of the East, and always looked back into the past with deep curiosity. Sometimes the modern life in Egypt, exciting as it was, almost seemed to him a phantasmagoria dancing across the real world of Rameses. This tendency of thought coloured one branch of his reading; he could not bear to miss a book which threw any light on the social and political manners of antiquity. Works like Fowler's _Social Life at Rome_ or Marquardt's _Le Culte chez les Romains_ thrilled him with excitement and animated his conversation for days. He wanted, above all things, to realise how the ancients lived and what, feelings actuated their behaviour. On one occasion, in a fit of gaiety, I ventured to tell him that he reminded me of Mrs. Blimber (in _Dombey and Son_), who could have died contented had she visited Cicero in his retirement at beautiful Tusculum. "Well!"

replied Lord Cromer, laughing, "and a very delightful visit that would be."

In the admirable appreciation contributed to the _Times_ by "C." (our other proconsular "C."!) it was remarked that the "quality of mental balance is visible in all that Lord Cromer wrote, whether, in his official despatches, his published books, or his private correspondence." It was audible, too, in his delightful conversation, which was vivid, active, and yet never oppressive. He spoke with the firm accent of one accustomed to govern, but never dictatorially. His voice was a very agreeable one, supple and various in its tones, neither loud nor low. Although he had formed the life-long habit of expressing his opinions with directness, he never imposed them unfairly, or took advantage of his authority. On the contrary, there was something extremely winning in his eagerness to hear the reply of his interlocutor. "Well, there's a great deal in that," he would graciously and cordially say, and proceed to give the opposing statement what benefit he thought it deserved. He could be very trenchant, but I do not think that any one whom he had advanced to the privilege of his confidence can remember that he was so to a friend.

The att.i.tude of Lord Cromer to life and letters--I speak, of course, only of what I saw in the years of his retirement from office--was not exactly representative of our own or even of the last century. He would have been at home in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution. I judge him to have been born with an inflexible and commanding character, which in the person of many men exposed to such dangerous successes as he enjoyed might have degenerated into tyranny. On Lord Cromer, on the other hand, time produced a humanising and mellowing effect. It may very well prove that he has stamped his mark on the East of the twentieth century, as Turgot did his on the West of the nineteenth century; but without straying into the perilous fields of prophecy we are safe in recording the impression that Lord Cromer was not altogether a man of to-day; he looked forward and he looked backward. Probably the nearest counterpart to his manner of mind and conversation may be found in the circle of whom we read in the _Diary_ of f.a.n.n.y Burney. We can conceive Lord Cromer leaning against the Committee Box in earnest conversation with Mr. Windham and Mr. Burke at Warren Hastings' trial. We can restore the half-disdainful gesture with which he would drop an epigram ("from the Greek") into the Bath Easton Vase. His politeness and precision, his cla.s.sical quotations, his humour, his predilections in literature and art, were those of the inner circle of Whigs nearly a century and a half ago, and I imagine that their talk was very much like his.

He was fond of repeating Bagehot's description of the Whigs, and it seems to me to apply so exactly to himself that I will quote part of it:--

"Perhaps as long as there has been a political history in this country there have been certain men of a cool, moderate, resolute firmness, not gifted with high imagination, little p.r.o.ne to enthusiastic sentiment, heedless of large theories and speculations, careless of dreamy scepticism, with a clear view of the next step, and a wise intention to take it; a strong conviction that the elements of knowledge are true, and a steady belief that the present would, can, and should be quietly improved."

In a full a.n.a.lysis of Lord Cromer's character, I think that every clause of this description might be expanded with ill.u.s.trations. In the intellectual domain, Bagehot's words, "little p.r.o.ne to enthusiastic sentiment," seem made to fit Lord Cromer's detachment from all the tendencies of romanticism. His literary tastes were highly developed and eagerly indulged, but they were all in their essence pre-Revolutionary. Those who are familiar with a book once famous, the _Diary of a Lover of Literature_ of Thomas Green, written down to the very end of the eighteenth century, have in their hands a volume in which the very accents of Lord Cromer may seem to be heard. Isaac d'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors in the dust; Lord Cromer had a short way with many of the writers most fashionable at this moment. When he was most occupied with the resuscitations of ancient manners, of which I have already spoken, I found to my surprise that he had never read _Marius the Epicurean_. I recommended it to him, and with his usual instant response to suggestion, he got it at once and began reading it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm, and, what was not like him, he did not read _Marius_ to the end. The richness and complication of Pater's style annoyed him. He liked prose to be clear and stately; he liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even Gibbon-though he read _The Decline and Fall_ over again, very carefully, so late as 1913--was not entirely to his taste. He enjoyed the limpidity and the irony, but the sustained roll of Gibbon's ant.i.theses vexed him a little. He liked prose to be quite simple.

In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and desultory conversations about literature which will be so perennial a delight to look back upon, betrayed his const.i.tutional detestation of the Romantic att.i.tude. He believed himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and resented the charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact, irritated by the excesses and obscurities of much that is fashionable to-day in the world of letters, and he refused his tribute of incense to several popular idols.

He thought that, during the course of the nineteenth century, German influences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in Europe. I do not know that Lord Cromer had pursued these impressions very far, or that he had formed any conscious theory with regard to them. But he was very "eighteenth century" in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and I always found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mystical order. It was impossible that so intelligent and omnivorous a reader as he should not be drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was puzzled by him. He described him as "manifestly a man full of contrasts, difficult to understand, and as many-sided as Odysseus." On another occasion, losing patience with Pascal, he called him "a half-lunatic man of genius." Fenelon annoyed him still more; the spiritual experiences of the Archbishop of Cambrai he found "almost incomprehensible." His surprising, but after all perfectly consistent, comment on both Fenelon and Pascal was, "How much more easy Buffon is to understand!"

He recommended all young men who intend to take a part in politics carefully to study pre-Revolutionary history, and one of his objections to the romantic literature of Rousseau downwards was that it did not help such study. It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended, moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of judgment, that "level-headedness" which he valued so highly, and had exercised with such magnificent authority. He disliked the idea that genius involved a lack of sanity, or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted that Dryden had given general currency to this idea by his famous lines in _Absalom and Achitophel_:--

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin part.i.tions do their bounds divide;"

but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account by insanity for every odd or confused expression in literature. He had nothing to say about Mazzini, whom he swept aside impatiently, except that he "was a semi-lunatic," and I have heard him declare of Chatterton and Verlaine--a strange couple--that they were a pair of madmen. He objected violently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very little about that poet's works.

If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be necessary to give human character to any sketch of the mind of Lord Cromer. He himself hated mere eulogy, which he said had ruined most of the biographies of the world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstone did not escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will be recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadowless portrait led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, which he afterwards issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid reader of memoirs, and of political memoirs in particular, but he almost always pa.s.sed upon them the same criticism--that they were too _public_. "I don't want Mr. ----," he would say, "to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up the file of the _Morning Post_. I want him to tell me what I can't find out elsewhere. And he need not be so very much afraid of hinting that his hero had faults, for if he had not had defects we should never have heard of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't want a priggish biographer to pretend that we are." He was speaking here mainly of political matters; but Lord Cromer's training and experience had a strong bearing on his literary tastes. With him politics reacted on literature, although he liked to fancy that he kept them wholly apart.

No doubt a selection from his correspondence will one day be given to the world, for he was a vivid, copious, and daring letter-writer. I suppose that he wrote to each of his friends mainly on the subject which absorbed that friend most, and as his own range of sympathies and interests was very wide, it is probable that his letters will prove excellent general reading. As in so many other of the departments of life, Lord Cromer did not think letter-writing a matter to be lightly regarded or approached without responsibility. He said:--