The Adventure of Living Part 19

Though Lord Arthur never held office, he had been for many years a Liberal Member of Parliament, and had also been a member of almost every literary and political club in London, such as "The Club," "Grignon's,"

"The Breakfast Club," and so on. Besides his literary and historical sympathies and interests, he was a man devoted to natural history, and had a great many friends on this side of knowledge. He was also a friend both of Hutton and of Townsend, always a diligent reader and a fairly frequent contributor to the columns of _The Spectator_, which made yet another tie between us. Finally, Lord Arthur, hitherto a very loyal, if sometimes critical, supporter of Mr. Gladstone, became, as I had become, a Liberal Unionist. He followed, that is, Lord Hartington into opposition on the Home Rule question. But I, as a member of the Liberal Unionist Committee and Editor of _The Liberal Unionist_,--the organ of our new Party,--had a position amongst Liberal Unionists rather above what might have been expected at my age. I was then about twenty- seven--a position which brought me into touch with Lord Hartington, Mr.

Bright, the Duke of Argyll, Mr. Chamberlain, and, in fact, all the Liberal and Radical Unionists of the day. Finally and, as it were, to cement my wife's old and my new friendship with the Arthur Russells, I bought a piece of land on which to build a Sat.u.r.day-to-Monday cottage, which, though I did not fully realise it at the moment, was close to the Arthur Russells' Surrey house, The Ridgeway.

No sooner had we pitched our tent in what was then the fascinating wilderness of Newlands Corner, than we discovered that we were only an easy Sunday afternoon walk from our friends. Soon it became a fixed habit with us, from which I think we never varied, to descend from our Downs every Sunday and walk by a series of delightful bridle-paths to The Ridgeway for tea--a serious inst.i.tution in a family where there were two girls and four boys.

At the Arthur Russells, when re-enforced by Mme. and Mile, de Peyronnet, Lady Sligo, who had also settled in Surrey, one heard talk such as I have never known bettered and very seldom equalled. Nothing could have been easier or more stimulating. Those were gatherings at which no one a.s.sumed the att.i.tude described in _The Rejected Addresses_:

I am a blessed Glendoveer.

'Tis mine to speak and yours to hear.

I was, except for the Russell boys and girls and my own wife, the youngest member of the party, but I was always made to feel at The Ridgeway that they were as willing to hear as even I was willing to talk, which, as my friends will vouch, was saying a good deal. I was, in truth, bursting to give my view, as a young man should be, on a hundred subjects. The intellectual world lay all before me. But though Providence was my guide, I was not yet confined to any fixed course, but with joyous inconsequence raced up and down the paths of the Dialectical Paradise as unconscious and as unashamed as a colt in a green meadow.

Lord Arthur Russell, though a man of a gentle, tranquil spirit, had a great sympathy with youth. He was, like all his race, a Whig, and a Moderate, in every human function and aspiration. He did not, however, allow that liberal spirit to be dimmed by fear or by selfishness. He was one of those fortunate men who are not awed by rumour or carried away by prejudice. Still less was there any touch of pride or vulgarity in his nature Meanness and commonness of mind were as far from him as from any man I have ever known. Yet there was nothing either of the recluse or of the saint about him. He was not afraid to look on life, and its realities, and he took the very greatest interest, not only in what concerned _h.o.m.o sapiens_, but also _h.o.m.o natumlis_. He loved good stories and told good stories, and loved also to a.n.a.lyse and comment upon the actions of the great men of his own day and of past days, for it need hardly be said that as the nephew of Lord John Russell, the son of Lady William Russell, and the cousin of half the politicians of his day, he was the repository of every sort of social and political tradition. He was an extraordinarily accurate man, and by no means willing to pick up, or record, or pa.s.s on stray pieces of gossip about historical people, without verification.

Lord Arthur's first-hand and personal recollections, though never of the tiresome kind, had often great poignancy and actuality. I remember being thrilled by an account which he had had direct from his uncle, Lord John Russell, of the latter's visit to Napoleon at Elba in the early part of 1815. The interview, of course, made a great impression upon him and the account he gave was vivid and picturesque. I must omit a detail which shows what a dirty savage Napoleon was, and how he maintained even in his little _palazzo_ at Elba the manners not only of the camp, but of the rudest soldier. In describing this episode, which would have been too trivial for narration if not so nasty, Lord John was wont to say, "I was very much surprised." It must be remembered here that not only in 1815, but even fifty years before (witness the testimony both of Dr.

Johnson and Horace Walpole), Englishmen were apt to be shocked by continental habits in the matter of personal cleanliness.

Another detail, however, is quite fit to tell. Napoleon knew quite well that the brother of the Duke of Bedford and a Member of the House of Commons was an important person, and was accordingly exceedingly civil to the young man. But Lord John told his nephew that very early in the conversation Napoleon seized him by the ear and held it almost all the time he was talking, or rather, pouring forth one of his streams of familiar eloquence as to the harshness and cruelty of the Allies.

Napoleon, when he was cross, would sometimes wring people's ears till they screamed for pain. Talleyrand, for example, was on one occasion, when held by the ear, so much hurt as to be deprived of his habitual insensibility to Napoleon's insults, and gave vent to the famous aside, "What a pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up!"

In any case, Lord John's ear, though held for ten or twelve minutes, was not screwed up. I remember when I heard the story, thirty years ago, at once asking the question, "Which ear was it he held?" That sounded almost to myself as I asked it a silly question, but, as the reply showed, it was not. Lord Arthur replied, "That is curious. It is exactly the question I asked my uncle, and he, instead of treating it as trivial, answered as if it was a matter of the first importance, 'My left ear.'" Certainly it seems to me a strong link with the past. Here was Lord Arthur, who would not have been much over eighty if he had lived till today, who had seen a piece of human flesh which had actually been held by the Corsican Tamerlane.

Lord Arthur once showed his belief in my discretion and also his divination that I was not one of the supercilious intellectuals who think details of family history are tiresome and unimportant, in a way which greatly pleased me. He confided to me the true story, which he had had from various people of the older generation who knew the facts, as to the relations between the two d.u.c.h.esses of Devonshire. The elder d.u.c.h.ess, Georgiana, was the Juno of the Whigs. It would be folly to call her the Madonna of the Whigs. It was at her eyes that the coal porter at the Westminster Election wanted to light his pipe. Sir Joshua immortalised her in his picture of the young mother and her child. To her the mystic poet and philosopher bent the knee of admiration, in the enchanting couplet:

Oh, lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, Where got you that heroic measure?

The other d.u.c.h.ess was born Elizabeth Harvey--the woman whose eyes still scintillate also from Sir Joshua's canvas, with an energy so overwhelming as to be uncanny--the woman who fascinated without actual beauty, but whose smile might have embroiled the world--the woman who stirred even the sluggish Gibbon and made him say, with a personal vivacity and poignancy which is unique in his writings, that if she had entered the House of Lords and beckoned the Lord Chancellor to leave the Woolsack and follow her, he must have obeyed. Gibbon had evidently racked his brains to think of the most audacious act of which a woman could be capable, and that quaintly proved in his case to be the enchantment of a Lord Chancellor! If, at the present moment, there is a lady possessed of charms equal to those of Elizabeth d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire, let us hope that the precincts of both the Lords and the Commons Houses are well guarded!

I shall not on the present occasion say more than that Lord Arthur gave me a note of the true facts of the story, to which many allusions, generally incorrect, have appeared in various memoirs--a story of incidents which, strangely enough, quite possibly affected the history of the world. These incidents had as their sequel the appointment of the son of a well-known Scottish doctor, Dr. Moore, to an Infantry regiment.

That Infantry subaltern became Sir Thomas Moore the man who lost his life in saving the British Empire, and first taught the people of these islands and then, what is more important, the whole of Europe, that there was nothing invincible about the troops of Napoleon, when they were faced by British regiments properly trained, as Moore trained them at Shorncliff. Just as the destruction of the Spartan Hoplites in the Island of Sphacteria broke the military spell cast by the armies of Sparta, so Moore's victorious retreat to, and action at, Corunna broke the spell of the Napoleonic Legions.

Though I have Lord Arthur's notes, and though he in no way bound me to secrecy, they want an interval longer than a hundred and ten years "prior to publication." Therefore they will rest in my safe, or wherever else they may have been affectionately mislaid, and where it would probably take a day's hard work to find them. There is no such secrecy and security as "filing for future reference." When the notes are found by my literary executors, they will please remember that they should not be given to the public until they have ample a.s.surance that the head of the Devonshire family sees no objection. It is not a family skeleton in any sense, but till family facts become historic, the utmost discretion is demanded alike by courtesy and good feeling.

I had, alas! no sooner fully realised that I had made a friend in Lord Arthur and that I might look forward to many years of intimate intercourse with a man of knowledge and sympathy, from whom I could learn much and in the most fascinating and delightful way, than the end came. A short illness, followed by a rapid operation--hopeless, or almost hopeless--cut short this honourable and gracious life. I was one of the very few people whom Lord Arthur asked to see in the few days allowed him between life and death. He wanted to see me out of pure friendliness, to talk about his children and to show me, as only such an act could, that he, like me, had hoped much from our friendship. He was the kind of man who would be sure to prefer saying this by deed rather than by word.

But for the simplicity and essential n.o.bility of character which he possessed, he might well have sent for me to see how a good man could die. There was everything to strengthen and so to quiet one in the way in which he faced the message which comes to all--a message so deeply dreaded by most of us, yet which, when it does come, proves to be not a sentence, but a reprieve--the mandatory word that does not imprison us, but sets us free, which flings the gates and lets us see the open heaven, instead of the walls and vaulted ceiling of the cells of which we have been the inhabitants.

But though the very last thing that Lord Arthur was thinking about was the impression upon my mind, that impression was intense both in kind and in degree. That short last talk at his bedside, in which so little was said, so much felt by both of us, has never left my memory. If for no other reason, it must be recorded here for it had, I feel, an essential if undefinable influence upon my life.

CHAPTER XIX

MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE 'NINETIES (_Continued_)

I am afraid that throughout these memoirs I have talked too much about the volumes which I might fill, but am not filling. Yet I must do so once more in this chapter. My mother-in-law, Mrs. Simpson, was an admirable talker and full of clear and interesting memories. I had no sooner entered the Simpson house and family than I found that there were a hundred points of sympathy between us. She had known everybody in London, who was worth knowing, through her father, Mr. Na.s.sau-Senior, and had visited with him--she acted for some twenty years as his social companion owing to her mother's ill-health--most of the political country-houses in England, and had known in London everyone worth knowing on the Whig side, and most of the neutrals. Macaulay was one of her father's closest friends; so was the third Lord Lansdowne, the Lord Henry Petty of the Cabinets of the'thirties and 'forties--Lord Aberdeen, Lord John Russell, and Lord Palmerston, and, earlier, Lord Melbourne, Lord St. Leonards, Lord Denman, and Lord Campbell, to mention only a few names and at random. It was her father's habit to ride every day in the Park for reasons hygienic and social, and she rode with him. There they were sure to be joined by the Whig statesmen who sought Senior's advice on economic points. She saw little of the Tories,--except perhaps Mr.

Gladstone, soon to become a Liberal, and Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli was of course, in those days, considered by the strict Whigs as "impossible"--a "charlatan," and "adventurer," almost "impostor."

In the world of letters she saw much of Sydney Smith, who was early a friend of her father's. She actually had the good fortune, while Miss Minnie Senior, to stop at the Combe Florey Rectory, and to discover that the eminent wit took as much trouble to amuse his own family when alone as to set the tables of Mayfair upon a roar. He liked to tease his girl guest by telling her that her father, then a Master in Chancery, did not care a straw for his daughter _"Minnie." "De Minimis non curat Lex"_--"the Master does not care for Minnie"--was a favourite travesty of the well-known maxim.

Rogers was also a friend, and as a girl she remembered going to his "very small" breakfast-parties, in the celebrated dining-room in which hung his famous pictures.

They were hung high, so as to get the light which was at the top of the room. It was this arrangement, by the way, that made Sydney Smith say that Rogers' dining-room was like Heaven and its opposite. There were G.o.ds and angels in the upper part, but below was "gnashing of teeth."

While Rogers talked about his pictures, he would have them taken down by his man-servant, Edmond, and placed upon a chair at his side, or almost upon the lap of his guest, so that he might lecture about them at his ease. Mrs. Simpson often told me of the horror she felt as a girl lest she should throw a spoonful of soup over a Raphael or by an accident run a knife or a fork into the immortal canvas! She had not learnt that pictures are about the most indestructible things in the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: J St. Loe Strachey. aetat 32]

Through her father Mrs. Simpson also knew the great French statesmen of her day, _i.e._, the middle period of the century, 1840 to 1870. He was the friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, and of Thiers and Guizot, and of most of the statesmen and men of letters who were their contemporaries. The leading Italian statesmen, such as Cavour, were also his friends. In fact, there were few people in Europe worth knowing whom he did not know. What was more, he had a most astonishing personal gift-- the gift for photographing in words the talk of the statesmen whom he encountered, not, remember, as a mere recorder but on terms of mutual benefit. Though he liked to draw their opinions, in both senses, they sought his wisdom and advice with equal a.s.siduity. He was quite as much Johnson as he was Boswell, or rather, almost as much Socrates as he was Plato, for that is the best a.n.a.logy.

_Conversations with the Statesmen of the Third Empire_, in two volumes, crown octavo, sounds a pretty dull t.i.tle, and yet anyone who takes the trouble to read these conversations will find that they are some of the most vivacious dialogues in all literature. Senior's system of recording conversations throws a curious light, by the way, upon the mechanism of the Platonic Dialogues. For some twenty-four centuries the world has wondered how much of these Dramas of the Soul is to be attributed to Socrates and how much to Plato, and the general verdict has been that in most of them there is very much more Plato than Socrates. In a word, they have been judged to be works of art in which certain very general ideas and principles derived from Socrates are expanded, put into shape, and often greatly altered by the alleged recorder, or rather dramatic recounter.

Mrs. Simpson told me something of her father's method of putting down his conversations which bears closely upon the value of this theory of the Dialogues. But first I must note that Senior's reports of conversations were famous for their extraordinary accuracy. Mrs. Simpson well remembered an incident in proof of this statement. Her father had written out a very important talk with Thiers in which by far the greater part of the talk was sustained as usual by the great Frenchman.

When Senior had written it out, that is about a couple of days after the conversation, he sent it, as was his habit, to Thiers for correction.

Thiers sent it back, saying that he could not find a word to alter, adding that he was astonished to find that Senior had not only put down his views and ideas, but had given his actual words. Yet, as a matter of fact, Senior had done nothing of the kind. He had not even tried to do so. What he had aimed at was something very different. His aim was to give the spirit of the conversation, to produce the extreme characteristic impression made on his mind by the talk of his interlocutor, not the words themselves.

To show in a still more convincing way that I am making no exaggerated deduction from my premises, I may call the further testimony given me directly by Senior's daughter. It is this testimony which convinces me that in the Platonic dialogues there is less Plato and more Socrates than is generally imagined. Mrs. Simpson, or Miss Senior, as she then was, once said to her father that she would like to listen to one of his conversations and try to see whether she could not write it down as he did. Her father, delighted that she should make the experiment, explained to her the art as he practised it and gave her the following directions.

To begin with, you must never try to remember the actual words that you hear Thiers, or Guizot, or Lord Aberdeen, or Mr. Bright, or whoever else it may be, use. If you begin to rack your brains and your memory you will spoil the whole thing. You must simply sit down and write the conversation out as you, knowing their views, think they must have spoken or ought to have spoken. Then you will get the right result. If you consciously rely on your memory, your report will lose all life and interest.

While the conversation was going on Senior attended very accurately to the ideas expressed and got a thorough understanding of them. When he took up his pen he put himself in the position of a dramatist and wrote what he felt sure his interlocutor would have said on the particular theme. He put himself, that is, in his interlocutor's place. The thoughts got clothed with the right words, though, no doubt, under great compression.

That is interesting and curious, not solely from the point of view of Plato, but of a great many of the speeches in cla.s.sical history. People have often wondered whether the men who speak so wisely and so well in Thucydides or Tacitus really talked like that. Judging from Senior's case, they very probably did. Thucydides, indeed, when describing his method, uses expressions by no means at variance with the Senior system of reporting, the system which, though aiming only at the spirit, often, if we are to believe Thiers, hits the words also. It is quite possible then that the British chieftain really made the speech recorded as his in Tacitus, the speech which contains what is perhaps the greatest of all political epigrams, "I know these Romans. They are the people who make a desert and call it Peace."

There is another point in regard to the secret of Senior's power of recording conversations which is worth noting by modern psychologists. I cannot help thinking that what Senior did, unconsciously of course, was to trust to his subconsciousness. That amiable and highly impressionable, if dumb, spirit which sits within us all, got busy when Thiers or Guizot was talking. The difficulty was to get out of him what he had heard, and had at once transferred to the files in the Memory cupboard. Senior, without knowing it, had, I doubt not, some little trick which enabled him to get easily _en rapport_ with his subconsciousness, and so tap the rich and recently stored vintage. His writing was probably half automatic. It certainly was vivid and dramatic in a high degree.

If anyone wants proof of my eulogy of Na.s.sau-Senior's powers as a conversationalist, let him go to the London Library and get down Senior's works. Perhaps the best volume to begin with is _Conversations and Journals in Egypt_--a book which Lord Cromer used to declare was the best thing ever written about Egypt. I remember also Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff saying that one of the conversations with Hekekyan Bey, describing how he--the Bey--on a certain occasion saw Mehemet sitting alone in his Palace by the Sea, deserted by all his followers, was as poignant as anything in Tacitus. It will be remembered that in 1840 we sent a fleet to Egypt under Sir Charles Napier, to enforce our Syrian policy. The private instructions given by Lord Palmerston to his admiral were as pointed as they were concise: "Tell Mehemet Ali that if he does not change his policy and do what I wish, I will chuck him into the Nile." In due course our fleet appeared at Alexandria. The Pasha was at first recalcitrant, but when our ships took up position opposite the town and palace and cleared for action he gave way and agreed to the British terms. During the crisis and when it looked as if the old tyrant was either bent upon political and personal suicide, or else had lost all sense of proportion, the courtiers and the people of Alexandria generally fled from their doomed Lord and Master.

As if by magic his palace was utterly deserted. No Monarch falls so utterly as an Oriental Despot. Hekekyan Bey described the scene of which he was a witness in words which could hardly be bettered:

I was then the engineer charged with the defences of the coast. We were expecting an attack from Sir Charles Napier, and I had been to Rosetta to inspect the batteries. It was on a tempestuous night that I returned to Alexandria, and went to the palace on the sh.o.r.e of the former Island of Pharos, to make my report to Mehemet Ali.

The halls and pa.s.sages, which I used to find full of Mamelukes and officers strutting about in the fullness of their contempt for a Christian, were empty. Without encountering a single attendant, I reached his room overlooking the sea; it was dimly lighted by a few candles of bad Egyptian wax, with enormous untrimmed wicks. Here, at the end of his divan, I found him rolled up in a sort of ball,--solitary, motionless, apparently absorbed in thought. The waves were breaking heavily on the mole, and I expected every instant the cas.e.m.e.nts to be blown in. The roar of wind and sea was almost awful, but he did not seem conscious of it.

I stood before him silent. Suddenly he said, as if speaking to himself, "I think I can trust Ibrahim." Again he was silent for some time, and then desired me to fetch Motus Bey, his admiral. I found him, and brought him to the Viceroy. Neither of them spoke, until the Viceroy, after looking at him steadily for some minutes, said to me, "He is drunk; take him away." I did so, and so ended my visit without making any report.

That heart-cry of the deserted tyrant, "_I think I can trust Ibrahim_"--his own son, in all probability, though called his stepson (Ibrahim's mother was a widow)--is comparable to the cry of Augustus: "_Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!_"

Wonderfully Tacitean is a later comment of the Pasha--an Armenian by birth. He told Senior that the Pasha could never forget or forgive that he had seen his master in the day of his humiliation. So intolerable was the thought that Mehemet Ali made two secret attempts to kill his faithful servant. "He wished me to die, but he did not wish to be suspected of having killed me." In my recollections of Lord Cromer, in an earlier chapter, I have told a story of one of Mehemet Ali's removals of inconvenient servants which is well worth recalling in this context.

If I say much more about Mr. Na.s.sau-Senior I shall fill a book. I admit that it would be a very curious and attractive work, for he was in the truest sense a man of note, but I cannot put a book inside a book.

Therefore this must be, not merely one of my unwritten chapters, but one of my unwritten books.

In the same way, I cannot dwell upon dozens of delightful men and women with whom I became acquainted through my wife and her people, and who remained fast and good friends, though, alas! many of them have long since joined the majority,--for example, Lecky, Leslie Stephen, and Mr.

Justice Stephen, and Mr. Henry Reeve of the _Edinburgh_. The last- named, very soon after our acquaintanceship, invited me to write for him, and thus I was able to add the _Edinburgh_ as well as the _Quarterly_ to the trophies of my pen. My wife and I used often to dine at his house--always a place of good company even if the aura was markedly Victorian. Reeve was full of stories of how Wordsworth used to stop with him when he came up to London in his later years. He lent his Court suit to Wordsworth in order that the Poet-Laureate should present himself at a Levee in proper form. But again these remembrances must be repressed for reasons of s.p.a.ce.

Just as I have taken the Arthur Russell group as a type of the people with whom my marriage made me friends, so I shall take as typical two men of high distinction who were friends of my mother-in-law, and whom I saw either at her house or at houses of friends to whom we were bidden through the kindly, old-fashioned inst.i.tution of wedding-parties. These were Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. I met Matthew Arnold at a dinner at Mrs. Simpson's, given largely, I think, because I expressed my desire to see a man for whose poetry and prose I had come to have an intense admiration. When quite young I was a little inclined to turn up my nose at Matthew Arnold's verse, though I admit I had a good deal of it by heart. By the time, however, that I had got to my twenty-seventh year, I bent my knee in reverent adoration at the shrine, and realised what the two _Obermann_ poems and _The Grande Chartreuse_ stanzas meant, not only to the world but to me.

I was captivated in advance by Matthew Arnold's literary charm. I delighted also in the stories about him of which London and Oxford were full. I had only to watch him and listen to his talk across the dinner- table to realise the truth of his own witty self-criticism. When he married, he is said to have described his wife thus: "Ah! you must see my f.a.n.n.y. You are sure to like her. She has all my graces and none of my airs." The said airs and graces were, of course, only a gentle and pleasant pose. They winged with humour Matthew Arnold's essential, I had almost said sublime, seriousness. Truly he was like one of the men for whom he longed: