THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT 
 
 a * ^ A ^ ^ A .
 
 RECOLLECTIONS 
 LITERARY AND POLITICAL
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 FORTY YEARS AT THE BAR 
 
 Some Opinions of the Press 
 
 'As interesting as it is illuminating. . . .' 
 
 The Spectator. 
 
 ' Written out of the fulness of knowledge, and by 
 one who has not allowed a long professional experi- 
 ence to dim a naturally keen and humorous eye.' 
 
 The Morning Post. 
 
 ' Mr. Balfour Browne's reminiscences are very 
 professional, very personal, and very piquant.' 
 
 TIte Sphere.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 LITERARY AND 
 POLITICAL 
 
 BY 
 
 J. H. BALFOUR BROWNE, K.C. 
 
 LL.D., D.L., Etc. 
 
 LONDON 
 CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD 
 
 1917
 
 
 Printed in Great Britain
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 Early Recollections .... 
 
 I 
 
 11. 
 
 Early Ventures with a 'prentice Pen . 
 
 8 
 
 III. 
 
 Philosophy ...... 
 
 • 27 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Metempsychosis of Ideas 
 
 34 
 
 V. 
 
 Reading 
 
 . 44 
 
 VI. 
 
 Mrs. Leo Hunter 
 
 55 
 
 VII. 
 
 Geology 
 
 ■ 59 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Talk 
 
 . 67 
 
 IX. 
 
 Critics 
 
 74 
 
 X. 
 
 Novels Comfortable and Uncomfortable 
 
 79 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Pulpit 
 
 . 85 
 
 XII. 
 
 • The Play 's the Thing ' . . . . 
 
 • 93 
 
 XIII. 
 
 A Chapter in History 
 
 . lOI 
 
 XIV. 
 
 My Curiosities of Literature 
 
 . 115 
 
 XV. 
 
 Lectures ...... 
 
 . 121 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Conversation . . • . 
 
 129 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Mad Poets ...... 
 
 • 137 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Writing 
 
 . 143 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Books and Art 
 
 148 
 
 XX. 
 
 Miscellaneous Matters . . . . 
 
 . 156 
 
 XXI. 
 
 My Right to Write 
 
 189 
 
 XXll. 
 
 Laissez-faire ...... 
 
 196
 
 VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 Some Sayings 
 
 . 205 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 Land-taxers 
 
 . 213 
 
 XXV. 
 
 Some Political Gossip 
 
 . 221 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Herbert Spencer . . . . 
 
 . 229 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 About Politics and Parties 
 
 • 237 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 Nineteenth-century Politics 
 
 . 242 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 Humour at Elections . 
 
 . 246 
 
 XXX. 
 
 Some Men ..... 
 
 • 254 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 Politics and the Future 
 
 . 269 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 Thoroughness in Politics . 
 
 . 275 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 Socialism and Syndicalism . 
 
 . 279 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 Some Politicians 
 
 . 289 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 Some Stray Reminiscences . 
 
 . 296 
 
 
 Index 
 
 . 305
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 A. K. H. B. — The Recreations of a Country Parson — The recrea- 
 tions of a somewhat busy lawyer — Edinburgh University — Pro- 
 fessor Blackie — Edinburgh's pride in hospitals and monuments 
 — Blackie a picturesque monument — The way he taught Greek 
 — Argument with Ernest Jones — Lecture on ' Scottish Song ' — 
 The Pulpit and the Stage — Professor SeUar — At Kenbank — 
 Professor P. G. Tait, Recent Advances in Science. 
 
 A CERTAIN writer of the old time — forty years seems 
 so long ago — was known, as everything is in our days, 
 by initials, and signed himself A. K. H. B. He wrote 
 a book entitled The Recreations of a Country Parson. 
 I forget what the recreations were, but I believe 
 he amused himself with his pen, for I remember 
 reviewing, in those days, another book by him 
 called Changed Aspects of Unchanged Truths, which 
 was, in fact, a volume of sermons delivered in St. 
 Andrews, and which he had not courage enough to 
 publish under their proper name. And really the 
 ' changed aspects ' was only the name for the old 
 sermons which Dr. Boyd had already inflicted upon 
 his followers. But the title of the earlier work 
 attracted me — The Recreations of a Country Parson. 
 The recreation of a man who is busy in one way, 
 according to his calling, is to be busy in another way 
 according to his heart, and in a long life I have found 
 leisure too much for me, and have made holiday in 
 some kind of work I was not called upon to do. 
 It is upon the uncharted and perhaps forbidden
 
 2 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 excursions of children from the beaten path that they 
 find all the treasures, and I think it is upon these 
 divagations that I found as much of my pleasure as 
 I had a right to expect. But in a profession like the 
 law, a reputation for anything but law or glibness is 
 a misfortune to a man, and most of my recreations 
 have been strictly anonymous, and it is only now 
 that I can make partial confession to having been a 
 dabbler in literature. Even the recollection and 
 confession of my memories of these illicit doings 
 is not an unpleasant occupation for the * retired 
 leisure ' of one who has not learned the art of doing 
 nothing well. 
 
 When at the University of Edinburgh, I was a 
 member of Professor Blackie's Greek class. Edin- 
 burgh, to which Blackie came from Aberdeen, he 
 described as very * West endy and East windy,' and 
 I do not know which of these qualities is the most 
 repulsive. But Edinburgh, when it lost Blackie, 
 lost one of its most picturesque monuments. There 
 are two things that Edinburgh people used to be 
 proud of. Of course they were legitimately proud 
 of the Castle, the Calton Hill, and Salisbury Crags, 
 but they were less legitimately high-headed about 
 their hospitals and monuments. Of their hospitals, 
 Donaldson's is the decoration of a suburb, and George 
 Heriot's (the 'jingling Geordie ' of James i.) is the 
 proud possession of its heart. But the monuments 
 were its chief glory. There was Scott's in Princes 
 Street — a steeple without a church ; Nelson's on the 
 Calton Hill — an old-fashioned churn ; and the 
 National Monument on the same eminence, by which 
 the Modern Athens tried to imitate the capital of 
 Greece by erecting a ruin. But in justice to Edin- 
 burgh, it is fair to point out that it was its poverty,
 
 EARLY RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 and not its will, that consented to leave these ruins of 
 a building which was never built, as a monument of a 
 nation. When Emerson visited Carlyle at Craigen- 
 puttock, a farmhouse among the heathery hills of 
 Dunscore, Carlyle pointed out to his visitor a piece 
 of road near by which marked in its incompleteness 
 an abortive enterprise, and called it ' the grave of the 
 last sixpence.' But here, on the Calton Hill, you 
 have not only the grave of the last sixpence from 
 the penurious national purse, but the monument of 
 the grave. 
 
 But what I wanted to say was, that of all the 
 monuments of Edinburgh when I was a student 
 there, the most picturesque was John Stuart 
 Blackie, Professor of Greek in the University. He 
 had a fine, thin, living face, a bubbling, enthusi- 
 astic nature. He wore a plaid over his shoulders 
 and round his spare frame. A soft hat with a 
 broad brim thatched his rollicking head, and he 
 carried a stick with a silver knob. I have seen him 
 a hundred times strutting — he knew he was an 
 ornament — in Princes Street, always with admira- 
 tion. As to his merits as a teacher of Greek, I was 
 too careless a student to judge. But for the man I 
 had then very enthusiastic admiration. There is a 
 fine portrait of him — the grey hair seen beneath the 
 broad brim of his hat, a finger or two in the folds of 
 his plaid, and the silver-headed stick in his other 
 hand — by Sir George Reid, which will keep old 
 memories alive, and tell those who never saw him 
 that I was right in speaking of him as a monument. 
 Even the stick had a history. It had been left to 
 him by some admirer, and had the testator's crest 
 on the silver top of it. But the Inland Revenue 
 has vigilant eyes, and the Professor was summoned,
 
 4 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 if that is the right word, for using a crest without 
 having paid a guinea to a defrauded government. 
 That it was not his crest was the feeble plea which 
 was scouted by a discriminating bench, and the 
 Professor had to pay some penalty — I forget what 
 — for his loyalty to his old friend, the testator. 
 
 This is not the place to speak of his propaganda 
 in favour of better University education in Scotland, 
 or his views as to the proper way to pronounce Greek. 
 I cannot pass any opinion either upon his translation 
 of Goethe or ;Esch34us. The former was distinctly 
 
 * spirited.' Indeed, everything he did was spirited. 
 His discursive lectures on things in general to his 
 Greek classes effervesced. He was full of spirits, 
 which were always overflowing. He was a boy in 
 his age, and had never learned dignity. Once he 
 announced, by a written document on the door of 
 his classroom, that * Professor Blackie would be 
 unable to meet his classes to-day. ' A sprouting wit of 
 a student altered the intimation by striking out the 
 
 * c ' in classes, which left it that the Professor would 
 be unable to meet his * lasses ' to-day. But, as 
 Shakespeare says, Blackie knew a trick worth two 
 of that, and before he left he took out the * 1 ' and 
 left the announcement that he was unable to meet 
 his ' asses.' He wrote much, even poetry, which 
 was excellent, but not quite poetry. While I was 
 a member of his class he challenged Mr. Ernest Jones, 
 the Chartist, to a public discussion on Democracy. 
 It was to take place in the Music Hall in Edinburgh, 
 not an inappropriate place, on two consecutive 
 nights. I went, and there were many other students 
 present who decided which of the two debaters had 
 the best of it by their political convictions, and not 
 by their judicial faculties, if they had any. The
 
 EARLY RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 noise was excellent. I forget now, if I knew then, 
 which really had the best of the argument, but I 
 know which should have had the best of it. 
 
 On another occasion the Professor was lecturing 
 at Stirling on ' Scottish Song,' and said some quite 
 true and some excellent things about the ' bubbling 
 well of Scottish song ' into which he dipped his can. 
 In the course of it he sang many songs, and said, 
 * Scotland was powerful in songs, sermons, and 
 shillings — songs as represented by Burns, sermons 
 by Chalmers and Guthrie, and shillings by Adam 
 Smith ' — and at the end he read * A man 's a man for 
 a' that ' ' with great birr.' At the close of which the 
 newspaper report has it : * To the immense delight of 
 the audience he hugged the Provost in exemplifica- 
 tion of Burns's prediction that " man to man, the 
 warld o'er, shall brothers be for a' that," and sat 
 down amidst roars of laughter and loud applause.' 
 
 There, as some would think, you have Blackie 
 at his best. But, like the Scotsman, * I have my 
 doubts.' Some men who believe that genius and 
 eccentricity are closely allied rather affect the latter 
 with a view to a reputation for the former. One 
 cannot quite acquit Blackie if such a charge were 
 preferred against his memory. Thus, in his Greek 
 class, we found after a mention of Aristophanes, 
 and after calling ' Punch ' the British Aristophanes, 
 he went into a defence of the Stage against the 
 Pulpit, and made copious comments on Sir Henry 
 Irving in Hamlet and The Bells. 
 
 Here is some of his teaching of Greek : ' I wish to 
 say here from this chair publicly, what I have often 
 said privately to distinguished members of the 
 clerical profession, that I have much oftener felt the 
 gracious tear-drop of human sympathy and devout
 
 6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 pity drawn from my eyes by the vivid impersonations 
 of the stage than by the most fervid appeals of 
 eloquence ever delivered from the Scottish pulpit.' 
 
 This is all well in its way, but it is a long way 
 from Liddell and Scott. Indeed Blackie was more 
 like a beacon fire than a professor in a dignified 
 chair. 
 
 Professor Sellar, who was Professor of Humanity 
 at the same time, was very much of a professor and 
 a scholar. I was a member of his class, and learned 
 a little in it, but there was nothing there as in 
 Blackie's class to set a light to random enthusiasm. 
 He succeeded in the chair Professor Pillans, whose 
 fame rests on his having been mentioned by Byron 
 in English Bards and Scottish Reviewers when he 
 said : 
 
 ' And paltry Pillans can traduce a friend.' 
 
 A good many years after I had left his class I had 
 a cottage for the autumn months in St. John's Town 
 of Dairy, in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, and 
 found Professor Sellar making holiday in his pictur- 
 esque autumn home at Kenbank. He was kind 
 enough to ask me to dinner. It was not 1 but Dr. 
 Gunion Rutherford, the Headmaster of Westminster 
 School, who made the cruel and, as far as I know, 
 utterly unjustifiable conundrum : * Why is Ken- 
 bank like a Catholic church ? ' And the answer 
 was, * Because there you can see the host elevated.' 
 See how these scholars love one another. 
 
 Tait — Peter Guthrie Tait — was Senior Wrangler, 
 and in my day was Professor of Natural Philosophy 
 in the University of Edinburgh. He was joint- 
 author with Thomson (Lord Kelvin afterwards) of 
 Thomson and Tait. He was a big man, and the
 
 EARLY RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 attics of his head overbore the other storeys in his 
 face. His subject was full of interest for young 
 people — like Christmas lectures at the Royal Insti- 
 tution — for the young are always interested in some- 
 thing going on, and an experiment is to them the 
 next best thing to a conjuring trick. He was good 
 enough to give me a prize for an essay on 'The 
 Conservation of Energy in the Cosmical Phenomena ' 
 (the title was worth the money), and I afterwards, 
 in 1877, reviewed a book of his, Lectures on Recent 
 Advances in Scie?ice, for the Times, 
 
 Professor A. C. Fraser, David Masson, and Patrick 
 MacDougall were also my teachers while I was at the 
 University of Edinburgh, but I have mentioned all 
 these with respect elsewhere.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 
 
 ' A College Magazine ' — Stevenson's essay — The University 
 Magazine of 1 866 — First and last number — Story for a bazaar — 
 Many writings ' returned with thanks ' — The desire of all the 
 young to write — A writing-master poet — My early efforts at 
 poetry, Mr. George GiLfiUan on — Volume pubUshed in 1880 
 noticed by Professor Nichol — Temptations to give up the plodding 
 professions — Long waiting for practice at the Bar — Reviewing 
 novels for the Morning Post — Invited to become a dramatic 
 critic in a small way — Dinners in Hall — Sir Lauder Brunton and 
 Sir David Ferrier — A spiritualistic seance — Ferrier's Localisa- 
 tion of the Functions of the Brain — Mr. and Mrs. Holmes — Sir 
 T. Wemyss Reid — The Leeds Mercury — Dinner at Headingly — 
 James Hannay — Descendant of Joseph Addison — ' Special Wire' 
 Sir W. Harcourt, the Solicitor-General — Articles on the Royal 
 Academy — Wemyss Reid on ' Charlotte Bronte ' — Letter from 
 Wemyss Reid as to Charlotte Bronte and the Brussels episode — 
 Writing law-books — The regulation of railways — Filing the 
 Times — Wrote for the Titnes — The law of railways — Legal 
 writings not literature — Baron Martin on Shakespeare — Wrote 
 for Law Magazine, Westminster Review, British Quarterly — In 
 1880, volume of poems; 1885, volume of prose poems. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Memories and 
 Portraits, has one of his delightful rambling essays 
 under the heading of * A College Magazine,' in which 
 he tells how he and two other students, one of whom 
 was Robert Glasgow Brown, an aspiring youth of 
 whom I had a glimpse or two afterwards in London, 
 started a college magazine which lived for four 
 struggling months and then died in some financial 
 convulsions. He has, in the same volume, re-edited 
 and reproduced one of the articles from that abortive
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 9 
 
 periodical. He says he had, even when exalted by 
 the thought of being a joint-editor of the thing, an 
 impression that it would be a fiasco. But he might 
 have had more assurance from experience, for in my 
 day — and that was before Stevenson's — there had 
 been a University magazine started which found it 
 impossible to attain a longevity even of four brilliant 
 months, but almost died in its birth with the first 
 number. I am perhaps to some extent responsible 
 for the death of that innocent little magazine in 
 grey (not in yellow, like Stevenson's), for I contri- 
 buted a story which was begun in the first number 
 and was to be finished in the second. But the second, 
 alas ! never saw the light. Still, it is quite possible 
 that the unpublished part of ' Charlie Sulley ' had 
 as much vogue as the chapters which were printed, 
 which I fear no one ever read but myself. That 
 falling star of a magazine flashed across our zenith 
 in March 1866. It was almost the first time I had 
 seen my writings in print, and, although like Touch- 
 stone's ^w^r^y, it was a ' poor thing,' it was * my own.' 
 My next venture into fiction, for it was in fiction 
 that I was determined to excel, was in connection 
 with a bazaar. I wrote and had printed a small 
 story entitled How I went to a Bazaar, which was 
 to be sold for the benefit of the particular school in 
 connection with which the bazaar was being held 
 in the Music Hall in Edinburgh. It was hawked 
 about at sixpence a copy amongst the people who 
 were fingering the wool or beadwork in the various 
 ' stalls,' and who thought, as they always do at 
 bazaars, that the articles had been marked at ridi- 
 culously high prices. But I am not at all convinced 
 that any one bought a copy, and if any one did, it 
 would probably have confirmed them in their opinion
 
 10 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 as to the exorbitant charges, if they paid sixpence for 
 that Httle pink rubbish of a book. Still, although 
 when the printer's bill came to be settled I believe 
 that the school did not profit much by my literary 
 effort, I think perhaps I did. A boy's ambition 
 requires some encouragement, and even fiascos teach. 
 
 But although these were my first printed works, I 
 had written much which was still left in the safety of 
 manuscript, and like some of the other things I wrote, 
 and which editors forgot to 'return with thanks,' 
 these have, no doubt, found their way into that 
 Cloaca Maxima of literature, the waste-paper basket. 
 
 But every one wished to be literary in these my 
 young days. There is a question in the Bible, ' What 
 went ye out for to see : a reed shaken by the wind ? ' 
 All the dubs in my young days were surrounded by 
 vocal reeds. Every twig screeched. I had a 
 writing-master once who was my guide to ' pot- 
 hooks and hangers,' who wrote and published at 
 his own expense a volume of poems. I, perhaps 
 luckily, have no memory of them now, and probably 
 laughed at them when I read them. But I have 
 become more tolerant of these hedge-birds, who, if 
 they do not sing for your delight, twitter for their 
 own harmless amusement. Well, I aspired to 
 twitter, but I fear I inflicted my raw strains upon 
 some kind and indulgent people. I know my first 
 attempts were read by Thomas Aird, and I found 
 lately a letter from George GilfiUan, who had some 
 reputation as a writer in my youth, which shows 
 that I had inflicted these * tunings up ' upon his 
 kindness. He wrote : 
 
 Dundee, i6th August 1870. 
 
 There is much pleasant matter in Mr. Browne's poems. 
 Many fine fancies. Some very tolerable wit in the epigrams,
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN ii 
 
 and a general freshness and vivacity in the whole produc- 
 tion. I do not, however, think a volume composed of 
 these verses would succeed. ' Columbus,' the longest, is the 
 least of the poems, and is scarcely up to the subject. For 
 the rest, as Scott says, ' Your fugitive verses often become 
 stagnancy with the public' Mr. Browne has excellent 
 powers, and should do something much better and weightier 
 than anything in these poems. 
 
 George Gilfillan. 
 
 I suppressed these * poems ' according to this 
 excellent advice, and I don't know whether I did 
 anything ' better or weightier,' but no verses of mine 
 saw the Hght until 1880, when Messrs. Maclehose 
 published a volume of my poems, which were, by the 
 way, too much praised by Professor Nichol — himself 
 a poet, and Professor in the University of Glasgow — 
 in his review of the book in the Glasgow Herald. 
 If you wait long enough you can become a critic 
 even of your own works. 
 
 There are a great many temptations to a young 
 man to give up one of the plodding professions, in 
 which success even if attained comes very slowly, for 
 literature, where, in the imagination at least of the 
 aspirant, the returns are as quick as in a ready- 
 money business. Even when I was reading for the 
 Bar, I learned that the probationary period was so 
 long that it had wearied out some stalwart fellows. 
 It was said and believed that Bramwell, afterwards 
 Baron, and ultimately Lord Bramwell, had done 
 nothing at the Bar for seven years — as long as some 
 one in the Bible served for a wife, only to be cheated 
 in the end — and we believed that Herschel found 
 success so slow to come to him that he thought of 
 leaving the country and carrying his undoubted 
 talents and piercing eyes into one of the colonies. 
 There were dozens of discouragements for a youth
 
 12 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 on the steps of the Law Courts. Indeed I was not 
 even on the steps yet, but only in the street leading 
 to them. 1 was reading in the chambers of a man 
 in Lincoln's Inn — an excellent, thin man with a 
 red-brick complexion which looked blue in winter, 
 and belied his abstemious habits — or I was attend- 
 ing lectures on law by withered sticks of lawyers 
 and, of course, keeping my terms by eating my 
 dinners. 
 
 Under these rather unhopeful circumstances some 
 one was good enough to introduce me to a Mr. 
 Dumphy, who was, I think, the literary editor of 
 the Morning Post, at that time an aristocratic three- 
 penny paper, holding its head high in the presence 
 of canaille penny ones. He asked me to review 
 books for him, and I think my assent to his pro- 
 posal was probably eager. I had a bundle of novels 
 — they were mostly in three volumes in those days — 
 given me to review, and I was to write a column 
 about each of them without having the easy resource 
 of sketching the plot. The books took some reading, 
 for I was a novice at the art and could not make 
 up my mind as to the merit of a novel, as some old 
 hands could, without reading it. I knew there was 
 a saying that you don't need to eat the whole leg 
 of mutton to find out the taste of it. But as yet I 
 had a conscience, and I read the books and then 
 wrote my columns. It took me two hours to write 
 enough to fill a column, and the remuneration (it is 
 so long ago I suppose there is no harm in mention- 
 ing it) was ten shillings a column. 
 
 Well, although the pay was poverty-stricken, I 
 was ' in literature ' and reviewing books. I forget 
 most of the books that passed through my scath- 
 ing hands, but I remember amongst them were
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 13 
 
 William Black's lit Silk Attire and Wilkie Collins's 
 Moonstone, and I continued to write for the Morning 
 Post for some time. Then came another great 
 temptation. It seemed to be my fate to be a writer 
 or journalist instead of a lawyer. I was asked by 
 Mr. Dumphy if I would undertake the duty of 
 dramatic critic and notice some or one of the panto- 
 mimes. To be in touch with books is something 
 to a youth, to be in touch with the stage, even the 
 stage which is filled with Clown and Columbine, and 
 Pantaloon and the red-hot poker, is far more. But 
 to undertake the work I would have had to remain 
 in London over Christmas. I think the production 
 to be noticed was a Boxing-day spectacle, and I was 
 unwilling to give up my Christmas vacation, and I 
 reluctantly declined. I never became, therefore, 
 a dramatic critic, although some time after that I 
 wrote some articles on Sir Henry Irving's acting for 
 some semi-scientific periodical. 'Well,' as one con- 
 tented man said, 'thank God for your misfortunes.' 
 I am rather glad now that these invitations into 
 literature — if journalism is literature, which I 
 doubt — failed to capture me for the service of the 
 servant pen. 
 
 One of the advantages of the continuance of the 
 old system of qualifications for Call to the Bar by 
 the keeping of terms, and the dining in the Hall of 
 the Inn of Court to which the student belongs, was 
 that in the social intercourse in Hall men learned 
 from their fellows more than they did from the 
 lectures. Besides one learned in Hall, in conversa- 
 tion, pleasantly ; while one learned, say, from the 
 learned author of Legal Maxims, in a lumbering and 
 reluctant way, what was necessary to equipment for 
 the profession.
 
 14 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Of course the conversation at dinners in Hall was 
 not confined to legal subjects. The theatres came 
 in for their share of lingual patronage, but the 
 conversations which were most instructive were 
 those in which some point of law or practice, some 
 case, or some legal luminary was freely discussed, and 
 some of the great lawyers who walked up the Hall 
 to the Benchers' table would have had ringing ears 
 if they could have overheard our criticisms of their 
 merits or failings. But I had from the first set my 
 face against becoming a lawyer and nothing but a 
 lawyer, and I entertained the idea that a man should 
 be an all-round man, not like some of the dried ferns 
 in a herbarium, which are flattened out into thin 
 dry layers. I have known some of these withered 
 things. With the view of keeping in touch with 
 other aspects of life than those which are to be 
 gathered from The Leading Cases or The Law of 
 Evidence, I still kept my friendship, which had 
 begun at the University, with Lauder Brunton and 
 David Ferrier. At that time they were living 
 together, behind their brass plates in Somerset 
 Street, Portman Square, and I saw a good deal of 
 them and profited b}^ their friendship, and I have 
 always retained the respect and admiration I then 
 formed for both these distinguished members of the 
 medical profession. Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton 
 was in the class of Medical Jurisprudence in the Uni- 
 versity of Edinburgh with me. He was a soft-spoken, 
 hard-working little man, with an excellent scientific 
 curiosity ; Sir David Ferrier was a dapper, perky 
 man, with some deserved confidence in himself, and 
 just a pleasant touch of the tongue of his native 
 Aberdeen in his English. He made early a great 
 reputation by his work on the localisation of the
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 15 
 
 functions of the brain, which was the handbook of 
 a sort of internal phrenology ; for while Gall and 
 Spurzheim judged of everything in character by 
 the bone dome, Ferrier found that the various 
 functions were connected with certain regions in the 
 brain and certain convolutions. His earliest experi- 
 ments with the electrodes on the brains of animals, 
 like cats or rabbits — work which made the hair of 
 certain anti-vivisectionists stand on end — were made 
 at the West Riding Asylum at Wakefield, while Sir 
 James Crichton-Browne was Medical Director, and 
 I happened to be my brother's guest at the time. 
 I remember well the scientific enthusiasm when, 
 in answer to the electric stimulus, a cat, we will 
 say, ' wagged its left ear,' a thing which Lord 
 Dundreary, a stage figure of the long ago, could not 
 do. His Functions of the Brain and Localisation 
 of Cerebral Disease all came from the wagging of a 
 tail in answer to the electric stimulus applied to some 
 particular convolution. But it was before he was 
 famous that we had those remarkable evenings in 
 Somerset Street, on which I look back with regret- 
 ful pleasure — pleasure because their pleasure is re- 
 flected in memory, and regret because those great 
 days come again no more. 
 
 On one occasion Brunton, Ferrier, and I were of 
 a party to see and hear certain spiritualistic mani- 
 festations of a Mr. and Mrs. Holmes in Quebec 
 Street. I do not think that this was the Mr. Holmes 
 who floated out of one window in Victoria Street 
 and in at another, according to veracious witnesses, 
 and some of whose utterances were referred to by 
 Browning as a vomit of lies. Of that Mr. Holmes, 
 Dr. Harrington Tuke, a feathery sort of a man, with 
 side-whiskers, and a merry face wrinkling into a
 
 i6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 smile, wrote when he married another medium, 
 Miss Gloomihne, thus : 
 
 ' Shall I wed ? ' asked the maid 
 
 Of the spirits so rappy. 
 They replied, ' Quit your gloomy line ; 
 
 Make your Home happy.' 
 
 But we had real amusement at the stance in 
 Quebec Street, and fooled the medium up to the top 
 of his bent. We acted well, and while the spirits 
 whose faces we saw, and the tambourines which 
 floated in the darkened room, did not impress us, I 
 think we impressed the spiritualists with the idea 
 that we were credulous dupes. If I mistake not, 
 Ferrier and I concocted a true account of these trick 
 manufacturers for some journal. 
 
 Lauder Brunton, who only died in September last, 
 was a South Country Scotsman, and was one of the 
 physicians to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1889 
 the Nizam asked him to Haidarabad to conduct 
 experiments to elucidate the occasionally fatal 
 results of chloroform inhalation. Here the number 
 of pariah dogs was diminished during his visit, and his 
 report was a good deal barked at when he came home. 
 I have his great work on Materia Medica and Thera- 
 peutics which he presented to me, and although I 
 have not consulted it much, whenever there was any 
 serious illness in my family I consulted him. The 
 existence of such a man gave to me a confidence in 
 the medical profession which perhaps it does not 
 deserve. But it should be a laudable ambition to 
 live up to such a standard of personal worth and pro- 
 fessional excellence as Lauder Brunton set for his 
 colleagues. When he died I lost a friend. 
 
 It was about this time that I came to know Sir 
 T. Wemyss Reid well. He was editor of the Leeds
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 17 
 
 Mercury when first I knew him. He was a Httle, 
 thick-set man, with a soft voice with a sHght 
 burr in it, but with a quick fair mind behind his 
 not distinguished face. We were friends from 
 those early days, although we saw less of one 
 another in later times than I would have liked. 
 But our separate professional walks took our steps 
 farther and farther from the road of companion- 
 ship. I remember I dined with him at Headingly, 
 near Leeds, where he was then living. Carlyle 
 somewhere points out that the boatmen on the 
 Norfolk rivers still have a word for the storm 
 or bore, ' Aegir/ which is only a corruption of the 
 name of the Storm-god of the Scandinavians (I am 
 quoting from memory, for the ' General Index ' to 
 his Works did not help me to find it), and he finely 
 describes it as the peak of a submerged world. Well, 
 that dinner at Headingly is the peak of a submerged 
 world of hospitality. I do not quite remember 
 who were the guests. I think that a Rev. Mr. 
 Carpenter, a son of the physiologist, was one ; my 
 brother, Sir James Crichton-Browne, was another; 
 but I do not know who the other guests were. As 
 for dinner, I don't know what we had to eat or drink, 
 but I know that we had two or three hours' talk, and 
 it sparkled more than the wine. It is not often that 
 ball-and-socket men come together, but when they 
 do they fit, and it is an occasion. I have remem- 
 bered that night, not to write it down, like Christo- 
 pher North in his Nodes, but to treasure as an 
 example of what society can be when it is at 
 its best. Wemyss Reid told a story of James 
 Hannay, the author of a forgotten novel, Singleto?i 
 Fontenoy, and who was, or had been, editor of the 
 Edinburgh Courant, and on one occasion contested 
 
 B
 
 i8 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the Dumfries Burghs with Mr. Ewart (Capital 
 Punishment Ewart), the name-father of Gladstone. 
 According to Wemyss Reid, Hannay was rather an 
 authority upon genealogies, or the roots of families. 
 When he, Wemyss Reid, and some others were 
 dining at some restaurant in the city — I like to think 
 it was the old Cock in Fleet Street — and had been 
 talking literature — for literature is an open fob into 
 which any pick-purse can dip his hand — a gentle- 
 man who was sitting at another table approached and 
 said, * Gentlemen, I have overheard accidentally some 
 of your conversation, and have been very much inter- 
 ested. I have the more confidence in joining you 
 because I am a lineal descendant of Joseph Addison.' 
 
 * Sir,' said Hannay, his knowledge of history now 
 standing him in some stead, * Sir, Joseph Addison 
 had one daughter and she was an idiot, which I admit 
 gives plausibility to your story ; but as she died 
 before the age of puberty, it must be a bloody lie ! ' 
 
 I think the port at the Cock, if it was the Cock, 
 must have been cheap. 
 
 Soon after the dinner at Headingly, Wemyss Reid 
 wrote to me and said he wished to have some talk 
 with me, and he came and lunched with me at the 
 Junior Athenaeum Club, which overlooks the Green 
 Park — but has suffered from a good many climac- 
 terics, which are called ' Whips,' in its somewhat 
 precarious career. What he wanted was that I 
 should become a * Special Wire,' I think it was called, 
 for the Leeds Mercury. It was a time before my 
 clients had found me out, and as I was living and 
 waiting to be discovered in the Temple, I was 
 pleased to accept his invitation. 
 
 A Special Wire is the green net of the ento- 
 mologists for the butterflies of gossip. He catches
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN ig 
 
 some fluttering rumour, and he pins it with a para- 
 graph and sends it down to the provincial paper, 
 and there it is in their glass-case museum the next 
 morning. I really thought it a very pleasant 
 occupation, but it was one of the temptations to 
 journalism which might have diverted me to that 
 tangled path from the high road of my profession. 
 A Special Wire in these days picked up some piece of 
 information at the Courts at Westminster, at the 
 Club, or in such society as he happened to have a 
 casual entrance to, and then he went and wrote a 
 few lines and took them to the London office in 
 Fleet Street before midnight, and away went the 
 * mot ' over the wire, and one was as proud as Punch 
 of having a part, however small, in the great machin- 
 ery of the Press. Perhaps one felt a little mean 
 sometimes, when one had got possession of some 
 political or literary secret, to go and whisper it, not 
 in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul's, but of the 
 Press. But one's conscience soon gets reconciled to 
 being a kind of detective and getting ten shillings 
 and sixpence for a paragraph, when some one had 
 relied upon one's reticence and had trusted one with 
 information which was probably quite untrue ! I 
 remember one triumph in my capacity as a Special 
 Wire. I met at dinner, or at an * At Home,' a lady 
 whose husband was ' in the running ' for the office 
 of Solicitor-General. She told me that night that 
 Sir William Harcourt was appointed to the office, 
 and she was angry with the Government for having 
 overlooked her husband's better claims. The Leeds 
 Mercury the next morning had the news. About 
 the same time I had a note from my informant 
 saying that she found she had made a mistake, and 
 that Sir William had not been appointed. That
 
 20 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 rather ' short-circuited ' the Special Wire, but there 
 was nothing to be done. It would not do to con- 
 tradict a Special Wire without derogating from his 
 reputation for omniscience. But luck was on my 
 side that time, for three days afterwards Sir William 
 Harcourt was made Solicitor-General, and, as you 
 see, the Leeds Mercury was the very first to know 
 the important legal secret ! 
 
 Wemyss Reid, too, put another temptation in my 
 way to desert the law for letters, for he got me to 
 write the Leeds Mercury articles on the Royal 
 Academy, and I did that for about four years. I 
 liked the work. I always dabbled or daubed with 
 paint, and I thought I knew what Art was. At that 
 time I had not, as I have since, made a small collec- 
 tion of the pictures of contemporary artists. There 
 was nothing then to convict me of deplorable ignor- 
 ance of art and want of taste, as some of my friends 
 may think my walls do now, and I wrote my articles 
 with a confidence which perhaps convinced the artists 
 themselves. I am certain it did when I praised. But 
 in these early days the impressionism kept within 
 bounds, and the futurism was for the future. 
 
 In 1877 Wemyss Reid wrote a Monograph on 
 Charlotte Bronte. I think at that time he was just 
 about to leave Leeds and become editor of the 
 Speaker, and managing director, if that is the right 
 title, for Messrs. Cassell and Co. When he came to 
 London we were near neighbours for two or three 
 years in Bramham Gardens. But, as I say, he was 
 still at Leeds when his Monograph and Swinburne's 
 Note on Charlotte Bronte appeared. I was at that time 
 writing articles for the Westminster Review, and I 
 was asked to review these two books upon a woman 
 who had a heart of fire under the hodden-grey dress
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 21 
 
 of a governess. I have not looked again at the 
 article, which was republished in my Literary Essays 
 in 1907, but I have here an interesting letter from 
 Wemyss Reid, which is worth quoting : 
 
 'Mercury' Office, 
 
 Leeds, Nov. 2, 1877. 
 
 My dear Balfour-Browne, — I wish I had the chance 
 of a quiet talk with you, and I should then be able to tell 
 you all I have to say about C. B., much more easily and 
 satisfactorily than I can do now. My book turns upon what 
 some of the intelligent reviewers have been good enough to 
 dub ' the Brussels mystery.' The Spectator (I think) and 
 an ass (whom you may possibly know) called R. Orme 
 Masson, in the Academy, have been very bitter because I 
 did not tell the whole truth about Charlotte's residence in 
 Brussels. But how could I, whilst her husband still lives 
 and favours me wdth an occasional letter of by no means 
 an amicable kind ? Now I '11 tell you the ' truth ' — it isn't 
 very much after all, and I '11 trust you to deal discreetly 
 and gently with it. C. B. went to Brussels quite heart- 
 whole. As a schoolgirl she had seen a certain rough 
 Yorkshire squireen whose name has never been mentioned 
 either by Mrs. Gaskell or myself, and from him she had 
 painted Rochester. This person had unquestionably 
 attracted her fancy as a schoolgirl, but never her love, and 
 long before she wrote Jane Eyre I find passages in her 
 letters in which she refers to him in a half-contemptuous 
 way, speaking as freely of his faults as of those of any other 
 of her acquaintances. Thus this is not to be counted a love 
 affair. She had made an ideal hero of the gruff Yorkshire- 
 man, whom at school and in Jane Eyre she worked back to 
 that ideal, while fully conscious of the fact that her ideas 
 were founded on a delusion. But at Brussels everything 
 was changed. There she met her master. I am not enough 
 of an amateur of hearts to say whether it was exactly a 
 state of love into which she fell, but she was undoubtedly 
 fascinated and spellbound, owned herself under the influence 
 of a ' superior spirit ' (Good heavens ! what blunders women 
 make in that subject), and passed through all that half- 
 painful, half-delicious state of struggling bondage which 
 she pictures in the story of Lucy Snowe.j^^Now for the
 
 22 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 ' mystery.' This man was married ; he was also her school- 
 master, and he was the husband of that Madame Heger who, 
 of course under an assumed name, figures in so disagreeable 
 a light in Villette. Now, do you see what a painful time 
 that must have been at Brussels. Charlotte, perfectly 
 pure in mind and heart, and yet captive to a clever, shrewd, 
 eccentric man, the Paul Emanuel of the picture ; dogged 
 day and night by a jealous, lying, unscrupulous old Belgian 
 woman, forced to feed upon herself for she had no confidante 
 until after her return to England (' I cannot write what I 
 want to say,' she cries in one of her letters), and debarred 
 from every social pleasure, went through a perfect agony of 
 suffering during those dark years. She returned to 
 Haworth a changed and disillusioned woman. Up to that 
 time she had not been the Charlotte Bronte of Mrs. Gaskell's 
 book, but after that period she was. I have evidently 
 failed to convey what I wished to do in my monograph, for 
 I cannot conceive any ordinary critics being so dull as not 
 to see the truth, if it was even hinted at. So I suppose I 
 have led the whole brotherhood off on a wrong tack. But 
 the truth was she went back to Haworth very unwillingly, 
 with her heart still captive at Brussels, and with the strongest 
 distaste for that dull monotonous life to which she felt 
 herself doomed. Her brother's fall produced not pity but 
 loathing and contempt in her heart ; it was not that which 
 drove her to find relief in song first and afterwards in fiction, 
 but the burden of pain she had brought back from Belgium, 
 and from which she was never henceforth to be free. One 
 other real love affair she had in her life. It was, strange to 
 say, with the original of ' Dr. John.' But she did not meet 
 him till years after the Brussels experience ; not indeed 
 until Jane Eyre was published and she had become famous. 
 He was younger than herself ; admired her, perhaps even 
 loved her; and she owned that she could love him. But 
 her common sense, assisted by ' Dr. John's ' mother, who 
 dreaded the idea of such a union, came to the rescue, and 
 she quietly put her good-looking and prosperous adorer 
 aside. Her marriage at last was brought about through a 
 sheer revolt against her father's injustice. She disliked 
 Mr. NichoUs, until indignation and pity compelled her to 
 make his cause her own. And then, a pale, broken-down, 
 disillusioned woman, out of whose life all the flavour had 
 gone, she married him — and died. I don't know that there
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 23 
 
 is anything new in this ; but still it may guide you to some 
 new lights in reading my book and Mrs. Gaskell's. 
 
 Let me give you two little hints which have just come to 
 me across the Atlantic, from Dr. Collyer, the great Unitarian 
 preacher in Chicago, who was an Ilkley boy. He tells me 
 that in his childhood there was a saying used by the shepherds 
 on the hills, to any friend who was in circumstances of the 
 greatest perplexity and difficulty : ' Thaa mun do as 
 they do at Haworth ; do as thaa can.' Isn't that capital 
 as a motto for the lives of the Brontes ? Perplexed and 
 baffled at all points, they ' did as they could.' Next Dr. C. 
 says that Haworth in those days had one redeeming feature, 
 a splendid peal of bells which were famous in all the country- 
 side, and to which as a boy he would listen on a Sunday 
 morning from the crest of Ilkley moor. He suggests that 
 the no7n de flume of the sisters ' Bell ' was taken from this 
 one good thing in Haworth. I am disposed to think it 
 quite possible. Forgive me for not telling you more ; but 
 if you come across anything you would like to ask me a 
 question about, do not fail to do so, and I '11 answer to 
 the best of my ability'. I dare say you would notice The 
 Times review of this morning. It is a very kind one. — 
 Yours ever, T. Wemyss Reid. 
 
 Wemyss Reid wrote a novel ; I forget its name, 
 and I don't think he cared to remember it, but his 
 biographies of W. E. Forster (1888), and Lord 
 Houghton (1889), and Gladstone (1899) are all 
 excellent. I knew well a brother of Sir T. Wemyss 
 Reid, who was the General Manager of what was 
 then called the Dubhn, Wicklow, and Wexford Rail- 
 way Company, a man somewhat like his literary 
 brother, and of real abihty and attractive personality. 
 
 But I must make shorter work of my recollections 
 of these early attempts at literature. About 1870 
 I wrote, and had published by Messrs. Chapman and 
 Hall, two novels, and about the same time another 
 story by me was published — and paid for — by Messrs. 
 H. S. King and Co. — and went to a second edition,
 
 24 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 But in 1874 I began to have some practice at the 
 Bar, and although I have never in all these years 
 dried my pen, the duties of a taskmaster profession 
 made it impossible for me to devote much time to 
 writing. In 1871 I wrote a book on The Law of 
 Carriers, but a law-book is not literature, and the 
 book was, I believe, the reason of my being appointed 
 secretary to the Railway Commission in 1874. The 
 Railway Commissioners in those days had very 
 little to do. The Court had been established to 
 regulate railways, as it was called, and from the very 
 small number of cases which then and since have 
 come before that august tribunal, it would seem as 
 if railways did not require regulation, and that a 
 grumbling public did not want this new-fangled 
 tribunal to do anything for them. As the office 
 hours were ten to five, and as there was little real 
 public duty to be performed by the secretary and 
 the chief clerk (we called him chief clerk for 
 the dignity it lent him, for there was only one), 
 except to file the Times, I would have had ample 
 time, as many other Government servants have, to 
 devote myself to the pen, had it not been for my 
 growing practice at the Bar. It was in those years 
 that I wrote a good many articles for the Times, 
 during the time that Mr. Chenery was editor ; one 
 or two of these have been republished. At the 
 same time I wrote law-books on the Law of Rating, 
 and, in conjunction with Mr. Theobald, now a 
 Master in Lunacy, a work on the Law of Railways, 
 which — I have no pride in this compilation, which is 
 only a record of assiduous work— I may call a standard 
 work. I have already tried to distinguish between 
 such writing and literature. Indeed, such mere 
 writing, which demands nothing but accuracy, is the
 
 EARLY VENTURES WITH A 'PRENTICE PEN 25 
 
 crudest, although a useful form of transcription. 
 Journalism, which does not make such a demand 
 on accuracy, and is a production which is for the 
 day, is perhaps a little higher in the scale of evolu- 
 tion. But literature, where imagination holds the 
 pen, and the thought is plaited with feeling, is the 
 last word in the ascent of expression. The differ- 
 ence is well illustrated by a story of the late 
 Baron Martin, a bluff lawyer who, when on circuit 
 with a brother judge, admitted that he had never 
 read Shakespeare. His colleague had a Shakespeare 
 with him, and lent it to the judge, recommending 
 to his notice Romeo and Juliet. The Baron tucked 
 the book under his arm and went to bed. When he 
 came down the next morning he was asked what he 
 thought of the play, and he said, * I don't believe a 
 word of it ' ! But the same learned judge was not 
 quite accurate in his own language, for once, when 
 sentencing a man who had been convicted of sheep- 
 stealing, he said : ' My man, if you had been tried 
 for this eighty years ago, you would have been hung 
 to-morrow morning.' 
 
 But although my hands were now pretty full of 
 briefs, I still found time to write a good many 
 articles for the Westminster Review, the British 
 Quarterly, and the Law Magazine, until I found that 
 the blue pencil which marks briefs and papers ousted 
 for a time what used to be called the pohte pen from 
 between my thumb and forefinger. And it was only 
 occasionally that I could still keep up a left-handed 
 connection with literature. It was in 1880 that 
 Messrs. Maclehose published a volume of what I 
 called my poems, and in 1885 that Messrs. Longmans, 
 Green and Co. pubHshed a small volume of, I don't 
 know what to call them — essaylets, prose poems,
 
 26 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 what you will ; but these books have long been out 
 of print, and have passed into the oblivion which I 
 have no doubt — as they did not touch the public 
 taste — they deserved. I write these guarded con- 
 fessions not to advertise these dead and buried 
 productions, but to show you that even while devot- 
 ing myself strenuously — none of my clients will 
 quarrel with the use of that word — to my arduous 
 profession (of which I have spoken elsewhere), I 
 still had occasional dealings, if not with the Muses, 
 with some of their poor understudies. But all my 
 work was anonymous, for there was a tradition at 
 the Bar that solicitors were suspicious of counsel 
 who wrote, and that they have an idea that a man 
 cannot serve God and Mammon ; but whether it is 
 the law that is God, and literature that is Mammon, 
 I am unable to say. During the greater part of the 
 time I was at the Bar, although I published many 
 books, none of them appeared under my own name, 
 and it was not until I was preparing to turn my back 
 on my profession, and to try my hand at politics, 
 that I published any books under my own name ; 
 and as these had a left-handed connection with 
 politics, and were intended to impress what used to 
 be called free and independent electors, of course 
 they were published without the disguise of anony- 
 mity. I think it still well to remain reticent as to 
 these works of purer — shall I call it literature, which 
 were published without a name, and as to those which 
 had my name on the title-page, these will be referred 
 to in their proper place. I remembered with refer- 
 ence to these the worldly-wise advice of a father to 
 his son who was going out into the world : * My son, 
 be spoken of ; well, if you can, but be spoken of/
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Philosophy and doubt — Metaphysics — Two of my teachers : 
 Professor MacDougall and Professor A. C. Fraser — Works of 
 Berkeley — Prize in his class — Dugald Stewart, Reid, Hamilton 
 and Brown — The Scottish Philosophy of ' common-sense ' — 
 Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysics — Bishop Berkeley — Hume — 
 Spinoza — Kant — Schwegler — Hutchinson Stirhng — Hegel — 
 Philosophical essays — Letter from Hutchinson Stirling. 
 
 ' Philosophy, when superficially studied/ according 
 to Bacon, ' excites doubt ; when thoroughly ex- 
 plored it dispels it.' I fear it has never been 
 ' thoroughly explored.' Some one said untruly of 
 metaphysics, that it was a man searching for a black 
 cat in a dark room when there was no cat there. 
 But, of course, in my college days I had, as a part of 
 the curriculum, to devote myself to philosophy. I 
 had two teachers, and both of them earned my 
 respect — and they were both real friends to a would- 
 be learner. The one was Patrick C. MacDougall, 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of 
 Edinburgh, a man with a blunt nose, a ruddy face, 
 but with a heart that glowed too. He used to cross- 
 examine his class, and the student who could answer 
 his conundrums stood up. I may say with some old 
 pride that I continually * took the floor,' so much so 
 that some of my envious class-fellows suggested that 
 ' I must be tired of standing.' 
 The other was Alexander Campbell Fraser, Pro- 
 
 27
 
 28 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 fessor of Logic and Metaphysics, a rough-featured, 
 grizzled-grey man when I knew him, and not 
 quite an ' enthusing ' teacher, although he produced 
 a most excellent edition of the Works of Berkeley 
 in 1871, which I reviewed in the Journal of Mental 
 Science, In his class I got a prize for an essay, 
 but although I have the book that was presented 
 to me, which was Macaulay's Essays, I have quite 
 forgotten the title of my own essay that was thus 
 rewarded. 
 
 These two guides led me into the labyrinth, and I 
 admit I was fascinated by the height of the rocks 
 that had to be climbed and the dim obscurity of the 
 place. Of course we began with the Scottish Philo- 
 sophy of ' common-sense/ The Outlines of Moral 
 Philosophy, by Dugald Stewart, was one of the class 
 text-books, and Mill's Logic, made down by Stebbing, 
 was another. Reid's works, his Inquiry into the 
 Human Mind and his Essays on the Intellectual 
 Powers, were 'tasks.' Sir William Hamilton's Lec- 
 tures on Metaphysics and Logic were better reading, 
 and Dr. Thomas Brown's Lectures on Philosophy 
 were fairly well written, and were therefore easy 
 reading. But the Scottish Philosophy of ' common- 
 sense ' struck me as a title both of tautology and 
 unveracity. If the truth is not common-sense, 
 then it is strange indeed, for according to so old an 
 authority as Phny, * Philosophy is a modest pro- 
 fession ; it is all reality and plain dealing. I hate 
 solemnity and pretence with nothing but pride at the 
 bottom of it.' It clearly ought to be * reality and 
 plain dealing,' but that is the last thing we find in 
 the labyrinth, while for ' solemnity and pretence ' it 
 is not even surpassed by the pulpit. But it was also 
 unveracious, for it pretended that philosophy was a
 
 PHILOSOPHY 29 
 
 man-in-the-street sort of knowledge, and that was 
 the ' pretence ' of such a man as Reid, who had reaUy 
 not a philosophy at all, and of whom Ferrier, the 
 author of the Institutes of Metaphysics, said that 
 ' Reid in philosophy was like a whale in a clover-field.' 
 But some one has pointed out that in the phrase, ' the 
 right of private judgment/ the protestants have 
 unduly emphasised the * private,* and have to 
 some extent ignored the * judgment,' which is 
 the kernel of the phrase. So in the philosophy of 
 ' common-sense ' the Scotsmen have emphasised the 
 * common ' and paid less attention to the * sense.' 
 
 I admit I walked for a time with my hand in their 
 hand, but Hume and Berkeley soon showed me 
 another road, and I followed them. I think I first 
 was friends with Hume for his essavs, and I can even 
 now read and re-read these with profit. Of Berkeley, 
 I first knew his Three Dialogues and read them with 
 dehght, and made marginal notes upon my copy. 
 From these I went to the New Theory of Vision and 
 Principles of Human Knowledge, but in time I knew 
 my Alciphron ; or, The Minute Philosopher, and even 
 Siris well. As I say, I felt myself, in 1871, 
 competent to write a long review of Fraser's 
 Berkeley. 
 
 Sydney Smith said, ' Bishop Berkeley destroyed 
 the world in one volume octavo, and nothing re- 
 mained after that but mind, which experienced a 
 similar fate from Mr. Hume in 1739.' And there was 
 a grain of truth in his joke, and as Hume had cleared 
 the ground, and had shown that * sensationalism ' 
 fails to account for knowledge, it was left for Kant 
 to show that sensations received into the universal 
 a priori forms of space and time are reduced into 
 perceptive objects in a synthesis of experience b}^ the
 
 30 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 categories. And Hegel thought that the ego de- 
 veloped its own categories. The futility of the Scottish 
 common-sense philosophy, so called, was that it ex- 
 plained none of these things which were the problems 
 of philosophy.^ It simply insists that there is an 
 irresistible and universal belief in the independent 
 existence of an external world, or that it is contrary 
 to common-sense to deny the notion of necessary 
 causation. Of course this is no answer to Hume, 
 who had stated — Principal Caird called him the 
 advocatus diaholi in the court of Reason — the doubts 
 of reason. It is simply an appeal to dogmatic re- 
 iteration of a fact, while it is that fact that philo- 
 sophy is called upon to explain. But in following 
 Hume, and then from where he left off seeking to 
 travel with Kant and Hegel, I am passing over unac- 
 knowledged an earlier debt. I was, in my early days, 
 beholden to Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysics. I 
 can say so much from memory, although I would be 
 puzzled if I were asked to describe the purport of his 
 work. I remember, however, an illustration he gave 
 of futility, which was probably applied to the vain 
 efforts of Reid and his school — I am not sure that it 
 was not borrowed from the Greek. He likened some- 
 thing to the ' milking of a he-goat into a sieve.' In 
 that case nothing comes, and even that you can't 
 catch. 
 
 But from Berkeley and Hume I went, as I say, 
 to Germany, partly under the guidance of Professor 
 
 1 It was Novalis that spoke of Spinoza as ' the God-intoxicated 
 man,' and that is a better condition than that of Dr. Johnson, who 
 kicked a stone and thought he had proved the existence of an external 
 material world. The man who has never questioned the domineering 
 senses, who rests in such certitudes as these give him, is an outcast 
 from philosophy, which tries to attain to the meaning of the unity 
 of a universe which can only be reconciled in mind and, as Spinoza 
 believed, in God.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 31 
 
 Calderwood's edition of the Metaphysics of Kant, 
 partly with the assistance of Schwegler's History of 
 Philosophy, and largely with the help of Dr. Hutchin- 
 son Stirling's Secret of Hegel, and so got deeper and 
 deeper into the labyrinth. But as when one is in a 
 tunnel, however dark, if it is straight you can see the 
 day at the farther end, so I thought I saw a little hole 
 of light at the end of the labyrinth. 
 
 Men's finger-prints are irrefragable evidence of 
 identity. A man's face may change. Mistakes have 
 frequently been made in hasty recognitions. But the 
 seal manual of a man's thumb is not mistakable. 
 So it is with God's finger-prints in the universe. 
 They are unmistakable, and it is the business of 
 philosophy to decipher these marks and to find a 
 unity in a diverse universe, in the marks of the 
 Potter's thumb that fashioned it. 
 
 With this small light guiding me I plodded on, 
 writing now on the Method of the Study of Mind 
 (1870), now on Berkeley (1871), on Hegelian Law, 
 Mathematics, and Physiology (1873), on the 
 Philosophy of Law (1874), until the time came to 
 devote myself to what Carlyle called, in a letter to 
 me, 'real work' ; and then, alas, I had to write, as 
 I said, upon Borough Extension, Contract Propert}^ 
 and Penalty, ' Rating ' and Railways. Still, before I 
 leave Philosophy, let me recall Dr. James Hutchin- 
 son Stirling. I knew him in Edinburgh before I went 
 to London. He was a native of Glasgow, educated 
 there, practised as a doctor, and lived for some time 
 in Germany. His Secret of Hegel was the book which 
 first brought him into considerable prominence. As 
 I remember him, he was a man of middle height, with 
 a shrewd face, and a little unkempt in his dress, as 
 perhaps a philosopher should be. His utterance was
 
 32 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 not glib but weighty. I have a letter from him of 
 which I was very proud at the time : 
 
 Laverock Bank, Edinburgh, 
 August 15, 1872. 
 
 My dear Sir, — I have just returned to my own room 
 from a descent to put into the hands of my wife your 
 critique on my Lectures, with the words : ' There, that is 
 worth reading ; that is the first word of sense that has yet 
 been written on the whole business.' I have read your 
 paper with great care, and as much pleasure. I find your 
 intelligence complete, and that is a very great point, for you 
 will not find in Germany any understanding of the notion 
 as you understand it. At least I know of no such expres- 
 sion of any such. The best assonance, and it is hardly more, 
 I have ever seen in Germany to my own views occurs in 
 what I have translated (in the Lectures) from Lassalle. 
 Your strictures too — coming from you — I am very grateful 
 for, and I will look into the matter of them most narrowly. 
 I fear, however, that you yourself will have to share my 
 experience here. You yourself understand all that about 
 the universal, particular, and singular, and every pertinent 
 word is seen clear — nevertheless, you yourself, for them, will 
 have to hear of * obscurity.' You tempt me to be extra- 
 vagant in speech. I must forcibly control myself and simply 
 thank you. I shall read your critique again and yet again, 
 I am sure, onl}' with increase, not only of thankfulness but 
 of advantage. — Yours very truly, J. H. Stirling. 
 
 Since re-reading this far too complimentary letter 
 — which made me at the time think I was a philo- 
 sopher — I have really been curious to see the critique 
 which got, even if it did not merit it, such a high 
 encomium. But, alas, I have not seen it from that 
 day to this. 
 
 But I have confessed that, after 1873, I returned 
 to the beaten track. I remember the story of Johnny 
 Head-in- Air, in Struwelpeter , who walked along look- 
 ing up at the swallows flying, and went souse into 
 the canal amongst the fishes. Since these pleasant
 
 PHILOSOPHY 33 
 
 excursions in the labyrinth, I have kept my eyes more 
 on the ground and perhaps less on the swallows. 
 But although the * main chance/ as the Scotch call it, 
 has made me too busy to write, I have read from time 
 to time the later excursions into philosophy by 
 William James, Bergson, Eucken, and others, and 
 I am still convinced that the perhaps extravagant 
 ambitions of youth are a better asset than the 
 sluggish content which besots men who aim at 
 nothing but the success of popularity or the rich 
 rewards of a treadmill existence.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF IDEAS 
 
 Diaries — Men who have something to report — ' Words of great 
 men ' words that stick to you— Repetitions in Hterature — Metem- 
 psychosis of ideas — Drummond, Chaucer, Babo, and Tennyson 
 — Shakespeare and Shelley — ' Fools rush in' — Fichte and Burns 
 — Landor and Disraeli — Drummond, Shelley, and George Herbert 
 — Milton and Goethe — George Eliot and Goldsmith — Pascal and 
 Novalis — Napoleon and Longfellow — Petrarch and Disraeli — 
 Pascal, Lessing, and Richter— Ben Jonson and Sterne — Sir 
 Thomas Browne and Goethe — Congreve, Richter, and Tennyson 
 — Hugo and Owen Meredith — Shakespeare, Milton, Schiller, and 
 Fitzgerald — Burke and Carlyle — Sir Walter Raleigh and the Mar- 
 quis of Montrose — Helvetius and Lilley — Bums and Ben Jonson 
 — -Wycherley, Sterne, and Burns — Emerson and A. Smith — Hare 
 and Tennyson — Shakespeare, Shelley, and Tennyson — Shake- 
 speare and Shelley — Richter and Carlyle — Fichte and Arnold — 
 Fichte, Hume, Goethe, and Eucken — Burns and Omar Khayyam 
 — Baxter and Landor. 
 
 Some idle men write diaries and put in them the 
 futile record of empty days, for the busy man has 
 no time to be his own amanuensis of his daily bio- 
 graphy, and as a fact perhaps it is only the busy men 
 who have anything worth reporting in that itinerary 
 of the days. But the fate of diaries is not unlike 
 that of human beings. They die a natural death 
 when the writer tires of them, or perhaps an un- 
 natural death when the author at last discovers that 
 he has nothing to put in them to keep them alive. 
 I have never had time to devote to the service of such 
 paper memories of the hours, or to become — to per- 
 vert Morris's line — ' the idle jotter of an empty day.' 
 But at one time I had a book in which, in a desultory 
 
 34
 
 THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF IDEAS 35 
 
 way, I put down ' words of great men ' which laid 
 hold of memory like a burr, and might be useful when 
 one was bankrupt of one's own literary resources and 
 one had to borrow from the dead, or the living. My 
 quotation book was not very successful, for that sort 
 of thing requires more reading and more leisure than 
 a busy man can give to literature. Still in these 
 random pages I find a heading which may not be 
 uninteresting to some readers. They say history 
 does not repeat itself, but literature certainly does, 
 and the heading in the old book was intended to 
 prove that there is nothing new under the sun. I 
 called the chapter the ' Metempsychosis of Ideas,' and 
 here are some of the resurrections or repetitions which 
 I noted quite casually. Don't suppose I am accus- 
 ing any one of plagiarism, for I think it quite natural 
 that minds produced in a similar mould should pro- 
 duce almost identical bullets. 
 
 Thus Drummond of Hawthomden said : 
 
 ' Sith passed pleasure doubles but new woe.* 
 
 Chaucer, in Troilus and Cressida, says : 
 
 ' No greater grief than the remembered days 
 Of joy, when misery is at hand.' 
 
 ' The greatest of all misfortunes is the recollection of 
 
 former prosperity,' said Babo, in Dagobert. And 
 
 Tennyson, coming late, assured us : 
 
 ' For the sorrow's crown of sorrow; 
 Is remembering happier things.' 
 
 Shakespeare, as we all know, made Lear sing : 
 
 ' Blow, blow, thou winter wind. 
 Thou art not so unkind 
 As man's ingratitude.' 
 
 Shelley, in his St. Irvyne (chap, vii.), has it : * Is the 
 blast so pitiless as ingratitude and selfishness ? Ah, 
 no ; it is unkind indeed, but not so unkind as that.' 

 
 36 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 We have been taught that : 
 
 ' Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' 
 
 But Thucydides, quoted by Phny, said : ' Folly 
 gives confidence, while thoughtfulness produces 
 hesitation.' 
 
 Fichte, in his Vocation of the Scholar, said that 
 ' not the station itself, but the worthy fulfilment of its 
 duties, does honour to a man.' Robert Bums, with 
 a peasant's fine pride, said : * I do not intend to 
 borrow honour from my profession.' 
 
 Walter Savage Landor, in his Southey and Porson, 
 says : ' Those who have failed as painters turn picture- 
 cleaners, those who have failed as writers become 
 reviewers.' Mr. Disraeli observed with some bitter- 
 ness : ' Critics are those who have failed in literature 
 and art.' 
 
 The likeness of Death and Sleep would strike the 
 most superficial observer, and has been almost a 
 commonplace in poetry. 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, in Madrigal, says : 
 
 ' If death sleep's brother be.' 
 
 Shelley, in Queen Mah, speaks of : 
 
 ' Death and his brother sleep.' 
 
 And George Herbert, who is quoted by Sir Walter 
 Scott in Woodstock, chap, vi., says : ' Sleep steals on 
 us even like his brother death.' 
 
 Milton observed that * those who would write 
 heroic poems must live heroic lives.' And Goethe, 
 according to Eckermann in his Conversations, said : 
 * If any would write in a noble style, let him first 
 possess a noble soul.'
 
 THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF IDEAS 37 
 
 In the excellent first chapters of Felix Holt, the 
 Radical, George Eliot speaks of our hedgerows, the 
 pride of England, as * the liberal homes of unmarket- 
 able beauty,' and so much pleased was she with the 
 idea that in Theophrastus Such she repeats it, talk- 
 ing of * hedgerows reckless of utility.' But Gold- 
 smith, in the Deserted Village, had written two 
 anticipating lines : 
 
 ' Beside yon straggling fence which skirts the way, 
 With blossomed furze, unproiitably gay.' 
 
 Pascal had a thought. * But I thought,' he says, 
 * I should find many companions in the study of man- 
 kind, which is the true and proper study of man.' 
 But Novalis told us, not remembering we had heard 
 it before, that : 
 
 ' The proper study of mankind is man.' 
 
 Longfellow's ' Footprints in the sands of time * 
 had been anticipated by Napoleon. 
 
 According to Petrarch, * We pass the first years of 
 our life in the shades of ignorance, the succeeding 
 ones in pain, and the latter part in grief and remorse, 
 and the whole in error.' Mr. Disraeli is credited with 
 observing that ' Youth is a blunder, manhood a 
 struggle, old age a regret.' A fairly accurate trans- 
 lation. 
 
 We have it : ' It is the contest that delights us, 
 and not the victory. It is the same in play, the same 
 in the search for truth ' (Pascal) . 'Did the Almighty, ' 
 says Lessing, ' holding in His right hand Truth, and 
 in His left hand Search for Truth, deign to tender 
 me the one I might prefer — in all humility, but with-
 
 38 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 out hesitation, I would request Search for Truth.' 
 And Jean Paul Richter tells us : 'It is not the goal, 
 but the course that makes us happy.' 
 
 It gets tedious, but let me remind you that Ben 
 Jonson was the first to remark : ' Fear to do base 
 unworthy things is valour. If they be done to us, 
 to suffer them is valour too.' And Sterne was 
 second when he made one of his puppets say : * I 
 hope I fear nothing but the doing of a wrong thing.' 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, sec. vii., 
 says : ' I can hardly think that there was ever any 
 one scared into heaven ; they go the straightest way 
 to heaven who would serve God without a Hell.' 
 And Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister's Travels, says : 
 * No religion that grounds itself on fear is regarded 
 among us.' 
 
 Congreve, in The Way of the World, tells us : * But 
 say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to 
 have loved' — (Act ii. sc. i). Jean Paul Richter, in 
 speaking of Love and Friendship, assures us that 
 he who has never sought either is better than he 
 who has lost both,' which is a contradiction. 
 Tennyson, however, by repetition, corroborates 
 Congreve, for in In Memoriam he says : 
 
 ' 'Tis better to have loved and lost 
 Than never to have loved at all.' 
 
 ' The great do what they will, 
 The small do what they can/ 
 
 says Victor Hugo in L' Homme qui Rit. 
 
 ' Genius does what it must. 
 Talent does what it can,' 
 
 says Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith).
 
 THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF IDEAS 39 
 
 ' There is no heaven or hell in all the earth, but thinking makes 
 it so.' Hamlet. 
 
 ' The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a heaven of hell or hell of heaven.' 
 
 Paradise Lost, Book i. 
 
 ' I myself am my heaven or my hell.' 
 
 Schiller's Robbers, Act iv. 
 
 ' I sent my soul, through the invisible. 
 Some letter of that after-hfe to spell. 
 And after many daj^s my soul returned 
 And said, Behold myself am Heaven and Hell.' 
 
 Omar Khayyam. 
 
 Burke, in his Reflections, says : * Their purpose 
 everywhere seems to have been to evade and shp 
 aside from difficulty. This it has been the glory of 
 the great masters in all arts to confront and over- 
 come ; and when they had overcome the first 
 difficulty, to turn it into an instrument of new 
 conquests over new difficulties.' Carlyle, in Past 
 and Present, says : ' Not a difficulty but can trans- 
 form itself into a triumph.' 
 
 Here, however, is an instance of curious coincid- 
 ence. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the night before he 
 was beheaded : 
 
 ' But from this earth, this grave, this dust. 
 The Lord will raise me up, I trust.' 
 
 The Marquis of Montrose wrote the day before his 
 
 execution (' Last words and dying confession,' as the 
 
 street-criers used to shout) : 
 
 ' I 'm hopeful thou 'It recover once my dust. 
 And confident thou 'It raise me with the just.' 
 
 Helvetius told us that * in order to love mankind 
 we must not expect too much from them ' ; and Mr. 
 Lilley, in his Shibboleths, tells us much the same 
 thing in much the same words : ' The best way to 
 keep on good terms with human nature is to expect 
 little from it.'
 
 40 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Burns's immortal : 
 
 ' The best laid schemes of mice and men 
 Gang aft agley,' 
 
 had been put fairly well by Ben Jonson in Volpone, 
 at the end of Act iii. : 
 
 ' But fortune can at any time o'erthrow 
 The projects of a hundred learned clerks.' 
 
 Wycherley, in The Plain Dealer, Act i. sc. i (an 
 adaptation of Moliere's Le Misanthrope), says : * J 
 weigh the man and not his title : 'tis not the king's 
 stamp can make the metal better or heavier.' 
 Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, has it that * Honours, 
 like impressions upon coins, may give an ideal and 
 local value to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver 
 will pass all the world over without any other recom- 
 mendations than their own weight.' Burns packed 
 up the same idea into a more portable line : 
 
 ' The rank is but the guinea-stamp ; 
 The man 's the gowd, for a' that.' 
 
 Emerson pronounced Swedenborg * a rare and 
 opulent soul.' Alexander Smith, in his Lifes Drama, 
 speaks of an * opulent soul ' too. 
 
 Hare tells us, in his Guesses at Truth, that ' the 
 most mischievous of liars are those that keep on the 
 verge of truth.' And Tennyson, in The Grandmother , 
 informs us, as if it were something new : 
 
 ' For a he that is half the truth 
 Is ever the worst of lies.' 
 
 ' Here was thy father's bed, here in my breast. 
 Thou art the next of blood, and 'tis thy right, 
 So in this hollow cradle take thy rest. 
 My throbbing heart will rock thee day and night.' 
 
 Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis.
 
 THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF IDEAS 41 
 
 ' Dream, sleep. This pale bosom thy cradle and bed, 
 Will it rock thee not, infant, 'tis beating with dread.' 
 
 Shelley, A Vision of the Sea. 
 
 ' Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.' 
 
 Tennyson's Swallow. 
 
 Of course a good many of these poetical observa- 
 tions were very obvious, and might have perhaps 
 occurred to any poet, but when once the obvious 
 has been adequately expressed, the after-poet should 
 avoid going over beaten ground. Thus it seems quite 
 probable that the snuffing out of a life by murder 
 should be likened to the extinguishing of a lamp or 
 candle. The thought may have occurred to the 
 first rushlight-burner, but Shelley ought to have 
 remembered when he put it into words that he had 
 been forestalled by Shakespeare in Othello. Shake- 
 speare wrote : 
 
 [Light burning. 
 ' If I quench thee, thou flaming minister ! 
 I can again thy former life restore, 
 Should I repent me : but once put out thy light, 
 Thou cunningest pattern of excellent nature, 
 I know not where is that Promethean flame 
 That can thy light relume.' (Act v. sc. 2.) 
 
 But we find Giacomo in the Cenci : 
 
 [Lighting lamp. 
 ' And yet, once quenched, I cannot thus relume 
 My father's hfe.' (Act i. sc. 2.) 
 
 But here is a thought which was in Jean Paul 
 Richter's head when he wrote Titan : * I will in 
 the sea of this world rise, like a living man by 
 swimming, not like a drowned man by corruption.' 
 But Carlyle must have forgotten where he got the 
 idea when, in Past and Present, Book iii. chap, v., he 
 wrote : ' Not by levity of floating, but by stubborn 
 force of swimming, thou shalt make thy way.'
 
 42 RECOLLECT IONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Fichte tells you to ' Create within you the spirit 
 of duty, and you will know God.' Thomas Arnold 
 did not better it when he said : ' Begin by regard- 
 ing everything from a moral point of view, and you 
 will end by believing in God.' 
 
 One more quotation from these high quarters. 
 Fichte, in his Vocation of the Scholar, wisely says : 
 * Be not overcome by pain, but overcome it with 
 action.' Hume, in his Inquiry, says : ' The great 
 subvert er of Pyrrhonism, or the excessive principles 
 of scepticism, is action and employment and the 
 occupations of a common life.' And Goethe tells 
 us : ' Doubt of any sort can only be removed by 
 action.' ^ 
 
 I have many other records of the same sort of 
 literary coincidences. Burns wrote : 
 
 ' Or were I in the wildest waste, 
 
 Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, 
 The desert were a paradise 
 
 If thou wert there, if thou wert there.' 
 
 And Fitzgerald wrote : 
 
 ' A flask of wine, 
 
 [which Burns did not mention] 
 
 a book of verse, and thou 
 Beside me singing in the wilderness, 
 And wilderness is Paradise enow.' 
 
 Omar Khayyam. 
 
 These, then, are instances of men who tried to 
 say things admirably, and who hit upon a form of 
 
 ^ These quotations are in effect an anticipation of Eucken's 
 Activism, his theory being that ' Doubt is not cured by medita- 
 tion, but by action.' The pragmatists make truth depend on use- 
 fulness to, or helpfulness for, life. Eucken, however, thinks that truth 
 is truth — not because a certain thing is useful is it true. Truth, 
 reality, is independent of our experience of it, and truth comes to 
 us intuitively through a life of action.
 
 THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF IDEAS 43 
 
 expression closely resembling the similar folds in 
 which a past master had draped his idea. And I will 
 finish by quoting the twice-enforced advice. * The 
 plainest words are,' says Baxter, * the most profitable 
 oratory in the weightiest matters.' ' Never try,' says 
 Walter Savage Landor, who always said things 
 admirably, ' never try to say things admirably, try 
 only to say them plainly.'
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 READING 
 
 A voracious reader — Was read to — Monte Crista — Miss 
 Ferrier's novels — Sandford and Merton — Dr. Barlow's advice — 
 Robinson Crusoe — Boys' books of to-day — Treasure Island and 
 Kidnapped — Swiss Family Robinson — Defoe's Journal of the 
 Plague — Plutarch's Lives — Dumas' Three Musketeers, etc. — 
 Scott's Antiquary — Don Quixote — Gil Bias — Goethe's plays — 
 Schiller's Piccolomini and Wallenstein — Science — Brewster's 
 More Worlds than One — Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy — 
 Proctor and Turner — The ' how ' and the ' why ' of life — The 
 National Encyclopcedia, ' Manchester Lectures ' — History — 
 Lingard, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle — Fiction — Notre 
 Dame de Paris and Les Miser able s — Wilhelm Meister — Dickens 
 and Thackeray — Goethe and Schiller — Pickwick — Esmond — 
 Vanity Fair — Emerson's Traits — De Quincey (EngUsh opium- 
 eater) — Ruskin — Mr. Carlyle on De Quincey — De Quincey and 
 his publishers — Carlyle and Emerson — Bulwer-Lytton — The 
 Caxtons and Coming Race — His plays — The Lady of Lyons — 
 Money — Letter from Lord Lytton — Roderick Random — Smollett 
 — Letters from France and Italy — Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews 
 — Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot — Scenes 
 of Clerical Life — Mrs. Browning and Aurora Leigh — George 
 Meredith. 
 
 I WAS a voracious reader even before I could read. 
 I pressed a too kind grandmother into my service, 
 and it was through her that I became acquainted with 
 Dumas' Monte Cristo, and other works Hke the Castle 
 of Otranto, which took my young breath away. I 
 think it was in the same way that I became a reader 
 of Miss Ferrier's Inheritance and Destiny, and with 
 Maria Edgeworth's stories, or some of them. But the 
 acquaintance with such excellent, although drj^ 
 literature was only slight, for the question what you 
 
 44
 
 READING 45 
 
 get out of a book depends upon the amount of know- 
 ledge which you bring to the high tryst. 
 
 There is another thought to be remembered in re- 
 lation to one's recollections of books read, or read 
 long ago, and that is that our old judgments would 
 mostly be reversed if the matter was reheard in the 
 Court of Appeal of to-day. 
 
 But even if the books I was thus early admitted 
 into did not give me all they might have done, they 
 gave me much, and have left some valuable memories 
 with me. It was in this way, through the spectacled 
 eyes of my grandmother, that I came to know some 
 poor veins of literature as well as some richer lodes. 
 For example, I listened to Sandford and Merton, and 
 all I remember of that possibly wholesome book was 
 the excellent advice of Dr. Barlow to ' eat when you 
 are hungry and drink when you are dry.' But far 
 better than any I listened to Robinson Crusoe. The 
 last was indelible, and I can see the eyes of the goat 
 looking at Robinson Crusoe in the cave, the discovery 
 of the footprints in the sand, even Friday's sugges- 
 tion to dig up the bodies of the slain, and the rest, 
 even now. There are many books, I dare say, nowa- 
 days making similar impressions on the adventure- 
 loving minds of boys, such as Treasure Island and 
 Kidnapped and others, but there were fewer in the 
 old days. Still, after all, we were not in poverty 
 when we had Robinson Crusoe. Afterwards, when I 
 could read for myself, having found so much in Defoe, 
 I read Swiss Family Robinson, another desert-island 
 book, but remember little of it except that the ship- 
 wrecked family seemed to have had all the luxuries of 
 life upon their desert island. But Defoe was a find, 
 when I could read ; his pages were full of delight, some 
 of them of excitement. I read the Journal of the
 
 46 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Plague, by this Hogarth of literature, which was 
 fiction, but was truer than most history ; Captain 
 Singleton ; and I even read some of his works which 
 would not have been tolerated in my hands had their 
 contents been appreciated, and which may, for any- 
 thing I know, be omitted from a polite list of his 
 works. But although these were not his best, the 
 reading of them did me no serious harm, and even 
 with a careful balance-sheet, with Crusoe on one side 
 of the account, I am still much his debtor. 
 
 It would be tedious to mention the books which, 
 when I could read for myself, I assimilated.^ Dumas' 
 Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The 
 Vicomte de Bragelonne were some of the early minis- 
 trants to my amusement. Ivanhoe, of course, was 
 an early favourite, although even in those young days 
 I think I liked The Antiquary better — at any rate 
 I do now. Don Quixote I read even before I could 
 fully understand that wonderful book, and after 
 Don Quixote I read Cervantes' Exemplary Novels. I 
 wanted to know something of the great masters of 
 all countries ; and having heard of Lesage, I got and 
 read Gil Bias and Z,^ D table boiteux. 
 
 It was Sir John Lubbock who wrote a list of the 
 one hundred best books, but for every man the best 
 books differ. I was still quite young when I read 
 Goethe's plays (in English) — Iphigenie, Torquato 
 Tasso, and Egniont, and afterwards I read Schiller's 
 Piccolomini and Wallenstein (I think translated b^- 
 Coleridge) . I once took the trouble to compare his 
 translation with the translation of the same scenes 
 which Carlyle has in one of his books, and I reluct- 
 
 ^ There is one book which, if not a great classic, stands very high 
 among my estimate of books — Plutarch's Lives. Some one called 
 that book the ' Westminster Abbey of antiquity,' and I have spent 
 much time among the tombs.
 
 READING 
 
 47 
 
 antly came to the conclusion that Coleridge's was 
 the better of the two. 
 
 But it was not by any means all fiction and plays 
 that was my diet in these interested days. I had 
 curiosity not only to know the inside of books, but 
 to know the inside of things, and the way they work. 
 The latter is the scientific curiosity which makes men 
 desire to know the ' how ' and ' why ' of things. It 
 may even be the * how ' and * why ' of the stars. I 
 remember I quite early read Brewster's More Worlds 
 than One, Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy , and 
 more recently I have read with pleasure Proctor's 
 Other Worlds than Ours, and only the other day Pro- 
 fessor Turner's children's lectures at the Royal 
 Institution, A Voyage through Space. But the * how ' 
 and the ' why ' of life interested me as much as the 
 stars, and I soon wanted to know about the anatomy 
 of man and the physiology of his ' works.' You 
 remember the child, who was asked what she under- 
 stood by ' the devil and all his works,' explained that 
 it was ' the devil and his inside.' Well, the ' works ' 
 interested me. I took a watch to pieces in my youth 
 and learned how the mainspring worked, but I could 
 not put it together again, and the thing remained a 
 wreck of cog-wheels, balances, and dials. Perhaps 
 I understood better the meaning of analysis and syn- 
 thesis after that disastrous investigation. 
 
 But one of the books that I explored for the satis- 
 faction of my gnawing curiosity was an encyclopaedia, 
 called, if I remember aright, The National Encyclo- 
 fcedia, and I had a great find in what were called 
 * Manchester Science Lectures,' which told me 
 through Roscoe about Chemistry, through Huggens 
 about Spectrum Analysis, through Huxley about Coral 
 Reefs, through Lockyer about the Sun, through Abel
 
 48 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 about Gun-cotton, and a dozen other matters. So 
 far as I remember, I read in these days very little 
 history. I think I was set on one occasion, as a sort 
 of educational punishment, to read Lingard, and I had 
 been interested in the students' Hume, which I read 
 at school. But for Gibbon's Decline and Fall, for 
 Macaulay's England, for Carlyle's French Revolution 
 — a panorama more than a history — or his Frederick, 
 which I have not finished even now, and for bits of 
 Grote, I had to wait many years. 
 
 The way that fiction in such works pretended to 
 
 be something better, rather repelled me from these 
 
 books in the buckram of pride in those earlier days 
 
 ' / of my hours in a library. But Notre Dame de Paris, 
 
 .^ / Les Miserables, and even Hugo's forgotten Hans of 
 
 Islande, fascinated me then, and the two first could 
 
 < fascinate me again now. I knew Wilhelm Meister 
 
 J through Carlyle, and thought it dull. 
 
 But, of course, Dickens early made an appeal to 
 me as a reader. I think Martin Chuzzlewit must have 
 been a book read aloud in nursery evenings, but I 
 early read Oliver Twist and his life of Grimaldi for 
 myself. Bleak House came later. But his Christ- 
 mas stories, which were the nicest things he wrote, 
 and the Christmas numbers of Household Words 
 and Pickwick, these were my playfellows. It was 
 the time when the great literary problem was dis- 
 cussed between people who pretended to taste, which 
 was the greater novelist, Dickens or Thackeray. 
 There had been similar discussions in Germany over 
 the merits and greatness of Goethe and Schiller, 
 and I think it was one of these great men who wisely 
 deprecated the strife and observed that the people 
 should be grateful because they had both. The 
 comparison between Dickens and Thackeray was a
 
 READING 49 
 
 very futile matter, but it served for the pabulum of 
 conversations illuminated by large * Ohs ! ' The 
 two men were very different. Thackeray was a lesser 
 Fielding. Dickens was not so much a great novelist 
 as an amusing humorist. He didn't understand 
 character as Thackeray did, but he understood cari- 
 cature a great deal better. There were sore sides in 
 all his books but his pathos was very wooden, and 
 some, or most, of his puppets impossible. Even the 
 members of the Pickwick Club, or Sam Weller, were 
 not real. Smallweed and a hundred others of his 
 people never existed, nor could have existed, out of 
 the pages of his magic pen. But Thackeray for the 
 most part did not write farces. His Esmond im- 
 pressed me much. Vanity Fair is a remarkable 
 book, and so were many of his others that delighted 
 our young days ; but when, in Emerson's English 
 Traits, I found these words : 
 
 ' Dickens, with preternatural apprehension of the lan- 
 guage, the manners, and the varieties of street life, with 
 pathos and laughter, with patriotic and still enlarging gene- 
 rosity writes London Tracts. He is a painter of English 
 details, like Hogarth ; local and temporary in his tints and 
 style, local in his aims. Thackeray finds that God has made 
 no allowance for the poor thing in His universe, more 's the 
 pity he thinks, but it is not for us to be wiser, so we must 
 renounce ideals and accept London ' — 
 
 I felt that he was not far wrong in his estimate of 
 these two men who in my youth were regarded as 
 giants, but were somewhere between the huge bulk 
 of a Goliath and the puniness of a pygmy. 
 
 There was also at that time some learned dispute 
 between people of supposed taste as to whether the 
 style of De Quincey (the English opium-eater) or 
 Ruskin was the better. It was a nice bone to sharpen 
 wits upon. But the final fact is that they both wrote 
 
 D
 
 50 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 excellent English, and that their styles differed as 
 much as the men differed, for, after all, style is the 
 literary skin of the man. I early knew De Quincey's 
 imaginative piece of morbid biography. Confessions 
 of an English Opium-Eater, but afterwards had 
 more than a dipping acquaintance with his many 
 volumes. Selections Grave and Gay. Much of what he 
 wrote was for the time, and will not be accepted by 
 the centuries. When we praise a man's style it is 
 like criticising the * lines ' of a ship ; but however 
 perfect they may be to the eye, the proof of the 
 vessel is the sailing, and the proof of a book is its sail- 
 ing too. And both Ruskin, in his great books — the 
 Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps 
 of Architecture, and his more portable Unto this Last, 
 The Two Paths, the Political Economy of Art, Sesame 
 and Lilies, and Fors Clavigera — and De Quincey, in 
 his fourteen or fifteen volumes, must be judged not 
 by their present vogue but by their permanent value. 
 Will they sail the centuries ? De Quincey was spoken 
 of by Carlyle as * a bright ready and melodious 
 talker, but in the end inconclusive and long-winded.' 
 And Mrs. Carlyle said of him, ' What wouldn't one 
 give to have him in a Box, and take him out to talk.' 
 
 My own view of both is that for all their melodious- 
 ness, they are in the end ' inconclusive and long- 
 winded.' 
 
 The little man De Quincey once quarrelled — as 
 many authors have — with his publishers. Indeed, it 
 has been said that publishers ' are like the gods of the 
 Valhalla and drink their wine out of other men's 
 skulls.' And some other put-upon author quoted 
 Scripture to his spiteful purpose, and said, ' Now 
 Barabbas was a publisher.' But this dispute of De 
 Quincey's was with the firm of Hogg and Co., who
 
 READING 51 
 
 published some of his works, and the Uttle author 
 nimbly said ' he thought the devil must have got into 
 these Swine.' 
 
 But let me admit that although both Ruskin and 
 De Ouincey had my warm allegiance for a time — for 
 all monarchs are only on temporary thrones — I be- 
 came more naturalised after a time on that rugged 
 country of Carlyle's prose, or on the calm, cold pro- 
 montory of Emerson's crisp English. I had seen 
 and in a sense known the author of Sartor Rcsartus 
 from my early youth, and as a young man became 
 an ardent reader of his gnarled prose. Here again 
 some of the silly instituted comparisons between 
 the great rough-hewn Scotsman and the carefully 
 chiselled American, * finished to the nails ' as the 
 Romans used to say of their good statues. But it 
 was a feeble and futile comparison. They were both 
 great men. But the one was fire and molten lava, 
 the other ice and clear cold water. Still, as I say, their 
 works were sceptres over me for many years, and 
 when perhaps my overdone admiration began to 
 put on more sober hues, it was not without a sigh 
 that I saw them, if I may say so, to some extent 
 abdicate. 
 
 There is a story told of a Scotch minister that on 
 his way to take the duty of a neighbour at a distance 
 he lost the manuscript of his sermon. In the pulpit 
 he explained that he had lost his sermon, and that 
 therefore he could only speak the words to them that 
 the Lord put in his mouth. ' But,' he added, ' I will 
 be better provided in the afternoon ! ' This anecdote 
 compares with that which tells of a critic who said 
 that ' Emerson's prayer ' in some church in Boston 
 * was the most eloquent prayer which had ever been 
 addressed to a Boston audience.' But surely it was
 
 52 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 a misdirected letter, although Jean Paul has well 
 said that ' Prayer is a self-preached sermon.' 
 
 Of Bulwer I read much in my youth, The Caxtons 
 and What will He do with It? with admiration. The 
 Coming Race afterwards came in for its share of 
 enthusiastic appreciation. I had seen two of his 
 plays. The Lady of Lyons and Money, on the stage, 
 and always remembered the little prologue to the 
 latter : 
 
 ' It 's a very good world that we live in, 
 To lend or to spend or to give in, 
 But to beg or to borrow or get a man's own, 
 'Tis the very worst world that ever was known.' 
 
 But although I thought him a fine gentleman, the 
 phrase that Tennyson applied to him in Punch, * The 
 padded man that wears the stays,' sticks painfully in 
 my memory. There was a note of artificiality about 
 Bulwer Lytton which somehow the phrase, even if it 
 were untrue as to the fact, seemed to indicate. But 
 in 1871 I had not parted with my admiration for his 
 works, and sent him a copy of one of my novels ; and 
 as I have struck a derogatory note with regard to his 
 work, it is fair you should hear his opinion of mine. 
 He wrote : 
 
 Sir, — I am much obliged by your courteous note and the 
 book you have so kindly sent me. In the latter, there 
 appears to me much evidence of a talent superior to the 
 general run of most writers — but, speaking frankly, the 
 style adopted is not that which to my judgment belongs to 
 narrative, and if you wish to do yourself justice I think you 
 should study simpler modes of expressing yourself. 
 
 Lytton. 
 
 Torquay, Fehy. 22, 1871. 
 
 I early read Roderick Random and found good 
 Scotch grit in it, but although I addressed myself 
 to Humphry Clinker I cannot honestly say that I
 
 READING 53 
 
 read it. I think of all Smollett's books I like his 
 Letters from France and Italy the best. Of course I 
 read Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews early, and with 
 real zest, but Fielding's last journey, written when 
 he was on his way to Portugal to die and be buried, 
 was a disappointment and, as a book of travel, is far 
 inferior to Smollett's Letters. 
 
 I do not know that I have said enough to show that 
 I was a voracious reader, but if need were I could 
 number a hundred other favourites. The first of 
 Jane Austen's books I read was Mansfield Park, but 
 afterwards Emma and the others came in their 
 prim ability to take a permanent place on the shelves 
 of memory. But then there came two other women 
 of a very different type from Jane Austen — Charlotte 
 Bronte with her fire under a bushel, and George 
 Eliot with a man's brain, a woman's body, and a 
 head like a horse's. Jane Eyre laid hold of me. And 
 Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner have got 
 more of my heart than Middlemarch and Daniel 
 Deronda. The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede 
 were in their way excellent, but Felix Holt was not 
 up to her own high-water mark, and Theophrastus 
 Such was rather a carping cleverness. 
 
 When I first read Aurora Leigh I thought Mrs. 
 Browning greater than her husband, but judg- 
 ments have to be reversed, as I said, with further 
 evidence, and although I much admire her poetry, 
 and could still weep over Bertha in the Lane, I 
 have come to regard her in comparison with 
 Robert Browning as * moonlight is to sunlight, or 
 as water is to wine.' I only met Robert Browning 
 once, at dinner in Oueen Anne Street, and a casual 
 word or two before the other guests arrived passed 
 between us. I remember now how, by his pressgang
 
 54 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 of a mind, he forced a reluctant word into his service 
 and made it express exactly what he wanted to say. 
 I saw him often enough at the Athenaeum Club, but 
 I was too shy to renew such a very casual acquaint- 
 ance. 
 
 But in my reading I have come to our modern 
 masters, beginning with George Meredith, whose 
 dazzling pages demand an attention and strained 
 admiration which gets a little painful. But these 
 moderns deserve some separate notice, for it is the 
 present-day writers whose books are read and the 
 old writers are only praised. 
 
 Who was it said : 
 
 ' Klopstock is praised by young and old. 
 But few have read his verses o'er. 
 I 'm willing to be less extolled 
 If I am read a little more.'
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MRS. LEO HUNTER 
 
 Her Sunday evenings — Notablesand half-notables — Amuseum 
 of notorieties — 'Specimen men' — Professor Clifford — Mr. Alfred 
 Cock, Q.C. — Some whose names have escaped — Professor Gold- 
 win Smith — Grant Allen — Sir John Burdon Sanderson — 
 ' The backs.' 
 
 I WILL not say a word against a Mrs. Leo Hunter 
 
 who lived in H Street, and who every Sunday 
 
 evening filled her drawing-rooms with every notable 
 person she could lay her hands on. Her house was 
 on these occasions a museum of notorieties. Dis- 
 tinction of any sort was an introduction to her 
 hospitalities. She crowded her rooms with the illus- 
 trious or semi-illustrious, and would have had even 
 the more illustrious or supermen if she could have 
 got them. Her husband was less well known than 
 she was. I understood that, with the usual ability of 
 his race, he had made money in one of the large pro- 
 vincial towns in some sort of commerce or industry. 
 I never knew what his occupation had been, but it 
 was evidently an entirely different trade from that of 
 his little, very plump, kind wife, who thus traded on 
 Sundays in Specialities. How I ever came to be a 
 ' specimen man,' if I may adapt one of Walt Whit- 
 man's phrases, I never knew, but my modesty tells 
 me I never deserved it. Her Sunday-evening recep- 
 tion was preceded by what Sir Henry Thompson 
 used to call an ' octave dinner,' and the first time
 
 56 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 I had the honour of dining with Mrs. Leo Hunter, I 
 remember Professor CHfford, the Professor of Apphed 
 Mathematics at University College, and Mrs. Clifford 
 (since distinguished as an able novelist and play- 
 wright) were among the guests. Clifford had got a 
 great reputation for having passed second in the 
 Mathematical Tripos, and for his pronounced 
 atheism — a negative creed which a man is quite en- 
 titled to hold, but which he too often offensively 
 flourishes. 
 
 I do not remember any of the conversation, and 
 perhaps it is lucky that we can forget, for otherwise 
 what a rubbish-heap memory would be ; but from 
 what I have seen of Mrs. Clifford's books, I regret now 
 that I have no memory of what we talked about. On 
 the same occasion Mr. Alfred Cock, Q.C., was also one 
 of the privileged dinner guests. He was a man cast 
 in a rough mould, large and dark-complexioned, with 
 an aggressive manner which may have stood him 
 in good stead in the courts he practised in. He had 
 some pretensions to taste, which he showed by his 
 collection of curios ; these did not, on his too early 
 death, realise the sums of money which were ex- 
 pected of them, and that threw a posthumous blight 
 on his reputation as a connoisseur. There were others 
 whose names I may not have caught, or may have 
 forgotten : a gentleman, the muscles of whose face 
 jerked up his moustache, and that did for his smile ; 
 a lady who had a face which seemed to have been 
 made in putty, and looked as if some one had pulled 
 her nose out while it was soft and pulled her cheeks 
 out with it — it was nose or nothing in her case. I 
 dare say they were both noted for something quite 
 apart from these peculiarities. 
 
 It was in the same hospitable house that I made
 
 MRS. LEO HUNTER 
 
 57 
 
 the acquaintance — it was only an acquaintance of 
 ten minutes at most — with Mr. Goldwin Smith, who 
 was upon that occasion a returned visitor from 
 Canada, where for some eccentric reason he had 
 settled. That a Regius Professor of Modern History 
 at Oxford should emigrate to Toronto, where he 
 edited a Canadian ' Monthly,' seemed to me then — 
 regarding London as I did as the centre of the uni- 
 verse — an eccentricity almost amounting to a folly. 
 But in my ten minutes on Mrs. Leo Hunter's sofa I 
 detected no facts indicating insanity in the Professor. 
 But what can two men do with ten minutes ? One 
 of my grudging memories of that plump hostess is 
 that she was perhaps too anxious to introduce her 
 captures one to another, and after an introduction, in 
 terms which would make modesty as red as a boiled 
 lobster, she would allow you a few minutes to settle 
 all the questions of the universe, and then, like a 
 hospitable policeman, would ' move you on ' to 
 intercourse with another of her celebrities. It is 
 in this way that I have nothing but a dissolving view 
 of Goldwin Smith's long limbs and sprawling attitude, 
 and the exchange of some commonplaces which told 
 me nothing of the man, and possibly preserved my 
 careful incognito. 
 
 It was on another occasion that, in the same 
 review of the exceptionals of London literary society, 
 Mrs. Leo Hunter made me known to Grant Allen, 
 who even then, alas, had a cough which sounded hke 
 a knock on Death's door. I think he had written 
 The Woman Who Did, but he himself, the more the 
 pity of it, was the man that wouldn't do. His 
 tuberculous condition was 'too many for him.' 
 Disease is really a fight to get well. But although he 
 fought, he was too early defeated.
 
 58 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 I must have rubbed shoulders, at any rate, with 
 
 many other persons in H Street that it would 
 
 have been pleasant even to come to closer quarters 
 with than those defensive elbows, but I forget them 
 now. I think it was here, and only once, that I met 
 Sir John Bur don Sanderson, great, as I believe, on 
 the ' functions of living tissue,' himself a long un- 
 gainly lath of living tissue with an incisive knife of 
 a face ; but what we talked about I do not remember, 
 if we talked at all, for great men like the monologue 
 better than the dialogue, and I hope I did not inter- 
 rupt him. Still, although I question whether crowds 
 of geniuses playing at ' General post ' is Society, I 
 have not ungrateful remembrances of Mrs. Leo 
 Hunter for her kindnesses, if I smiled at her interest 
 in the interesting. It was ungenerously said of her 
 that, when she was asked after a visit to Cambridge 
 whether she had seen 'the backs,' she said, 'Yes, 
 they are coming to me on Sunday evening.' 
 
 But I believe that the good lady gave up the pur- 
 suit of 'big game,' and I myself am of opinion 
 that that is a game which is not worth the candle.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 GEOLOGY 
 
 Lyell's Principles of Geology — Magic and creation — The 
 bursting of a peat-moss — Water-supply — Degradation of the 
 earth by water — Modern Geology — Dr. James Hutton's Theory 
 of the Earth — His tea-service — Uniformetarianism — Hutton's 
 contribution to Geology— Wilham Smith and organic remains — 
 Sir Archibald Geikie — Buckle's History of Civilisation — Coinci- 
 dences — Hutton and Smith — Adams and Leverrier — Darwin 
 and Wallace — The catastrophic Ice-age — Rate of denudation — 
 Geologic time — Lord Kelvin — Paley's ' Design ' — Weismann — 
 Professor Tait — Lord Salisbury's Presidential Address — Lord 
 Kelvin and Natural Selection — Paley's ' watch.' 
 
 One of the most delightful works I ever read was 
 Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, or, to give it 
 its explanatory title, ' Being an attempt to explain 
 the former changes of the earth's surface by causes 
 now in action.' Until then I had been brought up in 
 the belief that magic had a good deal to do with the 
 creation of the world, in bringing about the changes 
 which had taken place in its ruggedly sculptured 
 features, and that all these had happened in six 
 thousand years. But this book took the trickery 
 out of the universe, and explained that if we used 
 our eyes and saw what was going on now, we could 
 explain by the doings of to-day the events of all the 
 innumerable yesterdays. I remember now the deep 
 impression the Principles made on me ; and, if I 
 remember aright, it was from Lyell that I learned 
 about that peculiar phenomenon, the ' bursting of a 
 
 58
 
 6o RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 peat-moss ' (or bog), which I used as an incident in one 
 of my earliest attempts to write fiction. I had in 
 after Hfe, in relation to the questions of 'water- 
 supply to towns,' to know, or pretend to know, a 
 good deal about Geology and the degradation of the 
 earth's surface by water-streams which, as the poet 
 has it, 
 
 ' Sing for centuries about their work of valley-making ' ; 
 
 but I had, in an obscure way, a connection with the 
 founder of Modern Geology. I was named after 
 my uncle, John Hutton Balfour, the Professor of 
 Botany in the University of Edinburgh, and he got 
 his second Christian name from James Hutton, the 
 distinguished author of the Theory of the Earth, who 
 lived in a house, No. 3 St. John's Hill, Edinburgh, 
 which was afterwards occupied by Professor Balfour's 
 father. What the exact relational connection be- 
 tween Dr. James Hutton and the Balfours was I am 
 unable now to say, and I have not troubled to investi- 
 gate. But I know I am still in possession of Hutton's 
 tea-service, consisting of really good oriental blue 
 and white china. There are blue cocks on every cup, 
 crowing, as they had a right to do, over the doctor's 
 achievements. The teacups (or dishes, as they used 
 to be called) are quite small, and the cock on them is 
 cramped for room, but there is one large cup as big 
 as a breakfast coffee-cup where chanticleer has space 
 enough, and that has come down to me with the 
 tradition that it was Dr. Hutton's own cup — which, 
 if it is true, must throw a light upon the doctor's 
 habits and also on his hospitalities. 
 
 But I am more concerned in what he did than in 
 what he drank, and his achievement, brought to 
 better light by the work of Playfair, was so consider-
 
 GEOLOGY 6t 
 
 able that one may be proud to recognise him, in some 
 obscure way, as a connection. 
 
 It was Hutton who, in the first instance, sought in 
 the changes now in progress on the earth's surface 
 an explanation of those which occurred in older times. 
 His doctrine was that every part of the surface of the 
 continents from mountain-top to seashore is con- 
 tinually undergoing decay, and is thus slowly travel- 
 ling to the sea. The floor of the sea may be elevated 
 into new land, but again the little drops of water 
 begin to nibble at it and continue the process of 
 unceasing degradation. This explains how rivers 
 dig out for themselves the channels in which they 
 flow, and thus a system of valleys is constructed 
 radiating from the water parting of a country, 
 down which these indefatigable rivers run and carry 
 their mosaics for the floor of the sea. 
 
 But Dr. Hutton saw that this war of attrition 
 would eventually lead to the entire demolition of 
 the dry land — a * sea change ' indeed — but he also 
 saw that this sedate catastrophe is prevented by the 
 operation of the underground forces whereby new 
 continents are upheaved from the bed of the ocean — 
 a veritable resurrection. It was thus, according to 
 him, that nature kept the ' balance true ' between the 
 land and water on a habitable globe. His theory 
 was further advanced by the fruitful generalisation 
 of William Smith, who demonstrated that the strati- 
 fied rocks of the west of England occur in definite 
 sequence, and that each well-marked group of these 
 can be discriminated from the others and identified 
 after thousands of centuries by means of the organic 
 remains, which were, as it were, pressed between the 
 pages of the world rock-book. The contemporaneous 
 discoveries of Hutton and Smith have been referred to
 
 62 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 by Sir Archibald Geikie as a ' curious coincidence.' 
 But these curious coincidences seem to have 
 occurred again and again in the history of Science. 
 The world was startled, and for a short time de- 
 lighted, with Buckle's History of Civilisation, which 
 was published in 1857 and which announced the 
 remarkable discovery that statistics have * thrown 
 more light on human nature than all the sciences put 
 together,' and that the conclusions founded on them 
 * rest on broad and tangible proofs accessible to the 
 world which cannot be overturned or even im- 
 peached by any of the hypotheses with which the 
 metaphysician and theologian have perplexed the 
 study of past events.' What he proposed to do was 
 to read the moral nature of man by means of arith- 
 metic. Thus * murder,' according to him, ' is com- 
 mitted with as much regularity and bears as uniform 
 a relation to certain known circumstances as do the 
 movements of the Tides and the rotation of the 
 Seasons.' It is no use promulgating a law 'Thou 
 shalt not kill.' There are two murders short this 
 year, and these must be committed or Statistic is 
 a liar. Murder is a product of the general con- 
 dition of Society, and Palmers and Pritchards are 
 not unnatural murderers, but are as natural and, I 
 suppose, as welcome as the flowers in May. 
 
 But following in the footsteps of the great Buckle, 
 and having regard to the coincidence I have been 
 mentioning in the discoveries of Hutton and Smith, 
 may we not formulate a law and say that great men 
 are always born twins. In our own time we have 
 the remarkable coincidence of the discovery of the 
 law of Natural Selection at the same time by Darwin 
 and Wallace ; and in Astronomy in the last century, 
 J. C. Adams, of Cambridge, by his calculations showed
 
 GEOLOGY 63 
 
 that the observed irregularities in the movements 
 of the planet Uranus may be accounted for by sup- 
 posing the existence of an exterior body, the orbit 
 of which is as follows — and then, in the dark, he had 
 as it were his hand on * Neptune.' But meanwhile 
 Leverrier, in France, had begun to work at the same 
 problem. He also thought there was a * rat behind 
 the arras,' and ended by pointing out the place 
 where Neptune must be, and that was almost pre- 
 cisely the same place in the dark sky that Adams 
 had pointed to. Here again, therefore, we have our 
 scientific twins, and it would almost seem as if all 
 our stars in Science were double stars. 
 
 But to return to Hutton and Lyell and the ' Uni- 
 form etarians,' as they have been barbarously called. 
 They had abolished catastrophes, but their theory 
 got a shock when it was demonstrated that there had 
 been an Ice-age. After this country had been the 
 home of jungle, tree-ferns, and club-mosses — a perfect 
 hothouse in which lions, hyaenas, wild horses, and 
 hippopotami roamed — winter set in with a vengeance, 
 and an ice-cap extended from the Arctic regions into 
 France. The blades of stone in a heft of ice began to 
 polish and smooth the rocks of this country, and the 
 marking of these tools can still be seen on our granite 
 hills. And this age — in which reindeer, musk-ox, and 
 mammoth took the place of the jungle beasts — con- 
 tinued over these islands, not for centuries, but for 
 thousands of years. As for the time that it took to 
 transform one country from a tropical jungle to a 
 glacier, or for the time it takes to wear away hills and 
 to turn them into sea-ooze, these calculations are the 
 fairy-tales of science. It is, for instance, calculated 
 that our rains take about seven hundred and fifty 
 years to wear away a foot of the surface of the earth
 
 64 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 and turn it into the raw material of the strata 
 which contain the history of the world, and as 
 the stratified masses of earth in their united thick- 
 nesses are not less than one hundred thousand feet, 
 it is quite easy to determine, by the arithmetic 
 of which Buckle thought so much, how long it 
 took to form the sedimentary rocks of this crusty 
 world. 
 
 There was at one time a very hot dispute — as to 
 time — between two sets of scientific gentlemen. The 
 question was as to the length of time it would take 
 to develop a professor from an ascidian (or sea- 
 squirt), and Lord Kelvin pointed out that the time 
 to be allowed for that desirable evolution was not 
 long enough. From the rate at which the earth was 
 cooling now, and from the fact that life on this planet 
 would be impossible if the temperature at the sur- 
 face were fifty degrees Fahrenheit higher than it is at 
 present, he only allowed one hundred million years 
 — a considerable period — for the whole of the 
 stupendous process, and Professor Tait cut down 
 the period considerably and would only allow ten 
 million years for the whole work of animal evolution. 
 On the other hand, biologists did not desire to be 
 confined to such narrow quarters ; they wanted far 
 more millions of years than this illiberally allowed 
 them, and as Lord Salisbury said, ' Long cribbed and 
 confined within the narrow bounds of the popular 
 chronology, they have exulted wantonly in their new 
 freedom. They have lavished their millions of years 
 with the open hand of a prodigal heir indemnifying 
 himself by present extravagance for the enforced 
 self-denial of his youth.' And I believe these 
 scientists are not yet reconciled as to the length of 
 the tether, and that there are still a few hundred
 
 GEOLOGY 65 
 
 millions of years claimed by the one which are refused 
 by the other. 
 
 When thieves fall out, it is said honest people get 
 their own, but when what Ben Jonson calls ' learned 
 cleeks ' or what we call ' scientists ' fall out, it is 
 difficult to determine who is profited by the flying of 
 their feathers. Thus there have been some terrific 
 storms ever since Paley's time over the question of 
 Spontaneous Evolution and Design. 
 
 Weismann, who contrary to Darwin denies the in- 
 heritance of acquired habits or developments, has yet 
 accepted the general theory on these grounds. * We 
 accept Natural Selection,' he says, 'not because we 
 are able to demonstrate the process in detail, not 
 even because we can with more or less ease imagine 
 it, but simply because it is the only possible explana- 
 tion that we can conceive. We must assume Natural 
 Selection to be the principle of the explanation of the 
 metamorphosis — ^because all otherapparent principles 
 of explanation fail us — and it is inconceivable that 
 there could yet be another capable of explaining the 
 adaptation of the organic without assuming the help 
 of the principle of design.' 
 
 These are rather curious words in the mouth of a 
 scientist. He is not able to demonstrate Natural 
 Selection, finds a difficulty even in imagining it, but 
 he will swallow it rather than believe in a God in 
 the universe. But as against his big assumption 
 we can place the words of Lord Kelvin. 'I have 
 always felt,' he said, * that the hypothesis of Natural 
 Selection does not contain the true theory of evolu- 
 tion, if evolution there has been, in biology. I feel 
 profoundly convinced that the argument of design 
 has been greatly too much lost sight of in re- 
 cent zoological speculations. OverDoweringly strong 
 
 E
 
 66 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around 
 us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or 
 scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they 
 come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to 
 us through nature the influence of a free will, and 
 teaching us that all living things depend on one 
 everlasting Creator and Ruler.' 
 
 r'^flhus we have it that Paley's 'watch,' which we 
 thought had been broken and thrown away long ago, 
 is back again, and ticking as loudly as ever.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 TALK 
 
 Talking is literature — Carlyle a monarch of talk — Sydney 
 Smith on Macaulay — Carlyle's description of Coleridge's talk 
 — Hazlitt on Coleridge — A ' passive bucket ' — Carlyle's own talk 
 described — Did not converse but talked — Emerson's visit to 
 Craigenputtock — Carlyle on Rah and his Friends — A specimen of 
 his talk — Thomas Aird — Talker not a raconteur. 
 
 Talking is the best literature. It is, although not 
 strictly included in the word literature at all, better 
 than what is written down. For all writing has 
 been talking first. Sometimes, no doubt, it is talk 
 to myself, that is muttering ; sometimes it is talk 
 to others, and that, if it is good, is oratory. In con- 
 versation we have flint and steel, and the sparks fly 
 in the writing. And at the best you have in writings 
 a camera-lucida rendering sunlight or stars. A man 
 is at his brightest when he has an audience. There 
 is a mousse about talk. Writing is still champagne, 
 or at best sparkling wine decanted. Most great 
 writers have been, or could have been, great talkers. 
 Thus Carlyle was a monarch of talk. Sydney Smith 
 said to Macaulay, who domineered in speech, that 
 he would be sorry, when he (the Canon) was dead, 
 that he had never heard him talk. 
 
 Carlyle naturally suffered when he met another 
 talker as great as himself. In his Life of John Sterling, 
 after giving a Turneresque picture of London from 
 Mr. Gillman's house at Highgate, where Coleridge 
 
 «7
 
 68 RECOLLECTIONS LTTERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 drowsed, he gives us a portrait of the man worthy of 
 Raebum. * Here/ he writes, ' for hours would Cole- 
 ridge talk concerning all conceivable and inconceivable 
 things ; and liked nothing better than to have an in- 
 telligent or, failing that, even a silent patient human 
 listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever 
 heard him as at least the most surprising talker 
 extant in this world. And to some small minority, 
 by no means the most excellent.' Now comes the 
 portrait : 
 
 ' The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty 
 perhaps ; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full 
 of sufferings, a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still 
 swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other 
 bewilderment. Brow and head were round and of massive 
 weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep 
 eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration ; 
 confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of 
 mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and 
 amicable, otherwise might be called flabby and irresolute ; 
 expression of meekness under possibility of strength. He 
 hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent and stooped 
 attitude ; in walking he rather shuffled than decisively 
 stept. A lady once remarked, he never could fix which side 
 of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually 
 shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A 
 heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. 
 His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into 
 a plaintive snuffle and singsong ; he spoke as if preaching — 
 you would have said preaching — earnestly and also hope- 
 lessly the mightiest things. I still recollect his * object ' 
 and ' subject ' terms of continual recurrence in this Kantean 
 province ; and how he sang or snuffled them into "'omm- 
 mjet " and " summ-mjet " with a kind of solemn""shake or 
 quaver as he rolled along. No talk in this century or in 
 any other could be more surprising.* 
 
 And then Carlyle, having got his listeners, talks on of 
 Coleridge's talk through three or four of his rugged 
 pages. He quotes John Sterling, who said, *Our inter-
 
 TALK 69 
 
 view lasted for three hours, during which he (Cole- 
 ridge) talked two and three-quarters/ and Hazlitt, who 
 said of him, ' Excellent talker very — if you let him 
 start from no premises and come to no conclusions.' 
 
 But his own complaint seems to be that he was 
 treated as a * passive bucket ' and pumped into 
 * whether you consent or not,' which, he says, * can 
 in the long run be exhilarating to no creature how 
 eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descend- 
 ing. But if it be withal a confused unintelligible 
 flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known 
 landmarks and thought and drown the world and 
 you ! I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical 
 energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, 
 and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any 
 individual of his hearers — certain of whom, I for one, 
 still kept eagerly listening in hope ; the most had 
 long before given up, and formed (if the room were 
 large enough) secondary humming groups of their 
 own/ and so on. 
 
 One can sympathise with Carlyle when he was 
 treated as a ' passive bucket ' when he wanted to be 
 at the pump handle. But when he got hold of that 
 instrument of deluge, he, if we can trust ear-witnesses, 
 worked it with a will. Here is the view of the writer 
 of his obituary notice, either in the Daily News or 
 Times, I forget which, who knew him and had listened 
 to him. * Then,' he writes, * he would pour out his 
 wonderful talk, which seemed to be of immeasurable 
 range and richness. The present writer has known 
 him to talk about birds until one would have said he 
 must have passed his life in the study of ornithology, 
 until the next time he heard him discoursing about 
 tea or coffee, words or myths — almost anything — 
 when he would become aware that he was in the
 
 70 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 presence of one who had explored every part of the 
 world he lived in to the furthest point. Not less 
 impressive than the matter was the manner of his 
 wonderful talk. Sometimes his face would flame 
 with wrath or earnestness which his subject kindled, 
 and his listeners shrank as before a gathering storm, 
 but it might be that some droll aspect of the case 
 would suddenly catch his eye and the storm would 
 burst in thunderous but not unmusical laughter, or 
 still oftener some delicate or tender association would 
 surprise his stormy path, and in a moment his voice 
 would sink to the sweetness of a lute. The tobacco- 
 pipe always seemed to be a sign of the inward work- 
 ings of the sublime talker ; it would send out thick 
 clouds or quiet blue curls as its master's stormy 
 argument grew vehement or gentle ; but it was sure 
 to go out at nearly every punctuation of his long 
 sentences, and to have to be relighted many times 
 in the course of the evening.' Who are the * passive 
 buckets ' now, and where is the douche coming from, 
 I wonder ? 
 
 There are some excellent specimens of Carlyle's 
 
 * talk ' (I don't think he conversed) , by an exceedingly 
 able reporter, in Emerson's English Traits when he 
 visited Carlyle at Craigenputtock. It is too well 
 known to be quoted. But Emerson's sketch of the 
 man is excellent : * He was tall and gaunt, with a 
 cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extra- 
 ordinary powers of conversation in easy command ; 
 clinging to his northern accent with evident relish, full 
 of lively anecdotes, and with streaming humour which 
 floated everything he looked upon.' 
 
 A writer in the Scotsman, under the heading 
 
 * Thomas Carlyle on Dr. Brown's Rah and his Friends,' 
 refers to * Carlyle's talk as richly worth reporting,'
 
 TALK 71 
 
 and sets himself to be Boswell for the nonce and to 
 
 report some criticisms which Carlyle made on that 
 
 * Dog Story ' when he was in Edinburgh. The whole 
 
 of this article, which was written in the 'eighties, I 
 
 think, and is signed with the initials P. L., would 
 
 be worth quoting but it is too long, and the interest 
 
 in Rab and his Friends and Hoycb SubsecivcB has passed 
 
 away since then. Still, as there are so few of Carlyle's 
 
 spoken words remaining, we quote the following 
 
 passages from P. L.'s report, which deal perhaps with 
 
 matters of more permanent interest : 
 
 ^ ' Have done with this raUfying talk, which could only be 
 heard in such a parish-capital as Edinburgh. Long ago 
 Edinburgh was made an intolerable hole for me. I was here 
 when Scott's Roh Roy came out ; and the hero who gives his 
 name to the novel was forthwith canonised. The work was 
 soon dramatised, and the city became Rob Roy's cave. Dull 
 College Professors joined in the drawing-room chatter of 
 young ladies about the hero, and compared Rob with the 
 long-armed Ulysses, but doubted if Homer's hero could have 
 tied his garters without stooping ! It was agreed that Rob's 
 escape, when he was bound to a horse and its rider, was more 
 cleverly managed than that of Ulysses fixing himself under 
 the belly of a sheep. I was present at a grim quarrel between 
 the scientific Brewster and the philosophical Hamilton, 
 about the virtues of the Highlanders — the quarrel growing 
 out of talk about Rob Roy. Brewster, through his marriage 
 with a relative of Macpherson, believed in Ossian, and held 
 the Highlanders to be God Almighty's princes and nobles ; 
 but his eloquence was — like his kaleidoscope — a few bits 
 of ghttering glass that, when turned and turned, make new 
 figures. Sir WiUiam, as a reader, had a continuous flow of 
 silvery accents ; but when talking he stammered at every 
 syllable, and then he could only say, as he wedged in some 
 strong expletives, " The Highlanders ! The motto is — rob, 
 rob, and their practice is to do it, to rob, rob, right and left 
 —unmitigated Rob's men, robbers ! " I felt that Rob was 
 abroad in Edinburgh, and that on every inch of pavement 
 and of carpeted floor his " foot was upon his native heath, 
 and his name was Macgregor ! " Not the " eagle," but the
 
 72 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 crowing cock was " lord above," to break my sleep by night, 
 and " Rob was lord below," to keep me from hearing a word 
 of sense by day. I fled from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan. 
 But your city and College must be bitten every now and 
 then by some favourite. After Rob, they long had a Bab 
 of whom they incessantly babbled — Babington Macaulay. 
 Next they were in frenzy about a Bill, " sweet WiUiam " — 
 the immortal Weg ! Ah, me ! Another babbler, truly ! 
 Yet words, issuing merely from the teeth, can bite, and 
 leave — in the bitten — the poison of raging admiration. 
 Oh ! the immensity of the windbag, since after such a pro- 
 digious escape of words, he floats about everywhere as 
 swollen as ever, while the Dizzy windbag often showed a 
 collapse, and needed time to take in a fresh pumping. How 
 madly Edinburgh raised her hosannahs to the spouting 
 statesman ! He had been the idol of the big cities of the 
 Empire ; and when he stooped to be to Edinburgh its own 
 special god, how intense was Auld Reekie's pride ! Com- 
 pared with the G.O.M., what was the grand old Castle, the 
 grand old Palace, and the far grander and older Arthur's 
 Seat ? He had also been the idol of Oxford University, and 
 when he stooped to have his shrine in Edinburgh College the 
 joy within all the " faculties " of Professors and students was 
 unbounded. But the crowning proof of Edinburgh infatua- 
 tion about Weg was furnished by an eminent firm of pub- 
 lishers. They were about to issue new editions of the 
 Waverley Novels in various sizes of sheets, and at different 
 prices, to show that the old Waverley mine was still unex- 
 hausted. Some new attraction must be found to enhance 
 the perennial charms of the Scott fictions. It happened that 
 Weg had just given a conversational lecture on Scott at 
 Hawarden to villagers and the Castle visitors. It was a 
 flabby mass of commonplace praise, gathered from what were 
 the highways of criticism in Scott's day. But the Edin- 
 burgh publishers hastened to incorporate this trashy lecture 
 with the new editions of the Waverley Novels, so that Glad- 
 stone not only rides down to all posterity along with Scott in 
 the Waverley chariot, but is seen there standing over Sir 
 Walter and crowning him with the laurel — and such a laurel as 
 that poor Hawarden lecture ! Thus, your Weg-bitten Edin- 
 burgh and its publishers insert a Weg-speech on Waverley 
 pages, and introduce the spouter as the supreme judge, to 
 pronounce the irrevocable " Well done ! " I hate coming to
 
 TALK 73 
 
 Edinburgh, for I must hold down my head in passing the 
 Scott monument, lest I should see a figure placing the 
 Hawarden laurel-crown upon the statue that sits under the 
 arch ! Wretched man that I am in Edinburgh ! To be 
 hunted down by this succession of local favourites — Robs, 
 Babs, Babblers, and Rabs ! The first and the last are bear- 
 able in proper time and place ; but the two in the middle 
 are without excuse and beyond endurance.' 
 
 I have heard many good talkers in my time. 
 Thomas Aird, although a recluse, had many excellent 
 things to say which came from living observation and 
 quiet study. He was not glib like a hedge-sparrow, 
 but gruntled along like a river through rocks and 
 over pot-holes. Stih, I think he allowed interrup- 
 tions — and that, as I gather, great talkers never do ; 
 and therefore I would rather say what I have to say 
 of his ' couthy speech ' when I am speaking of con- 
 versation. But even here we must distinguish. The 
 talker is not a raconteur who is simply a bubbling tap 
 from a cistern. Nothing is so poor an entertain- 
 ment as the mere repetition of good stories, however 
 well they are told. But talk, like books, must have 
 the merit of thought in it— and great talk is private 
 oratory.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CRITICS 
 
 On the whole honest — Easier to be clever than accurate — The 
 vocation a high one — Mere veracity — Men who write for a Uving 
 — The critics' scales — What convinces — Classes of critics — Bio- 
 graphers — Boswell and his Johnson — Lockhart, Macaulay 
 — Literature and journaUsm — Advertisement — Pope on critics 
 — Matthew Arnold in essay on Criticism — Justness of spirit — 
 A critic and a man — The critic guide we require. 
 
 Critics are on the whole honest, but slovenly. 
 They, for the most part, look out not for the merits 
 of the author, but for something to hang a smart 
 saying of their own upon. It is much easier to be 
 clever than to be accurate. The former comes to 
 those gentlemen of the agile press by nature, the 
 latter only by the hard work of reading. Of course 
 quotation is a great resource of the critic, and as 
 they are paid by the column, the quotation is like 
 ' found money,' to use a Scotch phrase, to them. 
 And yet, rightly looked at, the vocation of a critic 
 is a high, responsible, and important one. He is a 
 trustee of the books and works he criticises for the 
 public. He owes two or perhaps three important 
 duties — a duty to the author he reads, a duty to the 
 public he writes for, and a duty to himself if he is an 
 honest man. 
 
 It is not enough if a critic speaks the truth, for 
 the truth is good or bad according to the light which 
 is brought to bear on it. Mere veracity is the easy 
 prey of a mistake. Seen at a distance it is easy to 
 
 74
 
 CRITICS 75 
 
 mistake a man for a tree-trunk, or a tree-trunk for a 
 man, and to assert the one or the other, misleads, it 
 may be, but may be good faith in criticism after all. 
 But under such circumstances, in such half-lights, it 
 is wiser for a man not to assert at all. Wait till you 
 get nearer and then you may definitely declare that 
 it is the bole of an oak, or a blockhead. But the 
 critic who aspires to say not only what he thinks is 
 true at the instant, but really to guide his fellow- 
 men — and that is the ideal of the critic — must have 
 better eyes than that, and must not pawn off his 
 mistakes as valuable criticisms upon a foolish public, 
 who think that a thing in print is somehow more 
 authentic than the scaffolding manuscript from 
 which, by the building compositor, it was erected. 
 
 But perhaps I am ' taking too much on myself,' as 
 the huffy people say, when I preach at critics. Men 
 who write for a living cannot afford to be perfect 
 scales to weigh merits and demerits in. And, besides, 
 these scales which we have adopted as a metaphor 
 (as old as the hills) are quite a misleading figure of 
 speech, for all the scales of men's minds are loaded. 
 We weigh men not in a hair-balance, but in our 
 prejudices ; and we pretend that as we are not respon- 
 sible for our leanings, it does not really matter 
 what we say so long as we take the long ears of an 
 inattentive public. * Evidence,' I somewhere said, 
 but not in print, ' does not convince. It is self con- 
 vinces self.' 
 
 For an author who has been under the harrow 
 there is the consolation not only of a superior pride, 
 but another, for if he collates the reviews he will 
 find probably there are as many ' ayes ' as * noes ' 
 to * have it,' and he himself can give the casting 
 vote.
 
 76 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 But there are various classes of critics. Speakers 
 have been divided into two classes — those that have 
 something to say, and those that have got to say 
 something. Well, with regard to critics, there are 
 some parasitic ones who ride to popularity upon the 
 backbiting and back of some great man. Thus you 
 find your biographers like Boswell, a poor flea on a 
 broad back. It is true that Johnson gave him a bad 
 time for his pains. It is said * the worm will turn,' 
 but Boswell never did. Yet it is odd, we should never 
 have heard of Boswell if it had not been for his 
 Johnson, and we should have known very little of 
 Johnson if it had not been for his Boswell. But such 
 critics as Boswell and Lockhart are quite in a high 
 category. Then come the critics like Macaulay, who 
 with his glib style and glib mind and liberal bias 
 wanted to make a reputation like David Hume, both 
 as a historian — that is, a critic of the events of 
 time — and as an essayist. He was eminently read- 
 able, while Hume was eminently rememberable. 
 
 Then come the smaller fry of criticism who are 
 contributing to the run-and-read literature of 
 journalism, and these are for the most part only a 
 part of the paraphernalia of advertisement. They 
 review the books that are advertised in the other 
 columns. But no one would call that bribery in 
 these days of an immaculate press, and it must have 
 been an author that altered the old saying about the 
 way to get * wealthy and wise ' into 
 
 ' Early to bed and early to rise 
 Is no use unless you advertise.' 
 
 It is quite true, as was said, that if you give a 
 dog a bad name it is well to hang him ; it is also 
 true that if you give a book a good name you sell it.
 
 CRITICS 77 
 
 But it is bad taste to goad at critics and suggest 
 that in the past they have mauled you. Some one 
 (I forget who it was), sneering, said that 'critics are 
 people who dust men's clothes/ but I have often 
 known critics ' dust men's jackets ' very properly 
 for them. 
 
 Shenstone expressed the common view of critics 
 when he said, ' A poet that fails in writing becomes 
 often a morose critic. The weak and insipid 
 white wine makes at length excellent vinegar' — 
 a view that, we have seen, has been put in words 
 again and again. But the truer view of the critic is 
 that his is a high and responsible calling, and that 
 although many fail to reach the goal, most have 
 aspirations, at any rate, in that direction. * A perfect 
 judge,' Pope wrote, and Pope's art was neatness : 
 
 ' A perfect judge will read each work of wit 
 With the same spirit that its author writ.' 
 
 And that is one of the attitudes of real criticism. 
 Put yourself, if you can, in the writer's shoes, instead 
 of putting him in a punitive comer and only letting 
 him out after a drubbing. Matthew Arnold in his 
 essay on Criticism said wisely, for he was often wise : 
 * Criticism is disinterested endeavour to learn and 
 propagate the best that is known and thought in the 
 world.' Need a man long for a higher or better 
 vocation ? 
 
 But in his essay on Heine he accuses Carlyle of 
 lacking * the one quality of justness of spirit,' 
 which is in his view the necessary endowment of 
 a critic. Under the unexceptionable phrase, * just- 
 ness of spirit,' he really hides the meaning, which 
 is that a critic must be like the pair of scales 
 which weighs pounds of sugar. He wants a critic
 
 78 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 without human nature, for further on he says of 
 Carlyle that, * man of genius as he is, and no one 
 recognises his genius more admirably than I do, he 
 has for the functions of a critic a little too much 
 of the self-will and eccentricity of a genuine son of 
 Great Britain/ What does he want in a critic ? I 
 want a ' man ' ! Yet in the same essay he points to 
 Goethe's remark that ' through me the German 
 poets have become aware that a man must live from 
 within outwards. So the artist must work from 
 within outwards, seeing that, make what contortions 
 he will, he can only bring to light his own indivi- 
 duality/ If so, how can you have a man like a 
 mathematical instrument ? If this is what * justness 
 of spirit ' means, I will have none of it — and I prefer 
 the individuality of a genius like Carlyle to all your 
 weights and balances. What you want is as ' just 
 a personality and individuality ' as you can get, but 
 a man without a bias is not a man. The bias we 
 want is one which will make the bowl run heaven- 
 ward and not hellward. That is the critical guide 
 we require.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 NOVELS COMFORTABLE AND UNCOMFORTABLE 
 
 The novel in the nineteenth century — Wholesome literature — 
 Fielding and Smollett — Gait's Annals of the Parish — Miss Ferrier 
 and Jane Austen — Scott's novels — Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Gaskell 
 — Abb6 Prevost's Manon Lescaut — Hugo's novels— Anatole 
 France's Crime of Sylvester Bonnard — Daudet's Sapho and Tar- 
 tarin — Flaubert's Salammho and Madame Bovary — Theophile 
 Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin — Dr. Cranstoun's Catullus — 
 Tolstoi's War and Peace and Anna Karenina — Turgeniev — Dos- 
 toievski's Injury and Insult and Crime and Punishment — Gogol's 
 Dead Souls — Tchekofi's The Darling, The Duel, and Russian 
 Silhouettes — Maxim Gorki — Michael Artzebashef's Sanine — 
 Feodor Sologub's Little Demon — Compton Mackenzie's The 
 Carnival and Sinister Street — Gilbert Cannan's Round the Corner 
 and Young Ernest — Conrad — Walpole. 
 
 Just as the play was the leading feature in literature 
 in the great times of Elizabeth, so the novel has been 
 the leading literary feature of the nineteenth century, 
 and the twentieth so far as it has gone. My own 
 impression is, that there are too many novels written, 
 and that, I suppose, is because too many are read. 
 It is a case of demand and supply, and the journey- 
 man writer would cease to write if the idle reader 
 ceased to read. Not that a good novel is not a good 
 thing, and that a man or woman is well employed in 
 reading it, but that a bad or an empty novel is not 
 a good thing and much time is wasted in the vapid 
 perusal of them. 
 
 But one thing may be said of the novels of the 
 nineteenth century, and that is that they were, on 
 the whole, wholesome literature ; indeed, the novels 
 
 70
 
 8o RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 of that time were exceedingly comfortable novels. 
 Not 'stings that bid nor stand, nor sit, but go,' but 
 really cushions provided for the sofa of the dilettante. 
 Fielding and Smollett may have been at times very 
 coarse, but the times were rough. When we come 
 to Gait in the Annals of the Parish, and Miss Ferrier 
 and Jane Austen, those books which were still full 
 of interest were certainly less open even to that 
 objection. Scott's novels were as companionable 
 books as one could desire : you could be friends with 
 all of them. They very seldom rose to the level of 
 high drama — perhaps the Bride of Lammermoor did — 
 but never sunk to the slums for their inspiration. 
 He was faithfully followed in this moral walk by 
 DickensandThackeray,byTrollopeandMrs.01iphant 
 and Mrs. Gaskell, and a host of other writers whose 
 wagons may not have been hitched to a star, but who 
 certainly did not sail upon the sewers. It was a 
 literature not of the cothurnus, but of the slipper 
 sometimes down at the heel. But whether there is a 
 change in the public taste, or whether the writers of 
 light literature aim higher by going lower, the books 
 of to-day are certainly not those we like to have lying 
 about, or would wilUngly put in the hands of the 
 young who are supposed to be innocent. 
 
 Of course there were bad books long before our 
 days. Some of Defoe's are not good reading. Abbe 
 Prevost's Manon Lescaut (1733), while it is great, is 
 not edifying. Of course there is nothing that even 
 squeamishness could take exception to in Hugo's 
 great novels. They lend themselves to no such 
 criticism and are above praise. Anatole France too, 
 so far as I know his works, is ' on the heights.' The 
 Crime of Sylvester Bonnard is not only good but 
 beautiful. But it is a little curious that three of the
 
 NOVELS COMFORTABLE AND UNCOMFORTABLE Si 
 
 great French writers of the last century, while they 
 have written much besides, have only been really 
 great, have really produced masterpieces when 
 they put sensualism into print. Thus perhaps 
 Daudet's best book is his Sapho, but it is all about an 
 infatuated liaison. Of course I am not forgetting his 
 inimitable Tartarin, which, however, is after all a 
 farce and not a drama. Flaubert's Salammbo wearied 
 me. His Madame Bovary, which appeared in the 
 Revue de Paris, is a work of genius, but for it he was 
 indicted for an offence against morals. Theophile 
 Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, again, is perhaps 
 his best book, but it scandalised even Paris for a time. 
 All these are works of genius, but it is genius making 
 mud-pies. 
 
 I once knew a Dr. Cranstoun who was really a 
 ripe scholar, but he chose to be known as the trans- 
 lator of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. I have 
 his Propertius and, so far as I can judge, the doing 
 into English is well done. But it was an odd taste 
 to have his claim to fame founded upon that par- 
 ticular tripod of Latin poets. And to me it seems a 
 little sad that in the case of such men as Daudet, 
 Flaubert, and Gautier, their best books should be 
 their worst. But these bawdy masters have been 
 followed by the ruck of Russian novelists. 
 
 Tolstoi wrote some European fictions : War and 
 Peace and Anna Karenina are immortal. Even 
 his later work, when he had embraced the creed 
 of ' Resist not evil,' Resurrection, was a work 
 of great power. Turgeniev was a prose poet. 
 Dostoievski wrote great books. I have only read his 
 Injury and Insult and Crime and Punishment, but I 
 read them with more admiration than with pleasure. 
 It is quite true that in relation to such high
 
 82 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 endeavours, it would be wrong to look merely for 
 amusement. Nothing great is to be attained without 
 some penance. I read Gogol's Dead Souls with re- 
 spect and some disappointment. And quite recently 
 I read Tchekoff's The Darling, The Duel, Three 
 Years, and Russian Silhouettes with eager assent and 
 admiration. These are not the ruck of Russian 
 novelists. 
 
 Of course it is wrong to criticise the tendency of 
 a national literature if one is only acquainted with 
 a few of its authors. But recently a good many 
 Russian books of fiction have been such popular items 
 that they have overflowed in translations into other 
 countries, and many of these have been received by 
 the critics here with welcoming praise. I have only 
 become acquainted with some of them. Maxim 
 Gorki's short tales caught on like barbed wire. His 
 Three of Them is great, but not good, using good in 
 the old sense. Michael Artzebashef 's Sanine was un- 
 questionably a book of power, and perhaps of good 
 purpose, but it was also a book which in some of its 
 aspects disgusted some readers who still had what 
 used to be called a moral sense. Feodor Sologub's 
 Little Demon, again, was full of cleverness, but it 
 reeked of vodka. If the Russians in reality drank as 
 they did in that book, it was high time for the Czar's 
 ' abolition order.' But it was not only * wine,' but 
 women that were offensive in his book. I have not 
 read Kuprin's A Slav Soul or Korolenko's In Bad 
 Company, but after reading Sanine and The Little 
 Demon I certainly felt I had been in bad company 
 for too many pages. 
 
 Now literature is no longer, if it is at all good, that 
 of a country ; it belongs to a continent, and all these 
 books that I have been speaking of circulate in
 
 ii NOVELS COMFORTABLE AND UNCOMFORTABLE 83 
 
 England either in the original or in translation ; and 
 they do more than circulate, they influence our own 
 writers of fiction. Some of these, of to-day, have 
 perhaps as great ability as these Russians, but some 
 of them have, in imitation of these, presented very 
 dirty cups to their readers to drink their genius out 
 of. ' Make your book dirty and you may be censured, 
 but you will be read,' seems to be the motto of some 
 of them, and the lubricity which they affect makes 
 their works of art quite uncomfortable readmg. Mr. 
 Compton Mackenzie's The Carnival had great merits 
 and defects which were on the verge of the disgusting.^ 
 His Sinister Street, too, in its length a long lane 
 with many turnings, was a work of some genius, but 
 it revels in the slums and leaves a bad taste in one's 
 mouth. Mr. Gilbert Cannan's Round the Corner was 
 a somewhat squalid story, but with touches of vice 
 which remind us of his Russian masters. A good 
 deal of the love in the novels of to-day is nothing but 
 naked passion. It used to be said that * Love laughs 
 at locksmiths ' ; in these times in our fiction ' Love 
 laughs at marriage.' Thus we read in Young Ernest, 
 by Mr. Gilbert Cannan, these words as coming out 
 of the mouth of a respectable woman who is described 
 by the lovers as * splendid ' : ' Marriage ? Neither 
 of you have a scrap of conventional religion, you 
 can't personally be worried by scruples. Really, 
 the marriage laws of this country are m such a mess 
 that it has become almost a duty for decent people 
 to transgress them. They must be altered m our 
 time, so there is nothing for it but to disregard 
 them,' and so on. This is excellent advice to 
 two young people, one of whom, the man, has 
 
 * The squalid story of Hagworth Street, Islington, is well toid, 
 but the incident of Jenny in the ' ilat ' is quite superJiuous nlth.
 
 84 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 deserted his wife and is now contemplating the 
 desertion of his mistress. That pious opinion is 
 quotable, but there is much in these uncomfortable 
 books that I would hesitate to write down again here. 
 Of course among the younger school there are men 
 who are far above such censure. Mr. Conrad is too 
 original to imitate the Russian unashamedness, 
 and Mr. Hugh Walpole has written novels without 
 the help of those naked arts which seem to secure 
 a prickly popularity.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE PULPIT 
 
 Incongruity an element of humour — Humour in Court — Mr. 
 Hope — Humour in the pulpit — ' Coughers and scoffers ' in 
 church — Humorists and the priesthood — Rabelais and 
 Scarron — Swift and Sterne — Sydney Smith and ' Thomas 
 Ingoldsby ' — The Rev. Dr. Lees on clerical humour — Keeping 
 awake in church — ' Christians, awake ' — The flavour of pepper- 
 mint — Dr. Lees's own humour — Walter Dunlop and the devil's 
 bairns — A view of oaths and ' compromise ' swearing — 
 Prayer for fine weather — Also a prayer for rain — Prayer at the 
 launch of H.M.S. Mars — Short sermons — Coleridge hissed — 
 Paley's sermon — Lord Halsbury's stories — The Dean of St. 
 Paul's — What the boys said of him at Eton — The gloomy Dean, 
 and cheerful Deans — Sterne's sermon — How he made his sermons 
 — Sydney Smith's joke as to fasts and feasts. 
 
 We are all more or less persuaded that incongruity is 
 one of the elements of humour. A round man in a 
 square hole is a sight for the gods to laugh at, and 
 many jokes that find a 'ready chorus ' in our Courts 
 of law are thought more of because of the general 
 dulness, not to say solemnity, of the proceedings in 
 these haunts of justice, and would scarcely deserve 
 a smile in less sober surroundings. I must not 
 illustrate that proposition by any recent instances of 
 humour on the Bench or at the Bar, lest I should be 
 thought to derogate from the merits of the humorists ; 
 but take a quite long-ago joke as an instance. In a 
 case in which Mr. Hope (afterwards Mr. Hope Scott), 
 M^- Joy^ Q-C., and Mr. Hill were the counsel, Joy 
 was called away to some other Court, and Mr. Hope 
 
 85
 
 86 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 explained that his learned friend would return 
 
 immediately. There was some delay and his learned 
 
 friend did not return, and Hill got up and explained 
 
 to the Court that 
 
 ' Hope told a flattering tale 
 That Joy would soon return,' 
 
 which shows that the lawyers sometimes make jokes 
 quite worthy of being reported in these coffers of 
 learning, the Law Reports, but which, as I have said, 
 are not particularly funny when transplanted into 
 less austere surroundings. 
 
 But it is the same with humour in the pulpit. 
 When a congregation is in the spiritual doldrums, 
 even an occasional sneeze will relieve the monotony 
 to cheerfulness. And a laugh is sometimes to be got 
 out of the 'coughs which drown the parson's saw,' 
 for some wit said there were two classes of people 
 who went to church, * coughers and scoffers.* So 
 too, perhaps, our pulpit humorists have had more 
 credit for their wit than they deserved, or would have 
 got had the background of their illuminations been 
 less sombre than they were. 
 
 Some, however, claim that most of our wits have 
 been churchmen, and amongst them France has 
 given us some notable examples in Rabelais and 
 Scarron. We ourselves have had Swift and Sterne, 
 and later still Sydney Smith and 'Thomas Ingoldsby,' 
 who showed heels under their * frocks.' Indeed, the 
 use of humour as a pulpit instrument has been 
 defended by some of our own ecclesiastics. Thus 
 the Rev. Dr. Lees, in a lecture on * Church Humour, 
 where he rightly claims that ministers must be men 
 and that men are not complete without a sense of 
 humour, said : ' In some places in the old days it 
 was the custom to pay a man to go round the church
 
 THE PULPIT 87 
 
 at intervals and waken the sleepers by poking them 
 with a long pole. In some towns even in this Chris- 
 tian age a brisk trade was carried on upon Sunday 
 in lozenges, which were largely purchased by church- 
 goers perhaps to counteract the possible soporific 
 effect of the divines they were going to hear. He 
 hoped he would not be thought extravagant when he 
 said that perhaps a little humour flashing out occa- 
 sionally might answer as well as the long pole or the 
 clandestine confection.' This statement certainly 
 seems to show that the report as to a certain clergy- 
 man of the Church of England may have been founded 
 on fact. It is said that he announced that the 
 hymn after the sermon would be ' Christians, awake.' 
 
 Still we would be sorry to lose the flavour of 
 peppermint from the Scotch kirk, which is the incense 
 of these places of worship, even for the intellectual 
 delight of hearing Harry Lauder beating the drum 
 ecclesiastic. 
 
 But Dr. Lees was himself a humorist, and in his 
 lecture spoke of the sham man who, * having a faculty 
 of seeing the bright side of things and a genial dis- 
 position, yet pulled a long face and went about like 
 an ascetic, as if he had swallowed a poker and as 
 sour as if he daily washed in vinegar.' He rightly 
 deprecated the presence of * old women in the pulpit,' 
 for * old women,' as some one defined it, is a term of 
 opprobrium applied to stupid men. But there have 
 been no lack of humorists in the Church of the 
 country, and the country to which Dr. Lees belonged 
 has had its fair share of them. There were stories in 
 my young days of a Mr. Walter Dunlop — who had 
 been a minister of some denominational church in 
 the Dumfries district — which were told and had their 
 humorous side perhaps :
 
 88 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Once two children making a bntt of the reverend 
 gentleman — for all children think the eccentric fair 
 quarry — stopped him in the street and said : 
 
 ' Mr Dunlop, your work is done. The deil 's 
 (devil) dead.' 
 
 ' Well/ said the wit, ' I '11 still hae twa faitherless 
 bairns to look after.' 
 
 He did not make it an opportunity, as another 
 minister did, of combating the modem notion that 
 there is no devil at all by saying, as he did, vigorously : 
 
 * A religion without a devil is not worth a damn.' ^ 
 Once, too, on his rounds Mr. Dunlop stopped at 
 
 the door of a * guidwife ' who offered him a glass of 
 ale, and when it was poured out apologised for its 
 want of sparkle and froth by saying : 
 ' I fear, Mr. Dunlop, it 's dead.' 
 
 * I wouldna wonder,' he answered from a poignant 
 memory ; ' it was unco weak when last I passed this 
 way.' 
 
 There were many other such reminiscences of this 
 ' spiritual pastor and master ' which had a vogue in 
 my youth, but which have now probably shared the 
 fate of the weak beer and died a natural death and 
 been buried in oblivion. There was another minister 
 in the same district who deprecated swearing, in the 
 pulpit. He said he found the use of expletives was 
 growing among his flock, and that not in the candid 
 form which he mentioned in his prayer to the 
 Almighty, ' like damn and devil,' but in what he 
 called 'mid swearing,' and here again he illustrated 
 
 1 In the 39th Psalm I find these words of David : ' I kept silent 
 even from good words.' So ! he says nothing of the other kind of 
 words ! But that reminds me of a minister who was asked by one 
 of his flock what was the meaning of the words of Scripture, ' He 
 clothed himself with curses as with a garment,' and replied that it 
 just meant ' he had a habit of swearing.'
 
 THE PULPIT 89 
 
 his prayer by giving instances and mentioned such 
 mid-oaths as ' Losh, Gosh, and Govenante.' His 
 prayer may have been answered with regard to the 
 last neutral tinted oath, or possibly obsolescence has 
 overtaken that mouthful, but with regard to the 
 other compromises with devil, * Losh and Gosh,' I 
 fear they are still rampant. 
 
 There is a story of a Scotch minister — it may be 
 in Dean Ramsay's book, but I have not gone into 
 research for the roots of these trivial recollections — 
 who was praying at harvest time for fair weather, in 
 days of deluge. Perhaps he was a little impatient, 
 or expected too rapid an answer to his supplications. 
 The rain continued and the wind threw handfuls of 
 drops blattering against the kirk windows, and the 
 minister continued : 
 
 * Weel, weel, bicker away, good Lord, and spoil a' 
 the puir bodies' crops, as ye did last year. Ye hae 
 muckle credit o' your wark.* 
 
 But speaking of the answer to prayer, some 
 naughty boys, knowing that the minister in a long, 
 painful drought was going to pray for quiet, fruitful 
 showers, got a bucket of water and threw the whole 
 plashing contents against the window at the oppor- 
 tune moment of the prayer for rain. It took the 
 minister a little aback. He paused in his request 
 and said, ' But, O Lord, that 's ridiculous ! ' 
 
 There is quite a recent instance of what Dr. Lees 
 calls the substitute for ' clandestine confections.' 
 On the occasion of the launch of H.M.S. Mars, on a 
 very wet day at Dundee, it was expected that the 
 Bishop of Brechin would be present, but he was 
 unable to be there. The authorities had recourse to 
 an old gentleman, a minister, who offered up a prayer 
 in which the following passage was perhaps the most
 
 90 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 remarkable : ' O Lord, in the unavoidable absence of 
 the Lord Bishop of Brechin, and in the deplorable 
 state of the weather, we do not propose to address 
 Thee at any very great length.' 
 
 A very judicious remark, like that of the clergyman 
 who told his hearers that ' Speech is silvern. Silence 
 is golden, and as I haven't any small change about 
 me to-night, I will let you off with the gold.' 
 
 Not perhaps so much to the pohit as the charity 
 sermon on the text, ' Who giveth to the poor lendeth 
 to the Lord ' : ' If you like the security, down with 
 the dust.' 
 
 A Scotch minister, being perhaps out of the ' small 
 change ' referred to, said to his * man ' in the vestry : 
 
 ' Man, Robert, I wish you could preach for me 
 the day.* 
 
 ' I canna do that,' he answered, 'but I often pray 
 for you/ 
 
 This also comes, if not directly, indirectly from 
 the pulpit. A minister was presented by his con- 
 gregation on some particular occasion with a purse 
 containing £50, a clock, and a Bible. When the 
 good man died he had written his ' will ' on the 
 fly-leaf of the Bible. He said : ' The money is gone, 
 the clock is going yet, but the Word of the Lord 
 endureth for ever.' 
 
 Coleridge (Samuel Taylor), as a young man, was 
 preaching — he did little else — when he was hissed by 
 the audience. Whereupon he said, ' When a cold 
 stream of truth is poured on red-hot prejudices, no 
 wonder that they hiss.' 
 
 But going back to old-time pulpit wit. When Pitt 
 was made Prime Minister as a lad, Paley preached a 
 sermon when the new-made First Lord was in church. 
 The place was crowded with toadies and place-
 
 THE PULPIT 91 
 
 hunters. He said, * There is a lad here who hath 
 three barley loaves and two small fishes, but what is 
 that among so many ? ' 
 
 Lord Halsbury, in speaking on the iith December 
 1891, is reported by the Times to have said, * he re- 
 membered when the head of his own college was asked 
 by a distinguished preacher at St. Mary's what he 
 thought of his sermon, the former replied, " I heard 
 what I hope never to hear again : I heard the clock 
 strike twice." ' He also told how a Sheriff's chaplain 
 asked a judge what was the proper length for a 
 sermon. 'Well,' was the answer, 'twenty minutes, 
 with a leaning to the side of mercy.' 
 
 There was no joke in the saying (which I have no 
 doubt was a quotation, but I do not know where it 
 came from) of the Bishop of Dover (I think Bishop 
 Eden), which I heard in the Temple Church on the 
 4th April 1895, and M^hich I have remembered. He 
 said : 
 
 ' Plant a deed and you will reap a habit, 
 Plant a habit and you will reap a character. 
 Plant a character and you will reap a destiny.' 
 
 The present Dean of St. Paul's, although, as he 
 knows, he is called ' the gloomy Dean,' is rich in 
 humour. In The Church and the Age he wittily and 
 wisely says : * Put shortly, Socialism always assumes 
 that the stye makes the pig, while Christianity de- 
 clares that the pig makes the stye.' But he was, 
 while a master at Eton, himself the pivot of a boys' 
 joke. The youngsters used to quote the title of the 
 famous Cromwellian pamphlet, ' Killing no Murder * 
 (Kill Inge no'^murder), and used to think that he was 
 gloomy enough to attend his own funeral. But he 
 says, in the same delightful little book I have 
 quoted from, 'I have found myself dubbed "the
 
 92 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 gloomy Dean" in contrast with certain more 
 popular ecclesiastics who, because they can always 
 conscientiously shout with the largest crowd, are 
 naturally cheerful deans.' It was of one of these, I 
 suppose, the story is told that, having been offered 
 a deanery, one of his children assured a visitor, 
 when asked if he had accepted it, ' Father is still 
 praying for light, but mother has begun to pack up/ 
 
 But to return to the long pole to waken sleepers. 
 Sterne's sermon, in which he chose for his text, * It 
 is better to go to the house of mourning than to the 
 house of feasting,' which began ' That I deny,' was 
 certainly a * poke ' that would make the congregation 
 sit up, but for the most part his sermons were so 
 dull as to make ditchwater sparkling in comparison. 
 But it is not altogether to be wondered at, for the 
 Rev. Lawrence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, which 
 is better than his sermons, says that ' Of all the 
 several ways of beginning a book which are now 
 in practice throughout the known world, I am confi- 
 dent my own way of doing it is best. I am sure it 
 is the most religious, for I begin with writing the 
 first sentence and trusting to Almighty God for the 
 second' — a method of collaboration which has its 
 obvious convenience. 
 
 I only remember one piece of Sydney Smith's 
 pulpit humour, and it was a little bitter. He 
 remarked that * the poor kept all the fasts, and the 
 rich all the feasts/
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 ' THE PLAY 'S THE THING ' 
 
 A reader of plays — The Corsican Brothers and Duchess of Malfi 
 — The London Stage — Pizarro — Gay's Beggar's Opera — Burns's 
 Jolly Beggars — Mrs. Hannah More's Percy, some quotations 
 from — The Rev. John Home's Douglas — The German Theatre — 
 Schiller's Robbers and Don Carlos — Kotzebue — Lacy's plays — 
 Burlesques — Goldsmith and Sheridan — Restoration playwrights 
 — Ehzabethan dramatists — Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 Webster, Ford, Toumeur, Middleton, Shirley, Hejrwood — 
 Marlowe — Modern plays — Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, 
 Granville Barker, etc. — Picture palaces — Wrote a tragedy, 
 Bianco — A comedy. One in a Thousand — The view of a London 
 manager — Mrs. Scott Siddons — Wanted L' Homme qui Rit drama- 
 tised — Letter from — Wrote to Victor Hugo — Miss Glyn — Some 
 letters from. 
 
 I ADMIT I have been a reader of plays. In my youth 
 I was a playgoer, and have sometimes walked home 
 trembling on a night, below clouds or stars, after a 
 performance of The Corsican Brothers, or after seeing 
 an actress, a Miss Goddard who also played the 
 part of Hamlet on occasion, in a courage-staggering 
 rendering of the Duchess of Malii. I had in these early 
 days access to two books ; one was The London Stage, 
 or a collection in three volumes of various dramas, 
 tragedies, comedies, and farces which had been per- 
 formed at London theatres. Volume i. began with 
 Pizarro, altered from the German of Kotzebue by 
 R. B. Sheridan, and there were hundreds of other 
 plays in these volumes, many of which I read. 
 It was there I came across Gay's Beggar s Opera, 
 
 93
 
 94 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 which was produced and ran for a long time when 
 Rich was lessee of Dniry Lane, and it was in connec- 
 tion with that fact that the obvious joke was made 
 that the play was * making Gay rich and Rich gay.' 
 I confess how such a play ' took the time ' puzzles 
 me. But it is as difficult to tell what will be popular 
 as to make up your mind why certain works were 
 popular in the past. If you want to have a real 
 beggar's opera, read Burns's Jolly Beggars. 
 
 But as to the observation that it is hard to tell 
 what will take the taste of to-morrow, and also to 
 understand the taste of yesterday, let me give an 
 illustration. It is really interesting to look at the 
 neglected and forgotten literature of the past, not 
 perhaps so much for its own sake as to see what our 
 ancestors accepted, nay, applauded. It is difficult to 
 account for the popularity of some of the works that 
 had a vogue when we compare them with the great 
 works of the older past which were then neglected. 
 I had once the curiosity to read Mrs. Hannah More's 
 Percy, a play saturated with blood for which David 
 Garrick wrote both a prologue and an epilogue, and 
 which had considerable success and a considerable 
 run on the London stage. How it came by any 
 popularity it is now a little difficult to determine. 
 The plot is the common one of a maid who loves one 
 man and is forced to marry another. The latter is 
 jealous of the old love, and hence duels and poison 
 and deaths — some lingering — are all there. But it 
 was to see what literature delighted the people, that 
 I read it. Elwina, speaking of how she was forced 
 to marry Douglas, speaks compendiously : 
 
 ' I sigh'd, I struggled, fainted and complied.' 
 
 No redundancy there.
 
 ' THE PL A Y 'S THE THING ' 
 
 95 
 
 Again she says : 
 
 'And virtue's safest station is retreat.' 
 
 Douglas, with an appreciation of her beauty, speaks 
 of the world 
 
 ' Where far inferior charms 
 Only presume to shine when you are absent.' 
 
 The father, Raby, says : 
 
 ' Your labouring soul turns inward on itself ' ; 
 
 which is something like fiiping the ugly bride who 
 was pronounced by her husband to be like the king's 
 daughter, ' all glorious within.' 
 Elwina after that embraces 
 
 ' his venerable knees. ' 
 
 And Percy speaks of 
 
 ' The banquet of a tear/ 
 and also says : 
 
 ' Kind as consenting peace.' 
 
 And, according to the play, Percy's 
 
 ' last convulsive groan of death 
 Dislodges the sad spirit,' 
 
 but before that something, I forget what, 
 ' Inflames me to superior madness.' 
 
 There are a hundred such phrases which miss the 
 mark and tickle to laughter. Instead of being, as they 
 were in the real poets, additions to our knowledge, 
 discoveries of likenesses or appropriatenesses which 
 we had failed to recognise, but are now felt — the 
 conviction is so strong from the inevitable word — 
 here the words, which seem to have nm into their 
 places and lost their way, only darken counsel. 
 The words are round words in square holes, and are 
 there for the purpose of tears but only produce 
 indomitable laughter. And yet Mrs. Hannah More
 
 96 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 was an excellent woman and had in her day an 
 
 astounding reputation, and Percy had a run. 
 
 It was in these volumes ol plays, too, that I learned 
 
 * by heart ' from a Scotch minister, the Rev. John 
 
 Home of Athelstaneford, the speech * My name is 
 
 Norval.' This work Douglas , too, had a short vogue 
 
 when it was produced at Covent Garden in 1757, 
 
 with Peg Wofi&ngton in the cast. It is of that 
 
 first night that the story is told that when the last 
 
 words were uttered : 
 
 ' Let every rite 
 With cost and pomp upon their funeral wait. 
 For Randolph hopes he never will return/ 
 
 and the curtain fell amid plaudits, a little boy in the 
 gallery, with more patriotism than taste, and in a 
 small shrill voice which could not but be heard 
 everywhere in the now hushed house, cried : * Whaur 's 
 your Willie Shakespeare noo ? ' 
 
 But, on the whole, there was much pleasure to be 
 got and a great deal to be learned from these three 
 volumes. Then, again, there were four volumes 
 which were called The German Theatre, containing, 
 of course. The Robbers and Don Carlos by Schiller ; 
 half a dozen plays by Kotzebue, including Deaf and 
 Dumb and Lovers' Vows ; and two by James Marius 
 Babo. But on the whole I found the German theatre 
 a dull place, and I confess I read Dagobert, by Babo, 
 with little interest. But from these library books I 
 went to Lacy in the Strand and had such modern 
 works as the burlesques which were in vogue in my 
 youth — Endymion, The Maid and the Magpie, and, 
 better than these, Robertson's plays, especially 5oci^/y, 
 from which the ' Lend me five shillings ' scene has 
 lived in my memory for fifty years. But after that 
 I learned that in plays, even although I had revelled 
 in Goldsmith and Sheridan and had become well
 
 ' THE PLA Y 'S THE THING ' 
 
 97 
 
 acquainted with the * Restoration ' playwrights, the 
 moderns were poor things in comparison with the 
 men who wrote for the stage in the time of Ehzabeth, 
 and I took to reading the more profitable drama 
 of ' rare ' Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 Webster and Ford, Toumeur and Middleton, and 
 Shirley and Heywood, and I think it was even after 
 I had discovered these gold-mines that I came to 
 know Marlowe's ' mighty lines.' 
 
 In more recent times I have read, I think, all Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw's plays ; John Galsworthy's Silver Box, 
 Joy, and Strife ; Granville Barker's Three Plays and 
 Madras House ; Macdonald Hastings' The New Sin ; 
 Hausmann and Barker's Prunella, Githa Sowerby's 
 Rutherford and Son, Pinero's His House in Order, 
 Stephen Phillips' Sin of David, most of Maeterlinck, 
 and Hauptmann's Sunken Bell. Of my * seeings ' I 
 say nothing, for now that my ears are not such open 
 doors as they were I lose much of a play in the 
 theatre, and am looking forward to a time when I 
 may be driven to a * picture palace,' where one can 
 still understand and see Still Waters Run Deep and 
 The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and follow them with 
 one's eyes. 
 
 A mere enumeration of the works that have left 
 their impress upon memory is dull work to listen 
 to. Indeed I quite early found it dull work to read 
 some of these, and I aspired to produce stage plays 
 myself. I wrote, when I was still young, and before 
 I had been called to the dusty duties of the Bar, a 
 long and laborious play in blank verse called Bianca ; 
 but it has never seen the light, and I honestly believe 
 it deserves the obscurity in which it has been hidden 
 all these years. 
 
 I afterwards wrote a comedy called One in a 
 
 G
 
 98 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Thousand, and I had the temerity to ask a London 
 manager — at the time at the top of the tree of 
 popularity — which has, by the way, very thin twigs 
 from which a man is apt to fall — to look at it. 
 The * great man ' wrote back and said he could not 
 read plays in manuscript, but that if I could have it 
 printed he would consider it. I had not sufficient 
 confidence in its merits to speculate in the way he 
 proposed, so it has not been acted, and has only 
 been read to my children when they were quite little 
 and uncritical, and who admired it much. I have 
 not ventured to read it to them since they have come 
 to the years of more discretion. 
 
 In the early 'seventies, at the house of Sheriff 
 Hector in Edinburgh, and again at my brother's house 
 at Wakefield, I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Scott 
 Siddons, the granddaughter of ' the ' Mrs. Siddons. I 
 had heard her read and seen her act, and she did 
 both well in those her young days ; and although she 
 was a little woman she had a look of her grandmother, 
 'the Siddons,' although not so much of a tragedy 
 queen as to * stab the potatoes,' or address a call-boy 
 in blank verse : ' I asked for water, boy, you Ve 
 brought me beer.' 
 
 But Mrs. Scott Siddons had an idea that she would 
 like to pla}^ ' Dea ' in a drama founded upon Victor 
 Hugo's U Homme qui Rit.' My own view was that it 
 would be impossible to reproduce from the novel, on 
 the stage, the scene in the House of Lords. But at 
 her suggestion I made a play out of the novel. I 
 find her writing to me as follows : 
 
 ' Java,' 21 August '70. 
 My dear Sir, — In haste. There are various ways of paying 
 
 the author. Mr. D , who has let me have a play, I gave 
 
 either £100 down or ^^3 per night. My idea is now to arrange
 
 ' THE PLAY'S THE THING ' 99 
 
 for bringing out yours carefully and well in London at 
 Xmas. If by fair means we could get Victor Hugo's co- 
 operation, it may be possible to prevent any one else pirat- 
 ing it. 
 
 This you must at once look to. I am on the track to get 
 Lord Dudley to let me have Her Majesty's Theatre, Hay- 
 market. — Yours faithfully, L Scott Siddons. 
 
 Well, I did what she asked me and wrote to Victor 
 Hugo, and had a nice consenting letter in return, 
 written for him by some one, for he explained that he 
 did not write English. I meant to treasure his letter, 
 but it, like many other treasures, has slipped through 
 my fingers. But although we secured his co-opera- 
 tion, Mrs. Scott Siddons never succeeded in getting a 
 theatre where the play could be produced, and per- 
 haps that was lucky for my reputation. The manu- 
 script was, when last I saw it twenty years ago, in 
 a black leather trunk, the coffin of a great many still- 
 born children of the imagination. It is not, there- 
 fore, with reference to that buried play that I keep 
 my faith that * the play 's the thing.' 
 
 Miss Glyn — I think her real name was Cairns — 
 was, I believe, in her day an actress of power and 
 purpose. I knew her long after ' her day ' — indeed 
 when she had physical proportions which unfitted 
 her for the stage, but she still gave * Readings,' and 
 had eyes which, in Heine's phrase, could ' speak 
 catapults.' I heard her read and could understand 
 that when she was younger — for I only knew her 
 when she was getting old — she might have been a 
 great actress. I only knew her as an intelligent and 
 kind lady. I remember only one thing she said, 
 and that was by way of gentle rebuke. I was, quite 
 improperly I admit, wearing a very good imitation 
 of a white moss-rose in my dandy button-hole. She
 
 100 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 mistook it for a real flower and I had to undeceive her, 
 and she properly disapproved of the ' sham ' decora- 
 tion. I think I ventured to argue the matter with 
 her, saying that it would be a pain to me to be with- 
 out the little bit of ornament, and she said quite 
 wisely, ' Then wear the pain/ 
 
 She had married a Mr. Dallas, and their union was 
 not fortunate as the following letter shows. Poor 
 woman ! she had to 'wear her pain.' I find I have 
 two of her notes, written in a loud sprawling hand, 
 and only one of them has an exact date. The first is : 
 
 24 Hyde Park Place, 
 
 London, W., Fehy. '12. 
 
 Dear Mr. Browne, — I write from Southampton, where 
 
 I read to-night and return to to-morrow. I cannot 
 
 find your letter, so send this to the Morning Post. 
 
 You certainly have not failed to show the scorn of your 
 heart at Modernism. I should be sorry to believe you 
 scorn as you seem in that vigorous scold of a Lecture. 
 When I see you I will say more. 1 have much corre- 
 spondence, some 23 letters to answer, all coming out of 
 that ugly report in the AthencBum. The next thing that 
 will appear in proof will be what took Miss Glyn to the 
 West Riding Asylum and we hear she wants to visit that 
 place again. — Yours in haste, and sincerely of pleasant 
 memories, Isabella Dallas. 
 
 The other is : 
 
 13 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square. 
 HoLLOWAY Prison, June 27, 1876. 
 
 Don't be alarmed, dear Mr. Bro-wne, because I am here. 
 It is for no fault of mine. Just as I had nearly completed 
 
 another house at the above address, Mr. D caused me 
 
 to be arrested for refusing to give up the dread letters of 
 the ladies for whom I went into the Divorce Court — Lady 
 W and her two daughters, Lady B. L. and Mrs. S. 
 
 Will you come and see me ? — Yours sincerely, 
 
 IsoBEL Glyn. 
 
 Alas ! alas !
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 A CHAPTER IN HISTORY 
 
 Love your enemies, and hymns of hate — Old-time hatred of 
 a countryman who fought for America against England — Com- 
 modore John Paul Jones — Born in Kirkcudbrightshire — A neigh- 
 bour of mine in space and time — How he has been abused — Did 
 notable things — Carlyle's reference to him in his French Revolu- 
 tion — Packed history — Carlyle's own look-out and ' tasting ' of the 
 world — ' Six feet of Scottish earth ' — Paul Jones's doings on the 
 Ariel — On the rocks, and with men and courts — Adopted America 
 as his country — Disloyalty of subordinates — The Ranger — The 
 Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis — Threatened Leith and 
 Hull — Landed at Whitehaven — Served Russia — Again men were 
 the difficulties — At the court of Catherine — Black Sea command 
 — Prince of Nassau and Alexiano — Potemkine — Document 
 found amongst his papers — His education — His first voyage — 
 His letters — Retirement in Paris — Anniversary of taking of the 
 Bastille— His death and burial — The United States sends a fleet 
 for his mortal remains. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the advice to love our 
 enemies is an excellent one, and none the less excel- 
 lent because it is very difficult to carry into practice. 
 Indeed the tendency of the human heart is not only 
 to hate one's enemy but to think and speak all the 
 ill of him it can, and some people think that the good 
 opinion we have and the affection we bear to our 
 friends is really enhanced in its illumination by this 
 dark shadow of hate which is reserved for our enemies. 
 We know that the Germans, a musical people, have 
 their * Hymn of Hate,' and their pious prayer — they 
 are a religious people — that God will punish England. 
 
 101
 
 102 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 But although our feehngs may not have become so 
 expUcitly articulate, there is, I am certain, * no love 
 lost ' between us and our German adversaries. 
 
 But it was not of current animosities that I 
 proposed to speak in this place, but rather to refer 
 to an old-time hatred which has unduly blackened 
 the reputation of a countryman of our own of no 
 inconsiderable merit — a hatred which has survived 
 to detract from his fame over a hundred years. This 
 is a long-winded hate, and it is curious that it should 
 still exist — for even if we cannot always love our 
 enemies, we can generally forgive them much when 
 the grave has closed its ugly edges over them. It 
 is not easy, then, to account for the long-continued 
 enmity which was shown to his fame during his life, 
 and has tried to smudge the memory of John Paul 
 Jones since his death. 
 
 That the son of the gardener at Arbigland — a place 
 which is on the toe of round-shouldered Criffel hill, 
 which stands in a corner of the stewartry of Kirk- 
 cudbright, in the parish of Kirkbean, and paddles in 
 the Solway tide — should have made such a mark in 
 history is itself very remarkable ; but that his own 
 countrymen should grudge him his fame, should call 
 him * names ' while he was living, and even backbite 
 him almost a hundred years after his death, is equally 
 curious. But there it is. I count myself a kind of 
 neighbour, both in space and time, of the great sailor, 
 for the gardener's cottage at Arbigland is only some 
 twelve miles from the place where I was born, and 
 only about ten miles from the house where I usually 
 spend my summers, and from which the great bulk 
 of Criffel, the glitter of the Solway, and the blue 
 beauties of the Cumberland hills of England can all 
 be seen, and are fine samples of a beautiful world.
 
 A CHAPTER IN HISTORY 103 
 
 But Paul Jones has, as we know, been indicted 
 as a renegade, a pirate, and the Grand Jury of 
 England seem to have brought in a True Bill on these 
 counts. It is late in the day to say that a serious 
 injustice has been done to his memory ; and to 
 point out that we should have classed him with our 
 great admirals and sea captains, if he had only fought 
 for us instead of against us. It is, we think, a matter 
 for regret that the name of John Paul Jones should be 
 a name to conjure with in the United States, and that 
 it is a name on the * black list ' of contempt and 
 neglect with us. 
 
 He did some quite notable things, but as some of 
 these achievements were slaps in the face of Britain, 
 as some were serious blows to her sea-power reputa- 
 tion, he has no honour here, and has been rewarded 
 with perhaps an overdose of laudation by his adopted 
 country. The scales have not been held true, and 
 one of them has been loaded with a hatred which, if it 
 were deserved at all, should have been given to the 
 country he served, and not to the instrument which 
 served the United States so well in their struggle for 
 independence. John Paul is entitled to justice at 
 our hands. 
 
 Even Carlyle has his picturesque sneer at John 
 Paul in his French Revolution, where, by the way, 
 he gives a pleasant enough description of the scenes 
 which surrounded the youth of the great sailor : 
 
 ' On thee too, for country's sake, O Chevalier John Paul, 
 be a word spent, or misspent ! In faded naval uniform, 
 Paul Jones lingers visible here (Paris) ; like a wineskin from 
 which the wine is all drawn. Like the ghost of himself ! 
 Low is his once loud bruit ; scarcely audible, save, with 
 extreme tedium, in ministerial ante-chambers, in this or the 
 other charitable dining-room, mindful of the past. What 
 changes ; culminatings and decHnings ! Not now, poor
 
 104 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Paul, thou lookest wistful over the Solway brine, by the 
 foot of native Criffel, into blue mountainous Cumberiand, 
 into blue Infinitude ; environed with thrift, with humble 
 friendliness ; thyself, young fool, longing to be aloft from 
 it, or even to be away from it. Yes, beyond that sapphire 
 Promontory, which men name St. Bees, which is not sapphire 
 either, but dull sandstone, when one gets close to it, there 
 is a world. Which world thou too shalt taste of ! — From 
 yonder White Haven rise his smoke-clouds ; ominous though 
 ineffectual. Proud Forth quakes at his bellying sails ; had 
 not the wind suddenly shifted. Flamborough reapers, home- 
 going, pause on the hillside ; for what sulphur-cloud is that 
 that defaces the sleek sea ; sulphur-cloud spitting streaks 
 of fire ? A sea cock-fight it is, and of the hottest ; where 
 British Serapis and French-American Bon Homme Richard 
 do lash and throttle each other, in their fashion ; and lo 
 the desperate valour has suffocated the deliberate, and Paul 
 Jones too is of the Kings of the Sea ! ' 
 
 And he continues this eventful history in a nut- 
 shell with : 
 
 ' The Euxine, the Meotian waters felt thee next, and long- 
 skirted Turks, O Paul ; and thy fiery soul has wasted itself 
 in thousand contradictions ; — to no purpose. For, in far 
 lands, with scarlet Nassau-Siegens, with sinful Imperial 
 Catherines, is not the heart broken, even as at home with the 
 mean ? Poor Paul ! hunger and dispiritment track thy 
 sinking footsteps ; once, or at most twice, in this Revolution- 
 tumult the figure of thee emerges ; mute, ghostlike, as " with 
 stars dim-twinkling through." And then, when the light is 
 gone quite out, a National Legislature grants " ceremonial 
 funeral " ! As good had been the natural Presbyterian Kirk- 
 Bell, and six feet of Scottish earth, among the dust of thy 
 loved ones. — Such world lay beyond the Promontory of St. 
 Bees. Such is the life of sinful mankind here below.' 
 
 All this packed history of John Paul's doings at 
 Whitehaven, at Leith, off Flamborough Head, and at 
 Otchakoff on the Black Sea, was worth quoting for 
 its graphic succinctness. But it is difficult to gather 
 anything from Carlyle of the man he calls one of the 
 Kings of the Sea. I think for the sake of his picture
 
 A CHAPTER IN HISTORY 105 
 
 he makes the naval uniform ' faded ' ; again for this 
 reason he speaks of ' charitable dining-rooms/ mind- 
 ful of the past ; and further down refers to hunger 
 tracking his steps — of which, so far as I can ascertain, 
 there is no evidence. But Carlyle ought to have 
 known not to look ' gift-horses ' in the mouth, and 
 if you analyse hospitalities, how many of the dinners 
 we are asked to may not be ' mindful of the past,' 
 and charitable too, if we are great talkers as Carlyle 
 was? But, again, why apostrophise the boy who 
 wants to get away and ' taste the world ' ? What 
 about the son of a mason of Ecclefechan ? Although 
 from the houses in the street down which a stream 
 gutter ran there was no sapphire promontory of 
 St. Bees to be seen over the glossy Solway, was 
 there not plainly visible the hill of Repentance on 
 the Hoddam estate, and beyond it and Annan water 
 on its way to the sea was there not the ' blue Infini- 
 tude,' and was there not the boy Tom to look wistful 
 into the heaven over all? Was he not tempted 
 away from Annandale out into the world just like 
 ' poor Paul,' to ' taste the world ' at Juniper Green, 
 at Chelsea, and elsewhere ? Why too sneer at the 
 sailor because — at the time he was writing of, the 
 Revolution-tumult— he was ' mute, ghostlike.' The 
 man was ill, dying, and even Carlyle when he was 
 quite old was like a ghost of his strong rugged self, 
 perhaps, before he had, what he recommended to 
 Paul Jones as preferable to a * ceremonial funeral,' 
 ' six feet of Scottish earth' in Ecclefechan churchyard. 
 Even his bruit, once loud, will sink low. 
 
 But Carlyle was not, I think, desiring to detract 
 from the fame of the man who was born within twenty 
 miles of his own birthplace, and recognised him after 
 the ' sea cock-fight ' as cock of that watery walk.
 
 io6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Carlyle was too honest to bark at dead heels unless 
 he had excellent cause ; and it is more in pity than 
 in hatred that he deals with John Paul. But Carlyle 
 was right in his summing-up moral : ' Such is life of 
 sinful mankind here below.' What does it mean ? 
 It means that for the sinful or not sinful the life here 
 below is a grim struggle, and that not only, as in 
 the case of John Paul, with winds and waves — when 
 his intrepidity saved the Ariel from destruction 
 and wreck on the Pennarque Rocks — but when in 
 his various commands he had to fight not with 
 the elements but with men. In all these human 
 encounters — when he had to face men in mutiny, 
 comrades in opposition. Courts with their cold- 
 shoulder of closed doors — John Paul proved himself 
 a man, a stubborn and sturdy Scotsman although 
 he called himself an American citizen — a man with 
 a will, and a conscience. And with such equipment 
 a man can face the life of all sinful or innocent men 
 here below. The hero is the man who can use winds 
 for the purpose of his voyage, who can use men for 
 the purpose of his objective, if the objective be a 
 good and honourable one, as it was in the case of 
 that homespun hero who had adopted America as 
 his country and fought like a lion for his adopted 
 parent. But this very adoption is an offence to 
 some of those amongst us who hate their enemies. 
 It was an offence which, after the recognition of the 
 Independence of the United States by Great Britain, 
 was forgiven to all those who had taken up arms 
 against the * sea of troubles ' with which the mis- 
 governing of Great Britain had flooded her great 
 colonies. But it was an offence which could not 
 be forgiven to a captain who had invaded England 
 at Whitehaven — who had, as they said, stolen Lord
 
 A CHAPTER IN HISTORY 107 
 
 Selkirk's spoons, had captured the Drake off Carrick- 
 fergus, and who had taken the Serapis on the high 
 seas, with a valour which marked the man. 
 
 But in fighting men we have to use men as instru- 
 ments, and the worst of Paul Jones's luck was that 
 for the most part the human instruments with which 
 he had to deal were like broken spears in his hands. 
 Mr. Carlyle should recognise the invalidity of such 
 human means, for he regarded the forty million men 
 we have in this country as mostly fools. But Paul 
 Jones had not only to encounter fools, but knaves. 
 When he was on his first cruise in the Ranger, he 
 had a disloyal lieutenant in Simpson, who like a 
 plague-spot in the ship infected the crew with dis- 
 content which smouldered in disobedience, and that 
 insubordinate officer had ultimately to be superseded 
 in the command of the Drake and put under arrest. 
 
 But, again, what sort of men had he to deal with 
 when he had his great adventure in the Bonhomme 
 Richard ? Mad traitors. The story of that hair- 
 breadth excursion, in which against all odds Jones 
 won the stakes of glory, is a bad romance. We 
 remember that when the cranky Bonhomme Richard, 
 with half her hull blown to pieces by the English 
 guns, was at a death-struggle with the Serapis, 
 Jones's colleague in the joint-stock command, on 
 the Alliance, poured a broadside into the perishing 
 but triumphant vessel. We remember too, with a 
 glow of pride, when Paul Jones was face to face 
 with death on an almost sinking ship, and Captain 
 Pearson of the Serapis asked him ' Have you struck ? ' 
 his audacious ' I have not yet begun to fight.' It 
 was with such traitorous assassins as Landais that 
 Paul Jones had to put to sea to harry the coasts 
 of Britain — to attack vessels more than a match
 
 io8 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 for his ' cockered up ' East Indiaman. But his bad 
 luck in men followed him. When he was appointed 
 to the Black Sea command by that curiously 
 able strumpet, Catherine, he again encountered 
 disloyalty and incompetence in Otto, Prince of 
 Nassau, Alexiano, and the all-powerful Potemkine. 
 All that he effected in the Euxine was in spite 
 of these men, and not by their help ; yet owing to 
 the squinting view of Catherine's favourite (he had 
 lost one eye and the other looked over his nose) 
 these men filched the credit of the victories which 
 were won by Paul Jones, and were received at the 
 Russian court, covered with honours, had estates and 
 serfs handed over to them, while the real victor got 
 a paltry decoration and then, on the excuse of a lying 
 scandal, had the palace gates slammed in his face. 
 
 But notwithstanding all these disadvantages in 
 men, John Paul Jones succeeded. He threatened 
 and even put his foot in Whitehaven. He made 
 Leith tremble in her sloppy shoes. He would but 
 for chance have made havoc at Newcastle or Hull. 
 He, although his ship was sinking, took the Serapis 
 and ultimately sailed in her into the Texel. In the 
 Liman, with an inferior fleet, and with about an 
 equal flotilla, he beat the Turks, and would have 
 had even greater success in these battles with the 
 infidel had it not been for the idiocy of Nassau and 
 Alexiano. These triumphs would have been suf- 
 ficient to make the reputation of a great admiral, 
 even if, in the enterprises he had been in, the best 
 material that a nation could give had been given him ; 
 but that he succeeded in spite of these undermining 
 villainies, that is a double triumph. It is the same 
 sort of credit that David got for killing the all-armed 
 Goliath with a stone from a brook.
 
 A CHAPTER TN HISTORY 109 
 
 But Paul Jones, although he had these men stab- 
 bing him in the back, also had the art of turning a 
 poor crew into good seamen. One of his most 
 favourable biographers says that * he was respected 
 by his seamen, and not liked,' and seems to think 
 that a kind of mild censure. But it is not. Liked ! 
 You don't like great captains. You can respect, 
 admire, or worship them, but as for liking them, you 
 cannot come close enough to them for affection ! It 
 would be easy, too, to show how the hate which Paul 
 Jones had earned at the hands of the English frus- 
 trated his prospects at the court of Catherine. These 
 soldiers of fortune who were serving in Russia re- 
 sented, in their jealous patriotism, the presence of 
 this distinguished Scotsman, and even threatened, 
 it is said, to strike if he were to be put over them. 
 It was this English enmity, partly national pride, 
 which had been * taken down a peg ' by Paul Jones 
 in his invasion of Cumberland and his great sea-fight 
 in the North Sea, which was another of the unworthy 
 drawbacks in his great career. 
 
 But what man has not such untowardness to fight 
 against ? And the man who in his compact person 
 fights it out and triumphs deserves better than the 
 neglect which has been his reward at the niggard 
 hands of Britain. 
 
 Paul Jones's education at a dame-school had been 
 as thrifty as his home surroundings, and equipped 
 him poorly for the ' tasting of the world,' or for — 
 what is a more accurate description — the tussling 
 with circumstances in the great game of ' Catch who 
 catch can.' Indeed he picked up in the world all 
 he knew. His schooling was scanty, and when he 
 was twelve (he was bom in 1747) he crossed the 
 Solway Firth with its prancing tides to Whitehaven,
 
 no RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 and was bound apprentice to Younger, a merchant 
 in the American trade, and almost immediately went 
 to sea in the Friendship and made his first voyage 
 with Captain Benson to the New World. 
 
 It is impossible here, in a chapter, to trace the 
 history of his stormy life. Most of the painful parts 
 of it are on undisputed record. Here we can only 
 mention an episode or two. 
 
 Although the dame-school had taught him little 
 he taught himself much, and proved himself an 
 admirable letter-writer. Many of the letters that are 
 preserved are excellent. The only very silly one was 
 that which he wrote to Lady Selkirk in May 1778. 
 
 One of his detractors says of him : ' Whenever his 
 private actions can be examined they must be pro- 
 nounced dishonourable, and as to many others that 
 appear to be so there is no evidence in favour except 
 his own unsubstantiated and worthless testimony.' 
 This is all of a piece with the way John Paul has 
 been treated by people in this country who would 
 call themselves critics, but who are only vituperative 
 calumniators. Paul Jones had an exceedingly candid 
 pen. Far from being worthless testimony, any one 
 who reads his life and his letters without the jaun- 
 diced eye of prejudice must come to the conclusion 
 that John Paul was vain but capable, that he was 
 honest and brave, that he did great work for the 
 United States, and perpetrated the unforgivable 
 mistake of flouting and discrediting Britain in her 
 most sensitive of vanities — her ruling of the waves. 
 Here is a document found amongst his papers which 
 seems to us veracious : 
 
 ' In 1775 J. Paul Jones armed and embarked in the first 
 American ship-of-war. In the Resolution he had twenty- 
 three battles and solemn encounters by sea ; made some
 
 A CHAPTER IN HISTORY m 
 
 descents on Britain and her colonies ; took of her navy two 
 ships of equal and two of superior force, many storeships 
 and others. Constrained her to fortify her forts, suffer the 
 Irish Volunteers, desist from her cruel burnings in America, 
 and exchange prisoners of war, the American citizens taken 
 on the ocean and cast into prisons of England as traitors, 
 pirates, and felons.' 
 
 And for doing all this for the state to which he 
 owed his duty he has been dubbed by us in England 
 as a traitor, a pirate, and a felon himself. 
 
 We have said that the case, on these counts, 
 against him fails. 
 
 After his strenuous fighting life he lived in retire- 
 ment in Paris for two years at a time when the ' toil 
 and trouble ' of Revolution had turned the gay capital 
 into a flaming hell. He made only one public appear- 
 ance at that gloomy time, a time whose gloom was 
 made lurid with nether flames, and that was on the 
 occasion of the anniversary of the taking of the 
 Bastille in July 1790. It was then that he was seen 
 by Carlyle's historic eye, the ghost of himself, in 
 the faded 'uniform,' and on that occasion he led the 
 Americans and delivered an address to the Assembly. 
 After that the public saw no more of him. He lived 
 alone and he died alone, with his arms stretched out 
 over his bed, and his knees bent, as some would 
 suppose, to prayer. But God knows best. He was 
 buried in a corner of a little cemetery reserved for 
 Protestants, at the corner of the Rue de la Grange aux 
 Belles and Rue des Ecluses Saint Martin, which was 
 then a suburb and is now a thick coagulated town. 
 The cemetery was closed to burials in 1793 . But that 
 was not the way the Americans last recognised John 
 Paul Jones's genius, his courage and his services — 
 and perhaps in that recognition have given him more
 
 112 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 than his due of credit, by reason of the fact that in 
 this country he was stinted and cheated of his fair 
 share. 
 
 Since all the argle-bargling biographers have 
 ceased, we have seen the United States go far out of 
 her way to honour the memory of that dogged little 
 Scotsman whose remains ought to have had six 
 feet of Scottish earth, according to Carlyle, but which 
 were, in fact, to be carried over the Atlantic to 
 America with quite exceptional honour. On the 
 5th July 1905 a United States squadron, under the 
 command of Rear- Admiral CD. Sigsbee, arrived at 
 Cherbourg to translate to America the remains of the 
 naval hero, Paul Jones. Naval officers and special 
 envoys, Mr. Lomas, and General Porter, United 
 States ex- Ambassador in Paris, were feted on that 
 solemn-pageant occasion by the French Govern- 
 ment, and five hundred marines escorted the poor 
 remains from Paris to Cherbourg. It is not worth 
 while following the steps of such memorial festivities. 
 There was feasting, of course, and a religious service 
 in the American church in the Avenue de I'Alma. 
 The members of the Cabinet were present, the coffin, 
 in front of the choir, was draped with the American 
 flag. Then there were the eulogies. After the 
 service a gun-carriage bore the coflin, and with the 
 tramping feet of the marines and of French infantry 
 the procession passed down the Champs Elysees, and 
 across the Pont Alexander iii. to a dais erected in 
 full view of the dome of the Invalides. Here there 
 were very vast crowds, and heaven was filled with 
 loud cheering. At ten o'clock the special train which 
 was to convey the coffin to the flagship Brooklyn 
 left Paris. 
 
 There is only one incident of the day worth
 
 A CHAPTER IN HISTORY 113 
 
 dwelling upon, and a few words spoken about him 
 by M. Paul Brousee, President of the Council, at the 
 luncheon, that I would like to underline. He said : 
 
 ' Let us believe that if ever — which seems impossible — 
 you should hear from across the ocean the piercing cry of 
 wounded France — of that France which is resolutely pacific 
 in its Republican dignity — the gallant vessel of Paul Jones 
 which went from France to America would return to Europe 
 with a freight capable of coming to the rescue of her who 
 watched over the cradle of your independence.' 
 
 The United States has heard the piercing cry of 
 wounded France, the dying groans of a trampled- 
 upon Belgium, but there is no ship, no Paul Jones 
 that has come to the rescue. 
 
 Indeed, it appeared that the United States had 
 been too busy making money out of the necessities 
 of the Allies to think of such old-world debts of 
 honour — too busy even to protest against the bar- 
 barities of a nation which has no bowels of compas- 
 sion, no conscience, no regard for its own word or 
 guarantee. That the United States, in her counting- 
 houses and factories, has forgotten that France 
 ' watched by the cradle of her independence.' 
 
 In her lucrative neutrality she has forgotten 
 more than that : in her scramble for gains she 
 seems to have forgotten that the first duty of a 
 nation is to protect the lives of its subjects, and if 
 these subjects are done to death, to redress the wrong 
 and prevent the repetition of such outrages. But the 
 United States has forgotten the American citizens 
 (it was John Paul's proud boast even in his last will 
 and testament that he was a citizen of the United 
 States) who were murdered by Germany on board the 
 Lusitania and the Arabic, and has contented herself 
 with sending notes to Germany about these murders — 
 
 H
 
 114 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 threatening, like the curate in the farce of The Private 
 Secretary, ' a good hard knock ' — but doing nothing 
 to prevent the recurrence of such cold-blooded 
 crimes. And the reason, no doubt, is that she is 
 amassing enormous war profits. She has for- 
 gotten the gallant man who fought for her, and is 
 ' too proud ' to fight even for honour. It is a 
 sorry plight for a great country ! 
 
 Still there are not wanting signs that even the 
 deep sleep of that great nation is troubled with 
 dreams — dreams of what is due to civilization when 
 a mad nation runs amuck upon the high seas. 
 Already she has ceased to be on speaking terms 
 with a nation of murderers. Has broken off diplo- 
 matic relations, and is upon the tardy way to resent 
 the insults to her honour which have been heaped 
 upon her — last of all by the sinking of the 
 Franconia. No one could have spoken more tem- 
 perate sense than President Wilson in the past, but 
 the United States seems to feel now that it is a time 
 to speak with other weapons than pen and tongue.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 MY CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE 
 
 Mistakes either of writer or printer sometimes humorous — 
 ' BHndness of Milton ' printed ' Blunders of Milton ' — A question 
 on a line of Stevenson's — Scott's ' Caledonia ' — Thomson's tragedy 
 of ' Sophonisba ' — Burns's verses on ' The sweet poet of the year ' 
 — Wrong punctuation of a quotation from Shakespeare — Milton 
 misread — Prize poems, two quotations from — Lovelace's lines 
 misquoted — Hannah More's popularity — Bulls in Parliament — 
 Erroneous report of garden-party — Sir David Brewster's one 
 poem — The sun's cheek. 
 
 In reading, even in desultory reading, one occasion- 
 ally comes across some incongruity, either a mistake 
 of the writer or a misprint of the compositor, which 
 brings out a sense entirely different from the real 
 purport that the author had in view. These little 
 incongruities are sometimes greeted with a passing 
 smile, but are unfortunately quickly forgotten. It 
 is only a few that have stuck like burrs to memory, 
 and perhaps it is well, for while a few of such 
 reminiscences might interest, if there were many 
 of them they would undoubtedly pall. 
 
 Only the other day in correcting some proof sheets, 
 where I had been referring to a poem on the 
 ' Blindness of Milton,' the printers had got it the 
 ' Blunders of Milton.' But the mistake was prob- 
 ably due not to any view of the printers as to 
 Paradise Lost, but to my bad writing. Of course it 
 was an intended joke when a lady told me she 
 wished all parodies were ' Parodies lost.' 
 
 116
 
 ii6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 But here is a ' curiosity ' of literature. Robert 
 Louis Stevenson had written in one of his poems 
 
 the Hne 
 
 ' The incomparable pomp of eve,' 
 
 and a would-be critic wanted to know whether he 
 was speaking of Eve before or after the fall ! 
 
 I think it was a veritable mistake — although it 
 had, having regard to the Scotch climate, a semblance 
 of truth in it — when Scott's lines : 
 
 ' O Caledonia, stern and wild, 
 Meet nurse for a poetic child,' 
 
 were printed 
 
 ' O Caledonia, stern and wild. 
 Wet nurse for a poetic child.' 
 
 James Thomson in his tragedy had this some- 
 what staggering line : 
 
 ' O Sophonisba, Sophonisba O ! ' 
 
 Of course it was quite easy for his critic to go one 
 better in his review by saying : 
 
 ' O Jamie Thomson, Jamie Thomson O ! ' 
 
 But James Thomson was a great poet and his 
 * Seasons ' a great poem, and it quite deserved the 
 approbatory verses that Burns wrote of it. In 
 Burns's poem, in the three or four first verses, he 
 sketches the seasons with his incomparably graphic 
 pen, and the poem ends with : 
 
 ' So long, sweet poet of the year, 
 Shall bloom the wreath thou well hast won, 
 And Scotia with exulting tear 
 Proclaim that Thomson was her son.' 
 
 But, would you believe it ? that when it came to be 
 printed, the two last lines stood thus : 
 
 ' And Scotia with exulting tear 
 Proclaim that Tom's son was her son,'
 
 MY CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE 117 
 
 which reduces the whole thing to the level of an 
 affiliation case. 
 
 Of course when the quotation was made to read : 
 
 ' There 's a divinity that shapes our ends rough. 
 Hew them how we will,' 
 
 the real gist of the lines was considerably altered. 
 
 It is said, but I really do not know with what 
 truth, that Milton was as much mauled as Shake- 
 speare in the above quotation. Milton in L' Allegro, 
 says : 
 
 ' But come, thou goddess fair and free. 
 In heaven yclept Euphrosyne,' 
 
 and it is asserted that the last line was printed : 
 ' In heaven she crept and froze her knee.* 
 
 Somewhere I came across what, I suppose it was 
 humour, purported to be a quotation : 
 
 * To eat, to gorge, digest. 
 Aye, there 's the rub.' 
 
 What dreams may come when we have shuffled off 
 our waking consciousness ! 
 
 Robertson of Brighton, before he went into the 
 Church, was offered a commission in the Army ; and 
 afterwards looked back with perhaps some regret on 
 the way he had come, in preference to the way he 
 might have gone. The Dean of Durham in his little 
 book on Robertson says : * Throughout his life, to 
 adopt a picturesque phrase of his own, he seemed to 
 feel the Queen's " broad arrow " stamped upon him.' 
 I think it possible that the * broad arrow ' is stamped 
 upon other articles belonging to the Government, but 
 it is certainly oftenest seen and best known in con- 
 nection with the clothes of convicts. And with that 
 in mind the phrase does not seem so picturesque as 
 the Dean thought.
 
 ii8 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 But it is sometimes the author that makes the 
 
 mistake, and there is a Hne in Paradise Lost which 
 
 might come under the head of Milton's Blunders. 
 
 Adam and Eve are going to partake of fruit — not the 
 
 disastrous apple — and Milton has the reflection : 
 
 ' And while discourse they hold, 
 No fear lest dinner cool.' 
 
 And a little lower he has : 
 
 ' So down they sat 
 And to their viands fell.' 
 
 Aytoun, who was Professor of English Literature 
 in the University of Edinburgh before David Masson, 
 and who was himself a poet and wrote Lays of the 
 Scottish Cavaliers, and with Sir Theodore Martin was 
 joint-author of the Bon Gaultier Ballads, had, when 
 he was Professor, suggested ' The River ' as the sub- 
 ject of the prize poem to the members of the class. 
 He was found, by a friend, when he was reading the 
 production of one who ought perhaps to have had 
 the prize. He described the rise of the river in 
 the hills, and I dare say — as a real poet had it — 
 
 described it 
 
 ' making its ball of foam, 
 Kissing the edge, and journeying on.' 
 
 But that part was not the best of the poem. He had 
 come to the cataract, and it was here that the Pro- 
 fessor was also in a cataract of laughter, for the 
 poem thus described the waterfall : 
 
 ' The water, wildly leaping in mid-air, 
 Left the astonished river's bottom bare.' 
 
 In another prize poem on Nebuchadnezzar, who 
 as you remember was reduced to the eating of 
 grass, these lines occurred. He 
 
 ' Said as he chewed the unaccustomed food, 
 " It may be wholesome, but it isn't good." '
 
 MY CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE 119 
 
 Who was it that twisted Lovelace's hnes to 
 Lucasta, which run finely : 
 
 into 
 
 ' I could not love thee, dear, so much. 
 Loved I not honour more,' 
 
 ' I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 Loved I not Hannah More.' 
 
 Well, if Hannah More was not great, I believe she 
 was good. And at one time she was a really popular 
 writer. Her story of The Shepherd of Salisbury 
 Plain — not the more famous shepherd of Dartmoor, 
 who was a protege of Mr. Winston Churchill — and 
 Two Wealthy Farmers had, we were told, a sale of 
 over two million copies. But it was not of these I 
 was going to speak here. Speaking in another poem, 
 of Joshua when he commanded the sun to stand still 
 (he, and not Mr. Willett, was really the inventor of 
 ' Daylight saving '), she announces that the sun 
 
 ' Stupendously stood still.' 
 
 Now that must be a very difficult thing to do. Try 
 even to sit still stupendously and you '11 have an 
 idea of the difficulty ! 
 
 Dr. Johnson said that ' inscriptions on tomb- 
 stones should be in Latin, because being a dead 
 language it will always live,' and although at first 
 sight it reads like a ' bull,' there is some truth in it. 
 
 Talking of truth, who was it said that the motto 
 ' " Leave well alone " must mean the well that truth 
 is in ? ' — but that seems to be indirect praise of 
 mendacity. 
 
 Of course there is a famous ' bull ' which was in 
 that * china shop ' the House of Commons, when an 
 honourable member, an authority on Indian affairs.
 
 120 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 declared that the pale face of the British soldier was 
 the backbone of our Indian army. 
 
 And I have somewhere seen, and I dare say this 
 also blossomed at St. Stephen's, that, speaking of 
 Ireland, an honourable gentleman said : * Her cup 
 of misery has been for ages overflowing, and it is not 
 yet full.' Which tempts me to recall Sir Boyle 
 Roche, but I will not yield to the temptation. The 
 editor who reported that a certain garden-party had 
 been a very ' infernal affair ' corrected it the next 
 day by saying he meant * informal affair.' 
 
 Under the pretentious heading, * Sir David Brew- 
 ster's poetry,' there was a note that he had once been 
 asked to write in a lady's album, and had refused 
 on the ground that he was not a poet. But, being 
 pressed, he wrote and signed with commendable 
 
 succinctness : 
 
 ' Phebe, 
 You be 
 Hebe. 
 D. B.' 
 
 But I must cease to collect in this, my museum of 
 * curios.' Some one wrote, well enough : 
 
 ' I like the cheek the Sun has kissed.' 
 
 But the flippant critic wrote on it : 
 
 ' It 's Hke the cheek of the Sun to kiss it.'
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 LECTURES 
 
 The ' Caudle Curtain Lectures ' — Mechanics' institutes — Lec- 
 tures in Scottish Universities — University Extension Lectures 
 — Electric theatre competition — Lecture foundations — Lord 
 Gilford's Trust Disposition and Settlement — The lecturers — 
 The Bampton Lectures on Divinity — The Royal Institution 
 Lectures — Davy, Faraday, Tyndall, Dewar, Rayleigh, Thom- 
 son — The Midland Institute — Carlyle's Lectures in WiUis's 
 Rooms — ' On Heroes ' — Leigh Hunt on — Lord Rectorship of 
 Edinburgh University — The election of Lord Rector — Contest 
 between Carlyle and Disraeli fought on political lines— Dis- 
 raeli's committee — The Rectorial Address in the Music Hall — 
 The lecture of a lifetime. 
 
 There was at one time an inordinate belief in the 
 use of lectures. I am not referring to Douglas 
 Jerrold's rather vulgar ' Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lec- 
 tures ' which appeared in Punch. In the Victorian 
 era people seemed to think that progress was only 
 possible and salvation only attainable by means of 
 mechanics' institutes, which were established for the 
 express purpose of providing taps which could be 
 turned on and deluge the common people with in- 
 formation. Nowadays, so far as I can ascertain, 
 mechanics' institutes have ceased to be, and have 
 had to give place to their younger rival the cinema 
 theatre, which, according to some, is a school of 
 immorals. 
 
 But in my early days at the University the Scotch 
 system of education was by means of lectures, and 
 
 121
 
 122 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the tutorial branch of education had not then taken 
 root. Lectures on Logic, on Moral Philosophy, on 
 Natural Philosophy, and on Belles-Lettres were the 
 order of the day, and it is comparatively recently 
 that tutoring has found its way in these northern 
 homes of learning, in imitation of the scheme in 
 existence at English Universities. 
 
 There are, I believe, still many courses of Uni- 
 versity Extension Lectures — or, at any rate, were 
 before the war — which are delivered at various pro- 
 vincial centres ; but from what I am able to ascertain 
 the attendance at these is not large, and here also 
 the electric theatre has taken the wind out of the 
 sails of University extension, as extended by these 
 tramp lecturers, and they have every chance of 
 ceasing to sail or even possibly of going to the 
 bottom. Of course there are still among us, as 
 survival of the times when the lecture was more 
 thought of than it deserved, certain foundations 
 which provide for the delivery of certain lectures, 
 and as the pious founders of these left money for the 
 remuneration of the lecturer, these discourses are 
 still delivered, often perhaps printed, and sometimes 
 even read. George Herbert, if I remember aright, 
 in one of his poems spoke in the person of some one 
 on a sick-bed of those who visited the ailing, and 
 
 said : 
 
 ' You come to comfort us, 
 Or to be comforted.' 
 
 So it is quite possible that it is more for the 
 pleasure of the lecturer than of the listener that these 
 lectures are scrupulously delivered. 
 
 One of these foundations was due to the certainly 
 pious inclinations of a Scotch lawyer, Lord Gifford, 
 who in his Trust Disposition and Settlement said :
 
 LECTURES 123 
 
 ' I, having fully and maturely considered my means and 
 estate and the modes in which my surplus funds may be 
 most usefully and beneficially expended, and considering 
 myself bound to apply part of my means in advancing the 
 further welfare and the cause of truth . . . and further, 
 I, having been for many years deeply and firmly convinced 
 that the true knowledge of God, that is, of the Being, 
 Nature, and attributes of the Infinite, of the All, of the First 
 and only Cause, that is the one and only Subject and Being ; 
 and the true knowledge (not merely nominal knowledge) of 
 the relations of man and of the Universe to Him, and of 
 the true foundations of all ethics and morals — being, I say, 
 convinced, etc., I have resolved from the " residue " of my 
 estate as aforesaid to institute and found in connection, if 
 possible with the Scottish Universities, lectureships or 
 classes for the promotion of the study of the said subject 
 and for the teaching and diffusion of sound views regarding 
 them.' 
 
 As a consequence of his conviction and bequest we 
 have had I don't know how many courses of lectures 
 with the view of promoting, advancing, teaching, 
 and diffusing the study of Natural Theology, and 
 these have been delivered at intervals by all sorts and 
 conditions of men. The first to deliver a course of 
 lectures according to Lord Gifford's wish was Dr. 
 Hutchison Stirling, and he has been followed by 
 many others whose lectures I have not seen. I think 
 Viscount Haldane delivered one or two courses under 
 the bequest. Professor J. Arthur Thompson de- 
 livered a course, for I have by me a report of his 
 ninth lecture on * The Issues of Life,' and Mr. A. J. 
 Balfour was, I think, the last Gifford Lecturer, and 
 his lectures have been published during the last year. 
 It would be interesting to ascertain whether these 
 many, and sometimes curious contributions to 
 ' Natural Theology ' have had the effect that Lord 
 Gifford hoped from them ; but any such examina-
 
 124 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 tion of such teeming contributions would be far 
 beyond the scope of my present intention. 
 
 Of course I have only used the Gifford bequest as 
 an illustration of the lecturing mania which was an 
 epidemic of the nineteenth century — a century which 
 was under the impression that education and diffu- 
 sion of knowledge by spoken words was the assurance 
 for the progress of the race, a delusion which even a 
 Gifford Lecturer, Mr. A. J. Balfour, in his address or 
 lecture as Lord Rector of Glasgow University, has 
 endeavoured to show — if I remember his rather 
 pessimistic address aright — to be unfounded. 
 
 Of course the Bampton Lectures on * Divinity ' are 
 more correctly described as lecture-sermons. They 
 were founded by will, by the Rev. John Bampton, 
 who died in 1751 and left £120 for the endowment, 
 and have been more or less famous ; and under these 
 the shelves of pious libraries groan, just as some 
 listeners yawned in Great St. Mary's, for by the be- 
 quest thirty copies of the eight sermons have to be 
 published within two months of their being preached, 
 ' at the expense of the estate.' 
 
 But passing from these subsidised lectures which 
 * make for righteousness,' there have been in this 
 form, in the past, considerable contributions both 
 to Science and Literature. The Royal Institution 
 of Great Britain, a kind of superior and surviving 
 mechanics' institute, has belched lectures; and as 
 many of its professors have been great men, like 
 Davy, Faraday, Tyndall, Dewar, Rayleigh, Thomson, 
 and others, some of these have been valuable addi- 
 tions to this country's science. Of course, too, the 
 Midland Institute at Birmingham, and the Philo- 
 sophical Institution in Edinburgh, and similar 
 institutions in some other towns, have still gone on
 
 LECTURES 125 
 
 sowing these seeds, which fall for the most part on 
 very unresponsive ground, or else among thorns 
 which choke their promised growth. 
 
 Amongst these lectures — lecturers have had as 
 much to say about literature as the others we have 
 mentioned had to say about science, and occasionally 
 these lectures have passed from the reading-desk into 
 enduring literature — Carlyle lectured on German 
 Literature in 1837 at Willis's Rooms, on ' The 
 History of Literature or Successive Periods of 
 European Culture,' and * On Heroes and Hero 
 Worship.' It is interesting to remember that Carlyle 
 was not so much a lecturer — a reader of written 
 speech — as an orator, the speaker of the word. For 
 the first of these lectures he had prepared copious 
 notes, intending to read them ; but he lost his way 
 in these, stumbled, and then put them aside and 
 proceeded, as if he was a rock which had been struck 
 by Moses' rod, and then he flowed on to the end with- 
 out a stop to the gush of his oratory. ' He extem- 
 porises,' wrote Leigh Hunt in the Examiner. 'He 
 does not read. We doubted on hearing Monday's 
 lecture whether he would ever attain in this way the 
 fluency as well as the depth for which he ranks 
 among the celebrated talkers in private, but Friday's 
 discourse relieved us. He strode away like Ulysses 
 himself, and had only to regret, in common with his 
 audience, the limits to which the hour confined him.' 
 
 Bat I am coming now to my own recollections of 
 him, when he was installed as Lord Rector of the 
 University of Edinburgh. I forget who it was that 
 passed a University Act under which the matricu- 
 lated students of the Scotch Universities, once in 
 every three years, chose a Lord Rector to represent 
 them in the University Court. It must have been
 
 126 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 some one obsessed with the nineteenth-century craze 
 that representative government is the best of all 
 governments, and that everything is all right with the 
 world not because God 's in His heaven, but because 
 I have, with forty thousand others, a vote for one 
 member of Parliament who is said to be my repre- 
 sentative — although I have probably voted against 
 him and given that precious thing, a cross, at the 
 ballot to his opponent. What good it can do a 
 student at a university to have a vote for the Lord 
 Rector I have never been able to determine. At the 
 same time I am certain that the election of a Lord 
 Rector introduces boys too soon into the political 
 arena — a place which is none of the cleanliest — and 
 makes them adopt * a side ' or a party in politics 
 before they have any but the crudest ideas as to 
 politics or their meaning. The election at which 
 Mr. Carlyle was elected and Mr. Disraeli rejected 
 was fought out by the students upon political grounds 
 — and that, of course, raised quite a wrong issue. It 
 was quite a mistake, but we were Whigs and Tories. 
 The chairman of Disraeli's committee, of which I 
 was a member, was Stormonth-Darling (afterwards 
 a Lord of Session), and with him were associated 
 J. P. B. Robertson (afterwards Lord Robertson), 
 Lauder Brunton, Colin Macrae, Moir, and ten or 
 eleven other Conservatives. The election took up 
 all our attention for about ten days, which might 
 have been better given to the learning we came to 
 the University to acquire. There were all the usual 
 tricks and treacheries of an ordinary election. There 
 were lampoons. On one side they called out * Old 
 Clo ! ' because Disraeli was a Jew : on the other they 
 retaliated ' Old Clo ! ' because Carlyle had written 
 Sartor Resartus. Some spirited verses were written
 
 LECTURES 127 
 
 on both sides. Carlylese, which was easily written, 
 was used to ridicule the Sage of Chelsea. All this 
 silly hubbub resulted — I think now luckily, although 
 I did not think so then — in the election of Thomas 
 Carlyle, and it was when he came to be installed as 
 Rector that we students heard the lecture of our 
 lives. The wonder was that the noise of the cheers 
 of the boys, with their hoarse guttural voices 
 and the shuffling and stamping of their big clod- 
 hopping feet, did not lift the roof off the Music 
 Hall. The enthusiasm was a hurricane of sound. 
 I have seen somewhere that on that occasion he 
 was clothed upon with a Rectorial gown, with frogs 
 and tassels, and that before rising to address us 
 he let it fall from the shoulders which had already 
 shrugged off an LL.D.-hood offered to him by the 
 University, and stood like any common man to 
 talk sense to a lot of common youths. I did not see 
 these antics. I was too interested in the man, with 
 his face which was deep carved with thought and 
 even with the lines of sorrow which come with it — a 
 face which, like aqua fortis, bit its way into memory — 
 and a manner which was like the country which had 
 borne and bred him — a little rough and uncouth, but 
 with thought and words which came from an earnest 
 soul and pondering head. Of course that lecture is 
 or can be known to every one. To begin with, he 
 told us that he had tried to write a speech for us but 
 abandoned it. And there he stood without notes, 
 speaking with his lips and his eyes, and impressing 
 the wax of our youth as few ever had done or could 
 have done. There is or there was, a strong feeling 
 in Scotland against ministers who ' turn the leaf,' or 
 in other words read their sermons. If it is a prej udice, 
 it is, I think, a justifiable one. A man should speak
 
 128 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 to people from his heart, and not from his paper. 
 Besides, a man who has his eye on a page is docking 
 himself of half his means of expression. When you 
 speak to a man you look at him, and the eye helps 
 the lips. But if you have your eyes glued to your 
 manuscript you are not en rapport with your 
 audience. Carlyle understood the first duty of an 
 orator, which is to speak to the people. You feel 
 the man through his speech. And, after all, a man 
 is God's messenger to men. 
 
 There was even humour in some of his earnest 
 words — when he bated his natural breath and 
 changed the word ' fools,' which he had meant, into 
 the milder ' foolish persons.' But I am not report- 
 ing his lecture, but referring to a memory which has 
 not been without its inspiration for me and for many 
 others who heard him on that memorable occasion.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 CONVERSATION 
 
 ' A speaking animal ' — Education a drawing out — Conversation 
 is education — Man a social animal — Kinds of conversation — 
 Argument one of these — Heat and light — Good talkers I have 
 known — The atmosphere of conversation — Must not be a mono- 
 logue — A quiet, slow speaker who used the right words, but 
 could listen too — Ben Jonson and Shakespeare at the Mermaid 
 Tavern, described by Fuller — What Ben Jonson said of Shake- 
 speare — Pedantry in conversation — Anecdotes, how to be used 
 in conversation — Lord Chief- Justice Coleridge a raconteur — A 
 modern ' Joe Miller ' — His Address at the Philosophical Institu- 
 tion, Edinburgh — Some neat sayings — But story-telling is not 
 conversation — Mr. Finlason, a storehouse of stories — His book 
 on the Jamaica Case — -Mr. Richard Harris, joint-author of Lord 
 Brampton's Life — Memory and imagination. 
 
 * Man,' according to Hobbes, * is a rational animal 
 because he is a speaking animal,' and a child's first 
 step towards rationality is speech. There is no finer 
 art than that of conversation — indeed all the other 
 arts are founded on and only branches of that main 
 trunk — the communication of one's thoughts to others 
 by means of speech, and the drinking at other foun- 
 tains of the living waters of conversation. A man 
 is really only half a man when he is shut up in the 
 closet of himself. He is in a finer matrimony when 
 he is in converse with another or with others. Edu- 
 cation is the drawing out of a man's nature, how- 
 ever much people have mistaken the matter by 
 thinking that education is stuffing a man with forced 
 meat like a chicken, and it cannot be drawn out 
 
 I
 
 130 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 in any better way than in conversation. Indeed 
 conversation is the best of education. The child's 
 first babbHng efforts are echoes of what others say ; 
 and when it can imitate articulate sounds, it is 
 emerging from the womb of silence and being born 
 again. Some men pretend to recluseness, and Cicero 
 said, ' When I am alone I am least alone.' But I 
 think he was a prig and put too high an estimate on 
 the value of his own company. The fact is that even 
 in our studies we are only recounting past converse 
 or thinking of things we will say in the future. But 
 conversation is society and man is a social animal, 
 and when he is with his fellow-men even if the tongue 
 should be silent the eyes and the features speak. 
 
 Without conversation society or friendship were 
 impossible. The only way we really know our 
 friends is when they ' stand and deliver ' on the 
 highway. It is true, too, that conversation is also 
 for our enemies, but it is the dregs we keep for 
 them — indeed so poor are the rinsings of the mind 
 that hate has recourse to the non-dictionary words 
 which we call oaths, and even then our anger splutters 
 and does not talk. Of course love itself is conversa- 
 tion. There is no stop to the gallop of lovers' tongues, 
 and although when overheard it may all seem to be 
 about nothing, it is about the best of things — and 
 that is the feelings of two human hearts. 
 
 We have, of course, noted a dozen different kinds 
 of conversation. Argument is one of them, and men 
 fight with words instead of swords. The duel has 
 gone out, but the dialogue is left to us, for we must 
 still cross swords, or words, with somebody. It is 
 possible, notwithstanding Shakespeare's idea, that 
 * rightly to be great is not to stir without great argu- 
 ment,' that he meant by argument * consideration ' ;
 
 CONVERSATION 131 
 
 for argument very often leads to more heat than hght 
 — although, as even the savage nations know, both 
 heat and light are produced by rubbing two dry sticks 
 together. If men would confess it, they owe much 
 to conversation — indeed it is a realer thing than 
 books, for books are only written when men are 
 debarred the readier, the liner expression of clashing 
 words. 
 
 I have known a certain number of good talkers 
 in my time : some who were as full of information as 
 a dictionary, some so full of lively light that the con- 
 versation flashed like summer lightning. 
 
 It is perhaps a kind of breach of copyright to 
 try to reproduce conversations, but the copyright 
 is preserved because it is impossible to reproduce 
 them. The conversation depends for its excellence, 
 not on the words actually spoken, but upon the 
 atmosphere in which the conversation took place — 
 to understand the words you must know the men. 
 Besides there is another difficulty about reporting a 
 real conversation. It is not a monologue, and be- 
 longs to more than one speaker. To be real con- 
 versation there must be more than one contributory 
 to the treasury. All that we can retain of a good 
 conversation is an uncommunicable memory of it. 
 I knew one quiet, slow speaker. He had what 
 Browning ascribed to Napoleon : 
 
 ' A prone brow 
 Oppressive with his mind,' 
 
 but his face, although rugged, was as bland as a 
 spring day with quiet sunlight in it. He was an 
 interesting man to talk to, and his words hit things. 
 A great high-shouldered hill which he could see from 
 his window was to him like a ' great stranded whale,' 
 while one at the other end of the valley, which was
 
 132 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 azure blue and pointed, was ' an ethereal hill.' He 
 had what some one said Milton had, ' the unique 
 word for things, the word that is a discovery.' His 
 speech was as rugged as the hills, but it grew harebells. 
 He pointed to a place which was called ' Faldoun- 
 side ' and explained it as the record of a landslip ; 
 another place called ' Blawlowne,' which translated 
 means * blow softly,' as he said the name tells you of a 
 shelter, a ' beildy bit.' Lumbago he referred to as a 
 ' commanding pain.' ' Why,' he asked me once, ' is the 
 carrying of a lap-dog by a lady a mark of distinction, 
 while the carrying of a woman's own baby is only 
 taken as a mark of inferiority ? ' He spoke of one 
 man who had a ' head cool as an alp,' and described 
 the gentleman who was Member of Parliament for 
 
 his town thus : * Mr. . Yes, he is a fluent talker. 
 
 If you put a piece of soap about the size of a pea in 
 a churn and churn it, it froths and foams till you 
 think that all the world is in the box, but it is only 
 the little bit of soap after all.' I think he called 
 Carlyle a great transcendental snob. He spoke once 
 of * tempest-crested waves.' And of children 
 ' Spilling laughter from their thriftless eyes.' 
 
 But I am not certain that that was not a line taken 
 from one of his own poems. Talking of these, isn't 
 the simple line : 
 
 * Where lies the golden sunlight on the grass,' 
 
 as good as Wordsworth's equally simple line : 
 ' And all the sweetness of a common dawn.' 
 
 But I am, as I said, trying to do the impossible, to 
 reproduce the effect of a conversation. 
 
 Another man I knew who was as quick with his 
 words as a fencer. He did not so much speak as 
 flash. There is in my memory Fuller's fanciful
 
 CONVERSATION 133 
 
 description of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the 
 Mermaid Tavern, which was written in 1652 : ' Many- 
 were the hot combats between him and Ben Jonson, 
 which two I beheld hke a Spanish great galleon and 
 an English man-of-war : Master Jonson, like the 
 former, was built far higher in learning, solid but slow 
 in performance : Shakespeare, with the English 
 man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but light in sailing, could 
 turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage 
 of all winds by the quickness of his wit and inven- 
 tion.' And I have compared in my thought the 
 two talkers I have referred to, to these ' leviathans 
 afloat.' Ben Jonson, in his Discoveries, says of 
 Shakespeare, after such praise as is seldom heard 
 and almost never deserved, that he honoured ' his 
 memory on this side idolatry as much as an\^' that 
 sometimes it was ' necessar}^ he should be stopped.' 
 That is the ' spate ' conversation of the active mind 
 and ready tongue, and I have known men who in 
 these qualities reminded me of the indomitable talker 
 of the Mermaid Tavern. 
 
 I know, or have known, some gentlemen who are 
 poor pedants in conversation, and whose conversa- 
 tion is a thin solution of the books they have read, 
 which the}^ decant from a magnum of memory. 
 Some men pelt you with quotations, but a mere 
 walking library is a poor companion when you want 
 a man whose quality is that he is ' all there,' living 
 in the present with thought for the occasion, and not 
 making the burdened back of the horse bear a load 
 of books. Still I would rather suffer the pedantic 
 recollections of such a man than the story-telling 
 of others who expect each anecdote to be welcomed 
 with a grin. Conversation, to be good, must have 
 the merit of thought, and your anecdote may be of
 
 134 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 use to the thinker, but it ought never to usurp the 
 place of serious thought or spontaneous humour. 
 Merely to empty the pockets of memory is a poor 
 compliment to the person you are talking to — if you 
 have a heart and a head, for these are better than 
 mere recollections. Lord Coleridge — the Lord Chief- 
 Justice — was a tall, willowy man with a big bone 
 dome of a head, with a sleek manner and a mellow 
 speech which seemed to insinuate itself into the ear. 
 He was, too, a man of great ability and could have 
 done better things if he had tried, but in conversation 
 he kept the ear of the dinner-table with his stories — 
 good stories, well told and very seldom repeated — as if 
 he had a monopoly. He usurped our ears for a jest- 
 book, and it is a poor occupation, the compilation 
 over ' the walnuts and the wine ' of a modern ' Joe 
 Miller.' Indeed it is an illustration of what is not 
 conversation. But while I have referred to his 
 unfailing repertory of stories, these have, perhaps 
 luckily — although they elicit the obsequious smile of 
 the moment — no permanent place in a busy memory. 
 One tries to measure men by their better efforts. 
 When he was Sir John Duke Coleridge he addressed 
 the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh upon one 
 occasion, and I have read what he said there. He 
 began by telling his audience that ' nothing seems 
 left to say, yet it is the irony of the situation that 
 something must be said.' 
 
 He went on to talk about a spurious and a real 
 classical education, about a love of nature, a study of 
 English classics and the consolation of these to the 
 old, justifying his remark that ' something must be 
 said.' No one, I am certain, could say nothing 
 better. His address was really nothing but common- 
 places uncommonly well put. In the course of it he
 
 CONVERSATION 135 
 
 said, ' Every man has a tendency to become narrow 
 in mind and thin in intellect,' and I hope I wasn't 
 spiteful when I was reminded by that sentence of Sir 
 John himself. But he put one or two points with his 
 usual mellifluous neatness. 'Boyhood, youth, and 
 early manhood were, in fact, consumed with most of 
 us not in acquiring any real or competent acquaint- 
 ance with Greek or Latin literature, but in carefully 
 abstaining from the attempt to acquire anything 
 else.' And again he said : ' Many men are incapable 
 of much ; they are born, they exist, they die common- 
 place, with aims, feelings, desires, pleasures, common- 
 place like themselves : 
 
 ' They eat, they drink, they sleep, they spend, 
 
 They go to church on Sunday, 
 And many are afraid of God, 
 And most of Mistress Grundy.' 
 
 I don't know whether he borrowed or invented 
 these lines, but I have said enough of his nice 
 ansemic phrases and polished ' commonplace.' 
 
 It is sometimes a little sad to know that people 
 who can talk well miss, as the Lord Chief- Justice did, 
 the point of conversation, which is that it is a game 
 which must be played by more than one, and are con- 
 tent if they can find listeners for their monologue. It 
 is clever of a juggler to keep up three or four balls or 
 flashing knives in the air, but it is only a trick ; and 
 for the game at ball there must be a give and take, 
 and so it is with conversation. But your monologist 
 is only a juggler with words and keeps these whirling 
 in the air, to his own satisfaction and possibly to the 
 astonishing of an audience with dropping jaws. 
 
 Mr. W. F. Finlason — who reported in the Courts 
 for the Times for many years, and was after his death 
 a well-remembered figure there, with his swart hair,
 
 136 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 his shaggy eyebrows — was a teller of stories, and was 
 indeed believed to have compiled a book of these, 
 which was always about to be published but has 
 never seen the light or moved our laughter. Finlason 
 wrote and published a book, A History of the Jamaica 
 Case — which I reviewed somewhere — in which he as 
 a careful juryman found ' No Bill ' against Governor 
 Eyre, or, in Carlyle's words, that he merited ' for his 
 strong measures ' honour and thanks and wise imita- 
 tion should similar emergencies arise.' Finlason 
 told his stories well, with some fire in his narrative, 
 and it is a pity that his laudable intention as to a 
 published jest-book was never carried out. Mr. 
 Richard Harris, Q.C. — who wrote Hints on Advocacy 
 and edited, with Lord Brampton, Lord Brampton's 
 Life, or Remembrances — was a great talker, and 
 brimful of stories of people, some of which he 
 related with dramatic ability. But he never quite 
 understood the difference between conversation and 
 buffoonery. I have mentioned these talkers not as 
 masters of conversation, but as instances of men 
 with some ability and some humour, who had chosen 
 the unwise course of being parrots instead of men, 
 and of relying upon the anecdote of memory instead 
 of the wit of the nonce. It is the last of these that 
 is the real spice of conversation. Story-tellers should 
 remember what some one said, that a joke is a bad 
 investment. If you make it you lose the principal ; 
 if you don't you lose the interest. But George 
 Meredith is right when he assures us that ' a good 
 joke is not always good policy.'
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MAD POETS 
 
 A heckler at a political meeting — Madness and genius said to 
 be allied — ' Mad ' doctors think most people mad — ' There is 
 nothing like leather' — Article injonrnal of Psychological Medicine 
 made most of our poets out to be mad — Alfieri, Beattie, Chatter- 
 ton, Coleridge, Collins, Cowper, Ferguson, Nat Lee, Swift, Tan- 
 nahill, Tasso, E. A. Poe, Lloyd, Rousseau, Schiller, and Charles 
 Lamb — Vice and insanity — Weight health — Charles Lamb — 
 Almost a Templar — The tragedy — The asylum at Hoxton — 
 Mary Lamb — Charles Lamb's letter to Coleridge — Sonnet to 
 his sister — My recollection of Hoxton House Asylum — Henry 
 Scott Riddle, shepherd and song-writer — A ' teachable temper ' 
 — His ' Scotland Yet ' good patriotism but not the best poetry. 
 
 I was born in Dumfriesshire when m}' father, 
 Dr. W. A. F. Browne, was in medical charge of the 
 Crichton Royal Institution, a Chartered Hospital for 
 the Insane. Once at a political meeting in the county 
 in 1906 a heckler who knew something of my history 
 asked if it was not the fact that I had been born in a 
 lunatic asylum ? That, I think, was regarded as very 
 much of a home-thrust by my political opponents, 
 but I was able to answer : 
 
 * Yes, it is true I was born in a lunatic asylum, but 
 I was discharged cured. If you had been born there 
 you would have been there yet.' 
 
 Perhaps it was because I was, in my early years, in 
 a sense connected with the insane that made me 
 take an interest in the mad folk in literature. That 
 genius and madness are allied I deny, but that some 
 
 137
 
 138 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 geniuses have been mad is an undoubted fact, for 
 genius unfortunately does not exempt its possessors 
 from the ordinary ' ills that flesh is heir to.' 
 
 But there is one thing that every casual reader 
 must be on his guard against, and that is the rather 
 sweeping views that ' mad ' doctors and alienist 
 physicians entertain, that almost everybody is 
 insane and that it is right to hold every man mad 
 until he is proved sane. This is quite a natural 
 generalisation, like that of the shoemaker who holds 
 that ' there is nothing like leather.' 
 
 I came across once, in A Journal of Psychological 
 Medicine of long ago, two articles on ' Mad Poets.' 
 There, in that Madame Tassaud's waxwork of 
 eccentric genius, I found references to Alfieri, Beattie, 
 (the amicable author of the forgotten Minstrel, who 
 by the way, in his Essay on Truth, was at the time 
 thought by some as weak-minded as himself to have 
 refuted Hume) , Chatterton, Coleridge, Collins, Co wper, 
 Ferguson, Nat Lee, Lloyd, E. A. Poe, Rousseau, 
 Schiller, Swift, Tannahill, Tasso, and Charles Lamb. 
 The writer had in some instances mistaken mere 
 badness for madness, and confused a vice with an 
 insanity. Yet I believe the writer was an eminent 
 physician who had been connected with the care and 
 cure of the insane. I am personally a little sceptical 
 as to the cure of the insane. Many persons are put 
 under healthy conditions and the obscuration of the 
 intellect passes. I remember one ' mad ' doctor who 
 thought he was producing a curative effect if his 
 weighing machine showed that the patient was 
 gaining weight, and who used to say with an en- 
 deavour at wit, * Look after the pounds and the 
 " mens " will look after itself.' 
 
 But of all these I have mentioned it was the
 
 MAD POETS 139 
 
 indubitable case of Charles Lamb that interested me, 
 not only because Elia had interested me many times, 
 but because I had visited the scene of a part of his 
 tragedy in Hoxton House. Most of his story is 
 quite well known, and he has told some of it himself. 
 His birth in Crown Office Row in the Temple we 
 know of. His schooldays at Christ's Hospital are 
 recorded with the playfulness which characterised 
 most of his writings. He was a clerk in the India 
 House, where he made up for going late in the morn- 
 ing by leaving early in the afternoon. Then his 
 poor mad sister Mary killed her mother with a 
 carving-knife, and instead of sending the poor mad 
 woman to an asylum — asylums were only more hag- 
 gard prisons in those days — she was handed over 
 to the custody of Charles, who, except when she had 
 to go to Hoxton House when a fit was coming 
 on, lived with her the whole of his life. Here is 
 tragedy ! Insanity with a knife placed under the 
 care of another intellectual cripple ! And to see the 
 two walking over the fields to Hoxton when the wild 
 beast in the woman began to growl is one of the most 
 pathetic visions in all literary history. It is said 
 too, for we must sup full of horrors, that in after life 
 when the brother and sister went out of town there 
 was a strait-waistcoat amongst the clothes in Mary's 
 box. 
 
 But the tragedy was not played out, for in 1795-6 
 Lamb himself was mad, and was in that Hoxton 
 House Asylum for six raving weeks. This is the way 
 he speaks of the clouded episode in a letter to 
 Coleridge : 
 
 ' I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through 
 at Bristol. My life has been here somewhat diversified of 
 late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this,
 
 140 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad- 
 house at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now and 
 don't bite any one. But mad I was ! and many a vagary 
 my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume 
 if all were told. My sonnets I have extended to the number 
 of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate 
 to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which if 
 finished I pubhsh. . . . The sonnet I send you has small 
 merit as poetry ; but it will be curious to read it when I tell 
 you it was written in my prison house in one of my lucid 
 intervals.' 
 
 To my Sister. 
 
 If from my Hps some angry accents fell, 
 
 Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, 
 
 'Twas but the error of a sickly mind 
 
 And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well 
 
 And waters clear of Reason ; and for me 
 
 Let this my verse my pure atonement be — 
 
 My verse, which thou to praise were e'er inclined 
 
 Too highly, and with partial eye to see 
 
 No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show 
 
 Kindest affection, and would ofttimes lend 
 
 An ear to the desponding, love-sick lay. 
 
 Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay 
 
 But ill the empty debt of love I owe, 
 
 Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. 
 
 Now for my own recollection of Hoxton House, 
 where Charles Lamb had the lucid interval in which 
 he mosaiced the stained glass of his sonnet. My 
 remembrance of that asylum is of it as it was fortj 
 years ago — inspected and visited, even at that time, 
 by Commissioners in Lunacy. But my recollections 
 can still make me shudder and wonder how any 
 lucid intervals could occur within its dim walls. Of 
 course the fields over which the Lambs used to walk 
 to the asylum at Hoxton are now almost in the centre 
 of that brick Sahara, London. But it is the place 
 itself that gives me a bad memory. I had a friend 
 who was medical superintendent of that asylum, 
 
 7
 
 MAD POETS 141 
 
 a hospitable man with thin side-whiskers and a 
 swithering manner, and I have dined in Charles 
 Lamb's ' prison house ' upon several occasions. But 
 what a place it was ! Hoxton itself is a rickle of a 
 town, and Hoxton House Asylum was a rickle of a 
 building. You entered it from a narrow street, 
 where the squalid houses on the opposite side frowned 
 at you entering. Then behind the medical superin- 
 tendent's rooms — which I dare say were comfortable 
 enough, although they might have been cleaner, and 
 had a mahogany gloom about them — were some 
 labyrinthine yards, a hall or room where upon occa- 
 sion the patients were supposed to be amused by 
 stage plays by amateurs, who practised on the feeble- 
 minded, or where on other occasions dances were 
 held to music which seemed itself a little insane. 
 
 How Charles Lamb ever got better in such a place 
 it is impossible to say ; and in that congeries of rotten 
 buildings, grimed with the smoke which in Hoxton 
 does not go up but comes down, his lucid interval 
 of which he speaks must have been a very Scotch 
 mist of a light. Poor Charles Lamb had a stammer 
 in his speech, and his mind hesitated between the 
 clear articulation of health and the maundering of 
 disease. I could weep when I think of sensitive 
 folk like Charles and Mary Lamb in a place such as 
 Hoxton House was when I knew it. But I dare say 
 it was worse in their dark days. 
 
 In my youth I met Henry Scott Riddle, the writer 
 of various songs that had considerable popularity 
 and were sung in many a kitchen and house-place in 
 the lowlands of Scotland. He began life as a shep- 
 herd in Teviotdale, but with a fine appetite for fame 
 went to Biggar to school himself, and thence to 
 Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities. He had
 
 142 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 indeed what another Scotsman prayed for, a 
 
 * teachable temper.' He became a minister, and 
 ' wagged his head in a pulpit.' When I saw him he 
 had the gnarled face of a rough peasant, but with an 
 eye which spoke fire. It is curious to note how those 
 who, like Hogg and Riddle, have been in the silent 
 nursery of the hills of sheep, aspire to sing like larks. 
 He used in his young herding-days to carry his 
 poems in his hat or bonnet, and one day the rough 
 Border wind blew off his hat and, as he said, ' pub- 
 lished ' some of his poems. Indeed some of his 
 satirical verses, thus disseminated, got him into 
 trouble with his neighbours, but I think also got 
 him some local fame. The songs best known in my 
 days that he gave to the winds of popularity were 
 ' Scotland Yet,' ' The Wild Glen sae Green,' and 
 
 * The Crook and Plaid.' ' Scotland Yet ' owed its 
 popularity as much to its patriotic national pride 
 as to its poetry, but for that matter so does Bums's 
 'Scots, wha hae,' in which the best line is 
 
 ' See the front of battle lour.' 
 
 Riddle suffered, as some poets have, from a mental 
 depression which removed him from the pulpit and 
 justifies us in having mentioned him under the 
 heading of ' mad poets.' I think it was some luck in 
 my young days that I met shepherd songsters who 
 
 ' Sang but as the linnet sings.' 
 
 The twittering, chirping sparrow has as much 
 pleasure in his fragment of a lay as the lark in his 
 fluttering carol.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 WRITING 
 
 Writing and accuracy — If you have to review you ought to 
 read — Reading as a pastime — Reading for improvement — Read- 
 ing for interest — Focused attention — Mine not an idle pen — 
 Wrote reviews and articles, and wrote and published some 
 sixty-one law and other books — My ' joy rides ' on my pen — 
 Writing with an eye to readers — Looking forward — Harmless 
 employment — ' Knowledge is power ' — Knowledge is for life — 
 Men are meant to live, not merely to know — The sublime of 
 human hfe — Tales of love. 
 
 There is one good about writing, and that is that it 
 makes a man, as Bacon says, accurate. It is quite 
 true that some author — we have the authorit}^ I 
 think, of Punch — said : ' I don't read books, I write 
 them ' ; and that may be a pohcy which will do for 
 some, but it won't do for a reviewer of books or a 
 writer of political articles. If you are asked to 
 review Leslie Stephen's Life of Fawcett you must, if 
 you have even the shadow of a conscience, read it. 
 
 It was in this way that in my earlier years I read 
 a great many books, and read them usefully : for 
 there are many kinds of reading. If you read for 
 mere amusement or pastime, you are wasting your 
 time and unjust to the book. But if you read with 
 the intention * of well and truly trying,' ^ and ' giving 
 a true verdict according to the evidence, so help you 
 
 1 I somewhere said, and I repeat it because it seems true : ' Read 
 for " improvement " and you have no interest. Read for " interest " 
 and you have improvement.' 
 
 143
 
 144 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 God ' — and that was the form of the old jury 
 oath in courts — then you have to bring a focused 
 attention to the page, and it deserves that : and it 
 is good for you to have an attention that can be 
 focused, and not one that goes scattering its hght 
 like a stable lantern from its guttering intelligence. 
 
 I am far from thinking that the man who is always 
 considering his self-improvement is an agreeable 
 person, any more than a guest would be who is 
 always looking at his food with a selfish reference to 
 indigestion or dyspepsia. It is a good thing to go on 
 improving, but the man who makes that the object 
 of his life is only a selfish egotist. The man who 
 does not think of himself but of others is likely 
 to get more education out of his actions than the 
 man whose self-reference is the mainspring of his 
 conduct. 
 
 Now even the drudgery work of reviewing has 
 excellent educational results on a man who will put 
 a ' stiff back,' as the Scotch say, * to a steep brae.' 
 It would ill become me here to give a list of my 
 contributions to reviews and newspapers, but I look 
 back upon the time I was reading for and writing 
 these as days which did not, in Carlyle's words in one 
 of his half-dozen poems, ' slip useless away.' But in 
 order that the reader may know that I had not an 
 idle pen, I may confess that not long ago I counted 
 the books I had written and published. They 
 include law books, political books, books of criti- 
 cism, and books of other descriptions (most of these 
 were published anonymously, and I am not going to 
 let the cat out of the bag here) ; but leaving out all 
 the reviews, etc., that I have been referring to, I 
 found I had given, to possibly an ungrateful public, 
 about sixty books altogether. Some were large,
 
 WRITING 145 
 
 some were small, perhaps most of them insignificant, 
 and one of them was even translated into Danish. 
 
 But returning to my reviewing days, a time came 
 when such regular employment in literature was 
 incompatible with my work at the Bar. I had to 
 keep my pen for a ' joy ride ' in my holidays, and 
 just as in my early holidays after I had become fairly 
 successful I had a cob or pony which I rode with 
 exulting excitement in my long vacation — sometimes 
 even shouting as if I were charging an enemy when 
 I was only cantering down a quiet road or country 
 lane where the hoofs drummed rhythmically — so 
 in these holidays I rode my pen at a gallop, some- 
 times almost as exultingly, and mentally shouting 
 down the green lanes and unfrequented highways of 
 literature. But, as I say, many of these holiday 
 excursions were published. I have a shelf of them, 
 and most of them were, for professional reasons and 
 not from modesty, published under a pen-name. I 
 will observe the same reticence with regard to these 
 famous gallops of a flying pen here as on their blank 
 title-pages. I am not writing an advertisement of 
 these books, but am merely putting on paper some 
 recollections of literature and of my feeble efforts 
 in that great direction. 
 
 But without saying what I wrote I may say a word 
 in favour of writing. It was said by Heine that 
 ' when a woman writes a novel she has one eye on 
 the paper and the other on some man — except the 
 Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.' But 
 every one who writes has an eye on the distant, sees 
 a vista through his page — it may be the expected 
 triumph of to-morrow or next year, or perhaps 
 further, the appreciation of a just posterity. But 
 that hope is itself a gain. A man who can look 
 
 K
 
 146 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 forward, instead of having a methodist eye on the 
 navel of to-day, is on his way to improvement. The 
 man who can see forward is something of a prophet 
 or a seer.^ It was Dr. Johnson who said that a man 
 was harmlessly employed when he was making 
 money — which is a large apology for the Jews — but 
 as a rule a man is not only harmlessly, but well 
 employed if he is writing. 
 
 At the same time the pen is ' flightier ' than the 
 sword, and as it is only the understudy of the tongue, 
 it can do harm if the hand that holds it has not got 
 a conscience. 
 
 There was a time when people regarded ' know- 
 ledge ' as a kind of god. If I remember aright, 
 Bulwer founded one of his novels on the dictum that 
 ' Knowledge is power. ' This result was brought about 
 by the fact that most of our education is mainly 
 learning from books (' book learning ' the Scotch 
 call it), and it is because books are our preceptors 
 that so many people take to the emulative production 
 of writings. But it is for life, as Bergson pointed 
 out, 'that knowledge exists,' and knowledge is of no 
 use unless like food it can be used for the purpose 
 of living more. A man, as many have seen, is much 
 more than a pedant, and a human being more than a 
 professor. It is no use having your knowledge in a 
 dungeon : it was meant to go about, and it is very 
 largely by means of the pen that it has its peregrina- 
 tions in the world of men ; but even then the 
 publicity is not to be the goal but the means to 
 betterment, and it has to be noted that the pen has 
 too frequently been a means to pride rather than 
 
 1 I like to quote myself in a note. It looks important. I once 
 said : ' A poet is a seer — a prophet is a foreseer — a historian a 
 lundseer. But they all see ghosts.'
 
 WRITING 147 
 
 improvement. The literary man holds himself high 
 in his pulpit, but in this he is overlooking the fact 
 that it is not by books but by life that a man is tried 
 and tested. 
 
 Bums, when he said 
 
 ' To make a happy fireside clime 
 
 To weans and wife. 
 That 's the true pathos and sublime 
 Of human life,' 
 
 ma}^ have been regarded as vulgarly domestic, but 
 he was speaking the true sense of the whole matter. 
 Living is better than writing. It is Claude Melnotte 
 in the Lady of Lyons who says to Pauline : * We 11 
 read no books that are not tales of love.' 
 
 But that is nonsense. First, because lovers don't 
 want to read books about love, if the dried-up 
 spinsters do ; and second, that it is not tales of 
 love that are the object of life, but loving, as Bums 
 saw.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 BOOKS AND ART 
 
 Books for reading — Handsome bindings — First editions 
 ' uncut ' — My first copy of Milton cost tenpence, Shelley and 
 Burns about one shilling each — -A first edition of Allan Ramsay 
 — Ben Jonson's Works, showing Will Shakespeare as one of the 
 players — Richard Burbage — His epitaph — The Anatomy of 
 Melancholy — How Burton made himself cheerful — ' Happy as 
 kings ' — First edition of Waverley, and first edition of Kenil- 
 worth — I read with a pencil — A crutch to memory — Books of 
 reference — Reading the Dictionary — A delusion as to Jews 
 which came from not reading the Dictionary enough — Century 
 Dictionary and Punch— The art of skimming or ' dipping ' — The 
 cheap books of to-day— Was an art critic in a way — Criticised 
 the Royal Academy and Old Masters— Books to read and 
 pictures to look at, not to boast about — Misunderstanding 
 about art — Pictures with a story — Pictures with art. 
 
 I HAVE books, but they are for reading and not for 
 looking at. Many a library is a museum of handsome 
 bindings, or a curiosity shop of first editions * un- 
 cut,' for even the cutting of the edges takes from the 
 auction value of such treasures. But I have none 
 of these. I have a better edition now, but for years 
 my own edition of Milton was one published by 
 Milner and Sowerby, Halifax, and purchased by 
 me for tenpence or one shilling. Unfortunately now 
 the binding has come away from the book, but I give 
 you my word it is because it has been used. There 
 might be alternative explanations of such an occur- 
 rence — either it has been well read or badly bound. 
 My first copies of Shelley's Choice Poems and of 
 
 148
 
 BOOKS AND ART 149 
 
 Burns were procured upon a similar commercial basis. 
 But it is the fact that I have a first edition of Allan 
 Ramsay's Poems, and an interesting book which I 
 think must be a second edition of Ben Jonson's 
 Works, for it is dated 1640, and I find that prefaced 
 to Every Man in his Humour there is a statement 
 that the principal comedians were 'Will Shakespeare,' 
 etc., and that it was first acted in 1598 with the 
 allowance of the Master of the Revels. Shakespeare's 
 name, too, appears before another of the plays as * one 
 of the principal tragedians.' The name, however, of 
 Richard Barbage appears before most of the plays, 
 and who was no doubt, notwithstanding his stoutness, 
 worthy of the poetical elegy on him which some one 
 wrote, if I remember aright, in eighty-six verses, but 
 of which I only remember one : 
 
 ' He 's gone, and with him what a world is dead.' 
 
 The epitaph upon him is short and easily remem- 
 bered : 
 
 ' Exit Burbage.' 
 
 I have, too, a second edition, revised and enlarged, 
 of that strange book the Anatomy of Melancholy. It 
 is said that Burton was himself a melancholic, and 
 that the way he chased 
 
 ' loathed melancholy 
 Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born ' 
 
 away was by going to the bridge-foot to hear the 
 ribaldry of the bargemen, which, it is said, ' rarely 
 failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter.' If 
 swearing is a specific for melancholia we need none 
 of us be sad, but I think R. L. Stevenson's prescrip- 
 tion for cheerfulness is better than Burton's recourse
 
 150 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 to such rowdy physicians, for he says in A Child's 
 
 Garden of Verse : 
 
 ' The world is so full of a number of things. 
 That I think we should all be as happy as kings.' 
 
 But of my books, I have mentioned those only to 
 show the poverty of my shelves of those works which 
 constitute a ' library,' as distinguished from a small 
 collection of good books to be loved and read. But, 
 by the way, I forgot a treasure. About a couple of 
 years ago a * first edition of Waverley ' was sold in 
 a London auction for £200. I have a first edition 
 of Kenilworth, published in 1821, and I naturally 
 thought my fortune was made, and I looked at the 
 brown backs of the three plain volumes with the 
 eye of a miser, until in a catalogue which some 
 bookseller sent me I saw he was offering a first 
 edition of Kenilworth for eight shillings, and then I 
 wakened from my dreams of avarice. 
 
 But it would be useless for me to have a collec- 
 tion of first editions of books which are prized for 
 their out sides, for I read with a pencil. Whether it 
 was a habit acquired at the Bar, from the reading 
 and marking of briefs with a blue or a red pencil, I 
 do not know, but I have always found that a pencil 
 is of much use in reading and allows the eye, return- 
 ing to the page, to seize at once what impressed one 
 at the first reading. Of course such a practice, 
 which is a crutch to memory, would spoil any book 
 for other readers, although to me the markings are 
 an invitation to return to those old haunts. But 
 books are the seed of books, and very often the hand 
 is not content with a pencil but itches for the pen ; 
 at other times, as some one observed, * a book in 
 the hand is an excuse for idle thinking,' and many a 
 man finds the page a stepping-stone to reverie.
 
 BOOKS AND ART 151 
 
 Of course while books are for reading, as I have 
 said, when one is in the country there is a class of 
 books that are not quite for reading, and that is 
 books of reference. These are invaluable. I have 
 — I do not know how many — encyclopaedias and 
 dictionaries, and although these are primarily works 
 to be consulted — like lawyers when you are in a 
 fix — there is, if you have some patience, excellent 
 reading even in a dictionary. I once, when in 
 Lanarkshire, was taken to visit a man who was a 
 pauper lunatic, who was said to be * a great reader,' 
 and when I inquired of him what he read he informed 
 me that it was the Dictionary. I asked him how 
 he hked it, and he said, ' Fine,' with a perfectly 
 judicious comment that * it changed the subject 
 unco often.' 
 
 One of that poor man's supposed delusions was, 
 I believe, not an insanity but a misunderstanding. 
 He believed and said that ' they were all Jews in 
 Arran,' which, if it had been true, might have led 
 to anti-Semitic 'affairs.' But he assured me that 
 he had heard it from the minister, and that he 
 seemed to think the next thing to ' the word of God.' 
 But upon inquiry I think it would be found that the 
 minister in question had, in chiding his congregation 
 for the rejection of Christ from the conduct of their 
 lives, told them they had, as it were, crucified 
 Him again, and that they were * arrant Jews.' The 
 poor man had not read his dictionary enough. 
 
 But you never can tell where that art of reading will 
 lead you. A minister took pains to teach an illiterate 
 parishioner his ABC, and soon he became fairly 
 proficient, with a finger guiding an unsteady eye. 
 So much so that when the minister asked the 
 man's wife if he could read the Bible yet, she
 
 152 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 said : * Hoot ; he 's oot o' the Bible and into the 
 newspapers.' 
 
 But with reference to my books of reference, 
 I admit I was the dupe of one of the greatest 
 hterary tricks of the age. I had, through the Times, 
 purchased the ninth edition of the Encyclopcedia 
 Britannica, in a revolving bookcase also supplied by 
 the leading journal, and then in a year or two I 
 found I had to buy eleven or twelve more volumes to 
 bring the colossal information up to date. Still, I 
 think I am indebted to the Times for the Century 
 Dictionary, and the first twenty-five volumes of 
 Punch, also a valuable book of reference. 
 
 One of the evils of the time is that there are more 
 books and less reading than there ever was before. 
 Indeed a great many people do not know how to read 
 — and have learned the art of skimming or * dipping,' 
 which is an injustice to an author and an injury to 
 this tippler of literature. The result of this kind of 
 reading is that books are treated as a pastime 
 instead of as a serious part of education. And 
 another result is that such readers never remember 
 anything they read. It is true that a good memory 
 ought to know how to forget ; but a memory which 
 tampers thus with books ought to be ashamed of 
 itself. One or two books well read are better for a 
 man than an undigested library. 
 
 But there is now no excuse for not getting some of 
 the best books ; but remember that when books were 
 fewer men read better, therefore don't get too many. 
 What with the cheap books produced by Everyman's 
 Library, The World's Classics, The New Universal 
 Library, The Home University Library, and The 
 People's Books, no man should be uneducated in 
 these days. But, after all, you waste pearls on
 
 BOOKS AND ART 153 
 
 swine, and good books are thrown away on thought- 
 less readers. 
 
 I have admitted that in early days I aspired to be an 
 art critic, and wrote the Royal Academy articles forthe 
 Leeds Mercury for four successive years. T also wrote 
 an article on the Musee Wiertz at Brussels, and on the 
 Exhibition of Old Masters in 1878, for some periodicals 
 — I have forgotten which. But my more recent con- 
 nection with art has been as a very small patron of men 
 who are living and painting pictures, and not of the 
 dead — the purchase of whose works only serves the 
 dealers. I have no ' old masters,' not because I have 
 any rooted objection to those faked productions of 
 the past which are still in their teens — no, not even to 
 the genuine works of the great Italians and Dutch and 
 Flemings. I really would not object to be the proud 
 possessor of a Reynolds or a Gainsborough or a 
 Raebum, and would no doubt point to it as a show- 
 man does — and claim as much credit for the pos- 
 session of it as was due to the artist that painted it. 
 But, in the first place, my ambition is not to own a 
 ' NationalGallery ' — like the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan 
 — or to be the mere custodian of works beyond the 
 dreams of insurance, but to possess works of art 
 which give me pleasure in looking at them often, and 
 not merely in boasting of them and the price I paid 
 for them, to the envious. But I have some pictures 
 on my walls that please me, and are winter windows 
 which let me see pleasant landscapes. They please 
 me, and I am glad not only to have them but to look 
 at them — and that is one of the last things the owners 
 of pictures usually think of. I am not like the 
 possessor of the great librars^ of books, of which he was 
 very proud, who was asked by a friend, * And when 
 are you going to begin to read them ? ' I look at my
 
 154 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 pictures, and the best of a good picture is that it 
 becomes a better friend the more you know it. 
 There are many who buy pictures because of the 
 vogue they have had in a gaping academy, and who 
 sometimes entertain angels unawares. But the real 
 buyer of pictures, to profit by them, must hve with 
 them as friends. 
 
 But perhaps there is no matter about which there 
 is so much misunderstanding as about art. A good 
 book may tell quite a poor story, and a good picture 
 may paint a landscape which is not in itself interest- 
 ing, or tell a story which in itself may be haggard 
 enough. Now many people read books and pictures 
 only for the story, and have not a conception of the 
 finer story that is between the covers or in the frame 
 — the art. The question for the critic is not so much 
 whether there was good taste in the choice of the 
 subject, as to determine the way the thing is rendered 
 in deft words, or deft lines, or deft colours. You 
 don't blame the actor because he has the part of the 
 villain, and the question is how does he convey the 
 message of villainy to you ? Is it well, then, that is 
 his art ? But the art of the artist is of precisely the 
 same kind — it is the art of expression. Only the 
 common people don't see the art and look at the 
 picture, and they think they are equipped as critics 
 because they say ' they know what they like.' 
 People who look at nature through a picture are look- 
 ing at it through a stained-glass window which is the 
 artist's mind — and it is with that that the critic has 
 to do, and not with the landscape. But even clever 
 people don't see art. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 was it not ? who summed up Turner in the words : 
 
 ' A landscape, foreground golden dirt, 
 The sunshine painted with a squirt.'
 
 BOOKS AND ART 155 
 
 I remember a young lady, who had been married 
 to a friend of mine, came to call with her husband, 
 and who, upon going down the stairs — London is a 
 place of narrow stairs and broad views — recognised 
 a fair reproduction of Watt's picture of the man who 
 went away sorrowful because he had great posses- 
 sions, and turned to her husband and said. ' Oh, 
 look at this take-off ! '
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 
 
 Mrs. Pfeiffer — Professor Campbell — Lewis Morris — The Epic 
 of Hades — Learning ' by heart ' — J. Russell Lowell's lecture on 
 Coleridge — Lines that lay hold of memory — Tannahill as a song- 
 writer — William Miller — ' Wonderfu' Wean ' — A man of taste 
 who tried to write poetry — Minor poets — Natural Selection — 
 Dr. John Cleland's Scala Naturce, and his criticism of Darwin — 
 Terminal forms — Weismann's modification of the Darwinian 
 hypothesis — Instinct in insects — The sphex — The Yucca moth 
 — Bergson's explanation of instinct — My own theory of the Fall 
 — Darwinian and Bergsonian explanation of instinct criticised 
 — The production of new organs not accounted for — Confession 
 of Darwin and Wallace — Huxley's suggestion of 'jumps ' instead 
 of gradual accumulations — The electric fishes, gymnotus or 
 torpedo — How fire was brought down from heaven — Burns 
 Dinner to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his birth — 
 Took the chair at the Burns Club, Dumfries — Also at Sheffield — 
 The cautious attitude of the Bradford Bums Club — A double 
 rejection— Bacon was the last English judge to be bribed, and 
 his father the first reported joker on the bench — Mr. Duke on 
 Gray's Inn — Story about Lord Brampton — Bacon-Shakespeare 
 fad — Sir Duming-Lawrence — Principal Caird on Bacon — Mr. 
 A. J. Balfour on Mr. Duke's estimate — Dr. Maudsley on Brown- 
 ing's Red Cotton Night-Cap Country — Dr. Charlton Bastian 
 and spontaneous generation — Re-reading Jane Eyre — Men of 
 repute troubled by the aspiring writers either with manuscripts 
 or books — My own errors in that direction — Mr. Disraeli — 
 ' Hamilton Marshall ' — The Cottagers of Glenburnie — Lord 
 Hatherley and a book of mine— James Thomson and Francis 
 Thompson — The right to tell old stories — Compare some old 
 and new. 
 
 In 1877 I reviewed John Forster's Life of Walter 
 Savage Landor for the Times, and received a letter 
 
 156
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 157 
 
 from Mrs. Emily Pfeiffer which approved my esti- 
 mate of that volcanic poet and great literary genius, 
 and said some kind but perhaps undeserved words 
 of the writer of the article. In this way I made the 
 acquaintance of a most devoted married couple. 
 Mrs. Pfeiffer was a woman who wrote some admirable 
 sonnets and much verse besides. I had several 
 interesting letters from her, but the only one that 
 now remains to me is dated May 20 — I do not know 
 what year : 
 
 Mayfield, West Hill, 
 Putney, S.W. 
 
 Dear Mr. Browne, — Your letter has been read by us both 
 with rare pleasure : it is unusual in these days to have one's 
 work judged from so high a standpoint, manners seeming to 
 carry it so completely over matter with all the critics — or 
 those who dignify themselves by the name. I send you a 
 card for the Saturdays on which we remain in town and enjoy 
 ourselves, receiving the visits of our friends in the garden 
 among our roses, when the weather permits ; but I write 
 specially to beg you to give me the pleasure of your com- 
 pany at dinner on the 6th of June at ^ past 7. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Campbell from St. Andrews (you may know 
 him as the refined and sympathetic translator of Sophocles) 
 will be staying with us, and we are inviting some congenial 
 spirits to meet them ; to hear that you will make one of this 
 gathering will gladden us both. — Believe me, yours sincerely, 
 
 Emily Pfeiffer. 
 
 I forget that particular dinner-party, if I was at it, 
 but I remember dining with them once when Lewis 
 Morris, the author of the Epic of Hades, was also at 
 their table. He was a biggish, fleshy man (very un- 
 like Professor Campbeh, who was little and dapper 
 and neat — even in his translations of Sophocles and 
 .Eschylus), whose conversation was costive, and 
 when it did come was not remarkable. The Epic 
 0/ Hades and his other poems were much read — and,
 
 158 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 I suppose, admired in their day (I have seen a twenty- 
 fifth edition of the Epic) — but I question very mucli 
 whether the poems have much present-day vogue. 
 
 Mrs. Pfeiffer pubhshed many books, most of which 
 she was good enough to send me, and she not only 
 met her friends ' among roses,' but she painted roses 
 and Hlacs and other flowers with abiUty, and for 
 many years these careful studies in water colours 
 were exhibited in the Royal Academy. 
 
 They, the Pfeiffers, were so devoted to each other 
 on earth — his admiration foi her was so pronounced — 
 it was but natural that they were not long parted 
 by death. Both are long since dead, but by their 
 deaths I lost two kind friends. 
 
 Memory is a wayward faculty. Sometimes it 
 keeps on bringing into its audience-chamber some 
 thought that you had hoped was buried in the grave 
 of oblivion. At other times, when you are relying 
 on it for the recall of something only the ghost of 
 which is there, you find it a sieve. Of course every 
 man's memory depends on the man himself. A sour 
 man will have a ' wersh ' (as the Scotch say) memory. 
 A kindly man will have a genial memory. A selfish 
 man will have a memory that only remembers its 
 master like a dog, and some memories can obey St. 
 Paul and 'remember the poor.' It was the way in 
 the old days to cultivate literary memories by 
 making children learn much poetry ' off by heart/ 
 And it is obvious that poetry with rhyme is more 
 easily remembered than prose b}^ reason of the 
 mnemonics both of the riiythm and the suggestive 
 recurrence of the expected sound. A memory 
 so stored is an excellent possession. But without 
 intentionall}^ committhig to memory there is much
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 159 
 
 in books that, as of right, takes possession of remem- 
 brance and is there, as it were, for ever. 
 
 J. Russell Lowell in his lecture on Coleridge, 
 which he delivered in the Chapter-house in West- 
 minster Abbey in Dean Bradley's time, said : ' I 
 cannot think that it is a personal peculiarity but a 
 matter of universal experience that more bits of 
 Coleridge have embedded themselves in my memory 
 than of any other poet who delighted my youth, 
 unless I should except the sonnets of Shakespeare. 
 This argues perfection of expression.' And he gives 
 the following illustration : 
 
 ' The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, 
 At one stride comes the dark ; 
 With far-heard whisper o'er the sea 
 Off shot the spectre bark.' 
 
 But if it is perfection of expression which gives the 
 
 verse a hook which holds memory, he might have 
 
 found many other burr verses in the same poem. 
 
 One that always held me like barbed wire was : 
 
 ' To Mary Queen the praise be given, 
 She sent the gentle sleep from heaven 
 That slid into my soul.' 
 
 Still this ' perfectness of expression ' is just the 
 mark of the real poetic faculty, and it occurs not 
 only in a talkative philosopher like Coleridge, but is, 
 strange to say, in as great perfection in the plough- 
 man Burns : 
 
 ' Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, 
 And then she made the lassies, O ' ; 
 
 ' The rank is but the guinea-stamp ; 
 The man 's the gowd, for a' that ' ; 
 
 or 
 
 ' Twa lauchin' een o' bonnie blue.' 
 
 It would be hard to beat these for perfectness of 
 expression, and these, when once they have got into
 
 i6o RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the head, take up a permanent residence in the 
 
 memory. But is not good poetry just fehcity of 
 
 speech ? Sometimes speech is happy in prose, 
 
 and sometimes it is not happy until it goes into the 
 
 upper storey of poetry, and it does that under stress 
 
 of emotion, as when David said : 
 
 ' Would God I had died for thee, 
 O Absalom, my son, my son ! ' 
 
 I think of all the Scottish song-writers of the begin- 
 ning of the nineteenth century, the son of a silk- 
 gauze weaver of Paisley, himself a cotton weaver — 
 Tannahill — was my favourite. 
 
 He played the fife at Greenock parades, but he 
 played defter on Pan's pipes than on the flute. But 
 his excellent songs found their way to the appropriate 
 music and were sung in many places in Scotland in 
 my youth, and may still, for all I know. I know 
 they deserve it. Many of them were by the ignor- 
 ant thought to come even from a lustier singer, 
 Burns himself. Many of them can now raise lively 
 echoes in my memory. * Gloomy Winter 's noo awa',' 
 'Loudon's Bonnie Woods and Braes,' 'Jessie the 
 Flower o' Dunblane,' ' Yon Burnside,' ' The Braes o' 
 Gleniffer,' ' O ! are ye sleeping, Maggie? ' and 'The 
 Braes of Balquhidder,' are all in their way excellent, 
 but are — or ought to be — ^too well known to be 
 quoted. But could anything be better than : 
 
 ' Towering o'er the Newton woods, 
 Laverocks fan the snaw-white clouds ; 
 Siller saughs wi' downy buds 
 Adorn the banks sae briary, O.' 
 
 Or the next verse : 
 
 ' Round the sylvan fairy nooks 
 Feathery brcckans fringe the rocks, 
 Neath the brae the burnic jouks.'
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS i6i 
 
 Or take the shivering lover at his mistress's window : 
 
 ' Fearfu' soughs the bourtree bank, 
 
 The rifted wood roars wild an' dreary, 
 Loud the iron gate does clank, 
 The cry o' howlets mak's me eerie.' 
 
 Of course there are faults — pedanticisms — in some of 
 them. One hates a line like : 
 
 ' And left the red clouds to preside o'er the scene.' 
 
 It reminds one of a chairman at a county council 
 meeting. 
 
 But leaving Tannahill, who is too well remembered 
 to be quoted, let me refer to two verses from William 
 Miller, the author of the ' Wonderfu' Wean,' ' Willie 
 Winkie,' and * Gree, Bairnies, Gree,' which are as 
 good as verses need be : 
 
 ' Oh, hairst-time 's like a lipping cup 
 
 That 's gi'en wi' furthy glee. 
 The fields are fu' o' yellow corn, 
 
 Red apples bend the tree. 
 The genty air, sae ladylike, 
 
 Has on a scented goon. 
 And wi' an airy string she leads 
 
 The thistledown balloon.' 
 
 And : 
 
 ' The moon has rowed me in a cloud, 
 
 Stravaiging win's begin 
 To shuggle and daud the window-brods 
 
 Like loons that wad be in. 
 Gae whustle a tune in the lum-heid 
 
 Or craik in the sauchen-tree. 
 
 We 're thankfu' for a cozy hame, 
 
 Sae gree, my bairnies, gree.' 
 
 Now with such examples as these Scottish songs, 
 can you imagine a man of some culture, who bought a 
 Kilmarnock edition of Bums for £500 and gave it to 
 a free library, writing poems himself in which such 
 verses as the following find a prominent place by their 
 hideousness. The author was a man of some taste, 
 a member of the Scotch Bar, and on one occasion 
 
 L
 
 i62 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 contested a Scotch county with a view to entering 
 Parhament. He was an excellent man, with a head 
 which seemed to have mercury in it, for it lolled on 
 his shoulders, but he produced two volumes of verse. 
 He was an intimate friend of mine, and therefore I 
 will quote very few of his verses. Thus in one place 
 he says : 
 
 ' Pillar and statue and bust 
 
 May change with a change of the skies. 
 Yet from their time-honoured dust 
 
 Heroes from heroes arise.' 
 
 I don't laugh, I only wonder. If obscurity is poetry, 
 
 he has hit the nail on the head — to use as obscure a 
 
 simile. 
 
 In another place he remarks : 
 
 ' The north wind crowds the alpine clouds. 
 Then sets them sailing free 
 In order grand, like ships astrand. 
 On heaven's shoreless sea.' 
 
 ' Arbitrariness ' has been praised as an attribute of a 
 
 commanding poet, and Shelley's 
 
 ' Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity,' 
 
 has been quoted as an illustration of this command- 
 ing quality. But surely here we have arbitrariness 
 with a vengeance. 'Astrand ' on a sea without a shore 
 is a difficulty. 
 
 ' Angels o'er us 
 Singing chorus 
 To the music of the stream,' 
 
 where, I take it, the River Nith sings the solos. 
 
 In another place, speaking of Tintern Abbey, he 
 
 says : 
 
 ' Hereditary crows at random pass 
 Thro' loopholed windows, hovering up and down 
 Where once shone crosiered saint and storied glass, 
 Broken in pieces by some Roundhead clown 
 To show his detestation of the Mass.'
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 163 
 
 But enough, the man was excellent ! The poems 
 are as harmless as pap, and I have no doubt gave 
 him pleasure in the somewhat slipshod writing of 
 them. 
 
 But in comparing the great with these more 
 modern imitations, is it not safe to come to the con- 
 clusion that experience is a thing from which men 
 do not learn ? 
 
 An American once told me that he said to a 
 friend, * It must be a fine thing to be a poet,' and 
 the friend said, * Sir, it ought not only to be fine 
 but imprisonment.' 
 
 John Cleland, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., was for many 
 years the Professor of Anatomy in the Universit}^ 
 of Glasgow. He married a cousin of mine, the 
 daughter of Professor John Hutton Balfour, and the 
 sister of Professor Isaac Bailey Balfour, who in 
 succession occupied the chair of Botany in the Uni- 
 versity of Edinburgh. Of his distinction as an 
 anatomist or as a teacher of anatomy I am, of 
 course, unable to speak. His retirement was 
 marked not only by the perhaps usual pre- 
 sentation, but also by the deep regret with which 
 his going was associated, which was itself a measure 
 of the admiration he had earned in his distin- 
 guished career. It was in other ways than as an 
 anatomist that I knew him. As a man he was 
 admirable. In old age he has a front like Jove, a 
 brow heavy with thought, strong handsome features, 
 white hair which has not lost something of the curl 
 of youth, a fine eye and remarkable intelligence. He 
 was not only an anatomist, but a shrewd critic of the 
 great theory of his time, Darwinism ; a thoughtful
 
 i64 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 poet, and in his leisure made painstaking sketches, 
 some of which were reproduced to accompany 
 Christmas greetings to his friends. His Scala Naturce 
 and Other Poems is a problem. It is full of high and 
 deep thought earnestly uttered. But is it poetry ? 
 In one of his papers, ' The Seat of Consciousness," 
 he has shown, contrary to those physiologists who 
 account for many motions in animals, after the 
 removal of the hemispheres, by reflex action, that 
 these are due, even in the case of animals that have 
 been decapitated, to consciousness, and that con- 
 sciousness * may extend along the nerves.' So 
 poetry is not to be confined to the great brains of 
 the race, but extends along the nerves, so to speak, 
 and is to be found in men who are not endowed 
 with the musical gifts of a Shakespeare or a Milton. 
 And, as a fact, there is real poetry in these thought- 
 crowded pages which will touch the mind's ear. I 
 think his purely artistic gifts are the smallest parts 
 of him. 
 
 While finding, as all must, a great truth in the 
 theory of Evolution as expounded by Darwin, he 
 shrewdly criticised some of the conclusions in his 
 paper, * The Terminal Forms of Life,' in the 
 Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, vol. xviii. He 
 made it clear that the accepted theory requires 
 revision, and that the theory of Evolution as under- 
 stood fails in various directions to explain the facts. 
 One of his illustrations was the lamp-shells. It is 
 certain that, instead of evolving, many animals 
 although allowed thousands of centuries are to-dav 
 just what they were in the days of the formation of 
 the old red-sandstone strata. He showed, too, that 
 cockles, oysters, mussels, and scallops are another 
 set of cul-de-sac animals, and have flourished just as
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 165 
 
 they do now from palaeozoic times. He throws 
 doubt on the idea that reptiles, birds, and mammals 
 form an ascending series, and finds various * terminal 
 forms ' in nature. The horse, according to him, is an 
 illustration. Walking on its finger, as it did, it is 
 a terminus among mammals, and upon anatomical 
 grounds he believes that development of the verte- 
 brate form has reached its limit and completion 
 in man. 
 
 But not only has he suggested corrections in the 
 current edition of Darwinian views — there are other 
 directions in which these are open to serious doubt. 
 Not only has Weismann questioned the hypothesis 
 that acquired qualities are transmitted by heredity, 
 and has substituted the theory of the continuity of 
 the germ-plasm, but other criticisms are still waiting 
 for answer. For instance, the care of offspring with 
 all its curious incidents cannot be explained by any 
 theory of Natural Selection. That an insect like the 
 sphex should hollow out at the end of a long passage 
 three or more chambers and deposit eggs in each; that 
 she should then capture a supply of insects to serve as 
 food for the larvae which are to come in some six weeks 
 from the eggs ; and that she should foresee that the 
 larvae must have fresh meat and not putrid matter at 
 the end of the six weeks is extraordinary. But that 
 the mother insect should sting the crickets, spiders, 
 beetles, or caterpillars in such a way as to produce 
 paralysis and not death, and should plant a sting in 
 the exact ganglion in which most of the nervous 
 matter is, and that when all this is done b}' the 
 future-looking and calculating sphex, she should go 
 away and leave the eggs to the chance of this fore- 
 seeing care, must upon any theory of production by 
 Natural Selection be absurd. This is only an illus-
 
 i66 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 tration of the prophetic care of insects for young 
 which they will never see or know anything of. The 
 Yucca moth is as far-seeing into a future in which 
 apparently it has no interest, and is another instance 
 which cannot be accounted for merely by the survival 
 by inheritance of an accidental variation which is 
 found advantageous to an individual of a species in 
 the struggle for existence. 
 
 The story of the Yucca moth is really interesting. 
 It lays its eggs on the ovules of the Yucca flower, and 
 then carefully fertilises the pistil with pollen, the 
 result being that the seeds form the food of the 
 larvae. But the eggs of the moth are laid on a 
 smaller number of ovules than are fertilised by the 
 moth, so that wise provision is made that all the 
 seeds shall not be eaten by the larvae, but that certain 
 seeds shall be preserved so as to secure Yucca plants 
 in the future for future moths. Now in this case of 
 the plant the moth acts as if it was aware that the 
 larvae would require the ripe seeds of the Yucca, as if 
 it knew that these could only be obtained by fertilisa- 
 tion, and as if it was anxious to continue the existence 
 of that kind of plant for the benefit of a lepidopter- 
 ous posterity — and consequently preserves a certain 
 number of the seeds from being eaten by the greedy 
 larvae. It seems impossible for us to account for 
 this wise prescience of the moth by a mere survival 
 of chance variations, and the Darwinian explanation 
 of these complicated instincts in the sphex and the 
 Yucca moth is that actions which are performed by 
 instinct were originally produced by intelligence. 
 Now here Bergson comes to Darwin's assistance 
 and seems to think that all this apparent know- 
 ledge which is in instinct once was knowledge and 
 became, by long-continued habit, automatic and
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 167 
 
 unconscious. Indeed he makes out that instinct 
 and intelhgence were in their origin and nature 
 identically the same, differing only in the conscious- 
 ness or unconsciousness of the activit3^ 
 
 At the risk of being tedious let me describe a 
 theory that I adumbrated before I read Bergson, 
 but which is curiously confirmed by his conclusions. 
 At the time this was not intended for a joke. I 
 pointed out that Adam and Eve when created were 
 purely instinctive animals, and not reasoning animals. 
 They did right because they did not know wrong. 
 It was only when they ate of the forbidden fruit and 
 became as gods, knowing good and evil, that they 
 became capable of doing wrong — which is the privi- 
 lege of rationality, and implies a choice. They were 
 — after the Fall — in the intellectual as distinguished 
 from the instinctive phase of life. Now if that was 
 the explanation of the Fall, the way to recover the 
 lost Eden and innocence is to recover instinct by the 
 formation of habits which are formed by the accumu- 
 lation of similar actions — actions which are in the 
 first instance performed by the intelligence and reason 
 of man, but which in time become habits and are 
 performed by instinct. Thus a child learning to 
 play the piano has to think where to put uncertain 
 fingers on every note, but the accomplished musician 
 can go on playing most elaborate pieces of music 
 while employing his reasoning faculties in carrying 
 on a conversation with a bystander. But so it is 
 with regard to good actions and bad. These become 
 habitual, so that the really good man cannot do wrong 
 and the bad man cannot do right. It was, accord- 
 ing to my theory, in this way that the human race 
 was to find its way back to Eden by the passing from 
 the probationary stage of rational life into a state of
 
 i68 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 instinctive existence — which, so far as the reasoning 
 faculties were concerned, would be the Nirvana of 
 Buddha.^ Now it is obvious that my theory is 
 really founded on the Darwinian science that the 
 instincts of animals have been formed by conscious 
 actions which have by habit become unconscious 
 instinctive acts, and on Bergson's philosophy which 
 declares that instinct is intelligence which has 
 become automatic, and that intelligence is always 
 tending to become instinct. 
 
 But, after all, isn't that a rather lame way out of 
 the difficulty of accounting for the wise acts of the 
 sphex and the Yucca moth ? It is impossible, as I 
 understand these gentlemen, to account for these 
 exceedingly prudent doings of the insects on the 
 supposition that they have intelligence now ; but you 
 account for these miraculous instincts by saying they 
 had intelligence then, and that the conscious and 
 intelligent acts of the sphex and the Yucca moth of 
 antiquity have accounted for the instincts of to-day. 
 But you have only shifted the problem back one 
 hundred and fifty thousand years — you have not 
 solved it. I think it was Professor Tyndall, in his 
 address to the British Association, who wanted to 
 account for the origin of life by suggesting that a 
 germ might have been carried from some other planet 
 to the earth on a falling star. But merely transferring 
 the difficulty to another place in the universe is not 
 a solution. And we are no nearer to an explanation 
 of what seems intelligence or awareness in the 
 insects by saying it was once intelligence and has 
 now become automatic, for we have still to account 
 
 ^ If there is any substance in this suggestion, then there would 
 obviously be some sound advice in Solomon's Proverbs : ' Go to the 
 ant, thou sluggard : consider her waj^s, and be wise.'
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 169 
 
 for the intelligence which went to the formation of 
 the habits. 
 
 But there is another huge difficulty in the way of 
 accepting the theory that all animals now living de- 
 scended from an amoeba-like creature, and that the 
 evolution has been produced by small, probably acci- 
 dental variations from the parent model which were 
 found to be advantageous, and therefore were part of 
 the equipment for survival. How can that theory 
 explain the production of new important organs like 
 the electric battery in the gymnotus or torpedo fish ? 
 If the variations are small, it must have taken a very 
 long time and innumerable generations to produce a 
 real electric batter}^ which would be of use to the fish ; 
 and during all these centuries the battery in the pro- 
 cess of formation would not be a part of the equipment 
 for survival, but a serious disability which would 
 lead to the death of the fish that was building up 
 this war material, and so to a collapse of the progress 
 in that direction. Indeed this difficulty seems to 
 have been appreciated, but not met, by Darwin and 
 by Wallace, for it is admitted that it is almost im- 
 possible to conceive how the first rudiments of im- 
 portant organs can have been of any use ; or how, 
 if they were not of any use, they can have been pre- 
 served to further development by Natural Selection. 
 It seems, too, to have been seen by Huxley, who, to 
 help the lame theory over the stile, suggested 
 * jumps ' in evolution, but this black-magic theory 
 does not seem to have been accepted by, although 
 suggested to, Darwin — and possibly rightly, for the 
 theory of * jumps ' would imply either a providence 
 or the development of a formative power at the leap 
 which, as I say, would amount to a miracle. But if 
 it is true that Natural Selection accounts for the
 
 170 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 development of amoeba into man, it must account 
 for the origin of all the organs which we find in the 
 human structure, and that the Darwinians are unable 
 to assert. It is an odd thing, too, that there is no 
 trace in the animals of to-day of the construction, 
 during periods of uselessness, of organs — like the 
 battery — which are to be of use in time unless the 
 poor appendix at the end of the human caecum is 
 really the useless beginning of something that may 
 be of immense use in a long, long run. But if that 
 is the case, our surgeons should be placed under an 
 interdict ! 
 
 No one denies nowadays that Natural Selection 
 has been a powerful agent in the modification of 
 animals and in their adaptation for their environ- 
 ment, but these things seem beyond its explanations 
 — first, the origin of life in the primeval creatures ; 
 second, accounting for the new departures which 
 have taken place as if in imitation of the original 
 creation ; third, the dead ends at which progress 
 in evolution has arrived in various directions ; and 
 fourth, the dream-intelligence which we find in every- 
 thing with life and to which we have given the 
 name of instinct. 
 
 Professor Sir J. J. Thomson, in a lecture at the 
 Royal Institution in the spring of 1913, told his 
 audience that of course the getting of fire by the 
 rubbing of dry sticks together was known to many 
 uncivilised peoples, but that two savage races had 
 independently discovered that by means of the 
 compression of air you could produce heat and fire. 
 He hazarded the suggestion that these peoples might 
 have discovered it by accident from the use of the 
 blowpipe. If the blowpipe with which darts were
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 171 
 
 shot (so there is some ground for the suggestion as 
 to kiUing Kruger by the mouth) had got stuffed up, 
 possibly the compression of the air might have set 
 the obstacle on fire. He did not seem to remember 
 that Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a reed ; 
 and this is how Robert Bridges, in the Fire Giver, 
 speaks of it : 
 
 Chorus. 'Twas in the marish reed. 
 
 See, to his mouth he sets its hollow flute, 
 And breathes therein with heed 
 As one who from a pipe with breathings mute 
 Will music's voice evoke — 
 See, the curl of a cloud. 
 M. The smoke, the smoke ! 
 Semi-chorus. Thin clouds mounting higher. 
 M. 'Tis smoke, the smoke of fire. 
 
 This is an easy explanation of the supposed theft of 
 Prometheus. 
 
 I was born within about a mile of the place where 
 Burns's ashes lie after his tragic tussle with a pitiless 
 and cold-shouldering world, and it was natural 
 enough that I should be a worshipper of one who 
 had crowned the noble edifice of Scottish Song with 
 his own inimitable pinnacles, like * Go, bring to me a 
 pint o' wine,' ' Green grow the rashes, O,' * Ye banks 
 and braes,' and the ' Jolly Beggars.' 
 
 I had at first a shilling copy of Burns, as indeed I 
 had at first only a shilling copy of Paradise Lost, but 
 I read them well — and so far as Burns went, he made 
 my head sing. I had, of course, read with real 
 admiration the splendid essay of Carlyle on Burns, 
 and yield to none in my admiration of him, always 
 keeping on this side of idolatry, for there were spots 
 on my Sun. 
 
 In 1859 my father had been chairman at the
 
 172 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 dinner in Dumfries which was given, or at any rate 
 eaten, to commemorate the one-hundredth anniver- 
 sary of the poet's birth. At that dinner two of the 
 sons of Burns — old, white-haired colonels — were 
 present, and everywhere on that grand day Scotland 
 held up a proud head, and claimed the Burns she had 
 hunted to the grave, as her son. In my time I had 
 to take the chair on a 25th of January, at the Bums 
 Club dinner in Dumfries, and propose the Immortal 
 Memory, and to try to persuade the rest of his 
 admirers that I was saying something new, while 
 as a fact I was only a parrot of what had been 
 said about Burns and his poetry probably five 
 hundred times before. It is true that on that 
 occasion I had not only Burns but the scurrilities 
 of Mr. Crosiland's Unspeakable Scot as a theme, 
 and I could call the latter, the author of a catch- 
 penny book, names which pleased the Scotsmen, 
 who felt that he had been treading on the tails of 
 their coat. 
 
 But not content with that exposition of Burns, I 
 had again at a later date to take the chair in Sheffield, 
 where I met many Scots abroad — who were in the 
 steel metropolis making their fortunes I have no 
 doubt, but keeping their memories of their native 
 land fresh and green, watered by tears, as if in a 
 conservatory attached to their English homes. Here 
 was a difficulty. I must try to say something about 
 Burns and yet not repeat what I had said of him in 
 Dumfries. I do not know whether I succeeded, but 
 I found the enthusiasm for Burns, amongst these his 
 countrymen in the distant Sheffield, was so great, 
 and the warmth of applause so genial, that it would 
 have floated even a crankier vessel than I launched 
 upon the kind audience.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 173 
 
 I was saved from another dilemma. I had been 
 asked to take the chair at the Burns Chib in 
 Bradford, and I think I was prepared to criticise 
 Henley's criticism and to point out some errors in 
 Henley and Henderson's edition of Burns. But in 
 1908, I think it was, I was chosen as the prospective 
 Unionist candidate for East Bradford, and I had 
 begun the campaign which ended in my rejection b}^ 
 the ' mostly fools ' in the constituency, hi 1910, and 
 the re-election of Sir William Priestley. The story 
 of that contest — so far as it need be told at all — 
 belongs to another section of this work, but the 
 action of the Burns Club of Bradford must be 
 mentioned here. These admirers of Burns, who must 
 have held with him that ' Liberty 's a glorious feast,' 
 and that even if you are a Unionist candidate for a 
 constituency, 'A man 's a man for a' that,' thought 
 that the fact of my political venture disqualified me 
 as chairman at a Burns Club dinner, and so I was 
 relieved from the dilemma of having again to make 
 a speech proposing the Immortal Memory. I dare 
 say some of those cautious Yorkshire Scotsmen 
 thought that I was going to try to make political 
 capital, and win some votes from the Chair at their 
 festive meeting. So you see I was not only rejected 
 by the large and important constituency of East 
 Bradford but by the Burns Club. 
 
 Bacon, according to Lord Macaulay, was among 
 the last Englishmen who sold justice, and his father. 
 Sir Nicholas Bacon, was, according to Mr. Duke in 
 his admirable lecture on ' Gray's Inn,' the first 
 English judge of whom a judicial jest is recorded. 
 It is recorded by Francis Bacon himself that his 
 father, Sir Nicholas, who is said to have been a[great
 
 174 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 judge, was going the Northern circuit, and was 
 sentencing some fellows. One prisoner named Hog 
 had been convicted, and was called upon to show 
 cause why sentence should not be passed on him. 
 The prisoner pleaded as a plea that he was akin to 
 the judge. ' How is that ? ' asked Nicholas. * If 
 it please you, my lord, thy name is Bacon and mine 
 is Hog, and in all ages hog and bacon have been so 
 near kindred that they were not to be separated.' 
 So said the fellow, and the reply which Lord Bacon 
 attributes to his father is this : * Aye, but you and I 
 cannot be kindred except you be hanged, for hog is 
 not bacon until it is well hanged.' 
 
 But there is a story told of Hawkins (Lord Bramp- 
 ton) which, although a modern instance, is worth 
 recording in connection with that ancient mot. 
 
 It is said that Mr. Justice Hawkins, as he then 
 was, was at some Assize breakfast or luncheon, and 
 he was asked what he would have. Looking down 
 the table he said : 
 
 * I '11 try some of that hung beef.' 
 
 * It is not hung beef,' his host explained, which 
 made room for the addition. ' It will be sure to be 
 hung if the judge tries it.' 
 
 And yet Lord Brampton did not include that in 
 his Remembrances. 
 
 But it was not of Henry Hawkins that I meant to 
 speak here, but of Bacon. 
 
 A Fad is a man in possession of a weak mind. Thus 
 there are many who upon what they regard as evi- 
 dence have come to the conclusion that Bacon was 
 Shakespeare ; or at any rate, as the humorists have 
 it, that the plays were written by another man of 
 the same name. The late Sir E. Durning-Lawrence 
 was one of those who set out to * gild ' the lily of
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 175 
 
 Bacon's reputation by adding to it the glittering 
 fame of the writer of the plays and sonnets. Is it 
 too much to say that the propagation of that view 
 made him something of a bore ? ^ I would rather 
 have been convinced, or have simulated conviction, 
 than have listened to all his confident arguments. 
 Add a little stress to this ingenious literary fad 
 and you would have had the fixed idea of a brain 
 which reels like a top round that one stable position. 
 But it is not to the half-crazy monists — if I may 
 apply such a phrase to the Baconian-Shakespearians 
 — that we owe our real knowledge of the great Lord 
 Keeper. It is not even to Macaulay's distorted 
 portrait of him that we are indebted for a picture of 
 the man. Apart from Spedding's Life, we have had 
 the advantage of two excellent contributions to our 
 knowledge of Bacon — one from Mr. Duke (now Irish 
 Secretary, and at that time Treasurer of Gray's Inn) 
 on the occasion of the Assembly in Gray's Inn Hall 
 on the 17th October 1908, the three-hundredth anni- 
 versary of the day of the election of Francis Bacon 
 as Treasurer of that Inn ; and the other from Mr. A. J. 
 Balfour, on the occasion of the unveiling of the 
 Bacon statue at Gray's Inn on Thursday, 27th June 
 1 912. I was present upon both these occasions, and 
 remember both the speeches with gratitude. They 
 were worthy of the real reputation of Bacon, and 
 that is saying much. But even before these the late 
 Principal Caird, of Glasgow University, in an address 
 on Bacon said of him : 
 
 * Bacon, the philosopher of science, the author of 
 the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum, and 
 Bacon, the lawyer, politician, courtier — Bacon the 
 
 1 I have suffered from him at a reception for a long half-hour, 
 and even when he caught me at a private view of a picture-gallery, 
 he enveloped me again in his meshes, and I saw not the pictures.
 
 176 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 high priest of nature, the herald of the new era of 
 knowledge, inspired by a noble intellectual ardour, 
 leading mankind back from the paths of error and 
 pointing out the way to the kingdom of light and 
 truth — and Bacon, the subtle courtier, the ambitious, 
 eager place-hunter, stooping to be jostled among the 
 herd of time-servers and political lackeys in the 
 courts of Elizabeth and James i., seem to me not 
 one man but two.' 
 
 And Mr. Balfour, after quoting a passage from 
 Bacon, approaches the same view, for he says : 
 ' There surely speaks the seer. There you have 
 expressed in burning words the vehement faith which 
 makes Bacon the passionate philosopher so singular 
 a contrast to Bacon the cold and somewhat poor- 
 spirited politician.* 
 
 Indeed in some aspects Bacon was the Jekyll and 
 Hyde of antiquity. The ascription to him of the 
 foundation of inductive philosophy is of course a 
 mistake, for the method of that philosophy had 
 already performed wonders in the hands of Coperni- 
 cus, Galileo, Kepler, and Gilbert, and it did nothing 
 for Bacon, whose new organon of science was an 
 absolutely impossible suggestion, and by his puzz- 
 ling method no scientific discovery, either little or 
 great, was ever made or could be made. 
 
 We may leave Macaulay's inaccurate black-and- 
 white sketch of Bacon on one side and accept what 
 Sir John Herschel said of him and his relation to 
 science : * It is not the introduction of inductive 
 reasoning as a new and hitherto untried process 
 that characterised the Baconian philosophy ; but 
 his keen perception and broad spirit, stirring almost 
 enthusiastic announcement of its paramount im- 
 portance as the Alpha and Omega of science.'
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 177 
 
 One curious feature about his scientific exploits 
 is that by his method he would have superseded 
 inventive genius in science. Now we know that 
 imagination in science is an indispensable equipment, 
 and to put a mechanical expedient — as a method of 
 discovery of the truths of nature — in place of in- 
 ventive genius, and to have that suggestion from a 
 man who was himself compacted of imagination, is a 
 somewhat strange thing in the history of literature. 
 
 But here we come in touch with the least of his 
 works, which is also the greatest — his Essays. Bacon 
 had a cool, self-contained nature, and made no con- 
 fidant except his pen. To that he confided a good 
 many littlenesses — hints for conversation at table 
 and the like, but he never confided anything better 
 to it than his Essays, the miscellaneous wisdom of a 
 man who has been in the world. Now any one who 
 knows his Essays well — and ' it is,' according to 
 Mr. Duke, * as though he had walked in company 
 with Sindbad or Alo/Jdin, and had found his pocket 
 filled with gems ' — any one who thus knows Bacon 
 at his best, knows that Bacon at his best and Shake- 
 speare at his best were two men and not one. All 
 the evidence which the pernicious * Baconians,' 
 like the late Sir E. Durning-Lawrence, can collect 
 cannot shake the faith of a man who knows the 
 writings of the two. 
 
 Henry Maudsley, M.D. — who would be described 
 I dare say in Who 's Who as physician and author, 
 for he wrote a good many books — was at one time 
 editor of the Journal of Mental Science. He was a 
 man of some pointed intelligence and wrote a fairly 
 luminous style, although in nature I think he was a 
 little hard. He was an alienist physician of some 
 
 M
 
 178 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 repute. In April 1874 Browning published his 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, and I offered to 
 review it, from a psychological point of view, for 
 Dr. Maudsley's journal. The article is not worth 
 mentioning. Although Browning pronounced his 
 hero, Leonce Miranda, sane, I, from the internal 
 evidence of the poem, tried to prove him mad. But 
 Maudsley's letter is worth referring to, for it shows 
 how a fairly shrewd man in 1874 could criticise 
 Robert Browning very ineptly. He wrote : 
 
 I have turned over the next No. chiefly to Clouston, but 
 I dare say we shall have room. It would be in your name 
 of course. As for me, I think Browning to be something of 
 a psychologist, at any rate in his earlier poems, but the most 
 ridiculous absurdity as a poet that a foolish age has ever 
 been bamboozled with ! He simply dislocates sentences 
 and calls the result poetry. Put in plain language what he 
 says, and it is the most prosy tediousness imaginable. I 
 could not read Cotton Night-Cap although I tried ! ! — Yours 
 very truly, H. Maudsley. 
 
 It was of the author of the Ring mid the Book that 
 he was writing ! 
 
 I knew Charlton Bastian for a great number of 
 years. At first, in the seventies, well, and latterly in 
 a more fluctuating sort of way — a kind of pass-the- 
 time-of-day friendship at the Athenaeum Club. He 
 was, in my opinion, a well-disposed man, of dark 
 complexion, of middle height and middle capacit3^ 
 He thought by his juggling with chopped hay and 
 other experiments that he had proved spontaneous 
 generation among the lower organisms. He, like 
 Haeckel, was obsessed with the idea that ' if we 
 do not accept the hypothesis of Spontaneous Genera- 
 tion, then at this point of the history of development 
 we must have recourse to the miracle of a super-
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS lyg 
 
 natural creation. The Creator must have created 
 the first organism, or a few first organisms from which 
 all others are derived, and as such He must have 
 created the first monera or primeval cytoids and 
 given them the capability of developing further in a 
 mechanical way.' But that idea, which even when 
 stated in Haeckel's own words does not seem 
 ridiculous, went against the grain with Haeckel and 
 Bastian, and they were firm believers in getting life 
 out of dead matter. Haeckel seemed to think that 
 the heat and moisture of long ago had created living 
 matter, but Bastian thought he could do the same 
 thing with his flasks and infusions. Both of them 
 were seeking the living among the dead. 
 
 Bastian was at one time Professor of Pathological 
 Anatomy at University College, and practised his 
 profession for many years. The practice, however, 
 seemed to fall off, and he got a small pension from 
 the Civil List, which was well deserved but not 
 long enjoyed, for he died in a year or two. And 
 Science still believes with Harvey, omne vivum ex ovo, 
 and with Virchow, omnis cellula e cellula, 
 
 I have re-read Jane Eyre. It is a powerful, almost 
 a masterful book, but it is old-fashioned and in many 
 ways quaint. The Lowood school is well drawn, 
 and the episodical death of Helen Burns has tears in 
 it, although Charlotte Bronte makes too much of her 
 slatternHness. A good deal of the character sketching 
 is done with strong firm lines. Here in chapter ix. is 
 a fairly good landscape : ' That beck itself was then 
 a torrent turbid and ruthless. It tore asunder the 
 wood and sent a raving sound through the air, often 
 thickened with wild rain or whistling sleet, and for 
 the forest on its banks that showed only ranks of
 
 i8o RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 skeletons.' Here, too, is something good in chapter 
 xii : ' Far and wide on each side there were only 
 fields where no cattle now browsed, and the little 
 brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, 
 looked like rough russet leaves that had forgotten to 
 drop/ ' The murmurs of life ' is good as to the dis- 
 tant town. * A blue sea absolved from taint of 
 cloud ' is quaint and a little forced. ' Approach the 
 table,' Mr. Rochester says when he wants it put near 
 to him. A young lady is ' disposed to be gregarious.' 
 Another person is ' in the frequent habit.' Chapter 
 xvi., * A marriage was achieved.' These are quaint- 
 nesses. But there are many excellences in the 
 stirring pages. The * rustling state ' of Mrs. Fairfax ; 
 another person ' need not cover her smiles ' ; ' keen 
 condiments,' * fostering sunbeams,' ' glorious gaze,' 
 and many other minted phrases are there to show 
 the writer's deft use of happy words. But through- 
 out there is pith and passion in the book. 
 
 One of the disadvantages in the old days of making 
 anything like a name in literature was that you 
 were pestered by all scribblers to read their crude 
 performances, and to stand and deliver a candid 
 opinion of the Tragedy, the Epic, or the Novel that 
 they sent you in ' almost undecipherable' manuscript. 
 I have admitted that upon two occasions I sinned 
 against men who had acquired a certain amount of 
 reputation, and the two that I did approach for an 
 opinion upon certain very early poems showed that 
 they merited greatness by, at any rate, their kindness 
 and courtesy. But I also admit that when some of 
 my writings were in print I sent them to some men 
 who perhaps had merited something better at my
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS i8i 
 
 hands, and I have even now to be grateful for some 
 praise which it was probably their kindness that 
 dictated rather than my merits deserved. In another 
 place I have told how I sent a novel to Carlyle, 
 how I dedicated another with his permission to him, 
 and what he said of it and to me. 
 
 It must have been one of these — the first, I think — 
 that I sent to Mr. Disraeli, for I have a letter from 
 him. It is written by himself and dated : 
 
 Grosvenor Gate, August 25, '71. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli thanks Mr. Browne for his book, which he will 
 take with him to Hughenden. 
 
 Lady Beaconsfield had become partially acquainted with 
 it in the pages of a periodical work, and spoke highly of it 
 more than once to Mr. Disraeli. 
 
 It is true the book — a novel — had, before publica- 
 tion in two-volume form, been published in the 
 St. James's Magazine, at that time edited by Mrs. 
 Riddell, the author of A Life's Assize, and I was a 
 little proud of this note from Mr. Disraeli. 
 
 Of course one is familiar with the usual acknow- 
 ledgments of such a gift — as in the case of a certain 
 gentleman who was dunned for subscriptions to 
 charities, and who had recourse to the common form 
 on the first page of a sheet of notepaper : 
 
 I have to acknowledge the receipt of the applica- 
 tion from the Society for the Prevention of (or for the Pro- 
 motion of) and beg to subscribe 
 
 That was as far as he got on the first page, and 
 when the secretary with eager fingers turned over to 
 ascertain the limit of his generosity, he found only 
 
 myself. Yours truly, A. B. 
 
 In the same way we know that the recipient of a 
 book is quite justified in acknowledging the receipt
 
 i82 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 of it, and in assuring the author (ambiguously) that 
 ' he will lose no time in reading it.' But Mr. Disraeli's 
 note went one better than that. It is always better, 
 if you are to acknowledge the receipt of a book, to do 
 so before you have looked into it, for in that case 
 you may indulge in a more or less veracious * hope ' ; 
 but if you have read it, you may have to give the 
 more or less harsh opinion which follows from ' look- 
 ing a gift-horse in the mouth.' 
 
 By the way, that novel was published under the 
 pen-name of Hamilton Marshall, and in some paper 
 a paragraph appeared : ' Mr. Hamilton Marshall is a 
 direct descendant of Miss Hamilton, whose Cottagers 
 of Glenburnie delighted our ancestors.' This was, 
 of course, quite untrue. Miss Hamilton had been 
 known to my grandmother, who as a girl going to her 
 first party had been seen and admonished by Miss 
 Hamilton for not holding up her head. Nay, further ; 
 the author of The Cottagers of Glenburnie had put a 
 pin somewhere in the neck of the child's dress to 
 make her carry an upright head, and my grand- 
 mother — seventy or eighty when she indulged in the 
 reminiscence — had almost tears in her old eyes when 
 she remembered that the perky pin had drawn a 
 drop of blood from her forgetfully drooping chin 
 which stained her white dress. That, so far as I 
 know, was my only connection with Miss Hamilton, 
 and how the paragraph I have quoted came to be in 
 any newspaper, I do not know. However, the 
 mistake was soon corrected, for a gentleman wrote 
 from Dublin : 
 
 ' I beg to remind the reading public that the authoress of 
 The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Miss Elizabeth Hamilton, was 
 bom at Belfast, 25th July 1758, and died at Harrogate, 23rd 
 July 1816, without having changed her maiden name,'
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 183 
 
 I do not know who slandered the no doubt estim- 
 able dead lad}^ 
 
 Lord Hatherley, the Lord Chancellor, of whom 
 it was said he had all the virtues unredeemed by 
 a single vice, was very kind to me in the days 
 when I lived in the Temple. I dined with him in 
 31 Great George Street several times, and was asked 
 to * At Homes ' b}^ Lady Hatherley. The house had 
 interest for me afterwards, for when it ceased to be 
 a private residence it became ' chambers,' and my 
 friend, Mr. E. H. Pember, K.C., had the dining-room 
 — as it was in the Chancellor's time — for his consult- 
 ing-room, and the room behind for an eel of a man 
 with a red head of hair — his clerk — and if I have been 
 in consultation in that room once, I have been some 
 hundreds of times. I suppose I must have sent the 
 Lord Chancellor one of my law-books, for I have a 
 letter from him dated : 
 
 31 Gt. George Street, 
 January 25, 1873. 
 
 Dear Mr. Balfour Browne, — I am glad to see you have 
 turned your attention to the discussion of Professional 
 Topics. The subject you have chosen, though often treated 
 of, admits yeady a fresh development, and I trust your 
 labour will be found beneficial both to the public and your- 
 self. No one feels the value of such Treatises more than 
 one called upon to administer the law. I thank you very 
 much for sending me a copy of your work, and am yours 
 very sincerely, Hatherley. 
 
 James Thomson was born in Port Glasgow in 1834 
 and died in 1882. Francis Thompson was born in 
 Preston in 1859 and died in 1907. Although they bore 
 the same surname and were both poets — and very 
 considerable poets — no two men could be less unlike 
 in poetry. The City of Dreadful Night is a poem of
 
 i84 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 unrelieved gloom. Through The Hound of Heaven the 
 light shines. Francis Thompson wrote poetry com- 
 manding admiration and pointing to hope. James 
 Thomson has our admiration, but points to despair. 
 Of The City of Dreadful Night, George Meredith said 
 it was * a poetical offence of dark monotonousness.' 
 The Hound of Heaven is the beautiful, although 
 strained hunt, and a successful hunt for a soul. We 
 are perhaps induced to take too dark a view of James 
 Thomson's pessimism, for we know his City of 
 Dreadful Night best, and we associate him with his 
 black colleague in misery, Leopardi ; but there are 
 at any rate glimpses of sunshine in some of his other 
 poems, like Sunday up the River, if the City is under 
 a gruesome pall. The lives of neither of these men 
 were such as to inculcate cheerfulness. James 
 Thomson had a somewhat battered time. Francis 
 Thompson walked from Lancashire to London in 
 search of that worst of all livings, a life by the pen, 
 and found the stone heart of the Metropolis. The 
 great have always to be found out by the few. He 
 found some admiring and generous friends, in 
 return for his great gift of poetry. 
 
 But these writers are above popularity, and will 
 live in future — as they both desired to live — only with 
 the few. Each of them had depth and sincerity, and 
 had something really important to say to their 
 fellows, and said it in a form that suited the message 
 — each, in James Thomson's words, ' felt a rapture 
 trembling into awe.' 
 
 I protest against a criticism which is sometimes 
 brought to bear upon the harmless senility of reminis- 
 cences, and that is that the memory recalled or the 
 story retold is not new. First, with regard to stories,
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 185 
 
 it is certainly true that there is nothing new under 
 the sun. But, second, if one acknowledges that one 
 is dependent upon memory, it is absurd to expect 
 inventions ; and, really, some of the quite old stories 
 are vintage stories, and are much better than the new 
 brews of to-day. But, further, every one has not 
 heard every old story, and to some they really may 
 be new, although they were hatched a century ago. 
 Here is one which must be old, but is good enough 
 to be recalled. Theodore Hook was visiting a lady 
 who felt as strongly about temperance as the Lady 
 Carlisle who had one thousand bottles of wine poured 
 into the ground, and who, thinking a word in season 
 could do no harm to her guest, gave him a pamphlet 
 which was entitled, ' Three words to a Drunkard.' 
 Hook looked at it and said, ' Oh, I know : " Pass 
 the Bottle." ' 
 
 While speaking of Hook one may recall another 
 old friend. Daniel O'Connell was challenged to fight 
 a duel by Peel, but he wrote that Peel's challenge 
 had fallen into the hands of his wife and she insisted 
 upon his refusing to meet him. Afterwards — it 
 seems to have been the expiring fashion in these 
 days — he was challenged by Disraeli because he had 
 called that statesman a direct descendant of the 
 impenitent thief that died on the Cross. This time, 
 however, he had no wife to intervene in the interest 
 of his skin. But he again declined, on the ground 
 that his daughter had implored him not to fight. It 
 was about these rather pusillanimous proceedings 
 that Hook wrote : 
 
 ' Some men, in their terror of slaughter. 
 Improve on the Scripture command, 
 And honour a wife, or a daughter. 
 That their days may be long in the land.'
 
 i86 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Then, although death is a solemn subject, Jekyll's 
 statement of a brewer who drowned himself in one 
 of his own vats, that ' he was found floating in his 
 own watery bier,' is distinctly worth remembering ; 
 as is the statement of a parallel case where a coroner 
 had hanged himself, and some one said : 
 
 ' He lived and died 
 By suicide.' 
 
 There is too a story, which amused me, of an 
 American judge who was approached in his court by 
 two wrangling women to decide the case of the real 
 mothership of a baby. He proposed, upon the great 
 authority of Solomon, to cut the baby in two. But 
 the mothers would not hear of that, and said, * Oh, if 
 it comes to that, you can keep the baby,' and left the 
 court. When, some hours afterwards, the judge was 
 found carrying the baby through some of the pre- 
 cincts of the court, he was heard to declare that he 
 thought Solomon a greatly overrated judge. 
 
 That story really properly belonged to an earlier 
 work of reminiscence, and so perhaps does the 
 answer of a man who was charged with murder 
 before Mr. Justice Lawrence, and who when asked, 
 as is usual, whether he would like to be defended 
 b}^ counsel, said, * No, my lord, this is too serious 
 a matter.' 
 
 It is said that a man who had lived in Boston 
 died and went to heaven, and that Peter thought it 
 necessary, by way of excuse, to say, ' I hope you 
 won't be disappointed.' When a similar calamity 
 came to an inhabitant of Chicago and he went to his 
 place, he, even without the splendid memories of 
 Boston, looked round and said, ' Well, I did expect 
 to see something better than this.' But his guide — 
 not Peter this time — explained, ' This is not heaven.'
 
 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 187 
 
 It was said of an illustrious American, * His name 
 will be remembered wherever his deeds and mortgages 
 are known.' 
 
 Here are three new stories to compare with the 
 old ones : 
 
 A minister of a rural parish, when driving home to 
 the manse, overtook a girl who was a servant at a 
 farm not far from the manse, and offered her what 
 they call a * lift ' in his pony phaeton. When they 
 came to the road leading to the farm, he stopped to 
 let her get down, and she said, ' Oh, thank you, sir.' 
 
 * Don't mention it,' said the well-disposed minister. 
 
 * I won't,' said the girl, and she went her way with 
 her secret. 
 
 Once in an inquiry, counsel, with some impatience 
 of a witness's verbosity, said : 
 
 ' Did you ever answer " Yes " or ** No " to a 
 question in your life ? ' 
 
 * Yes,' said the witness and gathered the laugh. 
 
 ' Did you hear,' said a recently married man to 
 a friend, ' what a fright I got at my wedding the 
 other day ? ' 
 
 ' I was there ! I saw,' said his friend.
 
 POLITICAL RECOLLECTIONS 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 MY RIGHT TO WRITE 
 
 My connection with politics — Contested a county and a divi- 
 sion of a large burgh — Onlookers see most of the game — While 
 a prospective candidate, trouble with Sir Robert Reid (Earl 
 Loreburn) — A tea-cup storm — Peace restored — Lord Loreburn's 
 title confounded with St. Michael — Mr. Ure, Lord Advocate 
 (Lord Strathclyde) — Sir Robert Wallace and Perth city — An 
 American's view — Number of meetings addressed — Over 
 their heads — Points missed — Soaking in. 
 
 By what right, I may be asked, do you write political 
 recollections when your connection with political 
 life was so short, sharp, and decisive ? I stood for two 
 constituencies, one a county and the other a division 
 of a large burgh, in the Unionist interest, and was 
 rejected by both. But the answer to the suggested 
 question is, that my right is indubitable, for politics 
 is held to be every man's province — otherwise I 
 suppose we would not have manhood suffrage — and 
 my qualification to exercise that right is that it is 
 onlookers who see most of the game, and it is only 
 the outsider who can be impartial. Sorrel, the 
 French syndicalist, says, * It is necessary to be 
 outside to see the inside,' which sounds like a paradox 
 but it is founded on truth. Inside any movement or 
 doctrine you are part of it and cannot judge it, any 
 more than you can form a just opinion of yourself. 
 If you think about it, your own face is the one of 
 which you really have the most inaccurate mental 
 
 189
 
 190 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 impression, although you may have seen it in a 
 mirror every day. Outside a movement you can 
 stand, as it were, on the sidewalk and observe it. You 
 see it in profile, and you need not, unless you like, 
 join in the shouting. 
 
 I think I was sorry at the time not to be successful 
 in passing into the House of Commons, but as success 
 in either of these adventures would have made 
 continued practice at the Parliamentary Bar impos- 
 sible, I had substantial economic advantages in my 
 failure. Even before the election, when I was merely 
 what was called prospective Unionist candidate for 
 Dumfriesshire, I got into hot water. I told an 
 audience that Sir Robert Reid had said that 
 politics was ' a dirty business,' and I went on to 
 say that Sir Robert ought to know, for he had done 
 two dirty tricks : he had brought down Mr. Gulland 
 to contest the burghs, and Mr. Molteno — 'carpet- 
 baggers ' — to stand for the county. 
 
 I thought no more of the matter, until some months 
 afterwards Sir Alfred Cripps (now Lord Parmoor) 
 said to me that something I had said had given great 
 offence to Sir Robert Reid. I raked my memory, 
 and the only thing I could find in the dust-heap was 
 the almost stingless sentence I have quoted above. 
 Now when I went into politics I thought that the 
 politician ought to make himself a pachydermatous 
 animal. There is no place for the thin-skinned on 
 the political platform, and I was surprised that a 
 man like Sir Robert Reid, who must have had 
 many rough rubs in his time, and had no doubt 
 knocked many people over the knuckles, should have 
 taken offence at such a little libel. But the tea-cup 
 storm was put an end to, as a tea-cup storm should 
 be, by being stirred to the sugar at the bottom of
 
 MY RIGHT TO WRITE 191 
 
 the cup — in this case,in Sir Robert Reid's disposition. 
 I wrote and pointed out that the words had been 
 intended for a joke, if they had missed fire, and I 
 find that there and then the hatchet was buried. I 
 have his letter : 
 
 Royal Courts of Justice, 
 2jth July 1903. 
 
 Dear Balfour Browne, — I received your note with 
 much pleasure, and very heartily share your wish that our 
 relations should be friendly. It is true I was hurt at some 
 criticisms of yours. Perhaps I am too sensitive ; in any case 
 your note has banished from my mind the whole thing, and 
 I beg you also will entirely forget it. We are to have our 
 political fight in the same neighbourhood, and it may be 
 that we shall be political neighbours in future. It will be 
 my effort so to handle any controversies that I may not 
 disentitle myself to your personal goodwill however we may 
 differ in opinion. Thanking you for your letter. — I am. 
 Yours sincerely, R. T. Reid. 
 
 So it was we ' kissed again with tears.' 
 Our relations have been cordial ever since, although 
 when he took the title of ' Loreburn ' — on being raised 
 to the peerage as Lord Chancellor — I upbraided him, 
 as a man of peace, for having chosen the * battle 
 cry ' of Dumfries as a title to be known by. In the 
 old days when border raids were common the 
 Achilles heel of the town of Dumfries was by the 
 * lower burn,' and when the English approached, the 
 cry to the rallying front was * A loreburn ! ' and it is 
 still the motto of that excellent community. But 
 I was able not long afterwards to tell him a conso- 
 latory anecdote. The Town Council of Dumfries 
 had made it obligatory that the boys who were 
 attending the Academy should wear a badge on their 
 caps, and the badge had on it not only the town's 
 motto, *A loreburn,' but the town's patron saint, 
 St. Michael. A lady, meeting one of the boys she
 
 192 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 knew, looked at the badge and said : ' I see you 
 have St. Michael on your cap.' ' No, ma'am,' said 
 the boy, ' it 's Lord Loreburn.' 
 
 While mentioning my disagreements, I may refer 
 to the fact that at the time I contested Dumfriesshire, 
 Mr. Ure, now Lord Strathclyde and Lord Justice- 
 General, was Lord Advocate, and came down and 
 spoke for my opponent, Mr. Molteno, at Lockerbie. 
 I replied to his speech in words which might easily 
 have been a solvent of friendship, for we had acted 
 as counsel together and against one another on 
 several occasions. But let me say we were still good 
 friends after the event, for I find that when during 
 the contest he came down again to speak upon 
 politics, I asked him to come and stay with me at 
 Goldielea. I would have forgotten the fact had I 
 not found a letter from him which shows that we 
 were not ' at daggers drawn ' : 
 
 31 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, 
 
 Tuesday. 
 
 My dear Balfour Browne, — On my return from London 
 this morning I find your extremely kind letter of the 19th 
 awaiting me. I am so vexed that I cannot accept your 
 most hospitable proposal. But I am now up to the neck 
 in Old Age Pension appeals, and cannot get ofi to Dumfries 
 till a train due there at 7.40, and must return by the 
 earliest train next morning. So that it will be a great advan- 
 tage for me to stay at the Station Hotel. Many thanks to 
 
 you. 
 
 I am rejoiced to hear that you dare not be present. Life 
 would not be worth living for either you or me if we had 
 to go to political meetings. They are a horror. — Yours 
 very sincerely, Alex. Ure. 
 
 Once I was discussing elections with two men 
 who had both been in the House of Commons for 
 many years, and had both, at the time of our con- 
 versation, got the reward for that fine public service.
 
 MY RIGHT TO WRITE 193 
 
 One of them was a Unionist, the other was a Liberal. 
 Each of them had gone through six contested elec- 
 tions, and they were comparing notes. To certain 
 questions they admitted that not one of these elec- 
 tions had been quite pure or quite free from corruption, 
 and they seemed to think that there was much virtue 
 in their * quite.' I could say, however, for my own 
 contests that they were both conducted, so far as I 
 knew, without corruption ; one without any, and the 
 other — well, it is in such connection that silence is 
 golden. 
 
 While I am speaking generally of election contests 
 let me mention one. Sir Robert Wallace, Chairman of 
 the County of London Sessions, sat in Parliament for 
 some time as a representative of the city of Perth. 
 Sir Robert Wallace was a Liberal, and at one of his 
 elections his opponent, a Unionist, was supported 
 by the better classes in the community — I mean no 
 offence to Wallace — and had therefore a great 
 number of conveyances at his disposal to bring 
 voters to the poll. A drive in a nobleman's carriage 
 has often confirmed a voter in well-doing. Wallace, 
 notwithstanding the fact that most of his supporters 
 had to walk to the polling-booths, was successful, 
 and was at the head of the poll. When he was 
 walking — exulting perhaps — down one of the streets, 
 he was accosted by a ' stranger ' who said : * Mr. 
 Wallace, I think ? ' * Yes,' said the candidate, now 
 with the wings of ' M.P.' to his name. ' Wall, sir,' 
 said the stranger, * I am an American citizen, and I 
 remained in Perth to see the way in which a British 
 election is conducted.' * Well,' said the repre- 
 sentative, * what do you think of it ? ' ' Wall, sir, 
 I think that all the quadrupeds were on one side 
 and all the men on the other.' 
 
 N
 
 194 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 The American citizen had been judging of 
 ability by the number of legs and not, as a phren- 
 ologist would have done, by the height of the fore- 
 head of the voters. There is no more virtue in the 
 man who throws sixes from the dice-box than the 
 man who throws threes. And the ballot-box is a 
 dice-box after all. 
 
 But speaking of elections, and of the oratory which 
 is the feature of these gambling transactions, I am 
 reminded of what an American citizen, who sat next 
 me at a City dinner, said. We were both suffering 
 from the interminable talk of the after-dinner 
 speakers who, like Juliet in the balcony, * speak but 
 say nothing,' when my neighbour said, * Sir, in my 
 country we call capital punishment Elocution ' 
 (electrocution) . 
 
 Perhaps it ill becomes me to gird at talk. 
 In my first contest during the course of the elec- 
 tion campaign, I addressed sixty-five meetings at 
 various scattered places in an extensive country, 
 ' and it was wintry weather.' And certainly in 
 East Bradford during a whole month I must 
 have spoken about three times each night. And 
 one thing must have struck every one who has 
 done such things, and that is that at such meetings 
 speakers often mistake scurrility for wit. Indeed 
 the former is understood by the common people, 
 and the latter is very often over their wooden heads. 
 But that is one of the common forms of the election 
 agent. When a man has failed to * go down ' with 
 a meeting, his agent assures him that he is over their 
 heads, which is meant as a sort of reprobatory com- 
 pliment. I once said what I really thought was 
 rather neat. I forget what it was apropos of, but 
 I told the audience that ' flattery was the milk of
 
 MY RIGHT TO WRITE 195 
 
 human kindness turned to butter/ and I was assured 
 that that sort of thing wouldn't do. What the 
 people liked was * round abuse.' I remember once 
 in my first contest I went in my motor, some twenty 
 miles through wind and wet, to a meeting at a school- 
 house at E . There were fifteen or twenty 
 
 countrymen present, and even ' round abuse ' of a 
 * ramshackle ' Government did not rouse them to the 
 least interest in what I was saying. Indeed I 
 might as well have addressed fifteen or twenty sacks 
 of potatoes, but the Unionist agent assured me that 
 
 ' it was a good meeting for E ,' and some one else 
 
 said what I had said would ' soak in ' ; but my own 
 impression is that it was something else that had 
 ' soaked in,' and in such bad weather I dare say it 
 did them more good.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 LAISSEZ-FAIRE 
 
 Lord Bramwell and Mr. Shaw-Lefevre — ' Vive Laissez-faire ! ' 
 — Nails in its coffin — Free Trade — Adam Smith and the laws 
 of justice — Theft — Looking to individual benefit and not State 
 benefit — What is good for one not necessarily good for the 
 other — Money, no magic in — Adam Smith and retaliation — 
 Muzzling the House of Lords — Proletariat impatience of — 
 General strike — Referendum— Action of Executive — -Plebis- 
 citory bureaucracy — Social Reform — Old Age Pensions — 
 National Insurance — Eight Hours Bills — Conservatism and 
 Socialism — Lord Hugh Cecil — The Poor Law — Charity and 
 slavery — Imperiahsm and reciprocal trade — Imperialism and 
 war — Aspect of Tariff Reform — Old letter from Lord Bram- 
 well, and letter about Municipal Trading from Lord Alverstone, 
 Lord Chief- Justice of England. 
 
 Lord Bramwell, in 1884, after politely bullying 
 Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, who had, as President of the now 
 defunct ' Social Science Congress,' been praising in a 
 weak Liberal sort of way the Socialist statutes 
 like the Truck Acts, Licensing Acts, the Shipping 
 Acts, the Hares and Rabbits Act, the Employers' 
 Liability Act, and the rest, ended his pamphlet with 
 a kind of shout, ' Vive Laissez-faire ! ' 
 
 But even then Laissez-faire had a dozen nails in its 
 coffin, and now it has been dead and buried for years. 
 It is to be remembered that Cobden and Bright, both 
 humane men, were opposed to the Factory Acts, and 
 that Bright, on the principle that people should be 
 allowed to do what they choose, held that * adultera- 
 tion was a legitimate form of competition.' Now, 
 
 196
 
 LAISSEZ-FAIRE 197 
 
 of course, ' let things alone ' is an excellent motto 
 for those who have most of the things they want and 
 only desire to do with them what they please under 
 police protection, but it is a very unsatisfactory 
 doctrine to those who haven't got what they want 
 and who desire to have a great many things that 
 their better-off neighbours possess. The former are 
 always for ' Hands off ! ' to legislation ; the latter, 
 who have now the power of votes, are always for 
 * Hands up ! ' to those who have the wealth of the 
 country in their keeping. 
 
 But although this does not profess to be, and is not 
 a work on politics, it may be worth while saying a 
 word about the old Laissez-faire, which however only 
 survives in our present-day statesmanship as ' Free 
 Trade. ' Laissez-faire, which as I say means the liberty 
 of every man to do as he pleases, is in logical result 
 of course nothing but anarchy, and even those 
 who pretended to be in favour of such a curious 
 policy always limited the liberty by saying that in 
 every man doing what was right in his own eyes, 
 they meant that no man was to violate the ' laws of 
 justice ' — which, of course, made it necessary to ascer- 
 tain what the laws of justice were : and that Laissez- 
 faire did not tell us. A man they would have ad- 
 mitted is not to be allowed in a country to steal from 
 his neighbour by force or fraud, however much it 
 would please him to do so. And it is quite evident 
 that, from the point of view of society, theft is 
 economically wrong, for it does nothing for the 
 community, but only enriches the successful thief at 
 the expense of his victim or dupe. But why stop 
 at a thief ? If a trade union succeeds by means of a 
 strike in securing better wages with shorter hours, 
 and in consequence the products of the labour of
 
 igS RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 that trade diminish, the members of the trade union 
 have done in effect just what the thief did. They have 
 transferred money from the pockets of an employer 
 to the pockets of his employee ; but it has not pro- 
 duced a gain but a loss to the community, seeing 
 that it is not wages, but the products of labour, that 
 is wealth. 
 
 Now the error of those who held hy Laissez-fairewSiS 
 that they always looked at the individual and thought 
 that the interests of the State were the sum of the 
 interests of the individuals composing it. Now that 
 is an obvious fallacy. Individuals have to give up 
 liberty that a state may exist — as even Adam Smith 
 saw when he put the laws of justice above individual 
 licence — and the fact is that when we are discussing 
 Laissez-faire we ought to remember that the question 
 is. What policy is good for the community ? And the 
 answer to it is that letting everything alone, allowing 
 every one to do as he pleases, would be the death of 
 the community, and that fact has been recognised by 
 the country again and again in every department of 
 life except in that of international trade. 
 
 The Factory Acts were passed to prevent men 
 doing as they choose; they prevented masters employ- 
 ing children under a certain age, or women for more 
 than a certain number of hours a week. They pre- 
 vented women working longer, even if they wanted 
 to. The payment of wages in goods was, from an 
 individualist's point of view, a legitimate contract. 
 There is no magic in money. It is only a medium 
 for barter. But direct barter of articles for services 
 was prevented by the Truck Acts because it was 
 believed to be inimical to the interests of the com- 
 munity. These are only two out of a dozen illus- 
 trations that might be given of the fact that this
 
 LAISSEZ-FAIRE 19O 
 
 country has acted on the principle that if every one 
 did as he chose, his actions, however beneficial they 
 might be to him, might be an injury to the com- 
 munity, and would therefore be violations of the 
 laws of justice. 
 
 Now it is precisely on the same ground that we 
 condemn Free Trade. In a world where there were 
 no nations with their competitions and rivalries and 
 wars, perhaps it might work. But in this world as it is, 
 it is absurd to found a policy for nations upon the 
 peddling policy of the small shopkeeper, and that is 
 what the Wealth 0/ Nations did ; although even Adam 
 Smitli saw that ' defence was better than opulence,' 
 and wrote : ' There may be good policy in retaliations 
 of this kind when there is a probability that they 
 will procure the repeal of the high duties and pro- 
 hibitions complained of. The recovery of a great 
 foreign market will generally more than compensate 
 the transitory inconvenience of paying dearer for a 
 short time for some sort of goods.' He had opened 
 a trap-door in his platform, and Free Trade disappears 
 through it. 
 
 But we have travelled a long way since we attended 
 the funeral of Laissez-faire. 
 
 The Democracy has had it all its own way in later 
 years ; and as we have muzzled the ox — the House of 
 Lords that used to tread out measures — instead 
 of Laissez-faire we have had all sorts of Socialistic 
 legislation since Lord Bramwell cried in the wilder- 
 ness. The Liberals' idea of giving votes was that it 
 was a safety-valve against revolution — that the}'^ 
 were by this means eliminating force from the sphere 
 of pohtics. But the proletariat, having tasted power, 
 are now impatient of the slow method of red-tape 
 legislation. They clamour, as we have seen, for the
 
 200 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 expedition of their claims to what they want and 
 will have, and would fain secure by means of the 
 paralysis of a general strike which would bring 
 Britain to her knees in a week — by the Referendum, 
 by the direct government of the popular vote, or by 
 the suppression of Parliament by the action of the 
 executive. Much of the legislation which used to 
 be made at Westminster is now manufactured in 
 Whitehall, and to many politicians the days of 
 Parliament seem numbered and its ruined place 
 likely to be taken by a plebiscitory bureaucracy, in 
 which officials would draft, and the popular vote 
 sanction or reject, the proposed legislation. Indeed 
 individualism has ceased to exist, and the State 
 does more and more of what was formerly left to 
 individual initiative and private enterprise. 
 
 It is in these days that both parties — for votes — 
 have been embarking on what is called Social Reform, 
 but what is in fact nothing but playing to the gallery. 
 
 So it is we find Conservatives not only acquiescing 
 but approving of such Socialistic measures as Old 
 Age Pensions, National Insurance, Eight Hours Bills, 
 and measures for the protection of adult human 
 beings who ought to be able to protect themselves. 
 Nothing is more amusing than the ingenuity with 
 which a staunch Conservative swallows and defends 
 these experiments in legislation. In his very clever 
 and, on the whole, wise book on Conservatism, Lord 
 Hugh Cecil, while he admits that ' Conservative 
 social reforms need not proceed on purely indi- 
 vidualistic lines,' that ' State interference is not 
 such an alien from Conservatism,' states that ' there 
 is no antithesis between Conservatism and Socialism.' 
 The Conservative party go back for their lesson in 
 Socialism to the Poor Law (the 43 Elizabeth c. 2),
 
 LAISSEZ-FAIRE 201 
 
 which provided for putting the poor to work, but 
 also desired to see that none of them shirked work. 
 It was, no doubt, a measure of charity and slavery, for 
 while it relieved these, by work in a workhouse, who 
 had formerly been in receipt of doles at the gates of 
 the convents, it also made slaves of the workers, and 
 prevented vagrancy and * sturdy beggars ' by punish- 
 ments which began with a flogging, but ended in 
 case of contumacy with death. But it was a long 
 step from the prevention of starvation, which would 
 have disgraced a country which hypocritically pro- 
 fessed to be a Christian nation, to Old Age Pensions 
 and National Insurance, measures which made the 
 poor richer by making the rich poorer. And it is 
 also a long step from protecting women and children 
 in factories to protecting adult workmen by an Eight 
 Hours Bill. 
 
 But these are the steps which have been taken ; 
 and although Lord Hugh Cecil tries to defend even 
 such advances, not on the ground of the payment of 
 the State for the services of citizens — which is the 
 Socialist's claim — but on the ground of charity to 
 the destitute, and partly on the ground of the 
 Christian virtue of gratitude, the ingenuity does not 
 quite succeed. We account for this eagerness for 
 Social Reform in the Conservative party — which 
 came into existence to ' preserve,' and is now build- 
 ing a new edifice upon the ruins of what was called 
 the constitution — by the fact that the Conservatives, 
 like the Liberals, are fishing in the troubled waters of 
 politics for votes. Indeed, was not the policy of Tariff 
 Reform — which I think a wise policy, and which, I 
 gather, Lord Hugh Cecil rather reluctantly accepts 
 — was it not adopted as an attempt to secure the votes 
 of the people by the bribery of the promise of higher
 
 202 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 wages ? It is true it also looked to a closer relation- 
 ship between this country and her colonies, which has 
 somewhat curiously been brought about by the 
 haggard Imperialism of war instead of the smiling 
 Imperialism of reciprocal trade. But in the main 
 Tariff Reform was a net to catch votes in, and when 
 the time comes it will succeed because it is a measure 
 of Protection which is in the very teeth of Laissez- 
 faire, and is a more legitimate function of the State 
 than much of the social-reform legislation which it 
 has put upon the Statute-book. Much more of 
 the same sort that, when peace comes again, will 
 find its way into the pages of that history of the 
 masterly retreat of the Conservative party from the 
 trenches so carefully prepared, to shorten its front 
 and to establish positions further in the rear. 
 
 But the real policy of the Conservative party lies 
 in its Imperialism. It is not content that Great 
 Britain should be a recluse among nations ; it 
 desires to see it with influence in the comity of 
 nations. It was in this aspect that Tariff Reform 
 had a vista far greater than merely the increase 
 of the wages of our workmen : the punishment of 
 foreign nations who would injure us by their tariffs 
 or by the dumping of their wares and peaceful 
 penetration of their citizens — an Imperialism which 
 was to be brought about to some extent by diversion 
 of foreign trade into colonial channels. 
 
 But as I began the chapter with a mention of 
 Lord Bramwell, let me finish it by referring to 
 him again. In 1885 there was a long inquiry 
 before a Royal Commission, over which Lord 
 Bramwell presided, into the accumulations in the 
 Thames in consequence of the discharge of sewage 
 into the river at Barking and Crossness by the
 
 LAISSEZ-FAIRE 203 
 
 London County Council. About the same time Sir 
 James Crichton-Browne had been appointed to 
 inquire into the over-pressure of children in 
 elementary schools, and he made a report which I 
 reviewed in the West^ninster. I gather I must have 
 sent a copy of my article to Lord Bramwell, for I 
 find a letter from him in which he says : 
 
 The Elms, Edenbridge, 
 Kent, July 30, 1885. 
 
 Dear Mr. Browne, — You do not require recalling to my 
 mind. I have a very pleasant recollection of you, none 
 the less so that you remind me of the duty I had undertaken 
 when I was losing my temper over that endless sewage affair. 
 Thanks for the Westminster. I entirely agree with you. I 
 thought Dr. Browne right in his first report, and was sur- 
 prised at a fierce attack in the Times, and thought in his 
 reply he quite maintained all he had said. Of course I 
 read the things in the perfunctory way in which one reads 
 the ' daily ' newspapers, from which, however, one learns more 
 than from anything else. But I took an interest in it. We 
 have a little school here with a Master and Mistress, both of 
 whom as you say get a share of the grant. Before any of 
 this public talk about ' pressure ' both Master and Mistress 
 told me it existed in the little school, and that they would 
 be glad to get rid of it even at some loss of income. I feel 
 sure it is so. They are very kind to the children and give 
 them a little run, but it cannot be so : five years old is too 
 early to begin imless where the teacher is the father or 
 mother, with picture books and the lesson ^ an hour. I 
 am glad you refer to Laissez-faire. Our opinions are pretty 
 much alike. I am not sure that education might not be 
 gratuitous. Did you read a letter in the Times by Aubemon 
 Herbert, in the direction of your remarks about discharging 
 the parents from their duty ? And did you read the stinging 
 answer to it from some one who suggested that a similar 
 argument might justify not punishing wife-beaters ? It is 
 difficult to define ' pampering,' or indeed anything else. But 
 I think it is mischievous when it is an alms — a dole — fitful, 
 not when it is constant and a right and does not supersede 
 personal labour. The State affords it in some things — the 
 police, for example. I suppose the workman does not con-
 
 204 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 tribute to their support. Your observations at p. 17 as to 
 the multifarious duties of Corporations are good. But get 
 a paper pubUshed by the Liberty and Property League con- 
 taining a review of Private Legislation in one session — I think 
 1852. I have not one or I would send it to you. I send 
 you a paper of mine on that wretched George's ' Nationalisa- 
 tion.' You ought to be a member of our League. Let me 
 propose you. Cost 5s. a minimum. How did you like the 
 Sewage report ? Do you agree ? — Yours very truly, 
 
 Bramvvell. 
 
 Lord Bramwell was really an estimable and bluff 
 spirit, heavy in appearance, but straightforward 
 with every blow from the shoulder when he struck, 
 a great lawyer, and a man of robust common-sense. 
 It was a pleasure to know such a stalwart man — a 
 man not without the precious gift of humour in him. 
 
 Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), in his book on 
 ' State and Municipal Trading,' refers to a lecture of 
 mine on 'Municipal Trading' delivered in 1903. I 
 think it was printed by somebody, probably the 
 Municipal Association, and I must have sent a copy 
 to the Lord Chief- Justice, for I have from him the 
 following quite characteristic letter about it : 
 
 HoRNTON Lodge, Kensington, 
 ^rd March 1903. 
 
 Dear Balfour Browne, — Many thanks for sending me 
 your paper on Municipal Trading, which I have read with 
 much interest, and I agree with almost all your arguments 
 so far as they relate to such matters as gas, water, and 
 tramways. I doubt whether it is desirable for municipal 
 authorities to go into electric lighting, but that is a matter 
 of opinion. As regards the minor trades in which they 
 would actually compete with small traders, personally I 
 think municipal trading would be very undesirable. This 
 is, however, my private opinion, which I do not wish quoted 
 as I have really not sufficient data to form a conclusive 
 opinion on the matter. — Yours faithfully, Alverstone. 
 
 J. H. Balfour Browne, K.C.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 SOME ' SAYINGS ' 
 
 Not much fun in election contest — Noise at political meet- 
 ings — Number of speeches — Excursions of enlightenment — 
 Dark drives — Political speeches are dead things — After delivery 
 not worth reproduction — Some extracts which were given in 
 the Yorkshire Post in 1906, and in the Bradford Argus in 1910. 
 
 The idea that there is much fun to be got out of a 
 contested election is quite unfounded. We know 
 from experience that there is * fun at the fair ' with 
 its shooting-galleries and merry-go-rounds, but the 
 shooting at opponents in an electoral campaign, and 
 the merry-go-round of politics with its State hobby- 
 horses, is a very dull affair ; and although there is 
 sometimes much laughter and noise at political 
 meetings, it is due not to the humour of the occasion, 
 but to the bubbling enthusiasms of people who have 
 partisan proclivities, and * laugh full well with coun- 
 terfeited glee ' at a joke made for them by their 
 pet candidate, while they * boo ' at any such im- 
 pertinence from a speaker on the other side. 
 
 Besides making a great many speeches in the 
 county in 1903-4-5, some of them at Horticultural 
 Shows, some at Sports, as I have said I made some 
 sixty-five speeches in December 1905 and Januar\' 
 1906. Without a motor-car these excursions of 
 enlightenment would have been impossible, and as 
 most of the meetings had to be in the evening, for the 
 benefit of the men who were supposed to be at work 
 
 805
 
 2o6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 all day, many a long dark drive I had as the apostle 
 of this political enlightenment. The speeches which 
 I made at these various outlying places in the county 
 have been forgotten by the persons addressed, and 
 even by myself, and it would be body-snatching to 
 disinter these dead things from the grave of oblivion. 
 Even if they were remarkable, I fear they would — 
 unlike the speeches of my friend. Sir Edward Clarke, 
 which have been printed — be unworthy of publica- 
 tion. Still, I would — merely as a reminiscence, 
 and to give the reader some idea of the * stuff ' which 
 was in the speeches — like to quote some of the things 
 I said. Owing to the courtesy of the editor of the 
 Yorkshire Post, who allowed me to look at the back 
 numbers of his paper for these old dates in 1905-6, 
 I have been able to quote from his columns, which 
 were called * Points from the Platforms,' some 
 sentences which the Yorkshire Post of that time 
 thought it worth while to quote from the speeches 
 I delivered in Dumfriesshire. Whether they were 
 worth quoting may be a question, and they are only 
 reproduced here because some of them recall pleasant 
 memories of the occasions when the speeches were 
 delivered. They are mostly short, and give a fair 
 notion of the planks in the dilapidated platform on 
 which I stood. 
 
 Labour is all you have got to sell, but to make a bargain 
 there must be a buyer. Cobden saw that when he became 
 the apostle of Free Trade, he desired to secure markets for 
 our goods by the magic of cheapness. But now we have 
 our labour to sell, and our neighbour nations will not let us 
 into their markets. They desire to employ their own 
 people, and not our people. We, with our free imports, 
 employ their workmen and not our own. 
 
 Do you think we hold our colonies by force ? No, it is by 
 prestige. There are three thousand whites in Singapore,
 
 SOME ' SAYINGS' 207 
 
 and two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese and Malays. 
 This handful of men keep the British flag flying by reason, 
 not by force of arms — but by reason of the great name of 
 Britain. It is the imperial idea rules these colonies, and not 
 brute force. 
 
 Leamington is setting an example of an election without 
 speeches. The one side will not hear Mr. Lyttelton, the 
 other retaliates by refusing to hear Mr. Lloyd George. It 
 would be a good day for candidates if elections could be 
 conducted in silence and speeches could be taken ' as read.' 
 
 This is an election fought with the devil's weapons, lies. 
 ' But I have seen the wicked in power, and spreading himself 
 like a green bay-tree. Yet he passed away, and lo ! he was 
 not.' This Government may spread itself, but the time 
 will come when it will not be ! 
 
 Protection ! We protect all our weak : Our children 
 against parents who would not educate them ; our workmen 
 against employers who paid their wages in goods ; the pur- 
 chaser against the seller who foisted on him adulterated 
 articles ; women and children in factories against employers 
 who used to employ them for inordinate hours to save the 
 payment of fair wages to men. We have always by law 
 protected the weak against the strong. Now our trade is 
 weak and the strength is with our rivals, are we not to 
 protect and further it ? 
 
 It was Mr. Bright, I think, who said that force is no argu- 
 ment. The Liberals at Leamington and Derby seem to 
 think that noise is logic. 
 
 You might beat a competitor in the same line of industry ; 
 but do you think you can beat him and his Government, 
 which is fighting for him too ? Well, you are bold men, but 
 with all your foolhardiness you will be trodden under foot. 
 
 ' Chinese Slavery ' is the lying cry which has turned many a 
 foolish vote. I should have thought that the electorate had 
 more sense than to be influenced by a political tarradiddle. 
 
 Tradesmen in Ireland have, as you know, been boycotted 
 by the persons who used to deal with them and have had 
 to starve in consequence. We in Britain have been boy- 
 cotted by foreign nations, and if this system goes on we will 
 have to put up the shutters.
 
 2o8 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 You want cheap bread, cheap shoes, cheap clothes, cheap 
 everything, but you may buy them too dear if the price is 
 the starvation of the weak people, the producers of this 
 country. 
 
 All the Socialists, from Karl Marx down, have seen that 
 competition in the labour market reduces wages, and have 
 advised the limitation of competition by combination. But 
 the Liberal party of to-day desires to continue a policy which 
 enables every foreign workman to compete with undue 
 advantage against British labour. This is to remedy the 
 evil of a country by bleeding it to death. 
 
 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, at the Albert Hall 
 meeting, said that that was not the time to declare his policy, 
 and that would be done when the General Election came. 
 Now he issues his address to the Stirling Burghs and refers 
 electors to his speech at the Albert Hall for his policy. This 
 is like playing at battledore and shuttlecock with two battle- 
 dores, and nothing for a shuttlecock. 
 
 The golden rule of trade is ' make others do as you do to 
 them.' 
 
 If Protection is the ruin of the country, why are the 
 United States and Germany not in a state of dilapidation ? 
 And if our free-import system means salvation, why do the 
 continental nations and our colonies not abandon Protection 
 in favour of our method ? We cannot persuade any nation or 
 colony that we are right, and yet some persons try to per- 
 suade the electorate of Great Britain that the whole world is 
 wrong. 
 
 A great statesman was in favour of a clean slate for the 
 past. The Liberal party's programme is a clean slate for 
 the future. 
 
 Dumping is spoiling our market by illegitimate cheapness. 
 Tariffs spoil foreign markets for us by illegitimate dearness. 
 You working-men are between the devil and the deep sea. 
 
 Liberal policy is to tear pages from the Statute-book, to 
 reverse the legislation as to Licensing and Education. If 
 this becomes the policy of successive parties in power, you 
 will reduce legislation to an absurdity. To have one party 
 undoing what the other has done is to set people to weave
 
 SOME ' SA YINGS * 209 
 
 like Penelope. I think it was a funeral pall for her father- 
 in-law, Laertes, that Penelope wove and unwove, but it 
 would be a funeral pall of party representative government 
 if the weaving and unweaving of the Statute-book became 
 the practice of Parliament. 
 
 The more orders a manufacturer has, the more cheaply 
 he can produce ; the more business he has, the higher wages 
 he pays. Our policy, which will give you more markets, 
 will increase the demand and the sale of productions, and 
 in that way reduce prices and at the same time will increase 
 wages. 
 
 It was Heine who said : ' Calumny, that vile insolent 
 spectre, sits upon the noblest graves,' and calumny in the 
 mouth of the present Government has been sitting and 
 croaking on the grave of the Balfour Government with 
 scurrilous cackling. But the spectre cannot read what is 
 on the headstone, which is inscribed with the words, ' I will 
 rise again,' and that resurrection will take place in the early 
 days of the coming session after the General Election. 
 
 That is a prophecy which was not fulfilled. I 
 wonder who it was put the ' lymg spirit ' in my mouth ? 
 
 But I have borrowed enough from these old 
 copies of the Yorkshire Post, which was kind 
 enough to quote these and other sentences from 
 my speeches. In the contest in East Bradford 
 in 1910, some of what were called, perhaps a 
 little ostentatiously, ' Sayings of the Day,' were 
 given from day to day in the Bradford Argus. Many 
 of these, I dare say, scarcely deserve the proud 
 position they were given, and some which had 
 personal reference to opponents do not deserve to 
 be reproduced, for although the salt of bitterness 
 often does preserve from neglect, I question whether 
 it would be good taste now to emphasise them by 
 repetition. But it is not to be supposed that either 
 of my contests was ' vitriolic' They were both 
 conducted on both sides on a higher level than that 
 
 o
 
 2IO RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 of political Billingsgate, and these few quotations, 
 my ' Letters to an Elector ' and my ' Further Letters 
 to an Elector,' bear out the assertion. 
 
 Our enemy in this election is indifference. The Socialists 
 are in earnest, as robbers often are. We are apathetic. 
 There is an immense mass of sluggish opinion that determines 
 the issue of elections. I want you to move that, and we 
 shall have an avalanche of victory. 
 
 Do you know the cuttle-fish ? It has a way of ejecting an 
 inky substance into the water, and in the cloud eluding its 
 pursuer. The waters of politics are black with lies which a 
 cuttle-fish Government are ejecting into the clean waters of 
 truth. 
 
 If you send me to Parliament I shall not be a silent tomb- 
 stone set up to the memory of East Bradford. I do not 
 aspire to achieve oblivion in the House of Commons, as some 
 members have done. 
 
 Lord Rosebery, I said, reminded me of the quotation 
 from Shakespeare : ' The uncertain glories of an April 
 day.' 
 
 Sometimes I was prophetic : 
 
 Catastrophe knocks at our door. We can hear it ham- 
 mering in German shipyards, and yet we have to extort an 
 admission as to the ' two-power standard ' from a reluctant 
 and retrenching Government. 
 
 We have given the Government the keys of the castle 
 and they have betrayed their trust. They have left us un- 
 guarded and unarmed at a critical time, that they might get 
 votes from the ignorant and deceive people they have 
 betrayed. 
 
 Socialism desires that each man should be paid according 
 to his need, not according to his ability. There is a chance 
 for idiocy after all. 
 
 The Times, answering Mr. Asquith's question whether 
 any one believed that Germany's prosperity was due to 
 tariff walls, pointed out that seventy milhon Germans did, 
 and asked, ' Does he live in a balloon ? ' Well, he has been
 
 SOME 'SAYINGS' 211 
 
 living in an aeroplane but the engine has stopped, and he 
 will be precipitated next week from the zenith of power to 
 the hard earth of opposition. 
 
 (These things don't always come off.) 
 
 Socialism will stop all social legislation. Much requires 
 to be done by gradual advance. But the demands of the 
 hare-brained will frighten the people and they will stand 
 still, lest they should go too far, or too fast. 
 
 They ask us to disintegrate the Empire when the whole 
 tendency of the times is integration or the formation of 
 larger units. We have seen the formation of the German 
 Empire. We have seen the formation of a united Italy. We 
 have seen the resistance to disintegration in the American 
 Civil War, and yet Home Rule statesmen ask us to form a 
 disunited Kingdom. That is folly. 
 
 This election has reversed the position of parties : Liberals 
 are Conservatives, conservative of a foolish tradition of 1846. 
 Conservatives are reformers, and desire to see the fiscal 
 system remodelled. 
 
 Bismarck said, ' The Germans fear God and nothing else 
 on earth.' Your secular education will mean that your 
 children are to be brought up to fear only the devil. 
 
 Free Trade looks upon the destruction of a particular 
 trade with indifference. The workers, it says, will find em- 
 ployment in another trade. But what becomes of the 
 workers' capital of skill ? What is the good of the technical 
 knowledge of a watchmaker if you set him to plant trees ? 
 He will fall from a skilled worker, from an independent man, 
 to a sweated slave. Is Free Trade your friend or your 
 enemy ? 
 
 It is not true to say that all wealth is produced by labour, 
 if you mean the work of the muscles. ' Brains ' have pro- 
 duced more wealth than ' hands.' The inventor of the 
 steam-engine and the spinning- jenny have done more for the 
 production of wealth than all the workpeople of Bradford. 
 
 This is a Government all for foreigners. It will not tax 
 their imports, but takes the money that is necessary to run 
 this Empire out of your pockets. Its members are angry
 
 212 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 with Mr. Balfour because he has pointed out the inadequacy 
 of our preparations, and of course they are backed up 
 in this by the German newspapers, which look upon this 
 inadequacy as a virtue. They will have nothing to do with 
 a trade partnership with the colonies. At one time the 
 Liberals supported a policy of ' Perish India,' and now they 
 seem willing to part with the colonies rather than depart 
 from the obsolete principles of Free Trade. This is an 
 altruistic patriotism I despise. 
 
 I find, too, that the Argus was good enough to pre- 
 serve such truisms as : 
 
 ' If you can be superior to defeat, you can master the 
 world.' 
 
 ' Vituperation is a poor substitute for argument.' 
 
 But let me quote a more cheerful note. The paper 
 informed its readers that one of my meetings was 
 interrupted by a brass band, and credits me with 
 remarking : 
 
 ' Never mind, gentlemen ; an election never was won by a 
 big drum.'
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 LAND-TAXERS 
 
 ' This is the heir '— ' Come let us tax him '—J. S. Mill—' Spon- 
 taneous increase of rent ' — Henry George — Confiscation only of 
 rent — What gives value to land and other property — Single-tax 
 gentlemen — Right to property earned — Distinction between 
 earned and imearned — Individually earned property does not 
 exist — Exchangeable value — Existence of men gives value — 
 Labour or services — Land attempted to be distinguished from 
 other property^ — Copyright and invention — Bargain with State 
 — Taxation and confiscation — Increased profits of lawyer not 
 taxed — Peter and Paul, taking from rich to endow the poor 
 — Payment for ability or skill — The merits of the acquisition of 
 property to be inquired into — Mr. Blatchford in the Clarion gets 
 behind Land-taxers — Capital in a spade — Fair wage for past 
 labour. 
 
 ' This is the heir : come let us kill him, and the inherit- 
 ance will be ours.' But modern politicians who 
 desire to have a single tax are more moderate in their 
 language, and only say : ' Come let us tax him, and 
 the inheritance will be ours.' J. S. Mill, in his 
 Political Economy, had suggested that ' the State 
 should appropriate the increase of wealth, or part 
 of it, as it arises . . . instead of allowing it to 
 become an unearned appendage to the riches of a 
 particular class ' ; and had also suggested ' the valua- 
 tion of all the land in the country ' — a piece of advice 
 which, as we know, has in the last few years been 
 expensively followed by the Liberal Government 
 before it had war and munitions to think of. This 
 right to tax ' the spontaneous increase of rent ' as it 
 
 213
 
 214 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 is called, has been recognised as a policy since Henry 
 George told us that to make the land common pro- 
 perty without compensation to the owners ' would 
 be a needless shock to the present customs and 
 habits of thought, which is to be avoided/ and 
 said : * Let individuals who now hold it (land) still 
 retain, if they want to, what the}^ are pleased to call 
 their land ; let them buy and sell and bequeath and 
 devise it. We may safely leave them the shell if 
 we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate 
 the land, it is only necessary to confiscate rent.' 
 
 Very good ! I may keep the tree if I give you all 
 the plums. This sort of generous honesty has been 
 made the foundation of the propaganda which pro- 
 poses a single tax on land which is only to amount 
 to the confiscation of the rent, leaving the plucked 
 owner in possession of his worthless acres. If the}', 
 ' the people ' as they are called, tax us in that way, 
 then undoubtedly the 'inheritance will be theirs,' 
 and the land-owner had better take possession of the 
 only six feet of earth which will, in its permanence, 
 be any comfort to him. Of course the whole of this 
 robbery with the violence of the tax-collector is 
 founded upon a very obvious fallacy. The single- 
 tax gentlemen seem to think that the right to possess 
 a thing must be ' earned,' and that anything that is 
 not earned may be taken away from a man who has 
 it, and given to others who have not earned it any 
 more than he has, who are represented by the State. 
 That is, they claim the right to inquire into the cir- 
 cumstances under which property was acquired ; 
 and as they have convinced themselves that the 
 whole value is given to land by the presence, growth, 
 and industry of the people, it is to the people that 
 that form of wealth belongs, and taxation which
 
 LAND-TAX ERS 215 
 
 takes it away from these private hands is nothing 
 but an act of justice. 
 
 It is the same confusion of thought which founds 
 Sociahsm — the apostle of that creed saying that all 
 wealth is created by labour, and that therefore all 
 wealth ought to belong to labour. It is quite easy 
 to reason if you assume facts, and the idea that the 
 right to property is earning it is as great a fallacy 
 as the suggestion that all wealth is created by labour. 
 Both are fundamental lies. 
 
 The distinction between ' earned ' and ' unearned,' 
 which is made the reason for this confiscation by 
 taxation, rests in the suggestion that certain wealth 
 has been created by some men by their unaided 
 exertions, and that other wealth depends for its 
 value on the fact that we are in a community and that 
 the presence of our fellow-men has created this so- 
 called unearned increase. But there is no such thing 
 as individually earned or created wealth, for wealth 
 or value depends on the usefulness of the thing made 
 or discovered — to other people who deserve to have 
 it. When Adam delved, the products in the absence 
 of other people had no * exchangeable value ' ; for, 
 as we know, there is no such thing as ' value ' in an 
 economic sense except in exchange. The supposed 
 created wealth of a recluse in a world empty of all 
 mankind except himself is not wealth at all, but a 
 curiosity of the maker. It is, then, the existence 
 of men and women that gives value to the coat or 
 book I have made with my hands, just as it gives 
 value, and increased value, if the community goes 
 on growing, to the land I may have inherited 
 or purchased. If I have produced an article 
 which no one desires, I have wasted my time so 
 far as the production of wealth is concerned ; and
 
 2i6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the fact that there are few or many who desire either 
 an article I have produced, or the services (or labour) 
 I am prepared to render, is the circumstance which 
 determines the value of the thing or the labour. 
 Labour would have no value if it were not for the 
 presence, growth, and desires of the people. It is 
 obvious that value in exchange is only given to 
 anything by the presence here of men and women 
 who desire it, and it is their desires and not my 
 labour which has given the character of wealth to 
 the produce. 
 
 But the Land-taxers try to distinguish between 
 land and other things by saying that land is limited 
 in amount ; it is, they say, a monopoly in the hands 
 of the owners, and therefore it is distinguishable 
 from other kinds of property. But it is ' limitation ' 
 in amount that gives everything its economic 
 value. Air is useful to our lungs ; but as it is usually, 
 except in a Black Hole of Calcutta, unlimited in 
 amount, it has no value in exchange. But as a fact 
 land is no more limited than any other raw material 
 — wool or cotton or com or wine. It is because they 
 are not unlimited that they have value, and their 
 value is precisely of the same character as that of 
 land — although the land cannot be mobiHsed, and 
 these commodities to some extent can. As for the 
 ' monopoly ' in land, there is no such thing. A man 
 who publishes a book has a monopoly of publication 
 for a certain number of years, and that privilege is 
 called * copyright.' It is the same with an invention 
 and the protection of a patent. But land — although 
 one particular piece belongs to A. B., and he has a 
 monopoly of that acre — is just like his coat or his 
 tooth-brush, which is also a monopoly. But, of 
 course, there are many more coats in the world besides
 
 LAND-TAXERS 217 
 
 his, and many more acres in the world besides his 
 * cabbage patch/ 
 
 But the State has done something more than 
 by the aggregation of men in a community rendered 
 the creation of wealth possible. It has really by its 
 laws of inheritance, and by its protection of con- 
 tracts in our Courts, and of property in our streets, 
 given a guarantee that the owner of any property, 
 whether it be the sedentary earth or the property 
 with heels, shall be at liberty to use it, and to part 
 with it and its fruits at his absolute discretion either 
 by sale or gift. It is true the property must be used 
 for certain limited purposes ; but these limits are 
 not the opinion of his neighbours as to how it should 
 be used or disposed of, but the limits of law that a 
 man shall not use his property to the prejudice of the 
 State which guarantees it, or to the detriment of the 
 moral laws which are recognised by the community. 
 Subject to these limitations, a man is guaranteed by 
 the State the right to do what he pleases with his 
 own, and any denial of these rights which constitute 
 private property in the hands of individuals or cor- 
 porations would be an absolute breach of faith on 
 the part of the State. For instance, a tax of twenty 
 shillings in the pound on income would not be 
 taxation but confiscation. A tax upon the increased 
 value of land, owing to the fact that it is near a town, 
 is the same thing as a tax on the increased profits of a 
 lawyer or a doctor because the population of a town 
 has doubled in ten years. 
 
 Of course the State must do its business (although 
 probably it has taken to too many trades), and to 
 enable it to do that it must impose taxes. These 
 taxes must necessarily fall upon those who can pay 
 them, and not upon those who can't. But when the
 
 2i8 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 State taxes one class in a community for the benefit 
 of another, when it takes money from the rich to 
 endow the poor, when it makes the well-to-do provide 
 houses and pensions for the ill-to-do, it is going 
 beyond the bounds of legitimate taxation, and is con- 
 fiscating the property of Peter to pay Paul, with no 
 better excuse than a Dick Turpin who took from 
 the road traveller and gave the money away in alms 
 to a beggar. 
 
 But * earning,' in the sense it is used by the Land- 
 taxers, is intended to convey the idea that in some 
 cases men have deserved or merited what they have 
 got, and that in other cases they have not deserved 
 the gains they have acquired. There is, of course, a 
 certain amount of truth in the distinction between 
 property which is acquired by fraud or larceny, and 
 property which is acquired under the sanction of the 
 law. But that is not the sense in which these re- 
 formers use the word ' deserved.' If they think they 
 can apportion property in proportion to the moral 
 deserts of the labourers, they are hoping to do the 
 impossible. Who can determine whether a Caruso 
 or a Harry Lauder has morally deserved his gains 
 more than the chimney-sweep or the slater on the 
 roof ? And yet the services the former render are 
 in a sense unique, and are paid for in proportion to 
 the difficulty of procuring them — the services of the 
 latter can be replaced by an ordinary workman. 
 
 The fallacious idea of deserts has been seen through 
 by the Socialists, who have come to the conclusion 
 that men should not be paid according to their 
 ability or skill, but according to their needs. If the 
 needs are reduced to a minimum of enough to eat and 
 drink and a roof to cover one, these are capable of 
 ascertainment, but the abilitv or skill or deserts or
 
 LAND-TAXERS 219 
 
 ' earning ' of a workman are conundrums which can 
 never be guessed. 
 
 But those who admit the rights of private property, 
 and claim the right to distinguish between classes of 
 property, and tax according to their ideas of the merits 
 of the acquisition — and even Mr. Winston Churchill, 
 as we understand him, has suggested such a ridicu- 
 lous inquisition — are on ground which is mined with 
 fallacies, and which is easily reduced to a crater 
 imderneath their reforming feet. 
 
 During one of the elections I wrote a paper on 
 ' Unearned Increment ' which was published, and I 
 have no doubt, although I have not re-read the paper, 
 I used some of the arguments I have set out above. 
 The paper was noticed at some length by Mr. Blatch- 
 ford in the Clarion, who admitted the force of the 
 argument as to land. He said : ' Against Liberal 
 taxers and against the single taxers that is a perfectly 
 sound argument, but it does not touch the Socialists' 
 position at all. We are for the expropriation of 
 unearned increment wherever found.' But that is 
 scarcely a right way of stating the Socialists' position, 
 which is not only the appropriation of ' increment ' 
 but of wealth, and that on the principle which I 
 stated above, that * labour produces all wealth, and 
 that therefore to labour all wealth belongs.' 
 
 Now the absurdity of that proposition is to sup- 
 pose that labour can own anything, and it is also in 
 the erroneous use of the word ' labour ' as meaning 
 present active labour — which does not produce all 
 wealth, but has to be assisted in the enterprise by 
 dead past labour, which is capital. The man who 
 digs does not himself produce the furrow without the 
 spade or the plough which was produced by some 
 other worker. Indeed he cannot go out to work at
 
 220 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 all unless he has eaten bread made of wheat which 
 was grown a year ago, and it was past labour which 
 sowed the wheat and gathered the harvest. Indeed 
 he cannot come * home ' at night unless he has a 
 home to come to, and that is a house which was built 
 years ago and was produced by the labour of hands 
 which may belong to the dead. It is, therefore, not 
 true to say that present labour produces all wealth, 
 for it doesn't, without the help of capital, in spade, 
 in wheat, and in roof ; and it is therefore untrue, 
 and would be quite unjust to infer, that all wealth 
 belonged to present labour, for it doesn't. Now, 
 how do we pay for past labour ? By interest, by 
 return on capital — and past labour or capital is just 
 as much entitled to its fair wage as present labour. 
 For present labour to lay its hands on the products 
 of past labour is nothing but theft. I therefore see 
 no more logic in the Socialist grab than in the Land- 
 taxers' grab. They are both footpads, although 
 they pretend to be tax-collectors.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 SOME POLITICAL GOSSIP 
 
 While practising in Parliament I was not a party politician — 
 When I put on the uniform — After contesting East Bradford 
 had Sir William Priestley as a committee man — Was not a 
 member of a political club before igo6 — Fought the election in 
 Dumfriesshire ' off my own bat ' — W. H. Maxwell — The 
 Duke of Buccleuch — Sir R. Buchanan Jardine — In East Brad- 
 ford in 1909-10 some prominent pohticians came to help — -Mr. 
 Balfour, Mr. Lyttelton, Lord Cawdor, and Lord Percy — The 
 candidates — ' Fought for my own hand ' — Began poUtical adven- 
 ture in 1903 — ' New Fiscal PoUcy ' — Letters to a newspaper — 
 Kepubhshed ' Letters to an Elector '—Mr. Marshall Hall — 
 ' Coming Social Kevolution,' 1908, and other works — Distrust 
 of Mr. Chamberlain in early days — -1903, adopted Tariff Reform 
 — True instinct of statesman — A country and her satelhtes — 
 ImperiaUsm — Trade partnership — Reluctance of some Conser- 
 vatives to adopt the pohcy — Mr. Balfour one of the ' reluc- 
 tants ' — Dinner atMr. Chamberlain's after meeting of Mr. Balfour 
 and Mr. Chamberlain. 
 
 It was said by some one that every man should have 
 
 a rehgion, but that no wise man should say what it 
 
 was. It was my view while I was still practising 
 
 before committees of Parliament, that although every 
 
 man was entitled to have some political creed, 
 
 it was better pohcy for the counsel practising in 
 
 committee rooms not to be avowed politicians, 
 
 attached by their declared opinions to one or other 
 
 of the parties which struggle for the upper hand in 
 
 State affairs. It was only when I expected the 
 
 results of an election in Dumfriesshire might make 
 
 it necessary for me to give up the practice of my 
 
 221
 
 222 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 profession that I became a declared politician, and 
 it was the toward or untoward result of that election 
 which enabled me to continue to practise even after 
 I had put on the uniform of party. The reason for 
 the abstention from active politics of gentlemen 
 who are practising before committees, which com- 
 mended itself to me, was that committees are com- 
 posed of politicians — some of them of one party, some 
 of another — and that it is wiser there should be no 
 feeling either of political antagonism or sympathy 
 between the counsel and the members of the tribunal. 
 Indeed so delicate is the position upon occasion that 
 a counsel may have as one of his judges a member of 
 Parliament whose seat he contested, and whom in 
 the heat of election rhetoric he felt called upon to 
 abuse. Indeed mine is a case in point. After my 
 failure to secure the seat at East Bradford I was 
 frequently before the Local Legislation Committee, of 
 which Sir William Priestley, the member for that con- 
 stituency, was a member. But I would like to say 
 here that the friendly relations between us were 
 never strained. 
 
 I only mention this matter as an illustration of 
 the inconvenience of a clash of politics between a 
 counsel and a committee man, and as an explanation 
 of my studious aloofness from politics in my earlier 
 years. It was not until 1905-6 that I sought a seat 
 in the House of Commons, and up to that time I 
 was not a member of any political club. I was not, 
 therefore, in the tangle of wires which are there for 
 the pulling, and which are designated by the fine name 
 of political life. I did not consort with politicians, 
 and such opinions as I had were not the echoes of the 
 gossip of a club or a coterie. Indeed when I stood 
 for Dumfriesshire, instead of having a great many
 
 SOME POLITICAL GOSSIP 223 
 
 politicians to help me in the campaign — many- 
 elections are a babel — I do not think I had any speech 
 made for me by any recognised politician. Mr. 
 W. H. Maxwell, who had represented the county for 
 some years, was good enough to try to speak at one 
 meeting, but the people would not listen to him, 
 which is a curious instance of political gratitude. 
 The present Duke of Buccleuch, Sir R. Buchanan 
 Jardine, and others were good enough to take the 
 chair at some of my meetings, but I think I may say 
 with truth that I did all the political speaking my- 
 self, and that, as an enemy might say, may account 
 for the disastrous result of the election. 
 
 Even at Bradford, in 1909-10, I was somewhat of 
 a detached politician. It is true that during my 
 candidature there, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Lyttelton, Lord 
 Cawdor, and Lord Percy came down and spoke in 
 St. George's Hall. But they were in a sense joint- 
 stock politicians, and the big meetings were held in 
 the interest, not of the candidate for East Bradford 
 only, but in the interests of Lord Howick who was 
 candidate for Central Bradford, Sir Ernest Flower 
 who was standing again for West Bradford, and 
 Professor Hewins who was the adopted Unionist 
 candidate for Shipley. In East Bradford itself, 
 except for the loyal help of the chairman and mem- 
 bers of my committee, I — like the smith of Perth in 
 Sir Walter Scott's novel — ' fought for my own hand.' 
 
 I mention these quite unimportant facts to explain 
 that even although I have passed under the harrow 
 of two contested elections in the Unionist interest, 
 I was and am, as it were, to some extent out of the 
 game of politics, and therefore claim as an outsider 
 to see as much, at any rate, of the game as those 
 who are between the goals.
 
 224 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND FOLTTICAL 
 
 I began my political adventure in 1903, when I was 
 adopted as the prospective Unionist candidate for 
 Dumfriesshire, after Mr. W. H. Maxwell had announced 
 that he would not seek re-election. Once launched, 
 I went full speed ahead. I was not only busy with 
 my tongue but with my pen. I wrote for a local 
 paper circulating in the constituency, a series of 
 articles on the 'New Fiscal Pohcy/ and these were 
 republished in the autumn of 1903. A little 
 later certain 'Political Essays,' written at a much 
 earlier date for the Westminster Review, and some 
 later essays were republished in book form. ' Letters 
 to an Elector,' which had first seen the light in the 
 Bradford Daily Argus, were issued as a book in 1906, 
 and later it was foUowed by ' Further Letters to an 
 Elector ' and some political fables. 
 
 I find as I am gossiping that Mr. Marshall Hall, at 
 the Putney Constitutional Club, was kind enough — 
 after speaking of what he called the monopoly I had 
 in my profession — to say of my ' New Fiscal Pohcy ' : 
 ' The opmion of Mr. Balfour Browne upon a matter 
 of figures and political economy was as valuable as 
 any man's he had ever come in contact with. The 
 best pamphlet ever written upon Tariff Reform was 
 written by liim ' — which I quote more as a recollection 
 of friendhness upon his part than as a true estimate 
 of the value of my poor pamphlet. 
 
 But while I am cataloguing my contributions to 
 political literature — which is an ephemeral matter 
 that passes like froth — I may make the list more 
 complete. In 1906 I wrote on the ' Coming Social 
 Revolution ' m the National Review. In 1908 I 
 lectured in Glasgow on the ' Economics of Socialism/ 
 which was reprinted by the Anti-Sociahst Union in 
 1909, and they also republished a pamphlet or lecture
 
 SOME POLITICAL GOSSIP 225 
 
 on ' State and Municipal Trading ' in 1910. I mention 
 these facts as a sort of ground for the assertion that 
 I am entitled to have some political recollections. 
 In most cases such a title would be appropriated by 
 a man who had been in the great ' mash-tun,' the 
 House of Commons, and been connected in the actual 
 brewing operations which turn out the fermented 
 liquor of legislation. But every one is entitled to 
 his memories, and * these are of them.' 
 
 I had at one time considerable distrust of Mr. 
 Chamberlain. When he talked about 'holding the 
 rich to ransom,' he was adopting the attitude and 
 the language of a political bandit. I thought at 
 that time that he was a mere clever politician — and 
 politics are for to-day, like popularity ; statesman- 
 ship for time, like fame. It was while he was in 
 this aggressive attitude that I met him first at dinner, 
 at the house of Sir Edward Carbutt, who was Radical 
 member for the Monmouth Boroughs. But in 1903 
 I came to a very different conclusion as to Mr. 
 Chamberlain — perhaps too he had grown into the 
 maturity of political wisdom. His past had been an 
 education in politics. His connection with municipal 
 affairs in Birmingham had been an admirable re- 
 hearsal for the full-dress performance at Westminster. 
 He had, too, rejected the disintegrating policy of 
 Home Rule at a time when, as I have pointed out 
 elsewhere, recent history had been teaching the world 
 that integration, combination, Imperialism, was the 
 leading idea of the century. In 1903 he bravely — 
 not forgetting the failure of the earlier effort at a true 
 trade policy — adopted the policy of Tariff Reform. 
 I had then determined — perhaps unwisely, for 
 people and sometimes politicians have no honour 
 in their own country — to stand for Dumfriesshire, 
 
 p
 
 226 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 and, as I say, I wrote the articles which were gathered 
 together under the title of the 'New Fiscal PoHcy.' 
 The little book went quickly to a second edition, 
 for which a note from Mr. Chamberlain stood as 
 prologue : 
 
 Dear Mr. Balfour Browne, — I thoroughly appreciate 
 the value of your book. 
 
 The pamphlet had a certain vogue, but I dare say 
 convinced nobody who was not already convinced. 
 
 But it was not about these forgotten pages that I 
 meant to speak here, but about Mr. Chamberlain. 
 
 He was an alert, dapper man, with a very quick 
 intellect ; perhaps a little dressy. His orchid and his 
 monocle were not the things you noted in his appear- 
 ance, any more than you noted the butterfl}^ signa- 
 ture or monograph in Whistler's pictures or etchings ; 
 but a business acuteness, a sense of certainty that the 
 man was all there, was the quick impression he made 
 upon one's memory. I believe he had the true instinct 
 that a statesman must not merely be a carping critic 
 but a constructive politician — that what the world 
 wants is acts, not words. He had the sound idea 
 that a great country with its satellites of colonies can 
 be continued in greatness by a centripetal policy like 
 Imperialism, and that Imperialism can be brought 
 about not merely by touching the imagination of a 
 people, but as a business proposition, by touching 
 the pockets of the workers to whom our Reform Bills 
 have handed over the sceptre of power. It was on 
 these, I think sound, grounds that he adopted the 
 policy of Tariff Reform and Colonial Preference. 
 
 Imperialism has since his time had a marvellous 
 prosperity during the haggard time of war. The 
 war has drawn the bonds of friendship between the
 
 SOME POLITICAL GOSSIP 227 
 
 Mother Country and the Colonies, both in arms, closer 
 than they ever were. The world-dominion excursion 
 of Germany has brought about a magnificent unity 
 of patriotic purpose — curiously in contrast with what 
 was at one time called ' splendid isolation ' — which 
 could only have been achieved or approached in time 
 of peace by a trade partnership. 
 
 I am not discussing the problem here. We have 
 seen, and our Colonies have told us, that the war really 
 began in time of peace, and that there was a trade 
 penetration of our arch-enemy which jeopardised the 
 position of Great Britain. We have heard what 
 Australia had to tell us through Mr. Hughes. But I 
 am speaking of the time before the war, when under 
 a mask of friendship Germany was the enemy within 
 our household, and was stealing our trade under 
 the foolish hospitality of our Free Trade, while she 
 protected her own industries from our competition. 
 Mr. Chamberlain saw this, and set a courageous 
 spirit to protest against it. I was with him eagerly, 
 and ran Tariff Reform for all it was worth both in 
 Dumfriesshire and in East Bradford. 
 
 At the time of these elections there was a want of 
 eye-to-eye seeing between Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. 
 Balfour.^ The former was emphatic, the latter was 
 cautious. It was necessary to choose between the 
 two. I followed Mr. Chamberlain, and was almost 
 angry that philosophic doubt should be allowed to 
 unnerve the arm which should strike a blow for 
 Britain. You will remember that this philosophical 
 indecision upon the part of Mr. Balfour lasted some 
 time, but that on one occasion, after the election of 
 
 ^ I find in Lord Hugh Cecil's book on Conservatism that even 
 now he writes : ' These motives coalesce with the imperialist zeal 
 for the greatness of the country to make Conservatives adopt, 
 whether wisely or foolishly, the policy of Tariff Reform.'
 
 228 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 1910, there was a historic meeting between Mr. 
 Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour, and an agreement was 
 come to. I was dining with Mr. Chamberlain in 
 Prince's Gardens on the evening of the day of that 
 meeting. Several other * good men and true ' were 
 there that night : Sir George Doughty — a robust 
 politician with a ruddy round face,^ and a voice big 
 enough to fill the Albert Hall — Mr. Arnold Forster, 
 Mr. Claud Hay, and some others. I remember that 
 after dinner, when the ladies had gone, Mr. Chamber- 
 lain, referring to the conference he had had that day 
 with Mr. Balfour, said : * Gentlemen, I have got 
 him ! ' — and I think his fingers in his palm made his 
 hand like a fist showing the grip — and then he told 
 us of the interview. 
 
 I would not have remembered the incident so well 
 — although I do recollect that when I was going, 
 Mr. Chamberlain charged me with some slight mission 
 to Sir Edward Carson — had it not been recalled to 
 me a few weeks afterwards by a gentleman whose 
 name I will not mention, but who is now in a very 
 great political position and in high office — who, 
 saying he had been dining with Chamberlain that 
 night, told me the whole story with the very words, 
 * I have got him.' But the curious thing about his 
 story was that the gentleman who told me, as if at 
 first hand, had not been there, and I had ! 
 
 ^ Some one, a little mischievously, once said, referring to Sir 
 George's complexion, that, ' hke Caesar, he had passed the Rubicund.'
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 HERBERT SPENCER 
 
 Indices and the text — ' Board of Trade can do anything ' — 
 What an Act of ParUament can do — ^Herbert Spencer thought 
 Parhament did too much — Used to meet the ' great man ' on 
 Sunday evenings — The cut of a schoolmaster — Picture at 
 Athenaeum Club — Trained as an engineer — Mechanical view 
 of the universe — Problem remains unsolved — His work, The Man 
 versus The State — Huxley's ' Administrative Nihilism ' — In de- 
 fence of State education — Could conceive the existence of an 
 Established Church — Huxley in the lower smoking-room — 
 My dispute with Herbert Spencer — Spencer interviewed — His 
 opinion on liberty in America — ' Independence ' in politics 
 impossible. 
 
 It was said that in the index to a certain law-book 
 there was to be found this reference to Mr. Justice 
 Best : ' Best — his great mind.' But when the 
 text was referred to, it was found that the learned 
 judge had said that he had a ' great mind to commit 
 the witness,' who no doubt had been * drawing the 
 long-bow.' Two gentlemen were good enough to 
 assist me in the compilation of the index to the first 
 edition of my book. The Law of Railways, and on 
 looking over it I found this comprehensive refer- 
 ence : * Board of Trade — can do anything.' 
 
 Now although that was a mistake, there is a very 
 widespread belief amongst the people of this country 
 that ' an Act of Parliament can do anything,' and 
 there were many men, and Herbert Spencer was 
 among them, who thought that Acts of Parliament 
 had done a great deal too much. While I was still 
 
 229
 
 230 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 reading for the Bar I used to meet that ' great man,' 
 of ' massive achievements ' as I then thought, pretty 
 often on Sunday evenings at the house of some con- 
 nections of Professor Masson who were very kind 
 to me. Spencer was, I beheve, the son of a school- 
 master, and he himself had the schoolmaster's 
 manner, which has a twinge of superiority in it 
 because it is made out of the tyranny over boys. 
 Every man carries his pulpit about with him, and as 
 to Herbert Spencer when he came, his schoolmaster's 
 desk came with him. He had a face with a good 
 brow — a place for a big brain — side-whiskers, and a 
 clean-shaven chin. The picture we have of him at 
 the Athenaeum Club shows him a little older than 
 he was in the days when I used to meet him in that 
 house in the Regent's Park. 
 
 Although he impressed me with his schoolmaster 
 manner, I don't think he had been to school, but had 
 been educated by his father and uncle, and he meant 
 to be an engineer. He made certain inventions 
 between 1837 and 1846, but never invented anything 
 notable until he invented what he thought was a 
 ' philosophy,' but which was, after all, only a * stickit 
 engineer's ' mechanical view of the universe — a 
 ' philosophy,' if we use the proud word, which ended 
 with this articulate sigh : ' The ultimate mystery is 
 as great as ever, seeing that there remains unsolved 
 the question. What determines the co-ordination of 
 actions ? ' Von Baer had expressed the course of 
 * development through which every plant and animal 
 passes as the change from homogeneity to hetero- 
 geneity,' and this poor formula, which tells us 
 nothing, was the foundation of Herbert Spencer's 
 philosophy. 
 
 But here we have nothing to do with his First
 
 HERBERT SPENCER 231 
 
 Principles, but rather with his view as to the hmits 
 of State interference with private initiative, or, in 
 other words, the questions, Can Acts of ParHament do 
 everything ? and. Have Acts of Parhament done too 
 much ? Thus in The Man versus The State he says : 
 ' Dictatorial measures rapidly multiplied have tended 
 continually to narrow the liberties of individuals ' ; and 
 even the headings of some of the chapters will show 
 what bethought — as, for instance, 'The New Toryism,' 
 ' The Coming Slavery,' ' The Sins of Legislators,' 
 and so on. But there is one sentence I quote with 
 agreement : ' The great political superstition of the 
 period is the divine right of Parliaments.' ' Put not 
 your trust in legislation,' he says in one of his essays 
 (his Essays are, to my mind, his most useful work) ; 
 and it is quite worth while weighing that doctrine 
 in the balance in days when people trust to nothing 
 else, and when only the Syndicalists who desire the 
 tyranny of the trade unions are prepared to dis- 
 pute the significance of political action in relation to 
 labour and capital, where the battle of the times was 
 being fought before the larger war began. Indeed, 
 that battle would be raging still but for the way that 
 labour has been bribed to hold its clamorous tongue 
 * until the people have avenged themselves upon their 
 enemies.' 
 
 Herbert Spencer then accused the State of blunders 
 in the discharge of its duties as to the administra- 
 tion of justice, of jobbery, and incompetence in 
 relation to military and naval matters ; and while he 
 praised the doings — which no doubt have been great 
 — of private enterprise, he asked with a sneer, Is 
 this the ground on which we are to trust the State and 
 distrust private enterprise ? And the conclusion he 
 came to was that the State was a bad, defaulting
 
 232 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 trustee in its more legitimate functions, and that 
 nothing more should be put into its trembling, 
 blundering, thieving hands. This is not the place 
 to follow, or even to try to answer his arguments. 
 That indeed was attempted by Huxley in his lecture 
 on ' Administrative Nihilism,' which he delivered at 
 the Midland Institute in 1871. In that address he 
 wanted to justify the State interference with educa- 
 tion, and in doing so he was driven into a curious 
 corner. Taking the creed of those who followed 
 Herbert Spencer as ' Thou shalt not allow any man 
 to interfere with the liberty of any other man,' he 
 pointed out that his next-door neighbour's drains 
 might poison him, and that the sewer was as 
 deadly a weapon as a pistol; that if one man's 
 children go unvaccinated, it is as much a crime as 
 leaving strychnine lozenges about which another 
 man's children might eat. He was always happy in 
 his illustrations. As to the justifiability of State 
 education, his argument was ' that every man of 
 high natural ability who is both ignorant and miser- 
 able, is as great a danger to society as a rocket with- 
 out a stick is to people who fire it. Misery is a match 
 that never goes out ; genius as an explosive power 
 beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge which 
 should give that power of guidance is wanting, the 
 chances are not small that the rocket will simply 
 run amuck among friends and foes.' This is all very 
 picturesque, but not very convincing ; and now we 
 come to the corner he was driven into. If there is 
 to be State education, where is it to stop ? Are you 
 to teach a man to read and not to be good, and if 
 you do, do you not really equip him to become a 
 greater danger than ever to society ? But Huxley 
 faced the difficulty, for he said : ' I can conceive the
 
 HERBERT SPENCER 233 
 
 existence of an Established Church which would be 
 a blessing to the country ' ; but this Established 
 Church is to teach only Huxley's own religion. 
 Then he says : ' Depend upon it, if such a Church 
 existed no one would seek to disestablish it.' Well, 
 I for one would. But I do not want to argue with 
 Huxley. I never met him to speak to, but once, 
 in the lower smoking-room at the Athenaeum. I was 
 so near that I could not help overhearing him. The 
 portrait of him by the Hon. John Collier, in the 
 National Portrait Gallery, is like enough the man. 
 There were furrows between his cheeks and upper 
 lip, deep-set eyes, a blob of a nose, side-whiskers and 
 an upstanding thick head of black hair. It was with 
 reference to his hair that I was an eavesdropper. 
 Huxley was telling some one how he regretted his 
 thick head of hair, and how he did not see his way 
 to baldness, for, he continued, he had always looked 
 forward to the luxury of rubbing his bald head with 
 a silk pocket handkerchief, and that was denied him 
 by his obstinate bristles. But he had obstinate 
 bristles in his character as well as on his head. 
 
 But I have quite inadvertently been diverted 
 from Herbert Spencer. He was, upon one of the 
 occasions when I met him, enlarging with a ferule 
 of a finger on his thesis that ' if we define the primar}^ 
 State duty to be the protecting of each individual 
 against others, then all other State action comes 
 under the definition of protecting each individual 
 against himself — against his own stupidity, his own 
 idleness, his own improvident rashness or other 
 defect, his own incapacity for doing something or 
 other which should be done.' And he went on to 
 enlarge — with a copious memory and a wealth of 
 illustration — on the many muddling blunders which
 
 234 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the State had made by enlarging its fooHsh func- 
 tions of apron-string government, and by passing 
 Acts of Parhament which imposed duties clearly 
 beyond the legitimate work of a State if it was to 
 continue to exist. He really took a very gloomy 
 view of the future prosperity of a country which did 
 such foolish things, and in a moment of pessimism 
 proclaimed the decline and fall of this stupid country. 
 I was young — and perhaps, like most of the young, 
 impertinent — but here I put in my word, which was 
 to this effect : That if Mr. Spencer was right, it was 
 a foolish thing to try to prevent such muddling, as it 
 would only be keeping alive a nation which was 
 evidently, from his criticisms, unfit to survive ; and 
 that, according to his own theories, there must be a 
 struggle for existence between nations as well as 
 between individuals, and it would be right to let 
 Britain ' dree its weird.' 
 
 This, interjected in the rolling whirl of his talk, 
 was suffered with impatience, and he fell back on the 
 prejudice of patriotism as a reason for his wanting 
 to coerce a nation to do what he wanted, while every 
 individual was to be free to do what he himself chose. 
 I went home to my lodgings feeling quite proud of 
 having had a fling with my pebble at this Goliath of 
 Gath. 
 
 There was, however, a piece of his pessimistic talk, 
 not to me but to an American interviewer after he 
 had been two months in the United States, which has 
 an interest for us and is perhaps worth preserving. 
 At first he seemed to kick against the prick of the 
 interviewer's questions, but ultimately he stood and 
 delivered himself. So far as I know, the interview 
 only appeared in some newspapers. 
 
 Herbert Spencer had suggested that the English
 
 HERBERT SPENCER 235 
 
 people were gradually losing their freedom, and the 
 interviewer asked, ' Do you mean this as a sugges- 
 tion that we are doing the same ? ' He answered : 
 ' It seems to me you are. You retain the forms of 
 freedom. But, so far as I can gather, there has been 
 considerable loss of substance. It is true that those 
 who rule you do not do it by means of retainers armed 
 with swords ; but they do it through regiments of 
 men armed with voting papers, who obey the word 
 of command as loyally as did the dependents of the 
 feudal nobles, and who thus enable their leaders to 
 override the general will and make the community 
 submit to their exactions as effectually as their 
 prototypes of old. It is doubtless true that each of 
 your citizens votes for the candidate he chooses for 
 this or that office, from President downwards ; but 
 his hand is guided by the power behind, which leaves 
 him scarcely any choice. " Use your political power 
 as we tell you, or else throw it away," is the alternative 
 offered to the citizen. The political machinery as 
 it is now worked has little resemblance to that con- 
 templated at the outset of your political life. Mani- 
 festly those who framed your constitution never 
 dreamed that twenty thousand citizens would go to 
 the poll led by a " boss." America exemplifies at 
 the other end of the social scale a change analogous 
 to that which has taken place under sundry des- 
 potisms.' 
 
 This ought to interest us, for a good deal of what 
 he said about America is true of this country to-day. 
 We still talk as if we had a King, Lords, and Commons, 
 but the King — like the Mikado in Japan, who was 
 looked upon as a sacred person and was therefore 
 allowed to do nothing, while all the power was in 
 the hands of the Shogun — the King is a splendid
 
 236 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 figurehead for the ship of State, but he dare not 
 touch the rudder. The House of Lords is a doll's 
 house, and any legislation which the Commons ap- 
 proves of through two years must become law. The 
 Commons ! Then all the power is in the Commons, 
 ' Broad based upon a people's will ' ? Nonsense : 
 the House of Commons is the obsequious servant of 
 the party that has a majority of its members in its 
 pocket. And this, as Lord Hugh Cecil has pointed 
 out, ' does not merely mean that the minority 
 count for nothing ; it also means that the members 
 even of the majority are rather the servants than the 
 masters of their party. There is every year less and 
 less independence among Members of Parliament ; 
 every year they are more and more disposed to vote 
 strictly as their whips direct.' Here, then, we have 
 the ' boss ' system in full swing. But what about 
 the ' people's will ' ? A man can surely force his way 
 into the House of Commons although he may be a 
 nonentity when he gets there ? But even that is not 
 tnie. The disastrous fate at the polls of gentlemen 
 who have called themselves independent candidates 
 has shown that the organisation is more powerful 
 than the man, and that, as Herbert Spencer said, 
 you must vote as we tell you or else throw your vote 
 away. An independent man like Mr. Harold Cox 
 has not a chance in Parliament, and so has to take 
 to the refuge of literature.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 ABOUT POLITICS AND PARTIES 
 
 Politics a matter of feeling — Prejudiced voters at elections — 
 Party government no longer in evidence — Division of the spoils 
 — The two-party system — House divided against itself — Coali- 
 tion Government to ' Win the war ' — The group system — A 
 vanished fourth party — War and unpreparedness — Only began 
 the war after two years' fighting — If a machine breaks do%vn in 
 war, is it really useful in peace ? — Germany's peaceful pene- 
 tration — Arrangements after the war — Wrote long ago on ' Party 
 Government' — Letter from J. A. Froude. 
 
 Men very often think that poHtics is a matter of 
 reason, while as a fact it is a matter of feehng. It 
 is not logic which determines how we shall vote in 
 an election, it is custom and habit which have been 
 forming during years of unconscious education and 
 prejudices which are stronger than any argument. 
 The man who is in or wants to be in the House of 
 Commons may be in a sense a calculating machine, 
 and while no doubt his creed is to see which side his 
 bread is buttered on, he may determine his actions in 
 relation to the possible number of votes he must 
 win or lose by his political conduct. But the voters 
 themselves are influenced by these wayward ten- 
 dencies in human nature, which defy the compass and 
 chart, and sail by winds of doctrine which blow where 
 they list. 
 
 People seem to believe that the system of party 
 government is still in existence in this country. 
 There is an idea which survives from more primitive 
 
 237
 
 238 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 times that the two great parties, as it were, share the 
 spoils of the country, and that the determining court 
 as to the portfoHos is a General Election. There 
 was a pleasant simplicity about this bandit form of 
 government. To allow one set of men to go on in 
 power for ever was clearly impossible. As there were 
 two sets of men there must be a kind of * share and 
 share alike,' and the way to determine who was at any 
 particular time to have the power and the pelf of office 
 was for each of these parties to try and ingratiate itself 
 with the constituencies — which they did in the old 
 time by means of ready money, but more recently 
 by political bills of exchange or promissory notes. 
 
 But the simplicity of the two-party system has 
 long since passed away. Indeed, events have con- 
 demned it. Even Macaulay spoke of an ideal time 
 when none were for the party and all were for the 
 State — a Utopian dream which it is impossible to 
 realise. But that a house or a country continually 
 divided against itself lacks the first requisite of a 
 building, stability, became evident in the course of 
 the war, and what we call a Coalition Government 
 was formed with the express purpose of doing the 
 business in hand — Winning the war. The term 
 Coalition was intended no doubt to maintain the 
 personal identity of the parties, and at the same 
 time to sink the personal animosities and personal 
 ambitions which would, with such materials as an 
 Antwerp week-end excursion, a Dardanelles expedi- 
 tion, a Mesopotamia mess, and a Balkan muddle, 
 have wrecked two or three Governments. But 
 apart from our emergency expedient — which, of 
 course, condemns our past methods — there is in 
 time of peace an entire change from the bivalve 
 system of politics, and instead of two great parties
 
 ABOUT POLITICS AND PARTIES 239 
 
 you have a fission going on and producing groups, 
 and those who are in or want to get power must play 
 not only to the 'gallery,' the country, but to these 
 their fellow-actors on the stage of politics. 
 
 We had at one time a vanishing fourth party, which 
 no doubt served the purposes of the four gentlemen 
 who composed it. But now we have substantial 
 groups like the Nationalist party and Labour party, 
 and these must be captured by your politician if 
 he is to govern. 
 
 But in saying a word about party government, 
 one cannot overlook the fact that in the greatest 
 emergency which we have had in politics the system 
 broke down, and that a Government composed of 
 the leaders of the two parties was formed to conduct 
 the paramount business of the war. I am not going 
 back upon the question who was responsible for 
 the fact that the nation did not see before its nose, 
 although Lord Roberts warned it. I am not going 
 to inquire who was responsible for our unprepared- 
 ness for war. The fact seems to be certain that 
 we were unprepared, and Sir Wilham Robertson 
 tells us that it was two years after the war com- 
 menced that * we began to fight.' But is it not 
 obvious from the very fact that politics — which is a 
 game played with power and office for the stakes, 
 or a battle fought with the spoils for the victor — was 
 put to sleep, that we have lived in a truce at home 
 if we have lived in the turmoil of war abroad ? It 
 would occur to most people who think about politics 
 and parties at all, that if the machine by which the 
 country has been run in time of peace breaks down 
 and has to be replaced by another when we are at war, 
 there must be something wrong with the works of 
 that engine. If party government cannot be trusted
 
 240 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 to guide US in time of war, if the jangling of parties 
 is a serious disadvantage when we are face to face 
 with an enemy Hke Germany, can it be rehed upon 
 to carry out the enterprise of government in peace ? 
 It is, as we have seen, an error to suppose that we 
 have ever been at peace. The fact is that Germany 
 has been preparing for war for forty years ; that she 
 has conducted a subtle campaign during all the time 
 we thought we were living in * soft peace ' is certain. 
 Can it be right, then, that we should have been fight- 
 ing over the internecine affairs of politics, and play- 
 ing into the hands of enemies all these years without 
 finding out that we were really attempting to sail 
 a ship by means of mutiny ? We have condemned 
 politics, we have condemned party government in 
 our sore distress ; are we, after the war, going back 
 to these silly arrangements which were found in- 
 capable of meeting our requirements when the para- 
 mount interests of the country were concerned, and 
 which cannot be trusted when the equally paramount 
 interests of the country in time of peace are in the 
 balance ? 
 
 By the way, I wrote an essay on ' Party Govern- 
 ment ' in 1886, reviewing Popular Government by 
 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, and Liberty, Equality, and 
 Fraternity by Fitzjames Stephen, for the West- 
 minster Review. It was republished in 1907 in my 
 Political Essays. On the occasion of its publica- 
 tion in the Westminster I received the following not 
 uninteresting letter from Mr. Froude : 
 
 5 Onslow Gardens, 
 2nd May 1886. 
 
 Dear Sir, — I have read your essay on Party Government 
 with entire approval. You might write, however, less diffi- 
 dently. It has become now an organised evil in the heart
 
 ABOUT POLITICS AND PARTIES 241 
 
 of us, and a civil war which can have no end. A war purpose 
 is fought out and the principle contended for is decided. 
 In Parliamentary war the contending parties renew their 
 struggle every six years in contact with the constituencies. 
 Some remedy must be found if the British Empire is not 
 to go to pieces, though none of us can say in what direction 
 to look for help. — Yours faithfully, 
 
 J. A. Froude.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS 
 
 The great political conflicts of the century — Even in my 
 memory there was the Fiscal controversy and Home Rule on 
 the carpet, and the House of Lords has been reduced to an 
 assembly of ineffectives — Cat -and -dog politics — Catholic 
 Emancipation, 1829 — The Reform Bill, 1832 — Repeal of the 
 Corn Laws, 1846 — Household Suffrage, 1867 — Burke's doctrine 
 — The wisdom of CathoUc Emancipation — Passed by the Con- 
 servatives — Liberty and the Magna Carta — Tried by his peers 
 — Corn Laws repealed by Sir Robert Peel — Power handed over 
 to middle classes — Household Suffrage again a Conservative 
 measure — A race to reform — The Dean of St. Paul's on 
 politicians. 
 
 This is not in any sense a treatise on politics, but is 
 what it purports to be, the desultory recollections 
 of one who has been on the treadmill of affairs and 
 has kept on tramping on that apparatus which, 
 while it is punitive, effects little or nothing in the 
 way of work. My memory serves me as to two of 
 the great political conflicts — the Home Rule battle 
 of 1886-95, which ended, some supposed, with the 
 Parliament Act, but which still seems to go on in 
 curious shapes in the present day ; and the Fiscal 
 controversy, which began in 1903. As for the Parlia- 
 ment Act with its unveracious preamble, it rendered 
 the House of Lords an assembly of ineffectives ; and 
 as for Tariff Reform, it has assumed a new form for 
 those who have been considering what is to happen in 
 connection with allies' and enemies' trade after the war. 
 
 Of course in the last two years we have been told 
 212
 
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS 243 
 
 that politics have ceased to exist, althougli in my 
 view they are only sleeping, and I noted that even 
 in their dreams the honours and rewards are some- 
 what equally divided between those who were party 
 politicians before the formation of a Coalition Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 But looking back over the last century to the 
 history of the cat-and-dog life of politics in that much 
 maligned time — which in comparison with the 
 spacious times of Queen Elizabeth has been called 
 the specious times of Queen Victoria — there have 
 been, besides the conflicts I have mentioned here, 
 four transcendent controversies which have left 
 indelible marks on the times. 
 
 There was Catholic Emancipation, which was 
 achieved in 1829, the Reform Bill in 1832, the Repeal 
 of the Corn Laws in 1846, and the Household Suffrage 
 Bill in 1867. As to the merits of this march of 
 Democracy I will say nothing — it is an accomplished 
 fact. The wise words of an early, and one of the 
 greatest Conservatives, Burke — ' I would not ex- 
 clude alteration neither ; but even when I changed 
 it would be to preserve ' ; and in another place : 
 ' Thus by preserving the method of nature in the 
 conduct of the State, in what we improve we are 
 never wholly new : in what we retain we are never 
 wholly obsolete ' — have been forgotten ; and the 
 dictum of Henry viii. when he abolished the monas- 
 teries, that if he pulled down the nests the rooks 
 would fly away, seems to have been the guiding 
 principle of the democratic changes which have been 
 made, in the onward sweep of waves which have 
 obliterated landmarks. But one thing will strike 
 even a running reader of historj^ and that is the 
 sorry part Conservatism has played in these great 
 conflicts. As to the first, to allow every one in a
 
 244 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 country to partake in the government of the country, 
 whether he owes allegiance to Rome or, say, to a 
 foreign state like Germany, seems to be a very 
 questionable policy. We have been complaining of 
 the penetration of Germany into every department 
 of our commerce and our industries, and since the 
 war began we have been weeding our garden — but 
 your Catholic Emancipation hands over the sceptre 
 to these peaceful penetrants who choose to settle in 
 our midst and to become naturalised. We see the 
 result of such a proceeding in the hyphenated policy 
 of the United States during the war. But there you 
 are : the Catholic Emancipation Act is on the Statute- 
 book after a long resistance on the part of the Tory 
 party — and it was put there by the Conservatives. 
 It was the same with the Repeal of the Corn Laws. 
 These stood for the political power of the land-owner 
 in his country. The liberty which was secured to 
 the barons by the Magna Carta was not the liberty 
 we talk about in these days, which is freedom for 
 every one to do as he likes, but was the preservation 
 in the barons' hands of the liberties and privileges 
 they had hitherto enjoyed, and which had been 
 threatened by Henry ii. It was very different from 
 the concession, say, of the Permissive Bill, which Lord 
 Neaves in one of his songs described as a measure 
 
 ' To permit me to prevent you 
 From having your glass of grog.' 
 
 The Great Charter preserved the privileges and 
 exemptions which the barons enjoyed, one of which 
 by the way exists to this day — their right to be tried 
 by their peers, which was in fact a defiance of the 
 King's Court or Attla Regis. Now the Corn Laws, 
 which went to the wall in 1846, were a special 
 economic privilege which had been conceded to 
 those owning and cultivating land. Of course the
 
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS 245 
 
 Conservatives fought against the repeal, until Sir 
 Robert Peel betrayed the party by passing the repeal 
 himself. His practical statesmanship — which is often 
 a fine name for pusillanimity — was convinced by an 
 impending civil war and an actual famine in Ireland ; 
 and the result of this retreat of the army was the 
 handing over the power in the country into the hands 
 of the manufacturing middle classes. It would seem, 
 indeed, that Conservatism was a game which began 
 in bluster and ended by pilfering the policy of 
 its opponents. The same thing happened when 
 Disraeli and Derby were in office. They * dished 
 the Whigs,' as if * dishing ' was statesmanship. The 
 policy of Conservatism was to ' change ' so as to 
 * preserve.' The Household Suffrage Bill of 1867 
 was handing over the keys of power to the mob, and 
 that by statesmen who called themselves Conserva- 
 tives, but who educated their party in the principles 
 of Democracy. It is quite true all these changes 
 might have come in time, but it is somewhat curious 
 to find the party that is there wisely to preserve our 
 constitution nmning their rivals a race to bring 
 about such momentous changes. But look at any 
 Unionist Manual or Campaign Guide, and you will 
 find that the boast of the party is that it has done 
 more for the people than the Liberals have. It is a 
 race between the parties which is to reform the most, 
 and so secure the pay of office for their perfidy to 
 principle. No doubt when the war is over and ' soft 
 peace has come again,' this war of politics will begin 
 again, and there will still be attempts at outflanking 
 such as those that were supposed at the time to be 
 successful, in 1829, 1846, and 1867. 
 
 * In France and the United States,' says the Dean 
 of St. Paul's, ' politics is hardly a profession for an 
 honourable man,' What about England ?
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 HUMOUR AT ELECTIONS 
 
 No humour at elections — Candidates' stories — A heckler 
 answered — The atmosphere at election time not edifying — 
 Campbell-Bannerman's story — Whisky and a torchlight proces- 
 sion — Compared with various brews — ' Show me a Radical ' — 
 The mistake of a chairman at Mr. Lloyd George's meeting — 
 ' Commanding reticence ' — Women and Tariff Reform — 
 ' England for the English '■ — Mere bluff — Chinese labour and 
 undergraduates — Sir W. Agnew in Lancashire — Mr. Guinness and 
 a Dublin election — Lord Spencer and the lumbago — Epitaph 
 on a wife — Quickly ' done-for ' peer— Ironmaster and the 
 Decalogue — A teetotaller. 
 
 There is no humour at elections. In a well-known 
 book the index had the words, * Snakes in Ireland,' 
 and when you turned to the text you were told there 
 were no snakes in Ireland. And so it is with my 
 * heading ' and confession. If you think of the 
 thousands of speeches which are made at election 
 times, it is really a curious fact that they are for the 
 most part a sandy desert without the redemption 
 of a single oasis of fresh humour. Of course candi- 
 dates tell stories, and perhaps a jest-book is more 
 indispensable to a politician than his Campaign 
 Guide ; but, then, these stories are not their own, and 
 the telling of them is not evidence of humour at 
 elections, but rather a confession of the want of it. 
 There have been some humorous sayings, of course, 
 even in my time, on the arid platform. Thus the 
 candidate who, being young, was rudely asked * if 
 his mother knew he was out ? ' replied that ' to-morrow
 
 HUMOUR AT ELECTIONS 247 
 
 she would hear that he was in,' was very happily on 
 the spot. Another candidate that I knew, who had 
 been kicked by a pony or a donkey that mowed the 
 lawn when he was a child, and had his nose broken, 
 was at one of his meetings asked by a heckler how 
 he came by his broken nose ? The chairman inter- 
 vened and said that was not a proper question to ask, 
 but the candidate said : * It does not matter, Mr. 
 Chairman, this is not the first time that a donkey has 
 had a fling at me.' 
 
 But as a rule an election is no joke, and there are 
 very few good jokes at elections. Indeed candidates 
 as a rule, like the Scotsman, ' joke with deeficulty,' 
 or are, as the Scotsman defined * coyness,' * back- 
 ward in coming forward.' Candidates are as a rule 
 quite satisfied if they can turn the tables for an 
 instant on some insulting questioner, and enjoy 
 
 ' The trivial triumph of a silly jibe.' 
 
 But the atmosphere at election time is not one 
 which is suited to humour. A candidate is really on 
 his trial before a jury of his countrymen, and the 
 verdict of the poll may either promote him to the 
 honour he aspires to or relegate him to the outer 
 darkness of ordinary life. ' Have you considered what 
 you are going to do if you get in ? ' asked an inter- 
 viewer of a candidate. * No,' said the candid poli- 
 tician ; ' but what the devil will I do if I don't get 
 in ? ' Perhaps he was thinking of his wife. 
 
 Of course the platform at such times is as noisy as 
 Babel, with various tongues, but it is generally as 
 dull as a Sunday-school and, as a Scotsman would 
 say, * not so edifying.' 
 
 Still there are some happinesses even in these dull 
 places. Thus Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman once
 
 248 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 told a fairly good story which illustrated the char- 
 acteristics of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen. 
 
 A gentleman who had a good collection of china, 
 deploring to his friends the carelessness of a man- 
 servant whose fingers, as the Scotch would say, 
 
 * were all thumbs,' said he did not know what to 
 do with him. ' Why not dismiss him ? ' said the 
 practical Englishman. * But he is a good servant,' 
 said his host. ' Stop it out of his wages,' said the 
 Scotsman, with the excellent caution of his race. 
 
 * But,' said the master, * he breaks more than his 
 wages would pay for.' ' Why not raise his wages ? ' 
 asked the Irishman. 
 
 It was a Mr. O'Sullivan who said that a certain 
 whisky was like a torchlight procession going down 
 a man's throat. But Sir Stafford Northcote had 
 the questionable taste to use the story at a politi- 
 cal meeting in Edinburgh. The Scotch comment 
 on his speech was that ' it must have been Irish 
 whisky.' 
 
 Once at a New Year's meeting at rather a low 
 
 club, the candidate, who had been abusing the 
 
 Campbell-Bannerman government, when the bells 
 
 rang out for the New Year, was quick to quote : 
 
 ' Ring out the old Government, ring in the new ; 
 Ring out the false, ring in the true.' 
 
 A candidate who called himself a Tory and did not 
 hold by newfangled politics, speaking to people who 
 no doubt understood him, said : ' A Tory was old 
 October ; a Conservative, mild drawn ale ; and a 
 Liberal — a Liberal was swipes.' 
 
 ' Show me a Radical, gentlemen,' said a certain 
 politician, * and I '11 show you a liar.' ' I, sir,' said 
 an angry man in the hall, ' I am a Radical.' ' Just 
 come round the corner, then, and I '11 show you a
 
 HUMOUR AT ELECTIONS 249 
 
 fellow who said I could not find a Radical in this 
 borough.' 
 
 But talking of liars. Mr. Lloyd George went 
 down not long ago to speak in Wales, and the Mayor 
 of the town was in the chair. He introduced the 
 present Prime Minister with a few appropriate words. 
 He said : * Gentlemen, Mr. Lloyd George has come 
 down to speak on Welsh DisestabHshment, and 
 especially to answer the Bishop of St. David's. In 
 my opinion the Bishop of St. David's is the greatest 
 liar on the face of the earth. But, thank heaven, 
 gentlemen, we have here to-night one that is a match 
 for him.' 
 
 Of course a good deal of the one candidate's wit 
 is directed at his opponent, and savours of the sour. 
 If the sitting member has been a silent member in 
 the House of Commons, which certainly ought to be 
 counted to him for a merit, his glib opponent will 
 refer to him as a ' tombstone with the inscription 
 rubbed off,' as one in fact did, or refer to him as a man 
 of 'commanding reticence,' as another suggested — 
 which was greeted wdth loud but misunderstanding 
 laughter by the gentleman's own supporters : for a 
 candidate is no good unless he can carry his claque 
 with him. And even the least intelligent can under- 
 stand when something ' nasty ' is being said, and to 
 them the ' nasty ' is the ' nice.' 
 
 But to prove my proposition that there is little or 
 no humour at elections, let me give you one or two 
 specimens of attempts in that direction which were 
 mxade at some of my own meetings. 
 
 A woman or lady (there is no greater puzzle in 
 Hterature than the right and judicious use of these 
 words) asked me how Tariff Reform was going to 
 help women, and I had to explain that one thing
 
 250 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Tariff Reformers objected to was dumping, and 
 I thought the lady would agree with me that 'it 
 would be undesirable to have women dumped upon 
 our marriage market. We have women enough in 
 England.' 
 
 Now there was absolutely nothing in this to merit 
 the storm of applause which followed in its wake. 
 
 Once I was speaking of the necessity of Tariff 
 walls and said, ' England for the English ' — but I 
 added, * And one Scotsman.' 
 
 I quoted Gilbert once that every boy that was 
 born alive was either a little Liberal or else a little 
 Conservative, and said it wasn't true — that every one 
 was born a little of both. All men have a desire to 
 keep what they have got, that is Conservatism ; and 
 all wanted to have something better than they had, 
 that was reforming aspiration ; and as for Socialism, 
 it was stillborn. Now although that rounded off the 
 sentence it was not true, for Socialism was born alive 
 and kicking. 
 
 But a good deal that is sometimes by partisans 
 regarded as humour is only bluff. Thus when a 
 candidate was asked if he would vote for the aboli- 
 tion of mining royalties, he answered : ' I am not 
 in favour of any kind of theft.' ' Neither am I,' 
 said the heckler ; ' that is why I asked the question.' 
 * Then,' said the candidate with nice assurance — 
 ' then we are at one.' 
 
 When asked by a young gentleman who had, I 
 think, been called to the Bar, as to the Chinese in 
 South Africa being confined to their compounds, as 
 an indication of the allegation of the Chinese Slavery 
 which was the stick to beat Mr. Balfour's govern- 
 ment with, the candidate said : ' Why, under- 
 graduates at Oxford and Cambridge could not leave
 
 HUMOUR AT ELECTIONS 251 
 
 their towns without a permit.' * Nonsense,' said the 
 young gentleman ; * I often did.' ' Ah, but you,' 
 said the candidate, ' were a very naughty boy.' And 
 the house — it was a schoolhouse — came down. 
 
 These illustrations establish the paucity of humour 
 at election meetings. But that the chapter may not 
 be quite dull, let me tell some quite old stories — to 
 give light to a dull page. 
 
 I think it was Sir W. Agnew, the famous picture 
 dealer, who was contesting a South Lancashire 
 constituency, and was, as is the custom, comparing 
 the performances of his own party with the per- 
 formances of * the other side.' ' Look,' he said, * at 
 this picture and at that.' But one of the indepen- 
 dent electors administered a rebuke by shouting, ' No 
 shop.' In the same election he was opposed by a 
 well-known gentleman of great physical amplitude, a 
 big man who, to keep a big frame going, had to eat 
 and drink more than punier persons, his drink being 
 the fine vintage of champagne. Indeed I have my- 
 self seen the honourable gentleman with his pint of 
 Cliquot at breakfast time, in the Queen's Hotel, 
 Manchester. The election joke or conundrum was, 
 
 What is the difference between Agnew and Mr. ? 
 
 and the answer was, ' The one is very fond of cham- 
 pagne and the other of sham painting.' 
 
 While we are on the question of liquor, I think I 
 am right in saying that Lord Iveagh (then Mr. 
 Guinness) once contested one of the Dublin seats, and 
 on that occasion one of the posters of the opposition 
 was a kind of scriptural quotation : 'Those that 
 are not with us are agin us (a Guinness).' And 
 below, as if it was the reference to the text : * He 
 brews xx and xxx.' 
 
 One expects perhaps more humour at Irish elec-
 
 252 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 tions. Thus at one of these an Irish orator said he 
 wished there was a window in his breast, that they 
 might see that his heart throbbed only for his country. 
 But a man in the crowd asked, perhaps a little 
 vulgarly, ' if a pain in the stomach would not do as 
 well ? ' 
 
 Once, too, when Lord Spencer was Lord Lieuten- 
 ant (he had been accused of an invertebrate policy) 
 he was addressing a meeting, and rested his hands on 
 his haunches. * I hope,' said one sympathetic man, 
 
 * that his lordship has not got lumbago.' * Not at 
 all,' said his neighbour, ' he is only feeling for his 
 backbone.' 
 
 The candidate, who was gloating over the prophe- 
 sied death of the Government which was formed in 
 1905, referred to an epitaph which a man had in- 
 scribed on a tombstone over his wife's grave, and 
 applied it to what he called Campbell-Bannerman's 
 ' awkward squad.' It ran : 
 
 * Tears cannot restore her, 
 Therefore I weep.' 
 
 Another, referring to the way the Liberal Govern- 
 ment had been creating peers, or * dealing out 
 honours with a liberal hand,' said that some of those 
 
 * spick and span ' new lords would be surprised 
 
 when the Government that had made them abolished 
 
 the House of Lords, and might say, like the epitaph 
 
 on the baby which had died when it was only two 
 
 months old : 
 
 ' Since I was so quickly done for, 
 I wonder what I was begun for ? ' 
 
 A great ironmaster in Scotland, who was contesting 
 a seat, was asked by a heckler what he thought 
 of the * Decalogue,' and, feeling himself on unsafe 
 ground, said ' in his opinion it required amendment.'
 
 HUMOUR AT ELECTIONS 253 
 
 A good many people in these days seem to be of his 
 opinion. 
 
 Another candidate, more incautious, was asked 
 ' if he was a teetotaller,' and answered with some 
 heat, * Quite the reverse.' But such an answer puts 
 the people in a good humour, and that is an excellent 
 atmosphere for a meeting. 
 
 Even a confession like Omar Khayyam's : 
 
 ' Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before 
 I swore ; but was I sober when I swore ? ' 
 
 would go down well. 
 
 But I have said enough of the so-called humours 
 of elections.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 SOME MEN 
 
 Lord Rosebery in his Life of Chatham — Partiality and im- 
 partiality — Leaders in politics — Memory far from infallible — 
 Lord Cawdor — The devil's advocate — Alfred Lyttelton — Mr. 
 Balfour and overflow meeting — Lord Percy and capitalist 
 working-man — Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman — W. E. Glad- 
 stone — Remarkable feat — Conversion to Home Rule of a Party — 
 — Sir William Harcourt — Henry Fowler (Viscount Wolver- 
 hampton) — W. E. Forster — Sir Charles Russell — Sir Richard 
 Temple — Lord Cairns — John Bright — Lord Shaftesbury — Sir 
 Wilfrid Lawson — Lord Salisbury — Disraeli — Lord Granville — 
 Lord Cranbrook — Robert Lowe — Lord Herschell — John Stuart 
 Mill— Sir Michael Hicks-Beach — Sir John Karslake — Sir John 
 Duke Coleridge — Sir Alexander Cockburn — Sir Stafford North- 
 cote — Sir Thomas Milvain — ' Foothills.' 
 
 Some one perverted the words of Longfellow thus : 
 
 ' Lives of great men all remind us 
 That there are not any great ' ; 
 
 but Lord Rosebery, with more charity and some 
 neatness, says in his Life of Chatham : ' Death in 
 British politics magnanimously closes accounts with 
 a credit balance.' But it is a question whether that 
 is always the case in that accountancy. After all, 
 it is the duty of the men of to-day to arrive, if 
 they can, at a true estimate of the worth or worth- 
 lessness of politicians whether they are living or 
 dead. ' Sometimes,' as a mayor said at a municipal 
 dinner, * one may err on the side of partiality, some- 
 times on the side of impartiality ' ; but although the 
 latter error is rare, it behoves every one to try to 
 speak the truth and to * set down naught in malice.' 
 
 254
 
 SOME MEN 255 
 
 I have referred to one sentence in Lord Rosebery's 
 Chatham. I would like to quote another which he, 
 at page 186, himself quotes: 'Leaders of parties,' 
 said Pulteney, ' are like the heads of snakes which 
 are carried on their tails ' — which, of course, may be 
 an excuse for some of the actions of leaders, but it is 
 also an admission that it is in these heads, as in the 
 case of snakes, that there are the fangs. 
 
 It may be that in these pages there are many 
 inaccuracies, for memory is far from being, like the 
 Pope, infallible, and I have had to trust to a sieve 
 as if it was really a water-tight compartment of 
 history. I never kept that egotistical thing, a 
 * Diary,' and have kept no notes of my doings, or the 
 happenings which came my way. The book is what 
 it purports to be — * Recollections,' and I have no 
 doubt forgotten most things that were worth writing 
 and remembered the things which might have well 
 been left to oblivion, but whatever I have written 
 I have tried to write the truth, especially about the 
 men whose names are mentioned in these pages. 
 These sketches are sometimes from memory, but in 
 many cases I have mentioned public men whom I 
 did not know personally, and in these cases I claim 
 the latitude of the historian, whose imagination 
 gives him a longer tether perhaps than his memory 
 could. 
 
 I knew Lord Cawdor first as Lord Emljm, when he 
 sat for Carmarthenshire in the House of Commons 
 between 1874 and 1885. I remember him then as a 
 pleasant and intelligent chairman of committees. 
 I knew him as chairman of the Great Western Rail- 
 way Company, for I acted frequently for that 
 company, and I came to appreciate his business 
 capacity ; but when he became First Lord of the
 
 256 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Admiralty I formed a higher opinion of his abiUty 
 than I had up to that time entertained. It is occa- 
 sions that test men, and Lord Cawdor was tested 
 by the responsibihties of that great office, and was 
 not found wanting. The quahties I have men- 
 tioned, his good-humoured pohteness, his business 
 capacity, were useful parts of his equipment, but 
 there was in the comparatively small man a force 
 which had been dormant until then, and which fitted 
 him to hold and use power to the public advantage. 
 I heard him speak twice while he was in office, once 
 at a dinner of the 1900 Club, and once in St. George's 
 Hall, Bradford, during the election campaign of 
 1909-10. He came down, as I have said, at the end 
 of 1909, and tried to help in an uphill campaign. 
 He was a little, clean, nice-faced man, whose smile 
 ingratiated. He had not the steam-hammer that 
 gives ton-weight strokes, but he wielded a hand- 
 hammer which hit the nail on the head. The 
 speech he made on that occasion was a defence of 
 the House of Lords, a criticism of Home Rule, and he 
 also referred to Old Age Pensions and Tariff Reform. 
 But all such speeches are only for the day of delivery, 
 or perhaps the next day. They very soon become 
 obsolete, and fickle events put the words out of 
 court. But one of his paragraphs referred to ' the 
 Old Age Pensions lie ' which was then current, and 
 which had been given some vogue by Mr. Ure, the 
 Lord Advocate, who indicated that if the Unionists 
 were returned to power they would take away the 
 pensions. Another speaker at Lord Cawdor's meet- 
 ing said that ' such calumny was not work for the 
 Lord's advocate, but for the devil's advocate,' and 
 was cheered and ' booed ' for his small jibe. 
 
 Alfred Lyttelton was a lovable man. But the
 
 SOME MEN 
 
 257 
 
 very phrase implies a softness in the nature oi 
 the man to whom it can be appropriately applied. 
 We don't say we love Cromwell. We don't say — 
 nobody has said he loved Carlyle. There is ' sterner 
 stuff ' in these than love can approach. We can 
 admire, we can worship our heroes, but love — well, 
 perhaps love is too good for them. But don't let 
 me give a false impression of him ; the love one could 
 bear to Alfred L3/ttelton was not akin to pity, for 
 he was a man who evoked sincere respect. He was 
 a great athlete and, if I remember aright — for these 
 feats have left little trace upon my memory — he was 
 tennis champion and played cricket for England. 
 But he was essentially a man with a conscience. I 
 don't think Lyttelton could have done a mean thing. 
 But when a man is lovable, and when he is a man, 
 we may easily, and with excellent excuse, make a 
 more than adequate estimate of his merits. He 
 was, in the election of 1906, howled down at Leaming- 
 ton, which is no mark of demerit, and afterwards sat 
 for St. George's, Hanover Square, and was Colonial 
 Secretary from 1903 to 1905. He was thoroughly 
 abused for his conduct of South African affairs, and 
 * Chinese Labour ' was a nice stick to beat a rival 
 politician with. * He looked for judgment, but 
 behold oppression ; for righteousness, but behold a 
 cry.' That is a good description of what happened. 
 Elections are not won upon righteousness or judg- 
 ment, but on ' a cry.' At that time it was Chinese 
 Labour or Free Trade or the Dear Loaf, and so he, 
 with his colleagues, * was hounded from office by a 
 snarling press.' 
 
 But the calmer eyes of time, a little removed from 
 that period of heated controversy and * cries,' will 
 see that he did his work at the Colonial Office well. 
 
 11
 
 258 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 He had the conscience, as I have said, which made 
 him considerable, but had not the imagination which 
 would have made him great. 
 
 He also came down to Bradford in 1909, as the 
 journeyman politician, to press the Government 
 wares — some minor politicians (I was one of the 
 poor eggs in the basket) — on a reluctant electorate. 
 I do not remember much that he said at the meeting : 
 of course the man himself one cannot forget. He had 
 a face that was an introduction to friendship. As I 
 have said, he was an athlete, but as mild-mannered 
 as a woman, and goodness was shining out of his 
 face all the time. I do remember, however, he said 
 that ' people had been talking of the decline and fall 
 of the Unionist party, but the Unionist party de- 
 clined to fall.' A general election, too, he said, ' was 
 a close time for liars.' He spoke, too, of the errors 
 of the iniquitous Budget, for the meeting was called 
 to denounce it — and, I still think, rightly. 
 
 Another speaker at the meeting referred to Mr. 
 Lloyd George's Limehouse speech and Mr. Winston 
 Churchill's Leicester speech, and said these gentlemen 
 reminded him of the makers of bad sausages, who 
 tried to conceal the rancidness of the meat by the 
 quantity of pepper. Further, that Mr. Churchill, 
 who had at Leicester said of Mr. Balfour's speech 
 that it was ' four or five columns of insipid equivo- 
 cation ' — and that, he added, was the pepper of the 
 gentleman who, if he lived in history at all, would 
 be remembered only as the inventor of a big phrase 
 for a lie (terminological inexactitude). 
 
 I was only once on a political platform with Mr. 
 Balfour, and then I wasn't. He came down to speak 
 at Bradford on the Saturday before the poll, on 
 the Monday in January 1910. But St. George's
 
 SOME MEN 259 
 
 Hall, although I suppose it holds three thousand 
 people, wasn't big enough for those who wanted to 
 hear him, and there was an overflow meeting at the 
 Baths. Now that is how I was on the same platform 
 in a Box-and-Cox sort of way with our leader, for 
 while Mr. Balfour was delivering his great speech in 
 St. George's Hall I was making a stop-gap speech at 
 the Baths, and when he came to the overflow meet- 
 ing at the Baths I went back to St. George's Hall 
 and spoke there. It is diflicult enough either to 
 speak before or after Mr. Balfour. If you speak 
 before him, every one knows that you are only the 
 farce before the drama ; if you speak after him, the 
 people have heard enough, and are looking for their 
 umbrellas. 
 
 I think it was in May 1909 that the late Lord Percy 
 came down and spoke at a Budget protest meeting. 
 He was a young man, under thirty. He lacked the 
 big presence which, as in a man like Fox, is the sledge- 
 hammer of oratory. He was a nervous man, all 
 wires. He made an excellent speech there. On 
 another occasion I heard him make another excellent 
 speech at a dinner of the 1900 Club. But he fell 
 into one mistake. This is the report of what he said : 
 
 Referring to the land-tax. Earl Percy instanced 
 the case of a poor man who had a capital of £500. 
 (Loud laughter and shouts of ' Oh ! ') ' Well, if 
 nobody knows a poor man with a capital of £500, I 
 am happy to say I do.' (Cheers, and a voice, ' I 
 have no but eighteen bob a week.') And he pro- 
 ceeded with his illustration. We travelled up to 
 London together after the meeting, by the night 
 train, and he really was surprised that he had put 
 his foot in it about the capitalist working-man. He 
 was a man of real ability and much promise, and 
 died all too soon.
 
 26o RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 So far I have been speaking of men I knew, men 
 with whom in a minor sense I was associated in my 
 meagre adventures in pohtics, but I claim the 
 ordinary man-in-the-street's right to opinions about 
 other poHticians. 
 
 I have almost no right to remember Palmerston, 
 for he died in 1865. But he bulked very large in 
 his century. He was indeed a prematurely born 
 Imperialist. His policy was a bluff heartiness and a 
 high-handed attempt to make this country respected 
 abroad, and sometimes he succeeded. Like a John 
 Bull Englishman, with tongs-curled side-whiskers, he 
 often put his foot in it, but the people were with 
 him in the desire to make England a nation among 
 nations and not a non-intervening nonentity in the 
 world, and forgave him all his honest mistakes. He 
 was blamed for his attitude towards Napoleon in. 
 and the Chinese war, but he went to the country and 
 came back with a stronger hand than ever. He was 
 indifferent to domestic matters, was not an enthu- 
 siast for reform, and was really an excellent Whig 
 statesman of the ' fine old English gentleman ' type. 
 
 George Canning was a man of great ability and 
 wit before my time. As a statesman he had ' brought 
 in the new world to redress the balance of the old,' 
 and in effect laid the foundation stone of the Monroe 
 Doctrine of which we have heard a good deal, and 
 he also wrote The Needy Knife-Grinder . It is by 
 phrases perhaps more than by politics that he is most 
 remembered. 
 
 Of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, except what 
 the newspapers told me, I knew very little. He was 
 chairman of an important committee of Parliament 
 which inquired into the expediency of passing certain 
 Bills by which certain railway companies sought to
 
 SOME MEN 261 
 
 split their ordinary stock into preferred and deferred 
 ordinary stock — I was counsel for several of the rail- 
 way companies — and he conducted the inquiry with 
 acuteness and with courteous geniality. His round 
 moon of a face was the natural seat of smiles, and I 
 doubt whether he could have frowned in thunder, 
 with flashes of the eye like lightnings — which was 
 Gladstone's forte. 
 
 W. E. Gladstone was unquestionably a remarkable 
 man. I have seen him fifty times, but never had a 
 chance of speaking to him, although I knew his 
 eldest son, W. H. Gladstone, who with Lord Frederick 
 Cavendish was member with me of the Strand 
 committee of the Charity Organisation Societ3^ 
 Gladstone had the central lire of a volcano, and 
 sputtered in long sentences. I quoted from Lord 
 Rosebery, who quoted from Pulteney, that ' a party 
 leader was like the head of a snake, and was carried 
 along by the tail.' But that is not always true. 
 
 There was a story told by Mr. Morley in a speech 
 at Edinburgh delivered on the 7th June 1902. 
 According to him, some one asked how it was that, in 
 spite of the House of Lords, the Reform Bill and the 
 Repeal of the Corn Laws were passed, and the answer 
 was : ' The Duke of Wellington, who was very power- 
 ful in these days, went down to the House and said, 
 " Attention ! Right about face ! March ! " and 
 the thing was done.' 
 
 That, then, was clearly not a case of the tail wagg- 
 ing the dog. 
 
 But Mr. Gladstone's most remarkable feat was 
 the conversion, in almost as peremptory a fashion, 
 of his whole party to Home Rule. Here again 
 it was by the word of command. Nothing is more 
 indicative of the great momentum of his character
 
 262 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 than that achievement, which ultimately led to his 
 fall. But while he had a compelling character and 
 carried Houses of Commons with him by none of the 
 little arts of politeness, but as it were, by the force 
 of his spate, he was far from being a direct speaker ; 
 indeed much that he said was so involved as to be 
 almost obscure. I do not know where I came across 
 these lines, but they might have some indirect 
 reference to Gladstone's oratory : 
 
 ' There was a strong man in the syndicate 
 Who desired his position to vindicate, 
 He rose to deny that he meant to imply 
 So much as his words seemed to indicate.' 
 
 Sir William Harcourt was a big fleshy man of good 
 bearing, but sometimes perhaps of overbearing. He 
 had been at the Parliamentary Bar, but left it and 
 went into the House in 1874, the year I had my first 
 brief in the lobbies. He was a man of commanding 
 ability, which he used for commanding, not to say 
 bullying. He was a robust, not to say robustious 
 (it is a dictionary word) speaker, and he informed 
 the world that he was descended from the Plan- 
 tagenets — and perhaps he was. 
 
 Henry Fowler (Viscount Wolverhampton) was born 
 a man, was a solicitor, and died a politician. That is 
 not so derogatory as saying of a certain person that 
 ' he was born a man and died a grocer.' But perhaps 
 the last state of a man who becomes a politician 
 is worse than the first, and Fowler after being a 
 successful solicitor went in for politics. Still, he had 
 ability in himself, and his two daughters, who wrote 
 clever Nonconformist novels, were clever too. 
 
 W. E. Forster, the member for Bradford (who passed 
 the Education Act of 1870, and was at one time Chief 
 Secretary for Ireland, where he acquired the name of
 
 SOME MEN 263 
 
 * Buckshot Forster '), was a business man with slouch- 
 ing shoulders. I saw him in committee, and know 
 what he said in an address on the Colonies. His Life 
 was written by Wemyss Reid. 
 
 Sir Charles Russell, who became Lord Russell of 
 Killowen, and afterwards Lord Chief-Justice of 
 England, I saw little of. I was once in a case against 
 him. He had a strong head, a strong face, but on 
 occasion could use strong language too.^ 
 
 There was a Sir Richard Temple in the House of 
 Commons who had come back from India with some 
 reputation, which I fear he did not enhance in Parlia- 
 ment. He had a right-angled moustache like a cat's 
 whiskers, and rather looked like an animated tom- 
 cat. Lord Cairns had the incisive face and the 
 incisive brain of a lawyer. Many of his judgments 
 will live to be quoted, for it is by being quoted that 
 judgments live. There are very few lawyers who 
 have delivered judgments which are worth reading, 
 but some have. John Bright had learned a plain 
 style from the Bible, and made speeches which entitle 
 him to be called ' an orator.' He was an in-and-out 
 politician. From 1870 to 1872 he was out of office, 
 and did not appear in Parliament. In 1873 he was 
 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster — and did not, 
 like Mr. Winston Churchill, object to be a well-paid 
 official with nominal duties — but in 1882 he retired 
 from the Cabinet on the ground of their Egyptian 
 policy which culminated in the bombardment of 
 Alexandria. In 1886 he was one of those who re- 
 fused to swallow Home Rule, and became a Liberal 
 Unionist. His speeches were great, but his economic 
 creed was all in favour of the capitalist manufacturer. 
 
 ^ But we know the adage, JJc minimis non curat lex, has been 
 perhaps erroneously translated, ' The law docs not stick at trifles.'
 
 264 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 However, it has been said that ' Charity begins at 
 home,' and that by a child expositor has been defined 
 to mean giving to others what you don't want for 
 yourself. Lord Shaftesbury rode upon Philanthropy 
 into fame he would not have attained on a less showy 
 mount. Still, he was a good man, and wrote a beauti- 
 ful, old-fashioned hand, and his signature was a 
 triumph of penmanship. Sir Wilfrid Lawson had 
 a great reputation as a humorist, and I have no 
 doubt he did make good jokes ; but so far as I knew 
 him, and that was only as a committee man, or as 
 chairman of a committee, he seemed to me to have 
 as much humour as a frog, and I know he had as 
 many fads as a madhouse. I don't want to be rude, 
 but I think I may apply Charles Lamb's words to 
 him. Lamb said of a certain person, ' The more I 
 think of him the less I think of him.' I remember 
 some one said of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's 
 government, that if it was not a sagacious government 
 it was a tenacious government. I know no word 
 which applies so aptly to Lord Salisbury as ' saga- 
 cious.' He was a wise, courteous statesman, and 
 gave an excellent address as President of the British 
 Association. He had round shoulders, a great brow 
 which seemed to be the cause of his stooping. But 
 Lord Robert Cecil has the hereditary stoop, and all 
 the sons have the hereditary sagacity. Disraeli was 
 a great actor and wrote quite second-rate novels. He 
 thought to steal the Whig's clothes by the Manhood 
 Suffrage Act of 1867, but the pilfering did not suc- 
 ceed. He, a Jew, led the Conservative party in 
 Britain with consummate cleverness, and himself 
 conferred distinction on the peerage by becoming 
 an earl. Lord Granville was a chubby little man 
 who let things go and called it statesmanship.
 
 SOME MEN 265 
 
 Palmerston really tried to become a statesman, and 
 was rewarded for it by much admiration and long 
 periods of office. Lord Cranbrook was made at the 
 Low Moor Ironworks, but he had a good country 
 complexion and a big strong frame, and as he was 
 of a new family he naturally held by and did his best 
 for the party of old families. 
 
 Robert Lowe was a shrunk, parched man with 
 weak eyes — perhaps they were pink, for he had white 
 eyebrows. He had been a lawyer in Australia, and 
 wanted to stop the avalanche of Democracy which he 
 found in full sweep on the side of the slope. He is 
 remembered by his ex luce lucellum — of his match- 
 tax. But there are other stories told of him. He 
 saw a man in the House of Commons using an ear- 
 tnnupet, and said ' it was sad to think of a man so 
 throwing away his natural advantages.' To him, 
 too, is ascribed the saying, that ' asking Gladstone a 
 question was like pulling the strings of a shower-bath.' 
 
 Lord Herschell was a little very clever Jew done 
 in indian-ink. He was, after a long probation of 
 waiting, a successful lawyer, law officer, and he 
 became Lord Chancellor when conversion to Home 
 Rule at Gladstone's word of command merited 
 recognition. 
 
 I saw but never knew John Stuart Mill, although 
 I read his books sometimes with a good deal of dis- 
 agreement. His creed was a hard rationalism, his 
 politics a belief in competition and the devil taking 
 the hindmost, his ethics a cautious regard for self. 
 He was a Utilitarian of the dryest, a politician of 
 the narrowest, but a man with clear words, like the 
 distinct note of a long lean bell. He was a spare man 
 with thin sharp features and a thin sharp mind. He 
 got into the House of Commons for Westminster, and
 
 266 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 that was the end of him. He had a great reputation 
 as a philosopher and a poHtical economist in his day, 
 but it has been dying ever since. 
 
 Goschen I only met once at dinner, and as he was 
 a great man and I was inconsiderable, I sat a long 
 way from him at table, and could not even eavesdrop 
 his conversation. His part in finance was the reduc- 
 tion of the interest on consols, which seemed a great 
 economic triumph at the time, but has been regarded 
 as a financial mistake since. Of Sir Michael Hicks- 
 Beach (Lord St. Aldwyn) I saw more. He was 
 Umpire in an arbitration at Singapore when I was 
 one of the counsel, and he afterwards conducted 
 an inquiry in this country for, I think, the Board 
 of Trade, which involved the changes to be made 
 at certain ports. I took part as counsel in the 
 discussion, but I have really forgotten all about 
 it. He had been ' Black Michael ' when he led 
 the Conservative party in the House of Commons, 
 until the darkness of bhndness threatened him, but 
 he was fast becoming * Grey Michael ' when I knew 
 him. He was a shrewd politician, some people 
 declared with a bad temper, but that I am bound to 
 say I never saw. He was made an earl, which is 
 sometimes the recognition of great merit and some- 
 times not. The last time I saw Lord St. Aldwyn 
 was in the morning-room at the Athenaeum, upon 
 an occasion more or less memorable. It was the 
 14th of October 1915, and about nine o'clock at 
 night. Some one ran into the room saying the 
 Zeppelins were over us. I went out on to the steps 
 and saw, in the rays of a searchlight, a thing like a 
 large cigarette in the sky to the south-west. The 
 anti-aircraft guns were making a great deal of noise, 
 and one could see the shells bursting in the air like
 
 SOME MEN 267 
 
 Roman candles, but all of them at a great way from 
 the airship. This particular airship was in all 
 probability the one that did the damage in the 
 
 at the , and perhaps in . After 
 
 a quarter of an hour of uproar, as no shell was 
 within a mile of its objective, the searchlight was 
 put out, and the Zeppelin disappeared in the dark- 
 ness, and so had Lord St. Aldwyn. I never saw him 
 after that. 
 
 Karslake (Sir John) was popular — perhaps more 
 popular than he would otherwise have been — by 
 reason of the fact that he was always compared with 
 Sir John Duke Coleridge, who wasn't popular. He 
 was a tall, handsome, dark man, and people called 
 him ' Jack ' Karslake, which was, although a 
 familiarity, indicative of affection. 
 
 Sir Alexander Cockburn was a politician before 
 my time, but the tradition remained with us of some 
 great speech he had made in the House of Commons ; 
 and it was remembered that he had said an advocate 
 should use the sword of the soldier, and not the dagger 
 of the assassin. He represented Great Britain in the 
 Alabama arbitration, and was one of the judges who 
 tried ' Arthur Orton,' and that made him better 
 known to the public than any political career could 
 have done. 
 
 W. H. Smith provided news and books at stalls, 
 and had business capacity. He looked at politics 
 from a business point of view. Sir Stafford North- 
 cote (Lord Iddesleigh) has quite a respectable record. 
 The routine of statesmanship was safe in his cautious 
 hands, but adventure was beyond him. I knew 
 Tom Milvain, I suppose, for forty years. He con- 
 tested half a dozen seats at least, and sat in the 
 House of Commons for Hampstead for some time.
 
 m 
 
 268 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 He was rewarded for these exploits first by the 
 Recordership of Bradford, and afterwards by being 
 made Judge Advocate-General and a knight. He 
 was a good fellow — I should say as great on the 
 platform with his fists as he had been at Cambridge 
 in his day when he was champion of the light- 
 weights. If Alfred Lyttelton was fine porcelain — 
 perhaps too fine for politics — Milvain was delf : Those 
 who knew him were right sorry when he died. 
 
 When we compare these men with the political 
 mountain-peaks of the eighteenth century — men like 
 Chatham and Pitt, Fox and Burke — we see that 
 really they were only, as it were, nice foothills below 
 towering alps. These silhouettes, all in black paper, 
 are possibly very unfair ; but recollections are never 
 absolute justice, and my memory, confining itself 
 to a few words, has done its best.
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 POLITICS AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Politics of to-day and the press — Change in aspect since the 
 war began — ' Business as usual ' — Duty of the opposition — 
 Criticism— Recruiting tried—Bands and speeches — Kitchener 
 creating armies — Had to face compulsory service — Sir John 
 Simon's opposition — Coalition not a marriage — Cannot go back 
 to 1 91 4 — German methods of war, but German methods of state- 
 craft too — Treitschke and war — Organisation — State service — 
 Railways, etc., taken over and controlled by the State — We must 
 win the war — Banking and German banking iniiuence — Free 
 Trade rejected by Manchester — The new social conditions and 
 the outlook — Patriotism braced— Colonies drawn closer — 
 The many deaths of our robustest and best men will alter the 
 balance of the sexes — Superstition — The Mons Angels — Christi- 
 anity the creed of the poor — The poverty of the future — Spend- 
 ing ;^5,ooo,ooo a day. 
 
 It would perhaps be a little absurd to write about 
 one's recollections of politics, and to refer to the 
 turmoil of the past and the legislation that has come 
 out of it, and make no reference to the politics of the 
 immediate past — of yesterday. At the same time 
 .1 should not desire in this book to enter into the 
 arena of to-day's discussions, which are the more 
 immediate province of the press — which is, as it 
 were, the loom on which history is being woven — but 
 it is impossible for any political thought to ignore 
 altogether the somewhat unique phases of politics 
 since the war began, or to refrain from some specu- 
 lation as to the possibilities of the future. 
 
 We tried, in the earlier months of the European 
 
 269
 
 270 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 stniggle, to get on with the arrangements which it 
 was said had worked satisfactorily in time of peace. 
 People talked of * business as usual.' The Govern- 
 ment remained in power and the opposition was 
 expected to show its patriotism by neglecting what is 
 regarded as the real duty of an opposition — criticism. 
 That arrangement — although I think on the whole 
 it was fairly carried into practice — was found not to 
 be one which secured much success in the great 
 enterprise of war, or in preparing for the more 
 strenuous efforts both as to men and munitions 
 which were clearly necessary if any success in the 
 direction of victory was to be achieved. Recruiting 
 was tried as a method of securing a sufficient number 
 of men. Bands played, and big drums were beaten. 
 Members of the Cabinet, like the Prime Minister, 
 attempted by speeches to rouse the country from 
 flabby slackness to a strenuous enthusiasm which 
 would give the country the number of men the 
 military authorities never ceased asking for. 
 
 Lord Kitchener was praised for the creation of 
 armies, but it became evident that all these efforts 
 would not, by means of what Spurgeon called the 
 'Giant of voluntaryism,' fill our trenches with 
 sufficient men to win the war. Under these circum- 
 stances the Government had to face the necessit}^ 
 of compulsory service, but saw that any such 
 proposal would be unpopular, and they most 
 generousl}/ desired to share the unpopularity with 
 their political opponents. And it was in this way 
 that a Coalition Government was formed, and had 
 to face the unimportant opposition of Sir John 
 Simon and a party of perhaps half a dozen over- 
 looked politicians. My idea is tliat this Coalition 
 was not a marriage — where the twain shall be one
 
 POLITICS AND THE FUTURE 271 
 
 flesh — but a liaison which is intended to serve 
 temporary purposes, and that both the parties on 
 the Treasury Bench are looking forward to a resump- 
 tion of party politics when, if ever, the war comes to 
 an end. But the old order changeth, and we never 
 can get back to the point that we were at in July 
 1914. The advances which have been made in 
 connection with political ideals since the war began 
 have been very great. We have not only had to 
 adopt German methods of war to meet German 
 methods of war, but we have had to adopt German 
 statecraft with a view to ' staying the course ' and 
 winning the war. 
 
 Is it not, then, as Treitschke said ? ' Without war 
 there would be no State. It is through war that all 
 states that we know originated. It is the essence of 
 the State that it can realise its will and wishes with 
 physical force.' 
 
 Have we not seen, then, the origination and growth 
 of a new State here in Britain through this war ? — war 
 which was, according to Treitschke, a ' wholesome 
 medicine against decay, and an efficient stimulus 
 for waning patriotism.' 
 
 Then where do we stand ? The State has demanded 
 the services of every citizen who is of the required age, 
 with the army. They have found that it is neces- 
 sary to control, in the interests of a State in the throes 
 of war, hundreds of our enterprises which were free 
 before these calamitous days ; and our State with its 
 new powers manages much of the production, the 
 exchange, and the distribution of articles of com- 
 merce. It has a hand on the railways, and upon 
 hundreds of manufactures of war material, like shells 
 or ships or aeroplanes. But they have not even 
 allowed money to go its own way. They have con- 
 trolled American securities with a view to manipulat-
 
 272 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 ing exchange. They have borrowed these and other 
 securities, as if the State was a great banker, from 
 private holders. Enormous numbers of securities 
 are now in the hands of the State. The Government 
 controls the amount of petrol to be purchased by 
 those who depend for their locomotion upon motors, 
 and may, like Germany, have to resort to bread and 
 meat tickets. The State is the trustee for the people, 
 and, as the children said, ' we began to have jam 
 when papa became a trustee.' 
 
 All these immense advances in the direction of the 
 divine right of governments to govern wrongly are 
 all excused or justified by the one principle: We 
 must win the war. 
 
 But it is further urged that it is not enough to win 
 the war ; we must, when peace comes again, control 
 trade so as to prevent the peaceful penetration — 
 which resembles the peaceful picketing of labour — 
 and make it certain that our enemies are not to be 
 allowed, under the pretence of friendship, to secure 
 the banking, the shipping, and trade influence in 
 this country and our colonies which nearly wrecked 
 the Imperial establishment when the war began. 
 But in all these directions — the abandonment of the 
 principle of the liberty of the subject, the drilling 
 of civilians, the throwing over of Free Trade (as has 
 been done by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 
 curiously enough in a building which is still called 
 by the obsolete name of the ' Free Trade Hall ') — we 
 have, unconsciously it may be, adopted the creed of 
 the Unionists who were in favour of Protection, and 
 of the Socialists who were in favour of Collectivism. 
 It will take a cleverer tactician than we have in 
 politics to ignore these facts and to lead us in retreat 
 to the old positions we had before the war began 
 in 1914.
 
 POLITICS AND THE FUTURE 273 
 
 It is obvious, too, that the new social conditions 
 must — if and when this war ends, or results (as God 
 forbid it should) in * a draw ' — profoundly alter the 
 political outlook. The war has not only been the 
 medicine of a State, but it has braced patriotism here 
 and drawn our centrifugal colonies closer to the 
 centre by a great centripetal tendency. And these 
 conditions will not die down when the sound of the 
 drum ceases. But these battlefields have had other 
 lessons for our peoples. The deaths of those who 
 had not decayed and had in their rottemiess ripened 
 for the grave, but of men in the heyday of youth, 
 have made deep impressions upon many, and have 
 renewed among many a religious sentiment which had 
 almost disappeared in the days of commercial pros- 
 perity ; and that sentiment has been associated with 
 a revival amongst us of some curious superstitions. 
 The Angels at Mons is only an illustration of this 
 strange growth. ^ But superstition is a rank growth 
 which will not die down at the signing of a treaty. 
 
 But, further, Christianity has always been the 
 creed of the poor. It is a spiritual creed, and there- 
 fore it is a counterpoise — a consolation for the 
 absence of material prosperity. Jowett remarked, 
 ' I am afraid there is more in the Gospels about the 
 danger of being rich and the advantage of being 
 poor than most of us are wilhng to admit.' And 
 we have Christ's authority for saying that ' a man's 
 life consisteth not in the superabundance of the 
 things which he possesseth ' — a deep truth which has 
 been thought to justify an asceticism to which it did 
 not really give countenance. 
 
 But what of the economic conditions after the 
 war ? People think that whenever we achieve peace 
 
 1 Sir Oliver Lodge's curious book about his dead son is diiother. 
 
 S
 
 274 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 things will go on as before. That is a mistake. We 
 are on the doorstep of the hovel of poverty. Even 
 to-day the rich groan because one-fourth of their 
 income is taken from them by the State, and the 
 very rich who have to pay supertax have to give 
 8s. 6d. to the Government out of every pound they 
 get. But the distress and poverty after the war 
 which must result from the war spendings, which 
 have drawn on the past and mortgaged the future, 
 will be great, and will no longer be relieved by the 
 lavish outgoing of £5,000,000 a day. We will start 
 our peace with a millstone of debt round our necks, 
 and it will take many years of prosperous trade to 
 lighten the burden. We will have need of spiritual 
 consolations in our distress of poverty. 
 
 And, further, we must look forward to a timiC when 
 the old safeguards of traditional moralit}^ will be 
 seriously shaken by the fact that the balance of the 
 sexes has been and is being upset by the war, and 
 by the fact that much of the work which was for- 
 merly done by men is now and must in the future be 
 done by women. Does any one believe now that if 
 women ask for a vote after the war, it will be with- 
 held ? Does any one doubt that the deaths of 
 thousands of the young men of this country must 
 seriously affect the question of sex relations in the 
 future of the next fifty years ? 
 
 But these facts must, to a very large extent, 
 influence the politics of the future. How they will 
 act, what the result of these seething influences will 
 be, it is impossible to say. The outlook is far from 
 clear, and in its very darkness it is threatening. The 
 world began a new life after the French Re^^olution, 
 and it will enter upon a new and untried existence 
 after the war.
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 THOROUGHNESS IN POLITICS 
 
 A thorough people — Inquiries into Dardanelles expedition 
 and into Mesopotamia expedition — We inquire into blunders, 
 even into trade influence — Cierman politico-commercial pene- 
 tration — Banks and their influence — Mr. Hughes, Prime Minister 
 of Australia — We have ourselves to blame — On the Sgth day 
 of the third year of the war we take the matter up — Shutting 
 the stable door— A Cabinet of twenty-three to conduct war — 
 Clever gentlemen drawn from civil life — War Committee's func- 
 tions—Abdication of a Cabinet — Who is responsible for the un- 
 thorough policy of the country in the East, in Norway and 
 Sweden, and at home ? — Irish affairs and thoroughness. 
 
 We are a thorough people. We have a raid in the 
 Channel when we are certain that three of our 
 destroyers and six drift-net boats were lost, and 
 cannot be certain that we did any injury to the 
 German raiders. We have an abortive campaign 
 in the Dardanelles which cost us in money millions, 
 and in casualties 100,000 men at least. We have a 
 fiasco campaign in Mesopotamia, which was under- 
 manned and under-medicined. But our thorough- 
 ness as a nation is shown by the fact that we inquire 
 into these blunders. What a great people would 
 like would be victories and not investigations, but 
 we must put up with what we can get. 
 
 Anotlier thoroughness is shown b}- the way in 
 which we have dealt with what is called ' trade 
 influence.' For the last twent}^ or thirty years 
 Germans have been establishing a system which 
 
 275
 
 276 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 was intended to be subversive of our financial and 
 economic strength as a nation. It is a system which 
 is called politico - commercial penetration which 
 extended not only to the Mother Country but to 
 the Colonies. Germans had not only with their 
 trade penetrated into the very heart of the Empire 
 in their own name, but under a fraud and pretence 
 that they were British firms had disarmed even 
 the suspicions of the people of this country. Some 
 suspected these insidious proceedings even before 
 the war began : all have now ascertained the perni- 
 cious facts since we have been at death-grips with 
 Germany. But a good many of us have had to be 
 indebted to the straight speaking of Mr. Hughes, the 
 Australian Prime Minister, for such information as 
 we have obtained as to these disastrous methods. 
 Of course we have ourselves to blame. We have 
 invited foreigners into our trade. In the old days 
 there used to be limitations in the civil rights of 
 aliens. These we have swept away ; and we have — 
 under the pretence that our forefathers were narrow- 
 minded, and that these disabilities which were 
 placed upon our friendly enemies were unworthy of 
 us — put them on an equal footing with our own 
 people. Not only were the fraudulent traders under 
 a British mask, but openly they established banks 
 in our midst with which many of our citizens did 
 business. These were, of course, great centres 
 of German influence. But our thoroughness is 
 shown by the fact that, in the eighty-ninth day 
 of the third year of the war, the Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer, Mr. M'Kenna, announced that 
 the licence of the Deutsche Bank to carry on 
 business under certain limitations had been re- 
 voked, and that it was hoped to revoke the licences
 
 THOROUGHNESS IN POLITICS 277 
 
 of the other two great German banking establish- 
 ments. He informed us that it is * essential to break 
 the link between them and their British customers.' 
 This is quite true, but it is on the eighty-ninth day 
 of the tliird year of the war that we have come to 
 that drastic conclusion. 
 
 The thoroughness of shutting the stable door after 
 the steed has been stolen is characteristic of the 
 British. According to Sir William Robertson — 
 who rightl}' warned us not to look for an early end 
 of the war : and we are not looking for it — it was 
 only after we had been at war for two years that 
 we began the war. This is another indication of the 
 thoroughness with which this great enterprise has 
 been conducted. 
 
 Could any one invent an instrument less suited to 
 conduct a war than a Cabinet of twenty-three 
 clever gentlemen who had been distinguished in 
 civil life ? It is true that that humiliating idea has 
 occurred to the Government, and that we have 
 what is called a ' War Committee ' which is, we under- 
 stand, responsible for the one business in hand — the 
 making and, if possible, the winning of the war. 
 But if so, what has become of the business of the 
 country and the Government ? Has the Cabinet — 
 of all the different opinions — abdicated ? ^ We are 
 told that the ministers have not taken the real 
 responsibility out of the hands of the soldiers and 
 sailors, and if that is so, then apparently we are 
 making our soldiers and sailors responsible for the 
 policy of the country, which is really a matter for 
 
 ^ A good many events have happened even since this was written. 
 We have had what some call ' intrigues,' a press revolution, and the 
 formation of a National Government composed mostly of Unionists, 
 but under Mr. Lloyd George, who used to be thought an extreme 
 Radical politician.
 
 278 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the Government ; and the Government seemingly 
 occupy themselves by doing nothing, or perhaps 
 dabbling ineffectually in Irish affairs and in questions 
 of the registration of voters. Tliat, then, is an illus- 
 tration of the thoroughness which runs all through 
 the political life of this country.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 
 
 A simple science — Wealth and labour — ' Belongs' — Mr. Blatch- 
 ford — Are workpeople paid enough for their labour ? — What 
 would workers get under Socialism ? — The capitalist — Capital 
 necessary — A spade, a loom, represent past labour ; a building, 
 interest — Rent and wage — Private property' — Cannot nationalise 
 talent, invention, ability — Labour of hands, labour of heads — 
 A fleecer class — The ganger — Watt and Stephenson — Payment 
 according to needs — Shakespeare and a living wage — Obsoles- 
 cence and improvements — Marx and Engels and revolutionary 
 methods — Now people have votes — Jaures and a general strike 
 — Liebknecht — The Syndicalist's philosophy of violence — The 
 ' fourth estate ' — Coercive efforts — Boycotting and sabotage — 
 Sorel and Berth — Social paralysis — Deadly and implacable 
 conflict — Bergson's philosophy of intuition — Direct action, 
 Dublin strike, New South Wales strike — Economic organisa- 
 tions — Extreme politicians — Syndicalism and religion. 
 
 Socialism is quite a simple science. 'All wealth/ 
 according to Socialism, ' is produced by labour, and 
 therefore to labour all wealth belongs.' This seems 
 quite simple, but it is really meaningless. Even if 
 it were true that all wealth were produced by the 
 labour of men, it would be to the men and not to 
 the ' labour ' that the products would belong. But 
 there is evidently a misunderstanding even as to the 
 meaning of the word ' belongs,' for we are told by 
 Mr. Blatchford that, ' just as no man can have a 
 right to land because no man makes the land, so 
 no man has a right to himself because he did not 
 make himself.' But the real meaning of Socialism, 
 apart from these abstruse absurdities, is that the
 
 28o RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 workpeople don't think they get enough for their 
 services or labour, and the belief that at present a 
 workman only gets about one-third of his earnings, 
 while under Socialism he would get all his earnings. 
 
 Now if that is true it would be well to try to find 
 the thief of the other two-thirds, and the Socialists 
 think they have caught him and his name is ' the 
 capitalist.' The capitalist it is, who is called the 
 * fleecer,' shears the silly sheep and appropriates to 
 himself the clip which belongs to the flock. Now the 
 way to remedy this robbery of the fleecer is to do 
 away with private property, in land, in things, and 
 even, it would seem, in the man himself. That capital 
 is an essential of successful labour is obvious to any 
 who will think that before the man can dig he must 
 have a spade, and before he can weave he must have 
 a loom. Now it is quite true that the spade and the 
 loom are themselves the result of work or labour 
 upon some materials given by nature — they were 
 made. But that past labour which went to the 
 making of the spade or loom has a right to be paid, 
 just as present labour has, and if you call the spade 
 not only a spade, but ' capital,' it will be seen that it 
 is necessary to present labour and must have its 
 wage, which we call interest. It is the same with 
 the walls and the roof of the shed in which cloth is 
 made. These, too, are a * house made with hands,' 
 and these hands have to be paid, or have already 
 been paid, by the man who is said to own the manu- 
 factory, and must be repaid to him ; and that pay- 
 ment we call rent. Now it is the division of the 
 results of manufacture or agriculture between the 
 owner of the house who wants rent, the owner of 
 the spade or the loom who wants interest, and the 
 man who digs or weaves who wants wages, that is the
 
 SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 281 
 
 problem ; and Socialism wants quite naturally to 
 give the whole to the hands, and to succeed in that 
 it has to make the State, as the representative of the 
 workmen, the owner both of the land, the building, 
 and the machinery, and therefore entitled to the 
 interest and the rent. Of course if the hands or the 
 people owned the manufactory and the loom on 
 the one hand, or the land and the spade on the other, 
 all the returns, rent, interest, and wages, would 
 go to the people. That is why Socialism says, * Do 
 away with private property in land, in looms, in 
 spades, in everything.' Abolish capitalists, make all 
 the means of productive distribution and exchange 
 the property of the State by confiscation, and you 
 have realised the hope of Socialism, but by means 
 of what used, in the old days, to be called theft. 
 
 But there is one thing that you cannot well 
 nationalise, and that is talent, invention, ability, 
 genius, and really it is to these that the world in 
 a high sense owes everything. The loom did not 
 make itself, it had to be invented. The ' crooked 
 scythe ' and spade had to be designed. But here 
 it is worth noting that Socialism when it talks about 
 labour mostly means manual labour — * hands ' — and 
 makes no allowance for the head labour of invention, 
 of organisation, of distribution. Against your pro- 
 duction, then, talent has a great claim ; so that labour 
 must still give up part of its earnings, as it calls 
 them, to pay the men who put them to work, who 
 invented the tools, who found the markets. So you 
 see there would still be what they call a ' fleecer 
 class,' a parasitic class, and without these labour 
 could achieve nothing. Your workman recognises 
 the necessity of a ' ganger.' But labour is a mob 
 unless it is organised and drilled like an army. Now
 
 282 RECOLLECTIONS LIT ERA RY AND POLITICAL 
 
 although you can nationahse railways and banks, 
 what are you to do about Watt and Stephenson ? 
 They want their share, and their share would appar- 
 ently be private property ; and if the}^ did not eat 
 and drink all their share there would be something 
 in hand, and that would be capital. So that after 
 cheating Watt and Stephenson out of their genius 
 there would have to be another confiscation ; and 
 the Watts and Stephensons of the future would 
 invent nothing. This may seem absurd, but it is 
 Socialism. SociaHsts say, with Mr. Blatchford, that 
 a man does not belong to himself — ' Hamlet from 
 himself is stolen away ' — and one Socialist in a small 
 backsliding from the rigorous logic of Socialism said, 
 ' I would nationalise the means of production, but a 
 man would keep his toothbrush and toothpick.' 
 Still, I suppose we have to congratulate ourselves 
 that, even in spite of logic, the toothbrush is not to 
 be nationalised, and it is possible that even our 
 clothes might be left to us — or lent to us — by the 
 catering State. 
 
 Now the Socialists ingeniously get over the diffi- 
 culty as to your inventor, or writer, or organiser, 
 or genius of any sort, by a doctrine of the devil which 
 declares that a worker is not to be paid according 
 to his ability, but according to his needs ; and as the 
 needs of Watt or Stephenson or Shakespeare or Milton 
 would be much the same as the needs of the office- 
 boy who posts the letters, we would expect to get 
 the steam-engine or Macbeth or Paradise Lost cheap. 
 
 But this is where the system breaks down again. If 
 there is to be no reward for ability you will find that 
 there is none, and you will have a world full of mini- 
 mum-wage men, and in that desert not a single 
 flower of genius will grow or blossom. Do you
 
 SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 283 
 
 think you will get a Shakespeare for a ' living wage ' 
 without a recognition of his ability ? And if you 
 recognise his ability, is not that a private possession 
 which belongs to Shakespeare — which is in addition 
 to the toothbrush you have already conceded to 
 him ? And ought he not to have the recognition of 
 gain, just as the muscular work of carrying a hod 
 has ? 
 
 We have seen that past labour, or capital, 
 requires its share out of the profits of production. 
 But future labour, in the way of repair and mainten- 
 ance of the machinery we have, the improvement of 
 any means of production, and the making up for 
 obsolescence, must * stand in ' and have a share of 
 the products of these joint-stock productions. To 
 secure the future, labour must forgo some of the 
 profits of the present ; and therefore the pledge — that 
 as labour produces all wealth, labour is to have all 
 wealth in the shape of present wages — is an ob\^ious 
 mistake which only gulls the poor workmen. There 
 must be a store to meet these recurring requirements, 
 and that store is capital. Proudhon had it that 
 private property is theft ; well, public property is a 
 delusion and a snare, or, as I said somewhere, ' the 
 new heaven and earth promised by Socialism would 
 turn out to be a new hell.' 
 
 There is one feature of modem Socialism which is 
 worth noting in comparison with the even more 
 modern creed of Syndicalism. Marx and Engels 
 in 1847 declared that the Communist party would 
 fight along with the bourgeoisie, whenever it takes 
 up its revolutionary role again, and advocated the 
 turning and rending of the bourgeoisie by German 
 workmen after the downfall of the reactionary 
 classes. But the Socialists have now other weapons
 
 284 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 in their hands than those which were to ' let blood.' 
 They have votes ! and, as Jean Jaures — who lost his 
 life in the early days of the war — said, these will 
 bring about ' the revolution that will be embodied 
 in things, in laws, and in our hearts, not in formulas 
 and words, and it would free the great work of the 
 proletarian revolution from the sickening odour of 
 blood, of murder, and of hate which still clings to 
 the bourgeoisie revolution/ 
 
 They mean to vote daggers, but use none. They 
 are determined to bring about their revolution by 
 * the gradual and legal conquest of the power of 
 production, and the power of the State ' ; and in 
 another place he says, ' We have in the legal conquest 
 of the democracy the sovereign method of revolu- 
 tion.' He wisely deprecated a general strike, and 
 saw that such a thing would only ' unite all the non- 
 proletariat forces ' against Socialism. Liebknecht, 
 now himself in prison, ran his propaganda on similar 
 lines, and anticipated a time when his party would 
 be asked ' to participate in the government, and 
 would be called upon especially to reform the con- 
 ditions of labour.' 
 
 This is not the place to discuss these bloodless 
 tactics ; indeed, I have written enough about them 
 elsewhere, and pointed out how, in time of peace, 
 the rival parties in this country had been playing 
 the game for such plotters. But it is curious to 
 turn from these views to the more sinewy opinions 
 of the Syndicalists with their philosophy of violence. 
 
 The idea which is the foundation of Syndicahsm 
 is that the only way of getting justice for the work- 
 ing-classes — or the ' fourth estate ' — is by the inde- 
 pendent coercive efforts of the working - classes 
 themselves ; and in that creed the word ' coercive '
 
 SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 285 
 
 not only smells but reeks of blood. In former times 
 combination was for the purpose of government, now 
 it is for the purpose of revolt. A strike is a means of 
 making capitalists give up their savings, a lock-out is a 
 method of starving the men into submission. Neither 
 of these is a great moral agent, but each is really an 
 economic crowbar for forcing coffers. But a general 
 strike — the instrument of Syndicalism — is a means 
 of attaining its end by overturning society. Boy- 
 cotting and sabotage are the arms of this modern 
 warfare. Sorel and Berth are the exponents of this 
 philosophy of violence, and a general strike in a 
 country where all the people expect so much is the 
 means to immediate paralysis, by the withdrawal of 
 all luxuries and the pinching even of necessities, and 
 is the great means to the desirable ends of the ' fourth 
 estate.' 
 
 The Socialists, as we have seen, deprecated a 
 general strike, which had been tried by the Lyons 
 weavers in 1834 and was said to be the inspiration of 
 the Chartist movement of 1842 ; but the Syndicalists 
 regard it as the means to their ends, and it seems 
 to have been advocated by M. Briand before he was 
 Prime Minister of France. The Socialists were to 
 capture power by votes. The Syndicalists are in 
 favour of direct action, and not of the representative 
 system of modern government. It favours violence 
 rather than discussion, and it is to be admitted that 
 a philosophy of action is more likely to be effective 
 than a philosophy of words. 
 
 According to Syndicalism, ' masters and men stand 
 facing one another in deadly and implacable conflict,' 
 and a trade union is an association organised with 
 a view to war. There is one curious feature 
 about this theory of reform through murder, which
 
 286 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 is that we are told that both Sorel and Berth are 
 undoubtedly always very respectful to religion, 
 and also that they have founded their philosophy of 
 cut-throatism in some curious way upon Bergson's 
 philosophy of intuition — for we find Sorel saying 
 that a general strike is the intuition of Socialism, 
 and ' is in fact the perfect knowledge of the Berg- 
 sonian philosophy.' I fail to follow him, although 
 I find that the Syndicalist theorists depreciate 
 reason, and seem to rely upon that intuition which 
 is the vague inspiration referred to by Bergson. 
 
 But Syndicalism passed from the books, and the 
 speculations of writers, into ' practical reason ' or 
 ' direct action ' first in Dublin, when Larkin made 
 a fiasco, and again by a large experiment in that 
 direction in New South Wales, when, we read, the 
 Colony ' killed once for all the effort of Syndicalism 
 to hold the community to ransom. The Government 
 took power to arrest and imprison ringleaders, to 
 seize trade-union funds, to stop strike pay, to break 
 up the whole organisation of any strike directed 
 against the means of public existence.' 
 
 The New South Wales strike was crushed in about 
 three da3^s. So the revolutionary violence of the 
 unions has had a ' set back ' ; a colony has been 
 courageous enough not to fly the ' white flag ' on the 
 approach of the apostles of violence. 
 
 Socialism, as we saw, trusted to politicians, to 
 Parliament. Syndicalism, with some sense, dis- 
 believes in that roundabout regeneration, and hopes 
 by the direct action of the trade unions to bring 
 capital to its knees. We will hear more of these 
 methods in the time to come. Syndicalism is 
 wounded, but it is not dead. 
 
 It may be interesting to note in this connection
 
 SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 287 
 
 a curious development which has taken place in 
 recent times in connection with Stateism. The 
 State, according to Treitschke, was everything, the 
 individual nothing ; and the real full life of a State 
 was war — and war fought not with kid gloves, but 
 with ' f rightfulness ' as its real red weapon. 
 
 Now from the recent history of the country during 
 the war, that idea seems to have come here to stay. 
 It has been seen that whether, as he preached, ' strife 
 and conflict are the very life of a nation,' whether 
 it is true, as he said, that ' all the States known to us 
 are the children of war,' the way to fight a great war 
 to a great issue is to strengthen by every means the 
 hands of the State. It is in this way that the babel 
 of politics is to some extent hushed. It is in this 
 way that we have a despotic Government with a 
 muzzled press. The Government began as a popular 
 Government, but has continued itself in power with- 
 out an appeal to the people.^ It is in this way that 
 we are deprived of a dozen of our liberties which 
 were at one time thought essential to existence, and 
 that we are giving in some cases nearly the half of 
 our whole income to the State to produce the 
 * sinews ' of a war which is impoverishing the nations 
 and robbing them of the lustiest of their populations. 
 The State, to succeed, must strike as one man. Some 
 pessimists have even sighed for a Dictator Saviour, 
 and many seem to think that a Cabinet of twenty- 
 three is a method of paralysis. 
 
 Now against these great developments which have 
 in one way moved in the direction of Socialism — 
 which desired to win its way to Collectivist power by 
 
 1 A politician said, only the other day, the first thing wc must do 
 after the war is to get back our liberty. At present it is quite 
 certain that we are not governed by ourselves under representative 
 government, but by a clique of politicians.
 
 288 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 means of the open avenue of politics — we have to 
 note the antagonistic attitude of the Syndicahsts, who 
 look on the State as a political machine and suspect 
 that it is run in the interests of others than the 
 working-classes of any particular country. The 
 Syndicalists' idea, as I have said, is that the trade 
 union is an economic organisation, and that the 
 workers' best course is * to fight the capitalist and 
 eschew politics and politicians.' They detest the 
 bureaucratic State, and want to overturn the present 
 fabric of society. It is worth while pointing out 
 too, as we did above, that while Socialism repudiates 
 religion — Marx having declared that * the idea of 
 God must be destroyed ; it is the keystone of a per- 
 verted civilisation ' — the Syndicahsts have leanings 
 towards the faith ; and these facts make the exist- 
 ence of two antagonistic parties in the Church a 
 matter of some interest. 
 
 There is one party in the Church that seems desir- 
 ous to co-operate with the politicians of to-day, who 
 would make terms with the Labour party and would 
 call this curious alliance a winning of the masses ; 
 and the other which regards the Church as a spiritual 
 institution that should not meddle and soil its fingers 
 with the dirty matter of pohtics. The Dean of St. 
 Paul's is on the other side ; and after referring to 
 the Bishop who published a sermon called ' The 
 Democratic Christ and His Democratic Creed,' he 
 says : ' Our clergy are positively tumbling over 
 each other in their eagerness to be appointed 
 court chaplains to King Demos,' and refers to the 
 ' Nonconformist conscience ' as 'no more than a 
 rather tortuous and greasy instrument of party 
 politics.'
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 SOME POLITICIANS 
 
 Difficult to speak of living men — Everyday gossip — News- 
 papers — Living men's record not complete — Lord Rosebery — 
 John Morley (Lord Morley of Blackburn) — Lord Balfour of 
 Burleigh — Lord Lansdowne — Mr. Birrell — Sir Edward Grey 
 (Viscount Grey) — Viscount Haldane — Mr. Asquith — Mr. Balfour 
 — Mr. Bonar Law — Sir Edward Carson — Mr. Churchill — Lord 
 Wimbome — Demagogues and demigods — Mr. Chamberlain 
 and Mr. Lloyd George — Mr, Duke and Ireland. 
 
 So far I have only, here, spoken of men who were 
 called politicians but who have passed away from 
 that platform. It is more difficult to speak of men 
 who are still behind the footlights on the stage and 
 often under the limelight of party admiration. The 
 criticism of these fills a great place in the everyday 
 gossip — and the newspapers, which are gossip in 
 print, deal with their doings from day to day. Be- 
 sides, it is more difficult for a contemporary to deal 
 with the hving than with those that have passed 
 away into the sanctuary of death. In the case of 
 men who are still acting, their record is not complete ; 
 and even if it were the test of time has not been 
 applied to the veracity of the statements that are 
 made about them. Many of them, too — and I would 
 like to respect even their prejudices — would not 
 desire to be the objects of my invidious attentions; 
 and unless one can speak what he believes about a 
 man, it is better to hold one's tongue. At the same 
 time, any book which professed to be * Recollections
 
 290 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 of Politics/ and which confined itself merely to 
 wandering among tombs, would be properly regarded 
 as to some extent an attempt to produce the play of 
 Hamlet without any reference to the ' noble Dane.' 
 It is, then, necessary to say something — a word or two 
 perhaps thrown away — ^upon these men who are 
 playing the game, who are, as it were, at the wicket, 
 although they may still achieve a ' duck's egg ' or 
 a century, or may even carry out their bat with 
 them. 
 
 Lord Rosebery has always been something of a 
 ' quick-change artist ' ; but he grew tired of politics, 
 had won the Derby, and retired. Still, he broke 
 bounds occasionally with a rockety speech or a 
 pungent letter, and he has occupied his refined 
 leisure with better things than politics. His culture 
 is considerable, his taste good, and his writings, at 
 any rate, worth reading. He has just missed being 
 greater. 
 
 John Morley (Lord Morley of Blackburn) began 
 in literature and ended in politics, while Lord Rose- 
 bery began in politics and ended in literature. As a 
 writer Lord Morley has contributed much excellent 
 reading to our shelves, and if they remain on the 
 shelves when our children and children's children are 
 looking for books to read, that will probably be the 
 children's fault. Possibly his tongue did not main- 
 tain for him the reputation that his pen had achieved. 
 He retired from active political life when the war 
 demanded not the ' folding of the hands ' but more 
 strenuous effort ; and since then, perhaps he is 
 still in favour of peace, he has held his. 
 
 Lord Balfour of Burleigh, an ample man, was 
 Secretary for Scotland, and seems to like to be 
 immersed in affairs. When nothing else is doing he
 
 SOME POLITICIANS 291 
 
 acts as an arbitrator. He is also a railway director, 
 and is an exceedingly good business man. 
 
 It may be because I never had a seat in Parlia- 
 ment that I am somewhat suspicious of its doings 
 and the men that do them. Indeed, I have some 
 sympathy with the Scotch minister who prayed, 
 * That the Houses of Parliament now assembled 
 may be kept from doing any harm.' And, indeed, I 
 would echo the words in ' Chevy Chase ' and make 
 them apply especially to the Commons : 
 
 ' God save the King, and bless the land 
 
 In plenty, joy, and peace. 
 And grant henceforth that foul debate 
 'Twixt commoners may cease.' 
 
 But although I doubt their doings I still can have 
 some respect for politicians, as these my notes will 
 demonstrate. Take the case of Lord Lansdowne. 
 He has made fewer mistakes than any of our poli- 
 ticians on the unpopular side. He has a cool head, 
 a level temper, and does not wince. But what are 
 we, speaking of mistakes, to say of Mr. Birrell, the 
 neat writer, but the fumbling Chief Secretary ? We 
 have not heard the last of his colossal blunders, 
 which are red with blood. ' Standing in a white 
 sheet as he did in the Commons when he fell ' is not 
 enough. He has left a black memory as a politician. 
 Sir Edward Grey (Viscount Grey of Falloden) has 
 been much blamed for his poor diplomacy. Wanting 
 allies, he has played cards which have made neutrals 
 into enemies. He is a man with cool blood, and that 
 ought to be good for the brain of a Minister for 
 Foreign Affairs. Still, this is a case where the verdict 
 is not yet. He has been arraigned — and there it 
 must rest. 
 
 Viscount Haldane began b}^ being a peculiarly
 
 292 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 lucky man both in his profession and in poUtics. He 
 is in person and character stout. A shrewd man 
 who could never have been eloquent. His connec- 
 tion with Germany as his ' spiritual home ' — although 
 most of us look higher for a home for spirit — cost 
 him his position as Lord Chancellor ; and he retired 
 with the same sort of reputation that a German spy 
 might attain to, and now devotes himself to the 
 important matter of education. But in his case, 
 too, we are trying him before all the evidence is 
 before the court — an adjournment would meet his 
 case. 
 
 Mr. Asquith has many gifts, but humour is not the 
 most conspicuous of these. He is a master of mighty 
 phrases, and his career has shown him to be a political 
 tactician of ability. Solid and serene, he has man- 
 aged, notwithstanding mistakes which would have 
 seemed irreparable, to retain his position as Prime 
 Minister, and is still leading a Government composed 
 of his sincere traducers and his implacable political 
 enemies.^ His memorable speech at Newcastle, when 
 he said on authority that we were amply supplied 
 with munitions, was a mistake, but his friends threw 
 the blame on the authority. You can see him at 
 his worst in a picture in the Benchers' Room at 
 Lincoln's Inn. 
 
 Mr. Balfour has played fast and loose with politics, 
 and has coquetted with philosophy. He has admir- 
 able gifts of expression, but always suggests more 
 refinement than robustness. He is quite a deep 
 smatterer in many matters. Physically he reminds 
 me more of the willow than of the oak. In his fast- 
 and-looseness he gave up the leadership of the 
 
 ^ This was written before the recent wrestling match in which a 
 ministry ' fell ' or was, according to some, tripped up.
 
 SOME POLITICIANS 293 
 
 Unionist party, and Mr. Bonar Law was cliosen in 
 his stead, but when the Coahtion was formed he 
 became First Lord of the Admiralty, and staggered 
 the country by his first account of the battle of 
 Jutland ; and to make up for that mistake, when 
 the Channel raid took place, only half the truth was 
 told of the mishap. 
 
 Mr. Bonar Law ought to be made of sterner stuff, 
 for he was in the iron trade, and has the position — 
 the very responsible position in these days — of 
 Colonial Secretary.^ I think on the whole he has 
 done well. His reticence during the war, before he 
 and other colleagues were coalesced, got him a 
 considerable reputation. Silence in a politician is 
 sometimes invaluable, but it is an art which very few 
 of them practice. He has distinctly advanced his 
 reputation since the war began. It is hard to play 
 second fiddle in an orchestra of all the discords. It 
 is true the miscellaneous Government has shed 
 several of its members. Sir Edward Carson went 
 out, and is a considerable power outside these closed 
 doors. Mr. Churchill went out, and has been indulg- 
 ing in runaway rings at the bell beside the door since 
 his conscience would not allow him to take good 
 pay for ample leisure. Lord Wimborne, who, as he 
 himself said, was a kind of ornamental nonentity 
 in Ireland, resigned the office of Lord Lieutenant, 
 but was after a decent interval reinstalled in that 
 great office. 
 
 Mr. Winston Churchill was a precocious youth 
 who became prominent as a boy, and has kept his 
 boy's round face into his manhood, and the mind 
 behind the face is the petulant mind of a clever 
 
 1 Now Chancellor of Exchequer in Mr. Lloyd George's National 
 Government.
 
 294 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 youth who has never quite grown up. He began 
 as a Conservative, but became a Liberal — for, no 
 doubt, excellent reasons — while he was still quite 
 young. He turned his coat while it was still a 
 jacket. 
 
 It is curious how many men in politics begin by 
 being demagogues and end by being demigods. 
 That was what happened in the case of Mr. Chamber- 
 lain, that is what is happening in the case of Mr. 
 Lloyd George. He is a dapper little man with a 
 sharp eye and a moustache like a bunker in his 
 smooth-shaven lawn of a face. Abuse seems to 
 be the high-road to success. It is not long ago that 
 Mr. Lloyd George made speeches at Limehouse and 
 elsewhere which set the heather of a fairly Conserva- 
 tive country on fire. He introduced a Budget which 
 was, according to his opponents, not taxation but 
 robbery. At that time he was execrated by the 
 respectable people in the country, although even 
 then those who were to have the spoils of the rich, 
 admired and cheered the spoiler. But all that is 
 past, gone and forgiven, if not forgotten. He has 
 since the war stood for ' thorough ' — Win the war. 
 He even delivered a great speech on the text * Too 
 late ' which almost impeached the Government of 
 which he was a member. Then as Minister of 
 Munitions, and at the War Office, he has shown that 
 there is a driving power in him — which is what 
 carries points, and has even carried him into the 
 office of Prime Minister — and we want this point of 
 winning the war carried. And now everybody has a 
 good word for him. He is lauded like a successful 
 general — and we have had few enough of these to 
 praise in recent times. 
 
 Mr. Duke, now Chief Secretary for Ireland, began
 
 SOME POLITICIANS 295 
 
 in paper, proceeded from journalism to law, and after 
 a distinguished career at the Bar has proceeded into 
 the deep waters of politics, and has an ugly job on 
 hand in Ireland. The choice of servants, even by a 
 Coalition Government which shares the ' loaves and 
 the fishes ' between the parties, sometimes falls on 
 the right man. He is not Cromwell, but he has 
 an opportunity such as a great man might covet, 
 and which a small man would run away from. 
 Gratitude waits for the man who can solve that 
 problem.
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 SOME STRAY REMINISCENCES 
 
 Trumping land-taxers with Socialism — Nationalising a manu- 
 factory — A joke in the Labour Leader — Some heckling — ' Too 
 many lawyers in the House ' — ' The black hand of Socialism ' — 
 Questions by a butcher — Questions by post — A church bazaar — 
 A drawing-room meeting — Prognostication — Counting un- 
 hatched chickens — A candidate who prophesied — The State 
 and neighbour nations — A nation's vocations — ' The white 
 man's burden' — Our rule in India — ' They should keep who 
 can ' — Conservatism — Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity — Anti- 
 Jacobinism — Advance of Liberalism — Modification of principles 
 ' Doctrinal developments ' — Nationalism and world-power. 
 
 I GOT some pleasure out of a political meeting I 
 held at a village, surrounding certain manufacturing 
 works, which was mainly inhabited by the workmen 
 employed in the clanging works. The managing 
 director and the manager of the works were keen 
 politicians and advanced (I suppose that is the right 
 word) Liberals. They went about in the constitu- 
 ency praising my opponent (perhaps on the ground 
 that he had most need of praise) and denouncing the 
 poor Unionist candidate. They attended a con- 
 siderable number of my meetings, and put as many 
 questions to me as are in the Shorter Catechism. 
 They had apparently been reading Henry George's 
 book, and were obsessed with the idea of national- 
 ising land — they, I take it, not being land-owners 
 — and they denounced me because I was a fossil 
 and would not give the people what belonged to 
 them. 
 
 296
 
 SOME STRAY REMINISCENCES 297 
 
 They, in an evil hour, invited me to a meeting in 
 their village, and I went. There was a fair gathering 
 of men from the works, horny-handed sons of toil, 
 and my little joke was a strong argument, illustrated 
 with startling diagrams, showing how labour failed 
 to get its fair share of the profits of production, 
 and a plea not only for the nationalisation of land, 
 but of all means of production. I told them how 
 Mr. Ramsay Macdonald declared ' capital ' was the 
 enemy, and how the editor of the Clarion said that a 
 frugal workman only gets one-third of his earnings. 
 The men listened to me when I proposed to give 
 them all the manufactories in the country — just as the 
 clodhoppers had listened to those who proposed to 
 confiscate the land — and were much struck with my 
 suggestion that it was stupid to stop at the land 
 when we were giving things to the people, and that 
 we should hand over, with the land, the railways, the 
 banks, the tweed works, the boiler works, etc., to 
 secure to the workmen the whole of their wages 
 instead of the beggarly third which they at present 
 got. I believe the labouring men thought that my 
 logical conclusion was sound, but the managing 
 director and the manager listened with long, dubious 
 faces, and never asked me to address another meet- 
 ing at their village. 
 
 There is not much amusement to be got out of 
 political literature, but I was the subject of a joke — 
 I suppose it was — on one occasion. In the National 
 Review for 1906 I published an article on ' The Coming 
 Social Revolution.' I pointed out how we had pro- 
 ceeded a good way along the Socialist road, and in- 
 tended the article to be a solemn warning against 
 going further in a perilous direction. In some places
 
 A 
 
 298 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the article was praised, but nowhere so much as in 
 the Labour Leader of the 23rd November 1906, under 
 the heading ' Is Mr. Balfour Browne a Socialist ? ' 
 and the writer of that article says that reason for 
 the question is because ' he (Mr. Balfour Browne) 
 has written an article in which, with captivat- 
 ing force and clearness, he describes the extra- 
 ordinary progress that Socialism is making in the 
 world, and proves the irrefragable logic of the 
 Socialist position. It is by far and away the 
 most effective exposition and telling justification of 
 Socialism that has been published in Britain for 
 many a day.' And the writer goes on to try and 
 prove that I am an advanced Socialist, from an 
 article which was intended as a grave warning 
 against that fallacious creed. Still, the joke — the 
 writer's, and not mine — was well done, and I had 
 some pleasure from the misplaced and undeserved 
 praise of the Labour Leader. But what would the 
 writer of that article have thought if he could have 
 seen a report of my joke at the boiler works ? 
 
 I was asked at one meeting if I was not of opinion 
 that there were too many lawyers in the House of 
 Commons ? Well, candidly, I think I would have 
 answered the question that that was my opinion. 
 But then the heckler would have thought that 
 he had the best of me with his argumentum ad 
 hominem. So I said, ' If I get into the House 
 of Commons I mean to give up the law (I knew 
 I could not practise at the Parliamentary Bar) and 
 the profits.' 
 
 On another occasion a man mentioned to me a 
 poster which referred to the ' Black hand of Social- 
 ism,' and asked, ' What coloured hand Mr. Balfour
 
 SOME STRAY REMINISCENCES 299 
 
 Browne would like for the capitalist ? ' The answer 
 was obvious, and I guessed it right the very first 
 time : ' Clean hands/ 
 
 Once in Dumfriesshire a Mr. Thomas M., a butcher, 
 asked how it was that in none of the places with 
 tariffs were wages so high as in Britain ? ' ' Mr. / 
 
 Balfour Browne said (I am quoting from a local 
 newspaper) it was not the case that we had the 
 highest wages in the world. The average wage in j 
 Germany was only 19s. ofd., in Britain it was 33s. 
 or 34s., and in the United States it was 46s. 4jd. 
 But in Germany and France people lived more 
 cheaply than in Britain, and did not eat so much 
 butcher meat.' (Loud laughter. A voice, * Oh, 
 that 's a guid yin ' ; and another, * That 's worth 
 the shilling.') It was a fluke, however, for I did not 
 at the time know that Mr. M. was a butcher, but 
 saw that something had 'caught on,' and sat 
 down. 
 
 Sometimes the heckler reserved his questions and 
 pelted you by post. Thus on one occasion, on the 
 opening of a bazaar in aid of the funds of St. 
 Peter's Church Schools, I had to make a speech, and 
 I praised the side-shows and said that although the 
 people could not go in without paying they could 
 pay without going in, a joke which must have been 
 made by Artemus Ward. But I went on to tell 
 the people, what I thought an appropriate story, of a 
 High Church clergyman who, in conversation with 
 a Low-Churchman who was also the incumbent of 
 a church, asked him : ' Do you have matins in 
 your church ? ' * No,' he answered, * we have 
 kamptulicon right up to the altar rails.' The next 
 morning I had a letter written in a very old-fashioned, 
 ladylike hand — all angles, like the broken bottles
 
 300 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 on the top of a wall — in which the lady asked me * if 
 I thought it right to make a mock of religion ? ' 
 
 There was a lady who was an indefatigable worker 
 in the constituency. She was large and fat, and 
 when she laughed she shook in ripples like a jelly. 
 She had been married to a husband of quite dis- 
 proportional smallness and thinness. This good 
 lady gave what was called a drawing-room meeting 
 all amongst the stuffed birds and antimacassars, 
 at which I was to meet some of the lady workers 
 and have a cup of tea. At the last moment, however, 
 the lady of the house, with a smile which trembled on 
 her cheeks and chin, asked me to ' say a few words 
 to the lady workers.' I said that this had been 
 forced upon me, and the phrase reminded me of a 
 story of a man in America who was going to be 
 married, and made a bargain that at the breakfast 
 there should be ' no speeches,' just as a corpse bar- 
 gains that there are to be no flowers. But when 
 the time came the company cried out the more, ' A 
 speech ! A speech ! ' and the poor bridegroom had 
 to comply. He rose and, placing his hand kindly 
 on his wife's shoulder, began : ' Ladies and gentle- 
 men, this thing has been forced upon me.' 
 
 When I had finished my few words, a young lady 
 came up to me tittering, and said : ' Didn't you 
 know ? ' I did not know, and don't know to this 
 day, but somehow in that story I had put my foot 
 in it. 
 
 Prognostication in politics is a very difficult art. 
 Of course it is quite wise for a candidate to be hope- 
 ful, and to prophesy success on the following day, 
 although his poor heart may be in his boots. It is
 
 SOME STRAY REMINISCENCES 301 
 
 also natural that your agent and canvassers should 
 look at the bright side of things. But what strikes 
 me about elections is the worthlessness of all fore- 
 casts. I remember sitting next a candidate at 
 dinner on the night of the declaration of the poll. 
 He could have had no object in throwing dust in 
 my eyes. While we were talking it was past eight 
 o'clock and the poll had closed. He assured me 
 that so perfect was his organisation and information, 
 although he could not say whether he would be 
 ' in ' or ' out ' he knew that it would only be by two 
 hundred votes, whichever happened. An hour or 
 two afterwards we were at the Town Hall, and the 
 over-sanguine candidate was out and his rival in 
 by over four thousand votes. That indicates the 
 worthlessness of prognostication. 
 
 There is no more difficult question connected with 
 politics than that which deals with relations of a 
 State to its neighbour nations. In the case of the 
 individual, the golden rule was to do to others as you 
 would have them do to you. To respect yourself 
 and respect others is wisdom. But wisdom is often 
 so vague as to be of little use. Even with regard to 
 the conduct of an individual, we deny a neighbour's 
 right to neglect his drains so as to poison those who 
 are living near him ; indeed, we know that society 
 will not tolerate the individual liberty which was 
 at one time the ideal of statesmanship. The days 
 of * Let alone ! ' or * Hands off ! ' as the rule of a State 
 in politics, have gone by, and the State interferes in 
 various directions even with the innocent right of a 
 man to do as he likes with his own. 
 
 But can we apply the rules which are applicable 
 to individuals in a community to the members of
 
 302 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 the Comity of Nations ? How is a great nation to 
 behave to its neighbours. Well, one solution of this 
 intricate problem has been suggested, that * national 
 existence means the capacity to fulfil the national 
 vocation.' But that is a creed which would seem to 
 justify almost any conduct. The question, What is 
 my vocation ? can only be determined by the man 
 for himself. Is the question. What is my vocation ? 
 to be answered by each nation for itself ? How about 
 my neighbour's sewers ? The vocation of a nation 
 is to exist. But many might well believe that it was 
 the vocation of a nation to grow. It is the vocation 
 of the scholar to teach the ignorant. Is it not the 
 vocation of a civilised State to rule and to educate a 
 less civilised community ? Is not that the justifica- 
 tion of our rule in India ? And is it not the same 
 swelled-head idea that has made Germany desire to 
 be a world-power ? There is not only a vocation but, 
 as Kipling has indicated, a correlative duty — ' the 
 white man's burden.' But will not these principles 
 justify a policy of conquest, just as in the case of an 
 individual while still a child they justify punishment 
 and coercion, and in the case of an adult they justify 
 many rules in restriction of personal liberty ? ' Voca- 
 tion ' is a nice word which seems to imply divine 
 credentials to the strong to exercise the good old 
 rule and simple plan, * that he should take who has 
 the power,' but also the sanction to each nation, 
 ' that they should keep who can.' 
 
 Conservatism, it is said, came into existence as a 
 protest against the doctrines of the French Revolu- 
 tion. It won't do nowadays for any one calling 
 himself a politician to decry the Democracy. It is 
 here with us. It is here that the catchwords which
 
 SOME STRAY REMINISCENCES 303 
 
 have rung in our ears are misleading. ' Liberty ' — 
 there is no such thing. You can hear the people 
 who were ' Liberty and Property ' folk mourn its 
 death. We know that labour ' is organised ' (and 
 that was one of the strongest planks in the Socialists' 
 platform) ; the nation is drilled and conscripted. 
 There is no such thing as ' Liberty.' ' EquaUty ' is 
 as obvious a fallacy. There are no two men alike, 
 no two men equal. ' Fraternity ' is another pleasant 
 untruth, or a dream of those who, like the French 
 Revolutionists, were drunk with blood. Yet it 
 was on these impostors, the Trinity of the Revolu- 
 tion, that they thought to found a state — as if a 
 state could be founded on anything but truth, and 
 as if we were not still in search of the foundation 
 stone. 
 
 But what has become of the Anti- Jacobinism of 
 the Conservatives, the attempt by means of groynes 
 to save from the waves the solid land which was our 
 foothold ? Although ' wise preservation ' was, as 
 we saw, the motto of Conservatism, it has had to 
 admit the necessity of gradual advance. Liberalism 
 too, it may be said, which was originally pure indi- 
 viduahsm, has had to shift its ground, for there it 
 was shoulder to shoulder with anarchy, and in the 
 struggle in the nineteenth century between the ' do- 
 nothings ' and ' do-alls ' in politics, the ' do-alls ' or 
 Socialists won. 
 
 It is in this way that both Conservatives and 
 Liberals have had to modify their principles and 
 make ' doctrinal developments ' in their political 
 creeds. Each of them has adopted what is called 
 humanitarianism. They are both anxious to be 
 charitable institutions, to help the poor and relieve 
 the oppressed, to let the people have good houses
 
 304 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 and happy homes, leisure and amusement, at the 
 expense of the rich. There is also an attempt, as 
 we have seen, to recognise Nationalism, or the indi- 
 vidual right of small nations to continue to exist, 
 as against the bloody propaganda of a world-power 
 which desires to absorb.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ability or skill, payment according 
 
 to, 218. 
 Adams, J. C, 62. 
 'Administrative Nihilism,' 232. 
 Advertisement, 76. 
 Agnew, Sir W., 251. 
 Aird, Thomas, 10, 7j. 
 A. K. H. B., I. 
 Allen, Grant, 57. 
 
 Alverstone, Lord, letter from, 204. 
 American freedom, Herbert Spencer 
 
 on, 235. 
 Anti-Jacobinism, 303. 
 Argus, Bradford, 'Sayings' from, 
 
 209. 
 Arnold, Matthew, on Criticism, 
 
 77- 
 Arnold, Thomas, 42. 
 Art and pictures, 153. 
 Artzebashef s Sanine, 82. 
 Asquith, Mr., 292. 
 Aurora Leigh, 53. 
 Austen, Jane, 53, 80. 
 
 B 
 
 Babo's plays, 96. 
 Bacon, Francis, 175 et seq. 
 Bacon's joke, 174. 
 Balfour, A. J., 258, 292. 
 
 on Bacon, 176. 
 
 Balfour of Burleigh, Lord, 290. 
 Bampton Lectures, 124. 
 Banks, German, 276. 
 Bastian, Charlton, 178. 
 Baxter, 43. 
 
 Bazaar, How I went to a, 9. 
 Beggar's Opera, 93. 
 Bergson, 33, 167. 
 Berkeley, 29. 
 
 Works of, 28. 
 
 Berth, 285. 
 Birrell, Mr., 291. 
 Black, William, 13. 
 
 Blackie, Professor, 2-6. 
 Blatchford, Mr., 278. 
 
 in Clarion, 219. 
 
 Bonar Law, Mr., 292. 
 Books and art, 148. 
 Boswell, 76. 
 
 Bovary Madame, Flaubert's, 81. 
 Boyd, Dr., i. 
 
 Bradford Burns Club, 173. 
 Bramwell, Lord, and Laissesfaire, 
 196. 
 
 letter from, 203. 
 
 Brewster's More Worlds than One, 
 
 47- 
 Briand, M., 285. 
 Bride ofLammermoor, 80. 
 Bridges, Robert, in The Fire Giver, 
 
 171. 
 
 Bright, John, 263. 
 
 British Quarterly, wrote for, 25. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, Wemyss Reid's 
 
 Monograph on, 20. 
 
 Swinburne's Note on, 20. 
 
 Jane Eyre, 179. 
 
 Brown, Dr. Thomas, 28. 
 Brown, R. Glasgow, 28. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 38. 
 Browning, Mrs., 53. 
 
 Robert, 53. 
 
 Brunton, Sir Thomas Lauder. 14. 
 
 Buccleuch, Duke of, 223. 
 
 Buckle's History of Civilisation, 14. 
 
 Bulwer, 52. 
 
 Burbage, Richard, 149. 
 
 Burke, E., 243. 
 
 Burns, 40, 42. 
 
 Burns Clubs, 171. 
 
 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 
 
 149. 
 
 Caird, Principal, on Hume, 30. 
 Cairns, Lord, 263. 
 Caledonia, Scott's, 116. 
 Campbell, Professor, 157. 
 
 U
 
 3o6 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 
 248, 260. 
 
 Cannan, Gilbert, Round the Cor- 
 ner, 83. 
 
 Canning, George, 260. 
 
 Capital, 280, 281. 
 
 Carbutt, Sir Edward, 225. 
 
 Carlyle on Coleridge, 68. 
 
 on Paul Jones, 103, 104. 
 
 Carlyle's Past and Present, 39, 4 1, 5 1 . 
 
 Lectures, 125. 
 
 Lord Rector's Address, 127. 
 
 own 'talk,' 71. 
 
 Carriers, Law of, 24. 
 
 Carson, Sir Edward, 293. 
 
 Catholic Emancipation, 243. 
 
 Cawdor, Lord, 255. 
 
 Cecil, Lord Hugh, on House of 
 Commons, 236. 
 
 Cecil, Lord Robert, 264. 
 
 Chamberlain, Mr., 225. 
 
 Changed Aspects of Unchanged 
 Truths, I. 
 
 Chaucer, 35. 
 
 Cheap books, 152. 
 
 Chinese Labour, an election 'cry,' 
 
 257. 
 
 Christianity and the poor, 273. 
 
 Church and politics, 288. 
 
 Churchill, Mr. Winston, 258, 293. 
 
 and merits of acquisi- 
 tion of wealth, 219. 
 
 Cleland, Professor, 163. 
 
 Clifford, Professor, 56. 
 
 Coalition Government, 270. 
 
 Cock, Mr. Alfred, 56. 
 
 Cockburn, Sir Alexander, 267. 
 
 Coleridge, Lord Chief-Justice, con- 
 versation, 134. 
 
 Coleridge's (Samuel Taylor) talk, 68. 
 
 sermon, 90. 
 
 Collins, Wilkie, Moonstone, 13. 
 
 Colonial Preference, 226. 
 
 Commodore Paul Jones, 102 et seq. 
 
 ' Common-sense philosophy,' 28. 
 
 Compulsory service, 270. 
 
 Confiscation of rent, 214. 
 
 Congr^ve, 38. 
 
 Conservatism and Socialism, 200. 
 
 Conversation, 129. 
 
 Corn Laws, Repeal of the, 1846, 243. 
 
 Corsican Brothers, The, 93. 
 
 Cranbrook, Lord, 265. 
 
 Cranstoun, Dr., 81. 
 
 Critics, 74. 
 
 Curiosities of literature, 115. 
 
 D 
 
 Darwin and Wallace, 62. 
 
 Daudet's Sapho, 81. 
 
 Dean of St. Paul's on politics, 288. 
 
 Defoe, 45. 
 
 Democracy, discussion on, Blackie 
 
 and Ernest Jones, 4. 
 De Quincey, 49, 50, 51. 
 Design, Lord Kelvin on, 65. 
 Dickens, 48. 
 Dictionaries, 151. 
 Disraeli, 36, 37, 126, 185. 
 
 letter from, 181. 
 
 Don Carlos, Schiller's, 96. 
 Dostoievski, 81. 
 Doughty, Sir George, 228. 
 Douglas, by Rev. John Home, 96. 
 Drawing-room meeting, a, 300. 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, 35, 
 
 36. 
 Dugald Stewart, 28. 
 Duke, Mr., on Bacon, 175. 
 
 Chief Secretary, 295. 
 
 Dumas, 46. 
 
 Dumfries Burns Club, 172. 
 Durham, Dean of, 117. 
 Durning-Lawrence, Sir E., and 
 
 Bacon, 174. 
 Dunlop, Walter, 87, 88. 
 
 E 
 
 East Bradford, contest in, 222. 
 Economic conditions after the war, 
 
 273- 
 Editions, first, and others, 148. 
 EHot, George, 37, 53. 
 Elizabethan dramatists, 97. 
 Emancipation, Catholic, 243. 
 Emerson quoted, 40, 70. 
 Emerson's visit to Carlisle at 
 
 Craigenputtock. 3. 
 Emlyn, Lord, 255. 
 Engels, 283. 
 Epic of Hades, 157. 
 Equality, 303. 
 Esmond, 49. 
 Essays published by Longmans, 
 
 Green and Co. (1885), 25. 
 Eucken, 33, 42. 
 Exchangeable value, 215. 
 
 Factory Acts, 198. 
 
 Felix Holt, the Radical, 37.
 
 INDEX 
 
 307 
 
 Ferrier, Miss, novels, 44, 80. 
 
 Ferrier, Sir David, 14. 
 
 Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysics, 
 
 29. 
 Fichte, 36, 42. 
 Fielding, 53. 
 
 Finlason, W. F., conversation, 135. 
 Fitzgerald's Omar K hay yaiu., 42. 
 Flaubert's Aladafne B ovary, 81. 
 Fleecers, 280. 
 Flower, Sir Ernest, 223. 
 Forster, W. E., 161. 
 
 Mr. Arnold, 228. 
 
 France, Anatole, 80. 
 
 Eraser, Professor A. C, 27. 
 
 ' Fraternity,' 303. 
 
 Free Trade, 196, 227, 272. 
 
 French Revolution, Carlyle's, 48. 
 
 Gait's Annals of the Parish, 80. 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 80. 
 
 Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, 
 
 81. 
 Geikie, Sir Archibald, 62. 
 General strike, 200, 284. 
 Geology, 59. 
 George, Henry, 214. 
 George, Mr. Lloyd, 249, 258, 294, 
 German Banks in Britain, 276. 
 
 theatre, the, 96. 
 
 Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 48. 
 Gifford Lectures, 122. 
 Gilfillan, George, letter from, 11. 
 Gladstone, W. E., and Home Rule, 
 
 261. 
 Glyn, Miss, 99. 
 Goethe, 36, 38. 
 Goethe's plays, 46. 
 Gogol's Dead Souls, 82. 
 Goldsmith, 37. 
 Goldwin Smith, 57. 
 Gorki, Maxim, 82. 
 Goschen, Lord, 266. 
 Government by party, 239, 240. 
 Granville, Lord, 264. 
 Greek, Professor Blackie's teaching 
 
 of, 3-5- 
 Grey, Viscount, 291. 
 Grimaldi, 48. 
 
 H 
 
 Haldane, Viscount, 291. 
 Halsbury, Lord, stories, 91. 
 
 Hamilton Marshall and Cottagers 
 
 of Glenburnie, 182. 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 28. 
 Hannah More, 94. 
 Hannay, James, 17. 
 Harcourt, Sir William, 262. 
 
 Solicitor-General, 19. 
 
 Hare, 40. 
 
 Harris, Richard, and conversation, 
 
 136. 
 Hatherley, Lord, letter from, 183. 
 Hans of Islande, 48. 
 Hawkins, Justice, story about, 174. 
 Heckler answered, 247. 
 Heckling, 298. 
 Hegel and the Categories, 30. 
 
 The Secret of, -^i. 
 
 Herbert, George, 36. 
 Herbert Spencer, 229, 
 Herschel on Bacon, 176. 
 Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, 
 
 47. 
 Herschell, Farrer, 265. 
 Hewins, Professor, 223. 
 Holmes, the Medium, 15. 
 Home Rule and W. E. Gladstone, 
 
 261. 
 Hook, Theodore, on D. O'Connel!, 
 
 185. 
 Household Suffrage Bill, 245. 
 Household Words, 48. 
 How I went to a Bazaar, 9. 
 Howick, Lord, 223. 
 Hughes, Mr., 227, 276. 
 Hugo, Victor, 38. 
 Hume, 29. 
 Humour at elections, 246. 
 
 in the pulpit, 86. 
 
 Hunter, Mrs. Leo, 55. 
 Hutchinson Stirling, letter from, 32. 
 Hutchinson Stirling's Secret of 
 
 Hegel, 31. 
 Hutton, Dr. James, 60. 
 Huxley, Professor, on 'jumps' in 
 
 evolution, 169. 
 
 his religion to be taught, 233. 
 
 and a bald head, 233. 
 
 I 
 
 Ideas, Metempsychosis of, 34. 
 
 Imperialism and Colonial Prefer- 
 ence, 226. 
 
 Increment, unearned, and J. S. Mill, 
 213. 
 
 India, our rule in, 301.
 
 3o8 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Invention cannot be nationalised, 
 
 281. 
 Iveagh, Lord, and Dublin election, 
 
 251. 
 
 J 
 
 Jacobinism, Anti-, 303. 
 James, William, 33. 
 Jardine, Sir R. Buchanan, 223. 
 Jaures, Jean, on general strike, 284. 
 ' Jolly Beggars,' the, 94- 
 Johnson and Boswell, 76. 
 Jones, Ernest, discussion with Pro- 
 fessor Blackie, 4. 
 Jonson, Ben, 38, 40. 
 Journal of the Plague^ 45. 
 
 K 
 
 Kant and a priori forms of space 
 
 and time, 29. 
 Karslake, Sir John, 267. 
 Kelvin, Lord, 64. 
 Kidnapped^ 45. 
 'Killing no Murder,' 91. 
 Kitchener, Lord, and creation of 
 
 armies, 270. 
 
 Labour and wealth, 279. 
 
 Labour, hand and head, 281. 
 
 Labour Leader^ The, 298. 
 
 Laissez-faire, 196. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 139. 
 
 Landor, W. S., 36, 43. 
 
 Land-taxers, 213, 296. 
 
 Larkin and Dublin strike, 286. 
 
 Law of Carriers, 24. 
 
 Law Magazine, wrote for, 25. 
 
 Lawson, Sir Wilfrid, 264. 
 
 Lectures, 121. 
 
 Leeds Mercury, connection with, 
 
 18. 
 Lees, Dr., on clerical humour, 87. 
 Lesage's Gil Bias, 46. 
 Les Miserables, 48. 
 Lessing, 37. 
 
 ' Letters to an Elector,' 224. 
 Leverrier, 63. 
 Liberty, 303. 
 Liebknecht, 284. 
 Literature, curiosities of, 115. 
 Lloyd George, Mr., 249, 258, 294. 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver's book, 273 n. 
 Longfellow, 37. 
 
 Lord Rector of Edinburgh Univer- 
 sity, 126. 
 
 Lowe, Mr. Robert, 265. 
 
 Lowell, J. Russell, on Coleridge, 
 159. 
 
 Lyell's Principles of Geology, 59. 
 
 Lyttelton, Alfred, 256. 
 
 Lytton, Lord, 52. 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulays England, 48. 
 
 talk, 67. 
 
 MacDougall, Professor, 27. 
 Mackenzie, Compton, The Carnival, 
 
 83- 
 
 Mad Poets, 137. 
 
 Magna Carta, 244. 
 
 Malfi, Duchess of 93. 
 
 Manchester Lectures, 47. 
 
 Manon Lescaut, 80. 
 
 Marshall, Hall, Mr., on ' New Fis- 
 cal Policy,' 224. 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, 48. 
 
 Martin, Baron, on Shakespeare, 25. 
 
 Marx, 283, 288. 
 
 Maudsley, Dr., on Browning, 178. 
 
 Maxwell, Mr. W. H., 223. 
 
 Mercury, Leeds, edited by Sir T, 
 Wemyss Reid, 16. 
 
 Meredith, George, 54. 
 
 Meredith, Owen, 38. 
 
 Metempsychosis of Ideas, 34. 
 
 Mill, J. S., and unearned incre- 
 ment, 213, 265. 
 
 Miller, William, 161. 
 
 Milton, 36, 39. 
 
 Milvain, Sir T., 268. 
 
 Modern plays, 97. 
 
 Mons, Angels at, 273. 
 
 Monte Cristo, 44. 
 
 Montrose, Marquis of, 39. 
 
 Monuments, Edinburgh's pride in, 
 2. 
 
 Moonstone, Collins's, 13. 
 
 Morley, Lord, of Blackburn, 289. 
 
 Morning Post, wrote for, 1 2. 
 
 Morris, Lewis, 157. 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon, y]. 
 
 National Government, 277 n. 
 Natural Selection, 65, 165 et seq. 
 ' New Fiscal Policy,' 224.
 
 INDEX 
 
 309 
 
 New South Wales general strike, 
 
 286. 
 Nichol, Professor, 11. 
 'Nihilism, Administrative,' 232. 
 Nineteenth-century politics, 242. 
 Notre Daine de Paris, 48. 
 Novalis, 37. 
 Novels published by Chapman and 
 
 Hall and H. S. King and Co., 
 
 23- 
 Novels comfortable and uncomfort- 
 able, 79. 
 
 O 
 
 O'Connell, D., and Hook, 185. 
 Old Age Pensions, 256. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., 80. 
 Oliver Twist, 48. 
 Omar Khayyam, 39, 42. 
 Opium-Eater, De Quince/s, 50. 
 Otranto, Castle of, 44. 
 
 Paley and Pitt, 90. 
 
 Palmerston, 260. 
 
 Parties and politics, 236. 
 
 Pascal, 37. 
 
 Paul Jones, 102. 
 
 Payment according to needs, 218. 
 
 Peaceful penetration, 202. 
 
 Peers, to be tried by, 244. 
 
 Percy, Lord, at Bradford, 259. 
 
 Percy, by Hannah More, 94. 
 
 Permissive Bill, 244. 
 
 Petrarch, 37. 
 
 Pfeiffer, Mrs., 156. 
 
 Philosophy, 27. 
 
 Herbert Spencer's so-called, 
 
 230. 
 Pickwick, 48. 
 Pictures and art, 153. 
 Platform points, 206. 
 ' Play 's the thing,' the, 93. 
 Pliny, 36. 
 Poems noticed by Professor Nichol, 
 
 II. 
 published by Maclehose, 1880, 
 
 25. 
 ' Poets, Mad,' 137. 
 ' Points from the Platforms,' 206. 
 Political gossip, 221. 
 conflicts of nineteenth century, 
 
 242-3. 
 
 Politico - commercial penetration, 
 276. 
 
 Politics and thoroughness, 275. 
 
 I and parties, 237. 
 
 j of the future, 269. 
 
 Pope quoted, "j"]. 
 ! Preference, Colonial, 226. 
 
 Prevost, Abbe, 80. 
 
 Proctor's Other Worlds than Ours, 
 
 47- 
 Professor Blackie, 2. 
 
 Fraser, 27. 
 
 Hewins, 223. 
 
 MacDougall, 27. 
 
 Prognostication, futility of, 300. 
 Pulpit, the, 85. 
 
 R 
 
 Rabelais, 86. 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 39. 
 
 Reading for improvement, 143. 
 
 Recreations of a Country Parson, 
 I. 
 
 Recreations of a professional man, 
 2. 
 
 Recruiting tried, 270. 
 
 Referendum, the, 200. 
 
 Reform Bill, 1832, 243. 
 
 Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, 16. 
 
 Reid, Sir George's portrait of Pro- 
 fessor Blackie, 3. 
 
 Re id's Inquiry, etc., 28. 
 
 Rent, taxation of, 213. 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul, 38, 41. 
 
 Riddle, H. Scott, 141. 
 
 Robbers, The, 96. 
 
 Robertson of Brighton, 117. 
 
 Robiftson Crusoe, 45. 
 
 Rosebery, Lord, quoted, 254, 290. 
 
 Ruskin, 49. 
 
 Russell, Sir Charles, 263. 
 
 St. Aldvvyn, Lord, 266. 
 Salisbury, Lord, 64, 264. 
 Sanderson, Sir J. Burdon, 58. 
 Sandford and Merton, 45. 
 Sapho, Daudet's, 81. 
 ' Sayings,' some, 205. 
 Scarron, 86. 
 
 Schiller's Piccolomini, 46. 
 Scott Siddons, ^Irs., 98. 
 I Scott's novels, 46,
 
 310 RECOLLECTIONS LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 
 Scottish Philosophy^ 29. 
 
 'Terminal Forms of Life,' 164. 
 
 ' Scottish Song,' Professor Blackie 
 
 Teetotaller, a, 253. 
 
 on, 5. 
 
 Thomson, James, 183. 
 
 Seasons, The, 116. 
 
 Seasons, 1 16. 
 
 Selection, Natural, 165, 166, 167. 
 
 Sir J. J., 170. 
 
 Sellar, Professor, 6. 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 183. 
 
 Service, compulsory, 270. 
 
 Thoroughness in politics, 275. 
 
 Shaftesbury, Lord, 264. 
 
 Times, wrote for, 24. 
 
 Shakespeare, 35, 39, 40. 
 
 Tolstoi, 81. 
 
 and Jonson, 133. 
 
 Traditional morality, 274. 
 
 Sheffield Burns Club, 172. 
 
 Traits, Emerson's, 49. 
 
 Shelley, 35, 36, 41. 
 
 Treasure Island, 45. 
 
 Singleton, Captain, 45. 
 
 Treitschke quoted, 271. 
 
 Smith, Adam, and laws of justice. 
 
 TroUope, A., 80. 
 
 198. 
 
 Truck Acts, 198. 
 
 Smith, Alexander, 40. 
 
 Tuke, Dr. Harrington, 15. 
 
 Smith, Sydney, on Berkeley and 
 
 Tyndall, Professor, 168. 
 
 Hume, 29. 
 
 
 on Macaulay, 67. 
 
 
 Smith, William, 61. 
 
 U 
 
 Smith, W. H., 267. 
 
 
 Smollett, 53. 
 
 Unearned increment and J. S. 
 
 Socialism and Conservatism, 200. 
 
 Mill, 213. 
 
 and Syndicalism, 279. 
 
 Uniformetarians, 63. 
 
 Sologub's Little Demon, 82. 
 
 Unionist members of present 
 
 Sorel, 285. 
 
 Government, 277 71. 
 
 speaker, Wemyss Reid, editor of, 
 
 University Magazine, 1 866, 8. 
 
 20. 
 
 University of Edinburgh, 2. 
 
 ' Special Wire,' 18. 
 
 Ure, Mr., Lord Advocate, 256. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 229. 
 
 
 Spencer, Lord, 252. 
 
 
 Sphex, the, 165. 
 
 V 
 
 State and Municipal Trading, 225. 
 
 
 Sterne, 38, 40, 92. 
 
 Value, exchangeable, 215. 
 
 Stevenson's Memories and Por- 
 
 Vanity Fair, 49. 
 
 traits, 8. 
 
 Viscount Grey, 290. 
 
 College Magazine, 8. 
 
 Vocations of nations, 302. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 28. 
 
 Voluntaryism, Giant of, 270. 
 
 Stories, old and new, 184. 
 
 Voyage through Space, Turner's, 47. 
 
 Swiss Family Robinson, 45. 
 
 
 Syndicalism and Socialism, 279. 
 
 
 Syndicalists, Sorel and Berth, 285. 
 
 W 
 
 
 Wallace and Darwin, 62. 
 
 T 
 
 Wallace, Sir R., and Perth elec- 
 
 
 tion, 193. 
 
 Tait, Professor, 6. 
 
 War and Peace, 8 1 . 
 
 Lectures on Recent Advances 
 
 War and the State, 271. 
 
 in Science, 7. 
 
 Waverley, first edition of, 1 50. 
 
 Talk, 67. 
 
 Wealth, inquiry as to it being 
 
 Tannahill, 160, 
 
 deserved, 218. 
 
 Tariff Reform, 225. 
 
 Wealth of Nations, igg. 
 
 Tchekofif, 82. 
 
 Wealth and labour, 279. 
 
 Thackeray, 49. 
 
 Weismann, 65, 165. 
 
 Temple, Sir Richard, 263. 
 
 Wemyss Reid's letter as to Char- 
 
 Tennyson, 35, 38, 40. 
 
 lotte Bronte, 20.
 
 INDEX 
 
 3t 
 
 Westminster Revte^v, article on 
 
 Charlotte Bronte, 20. 
 Whisky and torchlight procession, 
 
 248. 
 Wilhelm Meister, 48. 
 Wire, Special, 18. 
 Write, my right to, 189. 
 
 Writing, 143- 
 
 Wycherley^s Plain Dealer^ 40. 
 
 Yorkshire Post, Points from Plat- 
 forms, from, 206. 
 Yucca moth, 166. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press
 
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