BOOK 
 
 of 
 ESSAYS 
 
 G.S. STREET 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 

^ 
 
 / 
 
Digitized by tine Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/bookofessaysOOstreiala 
 
A BOOK OF ESSAYS 
 
NOTE 
 
 These essays have been printed in Blackwood's 
 Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, Cornhill, The 
 National Review, The Monthly Review, and (a 
 journal I hope I did not help to kill) The Londoner, 
 I am aware that some critics object to one's making 
 a volume of such things. But it is surely severe 
 on a poor writer that he should be denied a judg- 
 ment, such as it may be, on his work as a whole. 
 In any case I have good precedents. 
 
A BOOK 
 OF ESSAYS 
 
 BY G. S. STREET 
 
 author of 
 
 'the autobiography of a boy' 
 'the wise and the wayward' 
 'the trials of the bantocks' 
 'a book of stories' 
 
 ETC. 
 
 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE 
 
 AND COMPANY, LTD. 
 
 1902 
 
Edinburgh : T. and A. Constablk, Gate) Printers to Her Mjyesty 
 
6037 . 
 S9tho 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 I. LONDON 
 
 PAGE 
 
 r. 
 
 LONDON IN GENERAL 
 
 3 
 
 II. 
 
 THE CITY . . . . . 
 
 10 
 
 III. 
 
 THE STRAND .... 
 
 18 
 
 IV. 
 
 ST. James's and mayfair 
 
 24 
 
 V. 
 
 PICCADIIJ.Y .... 
 
 31 
 
 VI. 
 
 BAYSWATER and ST. JOHNS WOOD 
 
 37 
 
 VII. 
 
 KENSINGTON AND HAMMERSMITH . 
 
 43 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE SUBURBS .... 
 
 49 
 
 IX. 
 
 COCKNEY HUMOUR 
 
 67 
 
 II. BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 BYRON TO 1816 
 
 BYRON, 1816-1824 
 
 AFTER HEADING HORACE WALPOLE 
 
 CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES THE SECOND 
 
 GEORGE SELWYn's LETTERS 
 
 IJVDY SARAH LENNOX . 
 
 ANTHONY TROLLOPE . . • . 
 
 THE GREAT DUCHESS . . . 
 
 67 
 94 
 120 
 133 
 161 
 178 
 198 
 213 
 
 624948 
 
VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 III. VARIOUS 
 
 TWENTY YEARS SINCE . 
 THE PARADOX OF THE JEW 
 THE PERSISTENCE OP YOUTH 
 FRANCIS GORDON, A STUDY 
 AT THE OPERA . 
 A CONVERSATION 
 
 PAGE 
 227 
 247 
 
 257 
 270 
 287 
 293 
 
LONDON 
 
I. LONDON IN GENERAL 
 
 I CAN present my readers with no facts 
 about the increase of population in London, 
 about its wealth, about its imports and 
 exports. Some local knowledge of anti- 
 quarian, literary, and historical account 
 belongs to me, but to disclose it would be a 
 scrappy performance of what has been done 
 admirably by my betters. 
 
 I propose, as a very constant Londoner, to 
 write about London generally, as it strikes 
 my fancy and sympathy. I do not know that 
 I have had very many predecessors in the 
 occupation. A Londoner takes London as a 
 matter of course. Its habits and its average 
 tone are familiar to him ; he lives with people 
 who practise the one and affect the other; 
 it does not occur to him that they need ex- 
 position. But London, absolutely as a whole, 
 is a subject for an epigram or a library. One 
 must take divisions of some sort, either of 
 trades or abstract subjects or places: it is 
 easiest to take divisions of place, made for 
 
4 LONDON 
 
 one already, and meaning very often great 
 differences of nature, and for the most part 
 these shall be my divisions. I invite you, as 
 it were, to ' take a walk down ' this or that 
 street or district, and to listen the while to a 
 chattering companion. If I trouble you with 
 a single detail of fact it will be by accident. 
 I propose to myself ideas only, stray fancies 
 that have remained with me, not facts, — no 
 foothold of land, as it were coelum undique et 
 undique pontus : and enough of preamble, let 
 us set sail. 
 
 To many people London is the great mart 
 of the world. But I confess that to me the 
 knowledge that it is richer than any other 
 city is neither agreeable nor even interesting. 
 For my own comfort I should like it to be a 
 great deal poorer. Its wealth almost stifles 
 one. The large number of spacious, pompous 
 houses of which one knows that the inhabi- 
 tants have at least seven thousand a year is 
 appalling: nay, I am told by a statistician 
 that there are enough millionaires in our 
 midst to hold a mass meeting in Trafalgar 
 Square. Of course the current tone among 
 them, if you except the more vulgar kind, is 
 to pretend to be quite poor : they have no 
 ready money, and so forth. No doubt this 
 
LONDON IN GENERAL 6 
 
 homage to the seemliness of poverty is well 
 meant, but I think it exaggerates the nuis- 
 ance. You may philosophise about it as 
 much as you like, but I am quite certain that 
 the hardships of poverty are harder for the 
 proximity of monstrous wealth. And it is 
 annoying to wait, as in the season, twenty 
 minutes before one can cross Piccadilly by 
 reason of the charioted examples of our 
 plutocracy. No : the wealth of London makes 
 it a less agreeable place to live in than when 
 it was poorer and smaller, 'the Town' of a 
 hundred years ago. And is the wealth inter- 
 esting? Are a hundred million sovereigns 
 more interesting than a hundred million 
 cheeses? Civilisation? It comes of train- 
 ing and habit, not of money : there was 
 no vast quantity of that among the ancient 
 Athenians. Empire? If our Empire meant 
 no more than that many comfortable people 
 in London have too much to spend, it would 
 have little food for our imagination ; and if 
 those people and our Empire interact as 
 cause and effect, why, then they are not its 
 most lovely feature. Platitudes: but it is 
 worth noting that one does not love one's 
 London for this or that. It is not to me, 
 again, the scene of gaiety and splendid 
 
6 LONDON 
 
 pleasures. It is never gay, and its pleasures 
 are mostly stupid and tedious. Nor the 
 centre of art and literature and intellect : in 
 which regard one can only say that it con- 
 tains the National Gallery and the British 
 Museum. 
 
 London, to me, is the great meeting-place 
 of the humours of the uncivilised North. 
 I say uncivilised, because civilisation robs 
 humour of its material : the perfectly civi- 
 lised man does not act humorously, he acts 
 reasonably, and there is nothing humorous 
 in consistent reason : it is the dullest thing 
 under heaven. May I never live where there 
 are no irrational people ! And I say North, 
 because it is the verdict of all social philo- 
 sophers that the northern climate (and 
 especially our English) breeds more humours 
 than are found elsewhere : I like to be on 
 the side of the majority, though I have a 
 suspicion that a hot sun has its peculiar 
 humours also. Perhaps one may say that 
 if there is equal food for humour in the 
 South there is less capacity to digest it. 
 The North is the place for humours, and 
 nowhere else have they such scope as in 
 London ; nowhere else does grave-faced folly 
 show such merry changes. With sufficient 
 
LONDON IN GENERAL 7 
 
 variety in your societies you may pass the 
 day with ever fresh oddities and perver- 
 sities. And therein is an obvious gift of 
 London : any intelligent person, however 
 poor in pocket, may live in half a dozen 
 contrasting sets ; if he cannot pass from 
 dukes to costers, at least he may pass from 
 costers to cab-drivers. 
 
 These humours are mostly grey in our time : 
 it is a specially lucky accident alone that will 
 bring us on black and red. But if you can 
 read — a rarer accomplishment than it is sup- 
 posed — your London will grow dearer in an- 
 other way. You tread where trod, you may 
 easily live where lived, the brilliant and 
 coloured beings you love in memoirs and 
 letters. London is no longer England in the 
 sense that once it was, and since space, as we 
 say, is annihilated, place is no longer all 
 important. But here, if anywhere in England, 
 will place assist imagination to a sense of 
 pleasant bygone atmospheres. 
 
 For these reasons, and such as these, not 
 for its greatly illusory importance and its 
 materially monotonous pleasures, whether 
 he knows it or not, is London dear to the true 
 Londoner. I speak of all classes. Indeed it 
 is my belief that in the so-called upper and 
 
8 LONDON 
 
 middle classes there are quite few real Lon- 
 doners left. I do not count as such men who 
 work in the City all day and go to a suburb 
 for their sleep and social life, still less their 
 wives and daughters. And I grudge the 
 name to those owners of town houses who 
 make London dismal for nine months in the 
 year with blinds and shutters. There is, it 
 is true to say, a small number of people 
 whose England comprises London — I hate 
 ambiguity, but this must be understood or 
 not — wherever they are. But in the main, 
 true Londoners are they who have lived since 
 manhood three-quarters of the year in Lon- 
 don, with time to take to themselves its 
 shifting tones — and they are not a large 
 number of City, professional, and idling men. 
 This of the upper and middle classes. In the 
 lower there are many, fairly quick-witted 
 and free-living, who are true Londoners, and 
 would be miserable elsewhere. Atld, by the 
 way, you need not keep to the snob's division: 
 you may add to these very many men, especi- 
 ally young men (later to lose their London 
 for the most part), whose sense of life and 
 essential habits are the same. I may rest my 
 argument on these. What they would miss 
 elsewhere is just the humours of their fellows 
 
LONDON IN GENERAL 9 
 
 acting and reacting on their own, which can 
 thrive in no place but London. So a Lon- 
 doner loves it from habit. He may weary of 
 it, and it may not hold his happiest memories ; 
 but it holds the average of his life, and he 
 must not desert it for ever, lest he starve. 
 So much of London as a whole : I start on 
 my chosen divisions. 
 
11. THE CITY 
 
 I TAKE the City first, wishing to get it off my 
 hands. I dislike it. I do not hate it, I am 
 glad to say. If I hated it, it might acquire 
 an irresistible attraction for me, as the way 
 is with things and people one hates, so that 
 I should wander down there every day and 
 end by growing offensively rich. But I dis- 
 like it: its sole criterion of merit is par- 
 ticularly annoying to a scribbler, and it has 
 a habit of regulating its courtesies thereby. 
 Elsewhere in London, though everywhere 
 the quantity of money a man may have or 
 lack is raised to an irrational importance (for 
 you gain nothing by A's millions and lose 
 nothing by B's bankruptcy), other qualities 
 in him are allowed to exist : in the City, if he 
 is bare of funds, he is bare of everything, a 
 mark for British manners in their skeleton 
 form. I will deal with it plainly, and pass to 
 more agreeable phases of human stupidity. 
 
 Stupidity — yes : I maintain that the City is 
 of all things stupid. Its want of commonly 
 
 10 
 
THE CITY 11 
 
 intelligent observation is illustrated by the 
 fact that no City man ever contradicts the 
 popular fallacies concerning it. There is 
 the idea that in the City men walk swiftly 
 about, with set, anxious faces. They do no 
 such thing. There are more aimless, in- 
 different loafers in the streets of the City 
 than in any other part of London, the Strand 
 itself not excepted. If a man of dramatic 
 sense were to walk swiftly, with a set face, 
 he would be obstructed by a larger mass of 
 semi-stationary and purposeless humanity 
 than anywhere else. The City is not the 
 busy place it is supposed to be. The busier 
 part of the community plays dominoes in 
 restaurants, the less busy converses with 
 hats back-tilted and hands in pockets: the 
 idle part looks wearily at goods it obviously 
 does not intend to buy in shop-windows. 
 Inside the offices strangers are made to wait 
 half an hour and (if they are poor) given a 
 curt five minutes, but this is merely a pre- 
 tence to impress them : friends are welcome 
 as a change from the newspaper, and held in 
 lengthy conversations. But City men go on 
 believing that everybody else there is busy 
 to distraction. 
 Another fallacy about the City is that an 
 
12 LONDON 
 
 almost preternatural intelligence is required 
 to thrive there. This also is vanity. City 
 men are not intelligent, and even if you 
 cannot expect people to admit this of them- 
 selves, they would admit it, if they were not 
 stupid, of one another. I grant that in some 
 departments, as in speculation on the Stock 
 Exchange, intelligence is a useful aid to 
 sound information, but in most all that is 
 needed is a mastery of routine which any- 
 body can acquire in an hour or two. The 
 rest is a matter of capital. Average intelli- 
 gence may get the better in the long-run of 
 imbecility, but that is all. Study faces in the 
 City and compare them with faces in the 
 law-courts — excluding the dock, the jury, and 
 the witness-box — and your conclusion is in- 
 evitable. Or of whom do you expect the 
 more amusing converse — of the average 
 barrister and doctor of your acquaintance, or 
 of the average City man? Why, even men 
 of letters, with all the disadvantages of 
 seclusion, talk better than City men. Wit 
 and humour are surely a fair test of the 
 matter: are you generally amused by the 
 funny stories current in the City ? With all 
 my bitter experience of the public taste, I . 
 should not expect a fortune if I printed 
 
THE CITY 13 
 
 them. And it is useless to tell me that City 
 men do not set up for wits and humorists — 
 that they are too busy. I do not admit their 
 frantic preoccupation, as I have explained, 
 but as a matter of fact they are professed 
 wits, if not humorists : they vaunt their 
 jokes wherever they go. It will not do: 
 intelligence is in a poor way in the City, and 
 I am convinced that any man possessing it 
 who will take some technical trouble may 
 make his fortune there. 
 
 I do not wish, however, to appear pre- 
 judiced against the City. I should not so 
 appear, for I have accused it merely of idle- 
 ness and stupidity, and I am quite at home 
 with both these qualities. But I will pass to 
 direct eulogy. A matter on which I can 
 frankly congratulate the City is its un- 
 expected beauty of nomenclature. I had to 
 visit two solicitors there the other day, and 
 one of them lived in Idol Lane and the other 
 in St. Michael's Vicarage. I passed Rood 
 Lane on the way, and I believe Harp Lane 
 is thereabouts. There is an Angel Court, if I 
 am not mistaken. What spots are these for 
 spiritual poets and shadowy chroniclers of 
 the beautiful ! It is said that the hazards 
 of commerce are the true romance of modern 
 
14 LONDON 
 
 life. What wonder, indeed, is this when 
 commerce dates from such addresses ? How 
 they bring before you the medieval Church, 
 saints and martyrs and lovely ritual ! Poetry 
 makes shift with Mecklenburgh Square or 
 Porchester Terrace. But I almost regret 
 that the beautiful City names are old : I 
 would grant our City men a grim and dia- 
 bolical humour had they invented them. 
 
 I may with sincerity congratulate the City 
 on another quality — its reticent dignity. I 
 have heard men, indeed, in City restaurants 
 vaunt their dealings with thousands, but I 
 conceive that this was not vanity, but 
 business: imaginary thousands were a bait 
 for solid tens. And in any case the men were 
 not fairly representative. Your City man 
 of a good type makes it a point of honour 
 neither to vaunt success nor to bemoan 
 failure. He will learn of loss quietly, and 
 with little acrimony against those who have 
 inflicted it. This is a good quality, part of 
 that gift of public order which is the civilisa- 
 tion of the North, as that of the South is the 
 gift of social happiness. I like this quality, 
 but I am reminded that beyond the City, 
 where it is in its place, it spreads too far, as 
 concerned with money. In the City, where 
 
THE CITY 15 
 
 the game is wholly one of money, to mention 
 riches is to brag of success, to mention 
 poverty is to confess defeat. So it is well to 
 do neither there. But in other places, where 
 money need not be the alpha and omega of 
 life, I think reticence concerning it goes too 
 far. It has an ugly implication. It implies, 
 firstly, that a man's money, or lack of it, is 
 the most sacred matter in his life. And the 
 only explanation why the mention by a 
 man of his poverty makes his hearers un- 
 comfortable is that poverty is thought a 
 necessary discredit. Nobody is incon- 
 venienced by the mention of gout or some 
 other such ill fortune. And the idea that 
 poverty is discreditable is merely the most 
 ofiPensive, as it is perhaps the most inevitable, 
 characteristic of a materially successful race. 
 But I wander from the City. 
 
 In setting down such ideas of it as have 
 come to me for the moment, I have written 
 of the City as such, of City men as I have 
 seen them there. It is of course absurd to 
 define men nowadays by so narrow a limit. 
 Men of every society are found in the City — 
 men of fashion, if the phrase be current still, 
 sportsmen, men of pleasure, even lovers of 
 books. When they leave the City every day, 
 
16 LONDON 
 
 they for the most part leave it entirely, and 
 become something quite other than City 
 men till they return the next day. The City 
 man who lived there, and was nothing else, 
 was of a past generation. Yet it is foolish 
 to suppose that habits of mind in practice 
 for several hours every day do not uncon- 
 sciously linger when those hours are over; 
 and I think the contemporary fact that men 
 of every society and set are engaged in com- 
 merce has its connection with the contem- 
 porary fact that every society and set tends 
 to take money for its chief consideration. Is 
 it absolutely a national habit? One sees it 
 everywhere nowadays. Even they who 
 ought to be Bohemian, brilliant young 
 people who write and paint, are reckoning 
 their royalties and sales. It is a little de- 
 pressing. It is hard but that a universal 
 atmosphere should get into individual lungs, 
 so that those in whose pursuits merit brings 
 little money and faults bring much may be 
 tempted to desertion or regrets. But if a 
 man's aim in life be money chiefly, he should 
 go where money is. No amount of fretting 
 an artistic conscience will bring him a large 
 fortune. He should go into the City and try 
 his wits, and if I am right about intelligence, 
 
THE CITY 17 
 
 he should succeed. It is not altogether an 
 unamusing place. An uncompromising aim 
 and standard produce a rough cynicism that 
 sometimes refreshes one in the muddle of 
 opposing theories. The element of gambling 
 is pervasive and stimulating. No, it is not 
 altogether a dull place, but I decline to be- 
 lieve in the constancy of its energy, the 
 breadth of its intelligence, or the cleverness 
 of its jokes. 
 
III. THE STRAND 
 
 Who would dare to write anything of Fleet 
 Street ? Not I, and in fact I am glad to say 
 I know but little of it, greatly disliking its 
 appearance. We come westwards to the 
 Strand. But I cannot avoid writing about 
 myself if I am to write about the Strand, 
 because such amenities as it has for me are 
 entirely a matter of childish associations. 
 Those who have none of these pleasant 
 memories cannot appreciate it as I ; but I 
 fancy many people are in my own case. If I 
 were to come upon the Strand for the first 
 time to-day, it is likely it would not engage 
 my sympathies very warmly. If you cared 
 to point out to me that it is obstructive and 
 evil-smelling, and peopled by an unattractive 
 type of loafer, I could make no defence of it. 
 Taken as it stands, its evils are indefensible. 
 But to me and some others, from ten years 
 old to fifteen, the Strand was a sort of Mecca 
 of pleasure-lovers : it meant theatres — there 
 were few then west of it in town — and 
 
THE STRAND 19 
 
 theatres were then the acknowledged princes 
 of amusement. Pleasant was the sight of it 
 when one went to the play comfortably with 
 one's people, and pleasant the sight of it 
 when one sneaked there alone — as I boast to 
 have done at twelve — with enough money 
 for an afternoon pit. At fifteen or so, how- 
 ever, your British schoolboy grows sophisti- 
 cated and (in all probability) a bit of a snob, 
 and he becomes aware that the Strand and 
 its theatres are not the haunt of the aristo- 
 cratic roue. It is then no longer Mecca — 
 merely a casual oasis in the desert of boy- 
 hood's routine. But I am happy to say that 
 in my own case this knowledge was counter- 
 balanced by another attraction. For some 
 reason, which I cannot recall, it was in the 
 Strand that I localised that life of impe- 
 cunious but persistent pleasure-seeking 
 which I read of in the Sporting Times, a life 
 which I sturdily believed to be unceasingly 
 brilliant, and the details of which (I believed 
 them all to be true) I read every week with 
 religious care in my study at school. The 
 idea of this life quite fascinated me — its 
 joyous carelessness, its cynicism, its behind- 
 the-scenesness, its lack of discipline and 
 moderation. I hope it was all real: it was 
 
20 LONDON 
 
 an agreeable atmosphere to my imagination. 
 Well — I placed it in the Strand, and on my 
 way to a theatre I looked wistfully at the 
 passers-by, as who might see unconsciously 
 one of those brilliant beings whom I did 
 not know. And then at nineteen came the 
 university, and one's ' comrades of college,' 
 as Florae called them, introduced one to 
 other quarters of public pleasure a trifle 
 more exciting than the old, and so the Strand 
 slid down from its pedestal. 
 
 But now when I walk down it these memo- 
 ries of pleasure, partly enjoyed, but in 
 greater measure imaginary, are stronger 
 and sweeter far than those I have as I pass 
 the scenes of later and more actual amuse- 
 ment. The gala pleasures, as it were, of 
 early manhood are not, so far as London is 
 concerned, most agreeable to recollect : they 
 were most often tedious, not seldom coarse 
 and even vulgar. The philosopher of maturer 
 years remembers them perhaps without the 
 weakness of regrets, but he has small desire 
 indeed to re-enact them, and the places 
 where they were pursued have little charm 
 about them. But in childhood there was, 
 even about pleasures so little ethereal as 
 play-going, a quality of imagination which 
 
THE STRAND 21 
 
 redeemed them from banality and connected 
 them with the finer pleasures — in childhood 
 or in later life — that come of imagination 
 working on books. And I would even claim 
 that the callow boy's imagination of such 
 trite gaieties as I have indicated, his vague 
 idea of brilliant dissipation, is not without 
 its excusable quality of temperament: 
 certainly it is better than the actual dissi- 
 pation of succeeding years, and its locality 
 may be honoured without shame. 
 
 So the Strand with its malodorous restau- 
 rants, and uninteresting shops, and loafing, 
 soulless crowds, is dear to me in a way. Of 
 its actual state, as it appears to older eyes, 
 there is nothing very pleasant to say. It is 
 the haunt still of lesser actors, who go there, 
 I suppose, on business or to meet their 
 friends. The stage, like the turf, marks the 
 faces of its servants, and they preserve, as 
 far as they are allowed, the ancient and 
 picturesque instinct of distinctive dress. 
 But that charm, of faces or of dress, is not 
 enduring, if I may say so. Even the air of 
 importance, which I admit is amusing at first, 
 somewhat palls upon me. . . . 
 
 A great portion of a Strand crowd is, I 
 admit, not certainly intelligible to me. I 
 
22 LONDON 
 
 mean those people, neither obviously actors 
 nor journalists nor betting men, who drag 
 themselves wearily along and look in at 
 shop-windows. They are mostly young men, 
 and I conjecture that these are the counter- 
 part, on a lower plane of the social hierarchy, 
 of the men who stroll down Piccadilly of a 
 morning. Just as the country squire and 
 the man home from India like to stroll to 
 their clubs down Piccadilly, so, I imagine, 
 does the young provincial clerk, in town for 
 a few days' pleasuring, and not knowing 
 what to do with his mornings, loaf wearily 
 about the Strand, and look at photographs in 
 shop-windows and the halls of theatres. My 
 occasions take me too seldom to the Strand 
 to be acquainted by sight with its constant 
 figures, familiar, no doubt, to its habitual 
 frequenters. The only one I can remember 
 who used at one time to give it coherence, 
 as it were, and continuity to me, was a 
 sporting peer (now deceased) of some 
 notoriety, a man extraordinary for his hats 
 and remarkable for his waistcoats : he was 
 often in the Strand when I passed it, and 
 was easy to remember. Do you not like 
 these familiar, jDersonally unknown faces, 
 who seem always to meet you in certain 
 
THE STRAND 23 
 
 parts of the town ? There is an old gentle- 
 man I always see in St. James's Street, and a 
 younger I always see in Piccadilly, when I 
 take my walks abroad : I do not know who 
 either of them is, but I have many personal 
 acquaintances whose death would pain me 
 less. I regret I have no such unknown 
 familiar in the Strand. 
 
 No, the Strand as I see it now does not 
 attract me. But these memories, imperfect, 
 banal, as you may think them, prevent my 
 speaking ill of it. What days, when the 
 theatre was real enchantment — even the 
 theatre in contemporary London ! Love of 
 the footlights dies hard, but it is tried with 
 tolerable severity. Even then the delight 
 must have been suggestive mainly. When, 
 at sixteen, one sat in one's stall at the Gaiety 
 with a gardenia in one's button-hole and a 
 stick, as the custom was then, between one's 
 knees, it was not, I suppose, the wit of Mr. 
 Burnand's puns, or Miss Gilchrist's poses, or 
 even the catching vivacity of Miss Nelly 
 Farren, that formed one's chief enjoyment. 
 One had heard stories — ah, dear precocious 
 days when behind-the-scenes was mystery 
 and cynicism a joy ! They must not pull 
 down the Strand in my time. 
 
IV. ST. JAMES'S AND MAYFAIR 
 
 I WRITE of these two parishes together, 
 because if to-day their atmospheres differ 
 vastly, a hundred years ago and earlier — and 
 that is more important — their atmospheres 
 were much the same. It would be easy to 
 give you a list of engaging persons who lived 
 in one and the other, but it is not necessary. 
 When you think of the town of a century 
 to a century and a half ago, you think of 
 these parishes: it extended farther east- 
 wards, to be sure, but these remain with 
 much of their old appearance, and the per- 
 sistence of fashion in them to some extent 
 helps to make familiar the fashion of old 
 days. In Mayfair and St. James's lived those 
 dear people with elaborate manners whose 
 rudeness on occasion could be so very much 
 to the point, those men who bowed with 
 such an ample grace to one another and 
 presently ran one another through the 
 middle, those women who wrote 'Dear Sir' 
 
 to their most intimate friends and reduced 
 u 
 
ST. JAMES'S AND MAYFAIR 25 
 
 the scandal they whispered behind their fans 
 to terms so elementary. They were so punc- 
 tilious in little things, those dear people, and 
 so courageous when it came to the things 
 that matter. Heigho, they had something 
 to talk about! 'Have you heard the new 
 use for a bed-curtain ring, my dear?' ' Lord, 
 child, what can you mean?' ''Tis to get 
 
 married with.' 'My dear ' 'As I'm a 
 
 person of honour, 'tis true. His Grace of 
 Hamilton hath set the fashion. He must 
 get himself married in the night, so he wakes 
 up your neighbour the parson, and for want 
 of a ring prepared — you conceive the occa- 
 sion was something of the hastiest — he weds 
 the blushing nymph with a bed-curtain ring.' 
 
 ' Last night — married — why, who ' ' The 
 
 happy virgin, my dear, was the incompar- 
 able Gunning.' ' That ' ' Hush ! my 
 
 dear, you speak of her Grace of Hamilton.' 
 They must have enjoyed their conversa- 
 tion. 
 
 I am prepared to hear you say that the 
 savour of these times is coarse, something 
 animal. It is so easy to be misled by the 
 use of periphrases for monosyllables. All 
 the scandal that ever was talked comes to 
 elementary facts : I suggest that the clash 
 
26 LONDON 
 
 of swords makes a better accompaniment for 
 it — merely from an aesthetic point of view — 
 than the growl of heavy leading articles. 
 But it is monstrously simple to suppose that 
 the lives led in Mayfair and St. James's a 
 hundred years ago were more elementary 
 than those led to-day. The ' morals ' of idle 
 and wealthy people in every age are, climate 
 for climate, much alike. My own belief is 
 that the more highly placed of the older 
 period were less materialised: certainly 
 money, as such, was of less importance to 
 them, and taste of greater. Appreciation of 
 the arts came chiefly from them, as it cer- 
 tainly comes not now. Morals, in the limited 
 sense to which we are accustomed, are 
 coloured by such a fact, though they may 
 not be changed. But I claim only equality. 
 Unless humanity in general disgust you, 
 there is nothing that should disgust you in 
 particular with the lives of these parishes 
 in past centuries. 
 
 If one had to say offhand what were the 
 characteristics of Mayfair and St. James's 
 that distinguish the eighteenth century and 
 some years of the next from our latter days, 
 one might say that the material characteris- 
 tic was colour, the spiritual was irony. The 
 
ST. JAMES'S AND MAYFAIR 27 
 
 former difference is too obvious for comment. 
 Horace Walpole asked Lady Townshend to 
 choose his clothes for his niece's wedding : 
 she chose him 'a white ground with purple 
 and green flowers.' I should like to have 
 seen such wedding-guests trooping to a house 
 in Pall Mall, with a May sun shining his best 
 on them. As for the irony, I think it dis- 
 tinguished that time from ours even more 
 than did the brocade and the purple. The 
 letters and memoirs picture it constantly; 
 it was evidently the tone of pleasant breed- 
 ing. To relate the most eccentric of actions 
 with a grave dispassionateness — to regard 
 life as an amused, indifferent spectator, 
 that was the right air. It is almost gone, I 
 imagine. People take life as a bicycle race : 
 they took it then as a saunter. The 'pace' 
 in one sense was perhaps greater, but there 
 were longer breathing-times and pauses. 
 Hence irony was possible : people struggling 
 to keep heads above social water — or to push 
 them under — cannot be dispassionate in their 
 comments. 
 
 So the atmosphere that imagination calls 
 up in the parishes is that of a picturesque 
 game of life, a leisurely dance, with the ex- 
 hilaration in the air that came from hidden 
 
28 LONDON 
 
 currents of hot blood and desires accomplish- 
 ing themselves without fear or scruple. And 
 some charrm of those frontless, uncompro- 
 mising, patched beauties, and of the men 
 who drank and gambled and intrigued in 
 politics and love, and fought for their country 
 and fought one another and sometimes shot 
 themselves — some charm of a gayer, statelier, 
 more brightly wicked time lingers in the 
 places where they lived. 
 
 To me the charm of these places is almost 
 wholly of the past. But I must venture 
 an idea or two of the present. As I said, 
 Mayfair and St. James's have different 
 atmospheres, the one from the other, now. 
 Mayfair suggests plutocracy. St. James's is 
 rather impecunious than otherwise: there 
 are so many stray men of poor fortunes in 
 its attics. St. James's Square and a few 
 houses in St. James's Place are about the 
 only harbourage of whole families, pluto- 
 cratic or otherwise : the rest is clubs and 
 shops and lodging-houses. In the ten years 
 or so that my acquaintance with St. James's 
 Street has been constant, it seems to be 
 growing less dignified. There is — it seems 
 to me — more blatant noise of newspaper- 
 boys, more orange-peel, more bits of paper 
 
ST. JAMES'S AND MAYFAIR 29 
 
 in the street than was once the case. But 
 St. James's remains the district of all others 
 in town where a stray man should live, 
 unless he live in the Temple. It has associa- 
 tions and a pleasant atmosphere of a kind 
 even now. The Palace and the guards out- 
 side it, and the house across the way, give 
 it dignity for the circuit of a rood or so. It 
 does not swarm with miscellaneous crowds 
 on Sunday, as does Piccadilly, but there is 
 always some interest of humanity as you 
 stroll about or look out of a club window. 
 The milk is carried round by women with 
 the pails slung across their shoulders; they 
 suggest a game of Arcadia. There is a grati- 
 fication also in living near St. James's Square, 
 certainly the most dignified square in the 
 town. I have never been able to understand 
 how anybody not the twentieth duke of his 
 family and the possessor of several estates 
 in the country can presume to live in St. 
 James's Square, and I have always felt it to 
 be an honour and a pledge of a dignified life 
 to live, as it were, round the corner of it. 
 It speaks of ducal lines. And so the Palace 
 speaks of Courts, though to be sure the last 
 Court interesting to me was held in White- 
 hall. But I am drifting back to old times: 
 
30 LONDON 
 
 enough to say that St. James's is the proper 
 district for your single man. 
 
 Those who need a whole house may go to 
 Mayfair, if (by the way) they can afford it. 
 But one can only speak of its present state 
 in a sorrowful whisper. The names of its 
 streets and the appearance of its houses, or 
 many of them, warrant your living there, 
 if you must be fashionable. It is still a 
 thousand times preferable to Belgravia — the 
 shoddy-looking, the ugly beyond compare. 
 But it has heart-breaking associations with 
 mere millionaires, with wealth run to fat- 
 ness, never to elegance. It has taken to 
 itself a heavy, dull appearance; there are 
 parts of it where I am forced to rej)eat old 
 letters by heart to withstand the force of 
 present pomp and tedium. Still — we must 
 make the best of it. It is the best we have 
 in the way of domestic fashion. But I can't 
 write more of it without quotations. 
 
V. PICCADILLY 
 
 ' Though I be fair as a powdered peruke, 
 And once was a gaping silly, 
 Your Whitechapel Countess will prove. Lord Duke, 
 
 She 's a regular tiger lily : 
 She '11 fight you with cold steel and she '11 run you off your 
 
 legs 
 Down the length of Piccadilly.' 
 
 Yes, there was a time when exciting things 
 happened in Piccadilly, but one has to go for 
 them, as Mr. Meredith has gone, at least to 
 the first quarter of the century. Nowadays 
 the eyes of the nation are not fixed on a 
 handful of social heroes and heroines, so that 
 even were a discarded wife to chase her false 
 fleeting lord along the edge of the Green 
 Park few people would hear of the event, in 
 spite of our wonderful Press. But I doubt 
 if anything of interest, reported or not, ever 
 happens now in Piccadilly. If our manners 
 are less elaborate than our ancestors' were, 
 we are certainly more self-contained. Few 
 people ' let themselves go ' anywhere, least of 
 all in a public thoroughfare : the exceptions 
 
 31 
 
32 LONDON 
 
 are controlled by the police. And I fancy 
 the habit of interested sauntering has de- 
 clined; we hurry from one stupid occasion 
 to another in cabs and omnibuses, and we 
 lose our acquaintances in the crowd. Our 
 reminiscences will contain but few remark- 
 able encounters in the street. 
 
 All the same, there is still a significance in 
 Piccadilly. That is to say, from Bond Street 
 to Hyde Park Corner : from Bond Street east- 
 wards to the Circus there is no significance 
 at all, merely shops and an obstructive flow 
 of vacuous humanity. But walk from Bond 
 Street westwards on a fine day about half- 
 past twelve in the morning, and as you go 
 down the slope you feel that you are in the 
 spacious middle of social London, in the part 
 of it that means Town — as Mr. Kipling sings 
 to his banjo — to men who have known Town, 
 when they hear the word in Australia or on 
 the Niger. And that is the part that attracts 
 them when they return. Some house in the 
 country is dearer, perhaps, but they feel that 
 they are back in Town when they walk down 
 the slope of Piccadilly. Their minds may 
 contain little of the social memories of the 
 place : they may not think of the Duke 
 in his duck trousers or of 'old Q' in his 
 
PICCADILLY 33 
 
 unrepentant age, but there, if anywhere. 
 Town stirs in their blood. 
 
 I do not think it can be a merely personal 
 and individual pleasure that conies to me 
 when on a fine morning I look down Picca- 
 dilly from the top of the slope. I have 
 observed it often in others, and I always 
 fancy that people look brighter, with a 
 blander eye on the world, here than else- 
 where in London. For myself, I am conscious 
 of a sort of ludicrous increase of importance, 
 as though here one were less of an ant on 
 an ant-hill and more of a necessary screw in 
 the machine. I feel almost as one having a 
 definite and not despicable place in the com- 
 munity, who can hold up his head and meet 
 the world with a smile, not dodge it round a 
 corner. Perhaps it is that one's mind un- 
 consciously surveys its memories of those 
 who have strolled down Piccadilly, — not only 
 those whose achievements or fortune have 
 been infinitely greater, but those who have 
 come to infinitely worse grief ; and it un- 
 consciously reminds itself that the descent is 
 not altogether completed. Some have so 
 walked down Piccadilly and continued their 
 walking till they did it on tottering but 
 honoured feet: others have walked down 
 
 c 
 
34 LONDON 
 
 Piccadilly and walked away into some un- 
 known Inferno. I will not trouble you with 
 the associations of this or that house: per- 
 haps they too add to one's importance, as 
 one feels solemn in a graveyard. 
 
 There are folk who have no right in 
 Piccadilly of a morning. Those whose in- 
 terests are comprised in their money gains 
 and losses ; those whose clothes, whether old 
 or new, are worn uneasily ; those who stare 
 and scowl at their neighbours, and those 
 who cannot dissimulate their success in life, 
 — all these profane ones are requested to 
 absent themselves. In the afternoon let 
 them return : regretfully then I abandon 
 Piccadilly to the plutocrat ; by all means let 
 him arrive there from the City and stare at 
 his kith and kin in the crawling carriages. 
 In the morning it is for amiable people, who 
 saunter idly or march with a brisk swing, 
 people affable with their eyes, who assume 
 that those they meet are their brothers and 
 enjoy, they also, a pleasant outlook on life, 
 free from fret and snobbery and every base- 
 ness. Let them sniff the morning air and 
 take the town as a natural place, and forget 
 its gorging gold and suffocated millions. 
 
 All this of fine mornings in general, and 
 
PICCADILLY 35 
 
 especially of the early spring, before London 
 is used up and all men's faces are grown pale 
 with too effectual pleasures. In the after- 
 noon, as I said, the place is different. Some- 
 thing foetid has descended in the air, the red 
 sheen is gone from the omnibuses, the idle 
 saunter is exchanged for the painful crawl, 
 and the brisk swing for the blatant swagger ; 
 the baser racial instincts have come atop. 
 
 In the evenings there is a new enchant- 
 ment. But unless you be a triple-brass 
 philosopher, to enjoy it you must drive; 
 walking you find the national superiority in 
 morals a little too disagreeable. But drive, 
 drive up Piccadilly this time, not down, and 
 observe the lines of lamps in the darkness, 
 the one line by the seemly houses, the other 
 by the black trees. Do they not suggest 
 to you something vaguely but pervadingly 
 romantic ? 
 
 In the morning there was the feeling of 
 what social charm and interest there may 
 be in a town; at night there is the feeling 
 of its possibilities of adventure. It is, of 
 course, quite a different romance from that 
 of grey moors and distant lights in old 
 windows : this romance is gay in its quality, 
 even feverish. You may be driving home 
 
36 LONDON 
 
 from a quiet dinner-party, to go quietly to 
 bed; but do you not find a romance in this 
 line of lamps leading into the heart of the 
 town, where life, you imagine for a moment, 
 is at some heat of interest? There it lies 
 before you, multitudes of human things 
 with hearts and fancies, countless abodes of 
 mystery. You lean back and continue your 
 course, without a regret, to your peaceful 
 and respectable dwelling-place, but for a 
 moment there was the sense of romance, a 
 faint wave against your brain of the blood 
 that craves adventure. A fleeting fancy : as 
 I write it is gone: words do but riddle it. 
 As you draw into the closer traffic, romance 
 has flown, the closer sight of your fellow- 
 creatures, unless you be very young, has 
 killed it. Perhaps it was not a very edifying 
 thing while it was with you. But nowhere 
 else in London, as in Piccadilly by night, 
 shall you feel it. And for it, as for my 
 morning's stroll down the slope, do I count 
 Piccadilly precious beyond words. 
 
VI. BAYSWATER AND ST. JOHN'S 
 WOOD 
 
 I AM quite prepared to be charged with a 
 morbid extremity of cowardice when I con- 
 fess that Bayswater terrifies me. But the 
 confession is necessary, for this terror is the 
 proof of Bayswater's qualities, and without 
 it Bayswater cannot be explained. Yes : 
 when I walk through the wide-stretching 
 mass of monotonous ugliness, behind all my 
 artistic loathing there is fear — cold, deadly 
 fear. I sometimes wonder if the fear may 
 be directly personal; if, in spite of science 
 and all that, it is an intimation that some 
 day Bayswater will stretch forth a callous 
 hand and take me to itself, and I shall be- 
 come a Bayswater householder. We are 
 weak creatures, driven here and there by 
 circumstance, and the world is strong. Who 
 can tell if he too may not some day walk 
 down an ugly, soulless, monotonous Bays- 
 water street, and stand aghast as he re- 
 members that in such a house his lot is fixed 
 
 o7 
 
38 LONDON 
 
 for evermore, till the green-roofed house 
 receives his weary body ? 
 
 He may cry aloud and beat his breast, and 
 protest that his soul craves for beautiful 
 things : it will be in vain — he must take out 
 his latch-key and enter. Circumstance has 
 been too strong for him : he is a Bayswater 
 householder. 
 
 But this is a nightmare, and after all the 
 fear may have a less personally horrible ex- 
 planation. It may be that Bayswater affects 
 me in the same manner that I should be 
 affected by the dust of the Sahara, and have 
 been affected by a grey-coloured sea, when 
 the sky is sunless. It is the effect of limit- 
 less monotony. You walk through squares 
 and streets and ' gardens ' and ' terraces,' and 
 they are all the same. Square succeeds 
 square with no individual difference. Con- 
 sequently one is afraid, feeling one's own 
 narrow limits and very finite condition, 
 one's tendency to change and caprice, one's 
 development and the end thereof — feeling 
 all this and feeling Bayswater's uniformity 
 and immutability and vastness. Not to speak 
 it profanely, Bayswater suggests eternity, 
 and that, as we all know, depresses even the 
 most buoyant of us. 
 
BAYSWATER AND ST. JOHN'S WOOD 39 
 
 It is difficult for me to conceive the in- 
 habitants of Bayswater — when I think of 
 them in the mass — as not doing the same 
 things, strictly and absolutely, every day. 
 It is difficult for me to imagine that they 
 are born and marry and grow old and die. 
 I think of them involuntarily as eating the 
 same breakfasts, reading the same news- 
 papers, saying the same things at dinner 
 every day. I am even inclined to think that 
 such must be the case of the essential in- 
 habitants, and that the people living there 
 whom I know must be necessarily different 
 from the others. 
 
 If surroundings affect people at all, surely 
 to be surrounded by countless houses all 
 exactly the same as one's own must en- 
 courage the monotony of life to which most 
 of us are prone already. If you pass through 
 some of those outlying suburbs which consist 
 of rows upon rows of little confined houses, 
 it is odd but that you think with pity on 
 the tame and dreary lives of their tenants. 
 You have no pity in Bayswater, because you 
 assume that most of the people are well-to- 
 do, and many of the houses indicate opulence. 
 But monotony is monotony everywhere, and 
 these prisoners are merely exercised in a 
 
40 LONDON 
 
 slightly wider circle. For my part, I pity 
 neither society, knowing that both are 
 tolerably happy, as doing what they are 
 accustomed to do, and being afraid that the 
 impertinence might be resented. But if you 
 are to be concerned for the soulless lives of 
 your fellow-creatures, you have quite as 
 much reason to argue lack of soul in Bays- 
 water as in the poorer parts of Wandsworth 
 and Clapham; the raiment and fare are 
 better, and that is all. One may be more 
 rightly concerned, however, with the ugliness 
 of Bayswater than with its monotony, be- 
 cause it is really not good for a community 
 to have quite such bad taste as the English 
 public, and if you are ever puzzled by that 
 taste you have only to walk about Bays- 
 water to understand it. But this lament is 
 growing as dull as the place; let us go on 
 to St. John's Wood. 
 
 St. John's Wood gratifies the mind with a 
 contrast, because whereas the idea of Bays- 
 water is of dulness and respectability and 
 opulently bad taste, that of St. John's Wood 
 is of two things frequently conjoined in the 
 British mind — art and immorality. As to the 
 latter, I had best say frankly at once that I 
 do not believe in it. My belief is that the 
 
BAYSWATER AND ST. JOHN'S WOOD 41 
 
 public eye has been deceived by the number 
 of houses in St. John's Wood which have 
 high-walled gardens ; it does not understand 
 that a wish to avoid it may exist for reasons 
 not immoral. Or else it opines that there is 
 a suspicious prettiness about it : the necessity 
 of ugliness to morality is still a lurking con- 
 viction. Or else the idea of immorality 
 simply follows on that of art, for there still 
 exists a gloomy suspicion that all art not 
 religious, or at least didactic, is vicious. 
 
 St. John's Wood suggests art in concrete 
 forms. It does not perhaps speak to one's 
 soul of art eternal, but the knowledge that 
 many houses in St. John's Wood are in- 
 habited by actors and painters bestows on it 
 a glamour of a sort. Moreover, it contains 
 some rather beautiful gardens, so that it 
 repeats Campden Hill, with the fascinating 
 addition of mystery and recklessness. These 
 qualities, it is true, may come to it from the 
 old idea in which I have said I do not believe. 
 But it is a happy fact of psychology that we 
 may have to abandon a belief that may yet 
 illogically retain its associations. I have 
 abandoned the belief in the immorality of 
 St. John's Wood, but I still feel there — and 
 bless therefor my want of logic — that the 
 
42 LONDON 
 
 place is mysterious ; that could one pass 
 through keyholes, one would happen on 
 romances and adventures. To live there 
 would not be to suffer the staling of custom. 
 There would be a stimulus as one walked 
 down the road of one's house, haply shaded 
 with trees, and went to one's study looking 
 into a pleasant old garden. The sound of a 
 passing cab would suggest some dark in- 
 trigue, and set one dreaming. ... A pleasant 
 place, most agreeable after Bayswater. 
 
VII. KENSINGTON AND HAMMERSMITH 
 
 I SUPPOSE it was the existence of Kensing- 
 ton Palace that induced the inhabitants of 
 various other districts, such as Brompton, 
 Hammersmith, and Ladbroke Grove, to call 
 them South Kensington, West Kensington, 
 and so forth. It is a rather curious instance 
 of the great national characteristic parading 
 itself undisguised. It annoys me to think of 
 it, because these other places have a right to 
 their proper names and to the histories and 
 associations thereof. 
 
 But before I can say agreeable things of 
 Kensington, I must dispose of its melancholy 
 High Street. I think it one of the saddest 
 sights in London, interesting perhaps to the 
 impartial observer of human society, but a 
 sore to the patriot, and a stumbling-block to 
 the optimist. Crowds and crowds of women, 
 loitering outside shops, gazing anxiously at 
 the goods in the windows ! Women with 
 no sign of compelling poverty about them, 
 
 43 
 
44 LONDON 
 
 spending long mornings and afternoons 
 loitering, gazing, searching for little bargains 
 to adorn themselves withal. Where, I have 
 asked myself, is the higher education of 
 women we hear of, the emancipation, the 
 thought, the soul, the intelligence? For 
 years and years we have had no time to 
 attend to anything except the purity and 
 poetry and secret yearnings and intellectual 
 progress of woman, independent woman, and 
 — here she is, loitering and gazing — in her 
 right place, says the 'cynical man of the 
 world,' but it afflicts me dreadfully. At 
 Hammersmith Broadway also one sees 
 loiterers, but they are there for love of 
 loitering and idling simply, to exchange 
 open-air chaff with their acquaintance, to 
 enjoy life, not to hunt for mean bargains. 
 They are a genuine folk, leading, if one may 
 judge from a glance, practical lives — lives, 
 that is to say, in consonance with their tastes, 
 which lean to simple pleasures rather than 
 to getting on in the world by hard work. 
 The scene is cheerful, careless ; the talk is 
 open, friendly, with a pleasant smack of 
 irresponsibility in its phrases. The scene 
 in Kensington High Street is posing and 
 anxious, the talk mincing. 
 
KENSINGTON AND HAMMERSMITH 45 
 
 Happily, however, that is not all of 
 Kensington : one may turn with relief to its 
 pleasant Gardens, and the spacious, comely 
 houses in its northern quarter. It was my 
 fortune as a child often to stay in one of 
 them, and to be taken for my walk in the 
 Gardens every fine morning, and the west 
 gate, hard by the Palace, was, as it were, the 
 entrance to a wide field of possible romance. 
 We walked as far as the Albert Memorial, 
 which I regarded as a thing of mere magni- 
 ficence, not having been taught its offences 
 against art : I feel kindly towards it yet, and 
 should be extremely sorry if some secret 
 society of artistic persons were to blow it up. 
 So Kensington Gardens have a place in my 
 dreams of childhood, and doubtless have one 
 in many another sentimentalist's memories, 
 and one might have an uglier background. 
 I do not profess to regard the Palace with 
 any particular interest. English society was 
 extremely interesting when the King lived 
 there, but the Court was the least interesting 
 section of it, and Kensington Palace has no 
 associations of romance or of beauty. But 
 there are other houses hard by which suggest 
 comely things of the past and the present. I 
 remember one with gratitude for its uncon- 
 
46 LONDON 
 
 scious influence. It was of Queen Anne's 
 date, and had much old oak about it, with a 
 garden large for the town, and a high wall 
 which shut out London altogether. I should 
 like to buy it if ever I am rich — or is it a 
 fatal thing to resume associations of many 
 years ago ? I fancy it is. I know that when 
 I have gone back to my old school I have 
 been quite unable to push back old feelings, 
 and a word of command from the head- 
 master would have dissipated my man- 
 hood's self-respect in a moment and been 
 followed by instant obedience. So that a 
 house familiar to one's childhood — not, that 
 is to say, constantly familiar since, and so as 
 it were growing with one's growth — would 
 be like to send one dreaming day and night, 
 — and one commonly dreams too much for a 
 literal world as it is. As for one's present 
 regard for houses in this quarter, one con- 
 nects them somehow with art in comfort, 
 with fine taste and money to exercise it 
 withal. Perhaps the spirit of art shines 
 brighter in a student's garret, but it is only 
 ' perhaps ' after all, and the weaker brethren 
 may be allowed to prefer spaciousness and 
 soft cushions. These large and oldish houses 
 on Campden Hill suggest art and comfort 
 
KENSINGTON AND HAMMERSMITH 47 
 
 to one in passing them, whether or no the 
 insides of them correspond thereto. 
 
 It is all a matter of temperament, if you 
 like better such suggestions as these or those 
 of little houses in the Hammersmith Road. 
 These latter suggest a life less fine, less 
 delicate, less remote, but a life more restive 
 and ardent and in a superficial sense more 
 real. The Dickens temperament of quick 
 sympathy with common things prefers the 
 latter, and I think there should be moments 
 when we all prefer those smaller and warmer 
 suggestions. A home precariously supported 
 by hard work, having in it the bond of 
 common anxieties and what perhaps you call 
 vulgar pleasures — is it not at times and for 
 a moment warmer to one's sympathies than 
 a life of refined ease, of assured immunity 
 from essential privations? One would not 
 cant about different measures of affections, 
 which are as likely to be strong in one as in 
 the other life, but we may feel the throb of a 
 struggle for common existence which was 
 the aboriginal rule. The master of the little 
 house has had a good day's takings in his shop 
 or (haply) a successful day on the turf ; the 
 mistress can go with him to the music hall : 
 or perhaps he has had a knock-down blow, 
 
48 LONDON 
 
 and they must look out for two little rooms 
 in a back street. At times one sympathises 
 with such events as much as with the for- 
 tunate purchaser of a Velasquez. In litera- 
 ture, of course, it may or may not be one's 
 preference to linger with vulgar joys and 
 troubles — for my own part I think we have 
 had enough and to spare of them in books, 
 and but for the rigid rule of the market 
 which insists that writers should write the 
 same book over and over again, I would 
 exhort some professors of the humble to 
 turn their minds to Queen Anne houses and 
 beautiful backgrounds. In life, however, 
 one should not resent the sight of the little 
 houses on the Hammersmith Road, nor 
 resent the large houses with pleasant gardens 
 on Campden Hill. They are near together 
 in place, and it may be well if one turns 
 easily from the one to the other in imagina- 
 tive sympathy. It may have been some such 
 idea that induced me to join them together. 
 
VIII. THE SUBURBS 
 
 I HAVE observed that to live anywhere in 
 England may be made a reproach, a scoffing, 
 if not a hissing : a curious sign it is of an 
 instinctive pessimism. ' Cockney,' ' provin- 
 cial,' 'suburban,' are all adjectives of evil 
 import, but the worst of these is ' suburban.' 
 ' Cockney ' has something qualifying in its 
 connotation, and ' provincial ' has some air of 
 excuse, but 'suburban' is wholly scornful 
 and indignant, without one plea of kindness. 
 ' It will be popular in the suburbs ' is the last 
 word of contempt for a work of art, and ' sub- 
 urban ' is the commonest missile thrown at a 
 maker of books or plays. In the days when 
 depreciators of Dr. Ibsen still throve in the 
 land, they used to call him suburban, by way 
 of a triumphant assertion of a taste superior 
 to his eulogists. I have never been able to 
 understand it. The average taste of the 
 London suburbs in things artistic is much 
 the same — you will find it difficult to differ- 
 entiate it — as that of the rest of England. 
 
 D 
 
50 LONDON 
 
 Not a good taste, to be sure — but why the 
 invidious selection ? The inhabitants of the 
 suburbs are leavened as much as any others. 
 Horace Walpole, surely one of the most 
 urban of men, preferred Twickenham to 
 Arlington Street and Berkeley Square, and 
 for much the same reasons as the city clerk 
 of to-day might prefer it to an abode pos- 
 sible for him in town ; he liked the greater 
 spaciousness and the ' greenth and blueth ' of 
 the comparative country. Or if you say that 
 Twickenham was not a suburb then, I will — 
 with great reluctance — drop Horace Walpole 
 and come to the present day. The greatest 
 of living English poets lives in a suburb ; and 
 he who, in my opinion, is beyond intelligent 
 question next to him, used to live in another. 
 And any number of genuinely artistic and 
 intellectual people live in parts of London 
 which used to be called suburbs — Kensington 
 and the like — and ought to be called suburbs 
 now. Why, when the poor suburbs are men- 
 tioned, should we not sometimes think of 
 them, and not of the common race of dullards 
 who are the same all over England? I 
 protest I am sorry for the suburbs, and 
 indignant at their treatment. 
 
 The matter has gone so far that there are 
 
THE SUBURBS 51 
 
 8uburbs whose very names make people 
 laugh — with the laugh of indulgent super- 
 iority — even though they live themselves in 
 suburbs. The mere mention of Tooting or 
 Peckham Rye makes inhabitants of Rich- 
 mond or Wimbledon roar with laughter. 
 Why? I have heard people laugh heartily 
 at the mere suggestion that anybody can live 
 at Walham Green. Yet Peckham Rye and 
 Walham Green are euphonious names, and I 
 defy you to mention any ridiculous associa- 
 tion their names convey. I protest the 
 humour is altogether too subtle for me. 
 
 A reason for the contempt in which the 
 suburbs are held may be that their houses 
 are ugly. They are ugly, it is true. As a 
 result, I suppose, of that diffusion of pro- 
 sperity and comfort of which we are all so 
 proud, it is rapidly becoming impossible for 
 a person of moderate means in England to 
 escape squalid and hideous surroundings. 
 Ivy-covered cottages near London are nearly 
 all pulled down, and rows of little vile red 
 villas occupy the ground. If you are not 
 rich enough to live in a big house, standing 
 in its own ample grounds, and with a high 
 wall to shut out the view, you must live in a 
 little vile villa or something like it. It is 
 
52 LONDON 
 
 your fault for being born into this highly 
 civilised generation. But are London houses 
 so beautiful ? Mayf air, to be sure, is seemly, 
 and has an atmosphere, and Bloomsbury has 
 its virtues. But the tenants of unlovely, 
 mean-garbed Belgravia need crow over no 
 suburb in a ten mile circuit. Moreover, if 
 most suburbs are ugly, some are very much 
 the reverse, and when the word is mentioned. 
 Sheen and Roehampton should qualify its 
 ugly import. 
 
 Another reason for the contempt is, I sup- 
 pose, the idea that the social life of a suburb 
 is peculiarly mean and silly. This should be 
 qualified by the fact that in many suburbs 
 there is no social life at all. To the male 
 inhabitants, at least, they are simply dormi- 
 tories. There is also a qualification in the 
 occasionally convenient fact that in some 
 suburbs, as in London, you are absolved from 
 neighbourly acquaintance. You may live for 
 years in a suburb without knowing a single 
 inhabitant, if you have enough of acquaint- 
 ance elsewhere, or dislike human intercourse, 
 or fear the quality of that about you. There 
 is this negative qualification. Apart from 
 that, I suppose it is likely that the society of 
 a suburb may in its gradations have less 
 
THE SUBURBS 53 
 
 relevance to the essential facts of human 
 existence than even that of a country town. 
 In a country town there are other dis- 
 tinctions than those of apparent affluence or 
 poverty, though the latter, no doubt, tend to 
 be all supreme, and these other distinctions, 
 albeit often ignorant and anachronistic, are 
 not entirely sordid. Whereas in an inferior 
 suburb nothing but apparent wealth has a 
 vogue. But, after all, this is very much the 
 case elsewhere, and the reductio ad ahsurdum 
 in your suburb may entertain the minor 
 philosopher. I know a suburb in which 
 there is, as it were, a patrician and a plebeian 
 quarter: both quarters are mainly peopled 
 by tradesmen from the nearest part of Lon- 
 don, but the patrician quarter has a fine, 
 untempered scorn of the plebeian — will not 
 know it, in fact. Such sordid features are 
 silly. But we need hardly be angry with 
 them, and, as I said, they are not appreci- 
 ably worse than England shows in general. 
 Against these I insist that the inhabitants of 
 the many charming houses I have seen from 
 the outside in more than one London suburb, 
 in Richmond, Sheen, Wimbledon, cannot be 
 other than amiable and delightful : if it were 
 not so they would have painted their charm- 
 
54 LONDON 
 
 ing old houses green, or committed some 
 other such indecency. No ; I am sure that 
 the evils of suburban society are qualified, 
 negatively and positively, as much as those 
 of other places, and I can find no explana- 
 tion of my puzzle in them. 
 
 I can find no explanation at all, and if it 
 suits your circumstances and your ideas of 
 comfort to live in a suburb, I beg you will 
 not be deterred by any unpleasant use of the 
 word. I can easily understand your inclina- 
 tion. Perhaps when England is one big town 
 it may become natural for human bodies to 
 breathe soot. At present it is natural to 
 seek air comparatively fresh, a garden in 
 which one can sit, and so forth. It is rather 
 a weak compromise to go so far only as a 
 suburb and to return to the sooty town every 
 day, instead of giving up city employment 
 and herding sheep on some breezy plain, and 
 there must needs be a loss of the true Lon- 
 don spirit. But we live in a material age, 
 and the health of wives and children and such 
 considerations influence us all. So get you 
 your little red-brick villa and be suburban 
 and unashamed. 
 
 It is not for me to express the suburbs in 
 their quiddity. When they are mean and 
 
THE SUBURBS 55 
 
 squalid, why then they are mean and squalid: 
 as I have suggested, there is little philosophi- 
 cally to differentiate their squalor from the 
 squalor of other English places. And the 
 same remark applies to their social life : it is 
 sometimes mean, it may be sometimes pleas- 
 ant, but it contains no points of difference 
 for the philosopher from social life elsewhere. 
 Such differences as there are, in the one or 
 the other case, are for the observer of details, 
 the engaging person who records minute 
 differences of ugliness in speech and manners 
 and appearance for those who like such 
 photographs. But a feeling one has had in 
 the prettier suburbs may not be amiss to 
 indicate here. When one sees something 
 beautiful in a suburb, — a house, an old com- 
 mon, a park, — the beauty has in it something 
 wistful and pathetic which such beauty in 
 the country happily lacks. One feels the 
 nearness of the monster town with its blindly 
 groping hands — like some Polyphemus search- 
 ing for the fearful Greek in the jEneid. One's 
 enjoyment is anxious, for one has to trust to 
 boards and societies and such things for its 
 continuance. In spite of them the beautiful 
 things are going. A spasmodic effort (as 
 lately) may stop some glaring outrage, but 
 
56 LONDON 
 
 the lesser outrages go on unchecked. There 
 are spots in Richmond Park where one might 
 be in any beautiful park in the country, and 
 one may muse there on romance and dead 
 centuries. But London is creeping round, 
 and on Saturdays the park is alive with 
 defiant bells and perspiring hordes hurrying 
 back to restaurants and theatres. London is 
 near, and the beauty of Roehampton Gate as 
 you come down the hill at sunset has a 
 pathos I would not express if I could. Yet 
 it might soften the contemptuous commen- 
 tator on the suburbs. But I went there the 
 other day and found the beauty gone — de- 
 stroyed by a horrible red house which is 
 being built inside the Gate. O my country ! 
 
IX. COCKNEY HUMOUR 
 
 So far I have dealt with places. I must 
 allow myself one less concrete subject, and 
 end my unworthy appreciation of the town 
 I live in by doing it, if I may, one slight 
 service. 
 
 A gross injustice is done to London in the 
 conceptions which most people hold of Cock- 
 ney humour. Any vulgar joke you please is 
 referred to this source, any writer of pro- 
 fessedly funny books who happens to be 
 without taste and education is called a 
 Cockney humorist. This is very stupid, for 
 Cockney humour, whether excellent in its 
 average or not, is certainly distinctive, and 
 it has nothing to do with vulgarity as such, 
 nothing with the feebly forced jocosity of 
 the writers to whom I have referred. 
 
 This jocosity, indeed, falsely and incon- 
 veniently called Cockney, may be usefully 
 observed for a moment by way of contrast 
 to the true Cockney humour. I trust that 
 you will understand the sort of jocosity in 
 
58 LONDON 
 
 books and journals to which I refer: I am 
 too cowardly to name the books or the 
 writers. It can lay no claim to being Cock- 
 ney; it is not local in its nature, its pro- 
 ducers are not necessarily Londoners; and 
 its appreciators are the possessors of slow 
 wits and vulgar tastes all over the country. 
 Its local adjective is therefore misleading 
 and unjust, and is to be from this moment 
 abandoned. Conventional jocosity, like con- 
 ventional sentimentalism, comes of fatness 
 and idleness. It is essentially a quality of 
 the comfortable classes, an excrescence of 
 excessive materialism and want of mental 
 exercise. It supplies the occasions of those 
 whose minds move slowly and will not be 
 stirred, but whose idle sides crave to be 
 shaken. It is conventional therefore, and 
 deals in stock and largely labelled figures, 
 such as mothers-in-law and 'swells' with 
 eyeglasses. It is always behind the times 
 in the manners it depicts, for its patrons 
 have been fed on a long tradition of it and 
 must not be expected to use their eyes. 
 It tends to an unthinking and unmanly 
 brutality, gibing at old maids and women 
 who have lost their looks — a brutality to 
 which one notes with sorrow that one of 
 
COCKNEY HITMOUR 59 
 
 the few real humorists of our times has 
 committed himself. Its assumptions are all 
 the old middle class ideas, the unquestion- 
 ing acceptance of wealth as superiority, the 
 contempt of art, and so forth. I do not 
 wish to indict everybody who is amused by 
 it, for we all must laugh, and good causes 
 of laughter are not always known and acces- 
 sible. But it is essentially the amusement 
 of stupid, clumsy, and unexercised minds. 
 I protest with all the little vigour I have 
 that its confusion with Cockney humour is 
 abominable. 
 
 By Cockney humour I mean roughly the 
 humour of London streets and public-houses. 
 This I take to be distinctive : it is not under- 
 stood in its fulness outside London, even by 
 those of the same class and habits as the 
 Londoners who produce and relish it. By 
 ' produce ' I mean invent and shout from the 
 box-seat of an omnibus or from the press 
 round the bar, for it seldom if ever finds its 
 way into print. These Londoners live lives 
 that are tolerably strenuous, always pre- 
 carious, and often necessitous. Their minds 
 do not run to fatness. Sentimentalism 
 appeals to them only as following on beer 
 or gin in a play-house gallery, and is not 
 
60 LONDON 
 
 then of a pernicious type ; their sorrows are 
 mostly connected with police-courts. They 
 are the lower classes of London, and if they 
 are not, as it has been somewhat dubiously 
 said of the middle classes, the back-bone of 
 the country, I claim for them at least that 
 their wits, such as they may be, are in toler- 
 ably active exercise. Their humour is not 
 conventional; it is fresh, and it lives. I do 
 not mean that it is always first-rate — it is 
 generally, no doubt, pretty poor in quality ; 
 but it is humour, and suits the moment : it 
 is not a stereotyped and conventional pre- 
 tence of it. It is coarse, to be sure, if you 
 object to that. A vice of false refinement 
 is to mistake coarseness for vulgarity, and 
 to be offended by certain substantives and 
 adjectives. If that is your unfortunate case, 
 you cannot enjoy real Cockney humour. In 
 fact, I am afraid that to savour it rightly 
 you must be not only not prudish, but 
 familiar enough with certain words of coarse- 
 ness not to be surprised or preoccupied by 
 them ; you must remember that these words 
 are in constant use by the folk you are 
 observing, and must not overrate their force 
 or importance. To omit the words is to miss 
 the atmosphere. In some of Mr. Kipling's 
 
COCKNEY HUMOUR 61 
 
 soldier ballads it is necessary, for a right 
 eflFect, to replace certain words for which 
 he gives you tokens. They are quite harm- 
 less to the intelligent and genuinely refined. 
 So in a Cockney story one must keep to its 
 natural diction. 
 
 The most remarkable characteristic of 
 Cockney humour is that it is absolutely un- 
 scrupulous. It has no reservations. Every- 
 thing which comes within its horizon is a 
 subject, an occasion, for jest. Now that — 
 like it or dislike it — is a distinction. You 
 do not find it in modern literature. And I 
 am reminded that Cockney humour hardly 
 comes into literature at all. The spirit of 
 good Dr. Bowdler has kept it out. Dickens, 
 who might have used it, refrained, for if 
 you mention Sam Weller I reply that he 
 had next to no humour at all — adding 
 breathlessly, to keep my head from Dickens' 
 worshippers, that Sam Weller was a wit. 
 He had wit, certainly, and gave us a store 
 of witticisms, but he had not humour. Also, 
 Sam was not distinctively Cockney : his pro- 
 nunciation, of the Borough it may have been, 
 and as it exists in parts of contemporary 
 Essex, was hardly Cockney at all. I have 
 sometimes met with a fragment of Cockney 
 
62 LONDON 
 
 humour in the Sporting Times — a departed 
 contributor of that paper observed or in- 
 vented it with genius. But with that excep- 
 tion I have not seen it reported. There 
 follows in the distinguished absence of 
 scruple the quality of brutality. But it is 
 a different thing from the mean and con- 
 ventional brutality I was reviling lately. It 
 does not laugh at old women as a matter 
 of course. It consists merely in ignoring 
 the horrible or tragic side of a funny situa- 
 tion. Everybody knows the old story of the 
 Cockney laughing after a fire. ' " Jump, yer 
 silly fool," I says ; " me and my mite 's got a 
 blanket ! " An' 'e did jump, and there warn't 
 
 no blanket, and 'e broke 'is neck. Laugh ? 
 
 I 'aven't laughed so much,' etc. A thousand 
 apologies if the old story jars on your refine- 
 ment. But I maintain that the contrast of 
 expectation and the event is really humorous, 
 and the brutality which can laugh is surely 
 innocent. One finds such a brutality in 
 Rochester, who was a sort of aristocratic 
 blackguard Cockney of genius.- 
 
 Cockney humour is always ready, and in 
 a generation which is said to lack amusing 
 talkers its repartee should be cherished. As 
 a rule they are not exactly witty, they are 
 
COCKNEY HUMOUR 63 
 
 too bald in form for that, but they embody 
 roughly a humorous grasp of situations. I 
 will not give you instances, disliking to 
 shirk the faithful record of my memory, and 
 being afraid you may think me very vulgar 
 as it is. To find them you must go your 
 ways among cabmen in their shelters, and 
 omnibus men, and flower-girls, and other 
 people. Cockney humour seems to have 
 almost disappeared from the music halls; 
 the last inspired exponent of it I remember 
 was Bessie Bellwood. One meets it, of 
 course, among people who are not Cockney 
 nor lower class. The thoroughly dissipated 
 young rake who has a humorous turn is 
 much akin in his freer talk to the true Cock- 
 ney humorist. One wonders if the quality 
 will ever make a masterpiece of a book. 
 Serious, long-faced realism is allowed a 
 fairly free hand: one wonders if realism 
 will ever be allowed to laugh, and humours 
 of unscrupulous thoughts and unshackled 
 tongues to come to their own again in our 
 literature, as they partly came two centuries 
 ago. Probably not. 
 
II 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
BYRON— TO 1816^ 
 
 The first three volumes of Byron's Letters 
 and Journals, which Mr. Rowland Prothero 
 is editing and Mr. John Murray is publishing, 
 take their readers to the end of the year 
 1816, and so include the brief period of his 
 lionising in London, the lamentable business 
 of his marriage, his separation from his wife, 
 his persecution (for it amounted to that), and 
 his virtual and virtuous expulsion from his 
 country. A point has been reached, there- 
 fore, at which one may examine compara- 
 tively the edition so far as it has gone — its 
 merits, which are certain ; and its demerits, 
 such as they may be. And having done so, 
 one may be permitted further to state an 
 
 I I had it in mind to fuse these two essays, but found on 
 the whole that the balance of advantages was in favour of 
 asking the reader's patience for an apparently unnecessary 
 division. The edition they ' review ' is itself, substantively, 
 worth his attention, and my criticism of it is more intelligible 
 in the two halves than it would be in one whole. I think, 
 moreover, that the subject of Byron, as a man, is di£Scult 
 enough to excuse an appearance of repetition for the stdce of 
 clearness. — G. S. S. 
 
 67 
 
68 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 opinion or two, confirmed by certain fresh 
 evidences in these three books, of one of the 
 most remarkable Englishmen, putting him 
 at his lowest, that ever lived, and of one of 
 the strangest events in our social history. 
 
 Mention, but the briefest mention only, 
 must be made of the fact that circumstances 
 and accidents have prevented the placing of 
 Mr. Murray's mass of fresh material in the 
 hands of the poet and critic whose gifts, 
 knowledge, and distinction alike marked 
 him patently as the writer best fitted to deal 
 with it. It is a fact to which Mr. Prothero 
 himself has gracefully and generously 
 alluded, and on which Mr. Henley would not 
 thank me for insisting. But it is too great 
 a pity, too great a loss to the interest of 
 contemporary letters, for one to do less than 
 express regret. With this exception, how- 
 ever, it would be difficult to think of an 
 editor who would have been likely to do the 
 work more effectively than Mr. Prothero. 
 He is painstaking to an admirable degree ; 
 his names and dates and quotations are 
 noted all with scholarly exactitude. In the 
 matter of quotations, indeed, I am tempted 
 to think him a trifle over-lavish of his care. 
 Byron had a memory wonderfully quick and 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 69 
 
 tenacious, but not verbally accurate : he 
 quotes freely in his letters, and often makes 
 a mistake, whereupon Mr. Prothero inevit- 
 ably puts him right — which is very well, but 
 a little distracting to one's attention, as also 
 are the equally well-justified and inevitable 
 references to acts and scenes in Shakespeare 
 and so forth. But this is the ungracious 
 grumble of the surfeited. Mr. Prothero's 
 other conspicuous excellence is clearness of 
 statement; his facts are unambiguously 
 given, and when he gives an opinion (of 
 which he is properly sparing) there is no 
 doubt of it. Throughout, however, he has 
 subordinated himself to his task, taking, it 
 would seem, his part to be strictly that of an 
 editor, not of a biographer. It would seem 
 as though he had deliberately purposed not 
 to supersede Thomas Moore in his part of 
 commentator. As a consequence, partly, of 
 this attitude, while the edition, so far as the 
 actual letters and journals are concerned, 
 takes the place of Moore's, by reason of fresh 
 material, fulness, accuracy, Moore's own part 
 of the work is not superseded: it is still 
 necessary for an amateur of the subject to 
 read the Life. 
 This I take to be by no means a demerit. 
 
70 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 We think nowadays that Tom Moore was 
 overrated in his, but at least he was a con- 
 siderable personage, more than representa- 
 tive of the best opinion current in English 
 society, and one of Byron's two or three 
 most intimate friends to boot. His Life is 
 more than worth reading for its own sake. 
 Mr. Prothero has perforce made several ex- 
 cerpts from it, but I fancy — one fancies 
 inevitably — that he has left several signifi- 
 cant passages out. For example, there is the 
 little anecdote of Byron's early boyhood in 
 Aberdeen, an anecdote which illustrates a 
 persistent characteristic and is curious for 
 the Scotch dialect, which is tolerably foreign 
 to our ideas of the later Byron : I mean the 
 flash of temper and the ' dinna speak of it I ' 
 to the lady who noticed his lameness. This 
 is to be minute, but in personal studies one is 
 minute or nothing. There is Moore's story 
 of the lobster and the brandy, which is not 
 given in the notes to the letter referring to 
 it. There are Byron's criticisms of his own 
 English Bards, etc., written on a copy of the 
 poem in 1818 ; and there are Byron's notes on 
 Isaac Disraeli's Literary Character — 'When 
 a boy I could never bear to read any poetry 
 whatever without disgust and reluctance.' 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 71 
 
 Byron's saying 'Miss Milbanke, shall we 
 go ? ' when his bride and he were setting out 
 on their honeymoon, was significant enough 
 — if only for his absence of mind on the 
 occasion, elsewhere recorded — to be recalled. 
 These are examples of slight omissions 
 (within the period) which one reader might 
 regret and another not; but they help to 
 bear out my contention that Moore's Life 
 must still be read. 
 
 A more obvious omission,^ and one which I 
 quite fail to understand, is that Mr. Prothero 
 never marks his fresh material, whether 
 letters or passages in letters, as such. This 
 is not perhaps important to the general 
 reader, but is so obviously inconvenient to 
 any one who wishes to compare editions, or 
 who, having read the old, wishes to read only 
 what is new, and it has saved such a very 
 small amount of labour that one is perplexed 
 by it. It is possible to guess roughly and in a 
 roundabout way from what we are told of 
 collation with the original MSS. that certain 
 batches of letters are newly published, and of 
 course it is possible to collate the edition 
 
 > As it will be seen, the omission was ultimately supplied. 
 But I let the objection stand, as an humble admonition to 
 editors of gradually published works. 
 
72 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 letter by letter ; but this tedious and mechani- 
 cal task might have been so easily obviated. . . . 
 Any other objection ? None, I think, unless it 
 be that the design on the cover is not beauti- 
 ful, the coronets with which it is peppered 
 reminding one of an unimportant and amus- 
 ing but none the less rather petty foible of 
 the poet, who was called 'the old English 
 baron' at Dr. Glennie's school, and was 
 known at Harrow to speak of a 'brother 
 peer,' and probably to be kicked therefor. 
 After all, however, it is possible to have one's 
 copy rebound. 
 
 The merits of the edition are progressive. 
 The new material for the early years is large, 
 but not very remarkable. It grows in in- 
 terest with the Hours of Idleness and English 
 Bards period, at which Moore began to sup- 
 press names and delete passages as offensive 
 to people alive at the time, which Mr. Pro- 
 thero has restored. With the third volume, 
 which begins when Byron returned from his 
 travels in the East, the fresh matter grows 
 rapidly in importance, and is especially valu- 
 able for the light on Byron's connections with 
 his charming friends, Lady Caroline Lamb, 
 Lady Oxford, and Lady Frances Webster. It 
 is too late in the day to profess to regret this 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 73 
 
 light. Nobody detests and abhors more than 
 I the unnecessary publication of private mat- 
 ters: there have been instances of it which 
 I do not hesitate, especially since I need not 
 name them, to call disgusting. But Byron's 
 loves and quarrels, completely interesting as 
 they are for the psychology of passion and 
 intrigue and clash of characters and for the 
 social history of the period, were public pro- 
 perty (used as public property is wont to be 
 used) eighty years ago, and his charming 
 friends might be great-grandmothers: the 
 most fastidious of us need not blush to be 
 curious about them. Finally (for this third 
 volume) there is a correspondence anent the 
 famous separation, not all of it newly pub- 
 lished, it is true, but conveniently collected 
 from various sources, which makes the nature 
 of that transaction and of its unhappy con- 
 sequences for Byron plain to the most mys- 
 tery-loving of theorists. It will be in future 
 volumes, however, that the advantages of 
 this edition over its predecessors will be most 
 apparent, for, as Mr. Prothero has pointed 
 out, the bulk of Byron's correspondence from 
 1816 onwards was with John Murray, whom 
 he used as a convenient medium for com- 
 munication with men of letters and with his 
 
74 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 men friends generally in England: a large 
 part of this correspondence has not been 
 published, and much of what has been pub- 
 lished was very freely edited by Moore ; con- 
 sequently, from this point onwards, one will 
 look for fresh matter greater in quantity 
 and (since Byron had reached that period of 
 his life most fruitful intellectually and least 
 distracted by mere worries and unlucky 
 accidents) better in quality as well ; possibly 
 also one may write about it. And so much 
 for any general or formal comparison of 
 editions : one may pass to a more particular 
 consideration of the conclusions to be drawn 
 (more firmly than before) from the last — that 
 is to say, to some estimate of Byron and his 
 fortunes as he and they were up to the year 
 1816. 
 
 Without apology, for it is useless to deny 
 that Byron is still an open question. Many 
 of us have made up our minds about his place 
 as a poet and his qualities as a man, but we 
 can always find somebody — not necessarily 
 an unintelligent body — to take the opposite 
 view. It is not to the purpose of this essay 
 to argue about his poetry. The extraordinary 
 enthusiasm for his earlier poetry was largely 
 a question of the needs of a given genera- 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 75 
 
 tion; it was not until Don Juan that he 
 wrote for all time — until Don JiLan, which for 
 sheer strength of intellect, expressed in 
 humour, or irony, or idea, for variousness of 
 humanity, and here and there for beauty of 
 phrase and feeling, I take to be one of the very 
 greatest of the written achievements of our 
 race. For the poetry up to 1816, bating parts 
 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, the 
 first half-dozen stanzas or so of Parisina, and 
 certain songs, I am willing to give some 
 ground to its assailants. There is, however, 
 an order of adverse criticism of it for which I 
 am glad to express my contempt. In so far 
 as the contemporary ideal of style is for 
 simplicity and directness, I think it a better 
 ideal than that of Byron's day. His own 
 letters are as good an example of direct 
 simplicity as you may find anywhere: his 
 earlier poems are not so. That is a pity, I 
 admit : I admit that the convention of phras- 
 ing for poetry current in his time was a bad 
 convention. On this subject no greater a 
 person than Leigh Hunt gave Byron some 
 very sound advice, for which I can forgive 
 the ' puppy-dog ' a good deal of his trivially 
 abominable treatment of Byron's memory. 
 The passage is worth transcribing: 'The 
 
76 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 plain matter is this: it appears to me that 
 we often hurt the effect, in modern poetry, 
 of very true feelings and descriptions by 
 putting them in false language; that is to 
 say, we accommodate ourselves to certain 
 habitual sophisticated phrases of written 
 language, and thus take away from real 
 feeling of any sort the only language it ever 
 actually uses, which is the spoken language.' 
 That is a truth we have happily come to 
 recognise, and sometimes even to remember 
 in practice: in Byron's time it was little 
 understood. But because he was largely a 
 victim of this 'habitual sophisticated' diction, 
 certain critics are blind to the abundant evi- 
 dence, internal and external, that his poetry 
 was passionately individual and felt ; that it 
 was produced, as we know now, invariably as 
 a result of some emotional disturbance of his 
 own — and blandly condemn it as ' insincere.' 
 This is the criticism of critics who never 
 grow up, — whose vision, in depth and breadth, 
 is always that of the sixth-form boy. I am 
 glad to say an unkind word for them ; but, as 
 I stated, it is not my purpose to argue about 
 Byron's poetry. 
 
 Of his character as a man there will be 
 always, of course, two opinions. Some of us 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 77 
 
 admire a great mind and a generous heart ; 
 others admire a reticent manner, freedom 
 from scandal, and the capacity of living 
 within one's income. These two sets of 
 qualities are sometimes joined — heaven for- 
 bid that I should deny it! — but when they 
 are not there will always be people who 
 regard the absence of the latter rare set as 
 more than counterbalancing the presence of 
 the former: such people will always dislike 
 the memory of Byron, and they must be left 
 to their respectable, if not irresistibly at- 
 tractive, point of view. But there are certain 
 popular misconceptions of Byron on which it 
 seems a commonplace to dwell, since the first 
 publication of his letters should have dis- 
 missed them for ever, but which one may 
 notice in a word. The idea of him as a 
 saturnine, 'affected,' glowering being, dis- 
 dainful of ordinary life and plunged in 
 melancholy and conceit, the idea which re- 
 sulted in so many absurdities on the part of 
 imitative idiots, is dissipated by the merest 
 glance at his letters or the testimony of his 
 friends. He was a lively and witty com- 
 panion : Moore notes in his Diary this fact of 
 him when he saw him in Venice after three 
 years' absence from England, and when he 
 
78 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 had cause enough for melancholy in the 
 revival of memories such a meeting would 
 excite. He was full of humour, enjoyed a 
 joke and even a romp : who that has read it 
 can forget that scene when he tried to read 
 Thurlow's poem to Moore and Rogers and 
 could not proceed for laughing ? As for con- 
 ceit, a man of Byron's powers who professed 
 a mean opinion of them would be an im- 
 postor ; but he never resented criticism from 
 a friendly quarter, and would admit, even 
 unreasonably, that another man had done 
 better than he — e.g., his letter to Murray of 
 April 26, 1814; 'After reading it' (a poem 
 called Bonaparte by Stratford Canning) 'I 
 really regret having written my own. I say 
 that very sincerely, albeit unused to think 
 humbly of myself.' He was keenly interested 
 in his friends' affairs, and enthusiastic about 
 their achievements. That he was bitter from 
 time to time was inevitable. He had been 
 brought up in exaggerated views of his im- 
 portance, and especially of the importance of 
 that unfortunate title of his, and when he 
 went into the world after leaving Cambridge 
 he found himself without a friend, except for 
 a few college cronies, and with no resort but 
 the places of vulgar dissipation. Then, as 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 79 
 
 now, a mere title was no sufficient passport 
 to the best of London society, and Byron's 
 only connections of any social standing were 
 the family of his guardian. Lord Carlisle, 
 with whom he had quarrelled. Followed 
 later his brief career as a hero of society, and 
 then the crisis which drove him from his 
 country, and in which, if ever a man had 
 cause to rail at the malevolence and stupid- 
 ity of his fellow-creatures, he was that man. 
 He was only twenty-eight when it happened : 
 no wonder he was bitter. 
 
 But this bitterness yielded always to the 
 least approach of kindness and friendliness. 
 And Byron's great capacity for friendship 
 and the warmth of his affections may well 
 detain you for a while, since they are illus- 
 trated again and again, in ways most touch- 
 ing to follow, in the new letters. His 
 devotion to his sister, though as a boy he 
 hardly ever saw her, is shown in many 
 affectionate letters, and as one reads them 
 one thinks with nausea of the hideous story 
 which his wife (whose own letters are suffi- 
 cient refutation of it, if a refutation were 
 needed) devised in her, let us hope, crazy old 
 age, and which the egregious Mrs. Stowe and 
 many respectable people and periodicals 
 
80 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 disgraced themselves by believing or pre- 
 tending to believe. His boyish affection for 
 his Harrow friends, whose letters he kept to 
 the end of his life, and for his Cambridge 
 friends; his continued kindness to his law- 
 yer's family, with whom he had stayed as a 
 boy ; his care for innumerable dependants — 
 e.g., the old woman who followed him in all 
 his changes of address until he left England ; 
 his enthusiasm for Tom Moore; above all, 
 perhaps, since money is unfortunately a real 
 though a vulgar touchstone of friendship, 
 his unbounded and delicate generosity, — all 
 this is clear proof of a royal and warm heart, 
 and is very touching to observe. 
 
 I say touching, for it is quite evident that 
 Byron's friendship was very ill requited. 
 His best friend was Hobhouse, who defended 
 him boldly in the worst of his crises, who 
 did not scruple to tell him his faults, and 
 who was the only one of his old friends who 
 saw much of him when he left the country : 
 Hobhouse, who was always ready to speak 
 with his enemies in the gate, with his wife, 
 for example, and her terrible mother, or to 
 support him by his presence (he saw him off 
 from England, you remember, with Scrope 
 Davies, the Regency Buck, who came to a 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 81: 
 
 bad end, and deserved a better) — Hobhouse 
 stands out as the one absolutely disinter- 
 ested and constant friend. (I speak, you 
 remember, of the period to 1816.) I do not 
 mean that the others were not disinterested 
 because Byron was of service to them, but 
 with Hobhouse there cannot be even a 
 shadow of doubt: he had nothing to gain 
 from Byron, and he braved social and politi- 
 cal drawbacks on his account. The Rev. Mr. 
 Hodgson, whose marriage was made possible 
 by Byron's gift of £1000, wrote feeling 
 letters, and shed a manly tear over his 
 misfortunes. His sister, of course, did not 
 fail him, though she was a little too much of 
 a peacemaker at the time of his separation. 
 Hanson his lawyer, and Murray his publisher 
 — of course they remained on terms with 
 him. Who else was there ? There was 
 Fletcher, his valet. . . . Most of Byron's 
 friends seemed to have taken his hospitality 
 and his money, and gone away to criticise 
 his eccentricities. It is a little significant 
 that before he left England Byron, who 
 had given large sums of money to several 
 personal friends, and had supported poor 
 authors, so to speak, all over the country, had 
 to sell his library for £1500. 
 
 F 
 
82 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 I have not forgotten Tom Moore ; but his 
 case is complex, and requires a paragraph to 
 itself. Byron counted Moore and Hobhouse 
 as his two most intimate friends. Moore 
 stood before the world as his friend par 
 excellence, his literary executor, and so forth. 
 He was unfortunately out of town when the 
 town turned on Byron and rent him. His 
 Life is full of appreciation, and no doubt he 
 only did his duty in pointing out Byron's 
 faults. But have you ever read Moore's 
 Diary ? It is in eight volumes, I grant you, 
 but it is worth reading as the revelation of a 
 kindly, plucky, intelligent, independent little 
 soul, and, moreover, as a mine of stories, 
 many of which will bear quoting anywhere. 
 The revelation is intimate, so intimate that 
 I sometimes wonder why our essayists do 
 not mention it when they are writing about 
 Pepys. (For example, when he hears of 
 Walter Scott's misfortunes, the diarist re- 
 grets that he knew him so well, for otherwise 
 he had been spared the pain of sympathy — 
 surely an unusually frank touch.) Well, I 
 find no great affection for Byron in this 
 Diary, and I cannot help thinking it a better 
 guide to his feelings than his Life of Byron, 
 where every consideration induced him to 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 83 
 
 display his affection and admiration at their 
 highest. Moore, I fancy, was one of those 
 men who keep their real affections strictly 
 for those near to them. He was devoted to 
 his family : he was an excellent son, husband, 
 and father. But his friends in the world 
 with whom he dined and stayed in the 
 country, leaving his dear Bessy at home as a 
 rule, these friends he regarded somewhat 
 coldly and critically, and among them I 
 think he placed his 'noble friend' Byron. 
 He is critical of the letters he receives or is 
 shotvn ; he shows little gratitude for their 
 affection for himself. At the very moment 
 when Byron gave him the Memoirs to do 
 what he liked with them, he notes that 
 Byron is growing careful about money and 
 hoards sequins in a box. He admired Byron 
 sincerely, I do not doubt : the evidences of 
 his chagrin when people failed to place him- 
 self on Byron's level are natural when we 
 remember that audiences in the Edinburgh 
 and Dublin theatres cheered Tom Moore 
 when he went to the play. But I can find 
 no evidence that he returned the intimate 
 personal liking and affection which Byron 
 had for him. When he heard of Byron's 
 death, his first thought was the destination 
 
84 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 of the Memoirs. As for the destruction of 
 those Memoirs, I do not think we should 
 blame Tom Moore very severely. He lost 
 money by it at the time, and everybody — 
 Mrs. Leigh and Hobhouse included — advised 
 their destruction. It was a thousand pities : 
 it did not seem to occur to Moore and his 
 advisers that there was a mean between 
 publication and destruction. So far as one 
 can gather, moreover, from Lord John 
 Russell and others who read them, there 
 was nothing worse than 'coarseness' to be 
 alleged against them. A thousand pities : 
 but I am sure that Moore thought he was 
 doing the best for Byron's posthumous 
 interests. Only, once more, he never re- 
 turned Byron's friendship in full measure. 
 But Byron was content with him, it seems, 
 and so no harm was done. 
 
 In the case of men whom he simply met in 
 the world on a basis of mutual interests and 
 tastes, he had nothing for complaint before 
 1816, and the best of them — Rogers, for 
 example, and Walter Scott — stood by him, 
 more or less, at that time. Men whom he 
 knew more strictly as men of letters, as 
 Gifford and Jeffrey (whom he never met in 
 the flesh), were not frightened into renounc- 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 85 
 
 ing him. But all this was not enough for 
 Byron : his temperament needed a return of 
 his warm affection, and that, save in very 
 few instances, he never had. There is a 
 curious proof that he himself was sincere in 
 this matter. When the Duke of Dorset, who 
 had been one of his boyhood's closest friends, 
 was killed in the hunting-field in 1815, Byron 
 confessed that he did not care. They had 
 met only once in ten years, and ' it would be 
 a paltry affectation to pretend that I had any 
 feeling for him worth the name.' (It was 
 then that he wrote that sad and true poem, 
 'There's not a joy the world can give,' etc.) 
 Such a confession would not be made by a 
 trifler in friendship. 
 
 It is this side of Byron's nature which is 
 best shown in the letters up to 1816. Other 
 qualities there are in abundance — keenness 
 for life ; humour, sometimes gay, sometimes 
 biting ; whimsical flashes of temper — * the 
 devil never created or perverted such a fiend 
 as the fool of a printer'; cynicism, occasion- 
 ally cheap, no doubt; love of beautiful 
 things most patently real. These qualities 
 are confirmed afresh by the new letters, 
 but they were well known of him before 
 by all who preferred seeing the man 
 
86 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 himself to trusting popular conceptions 
 of him. 
 
 We come to the crash of 1816, which the 
 letters now printed or conveniently arranged 
 in this edition make more than ever, what I 
 have called it, one of the strangest events 
 in our social history. I do not mean the 
 actual separation from his wife. That I take 
 to be very little mysterious. Miss Milbanke 
 had been the idol of a little set, a prodigy of 
 cultivation and goodness and so forth. She 
 expected to be reverenced as a superior 
 being, and to continue in an attitude of 
 tender pity for her husband's imperfections. 
 As a lover — full of enthusiasm for a pure 
 woman and weary of intrigue and the 
 tempers of women less pure than pleasant — 
 Byron used towards her, as his letters before 
 marriage, now printed for the first time, 
 show, as much deference as she could desire. 
 But the role of self-complacent angel in 
 their wives is not commonly agreeable to 
 husbands, and no doubt Byron found the 
 cold superiority of the spoilt paragon a 
 thousand times worse than the tantrums of 
 Lady Caroline Lamb. He was otherwise 
 in an irritable frame of mind, living in an 
 atmosphere of bailiffs and writs — an atmo- 
 
 I 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 87 
 
 sphere which amuses comfortable people at 
 a distance, but is apt to get on the nerves 
 of those who actually experience it. And 
 she, no doubt, experienced the irritation not 
 uncommonly felt by perky little cleverness 
 in the presence of a wider and deeper intel- 
 lect. The sort of spirit, too, in which she 
 regarded her husband and what was dear to 
 him is significantly disclosed in her descrip- 
 tion of Mrs. Musters (Mary Chaworth), the 
 romantic and innocent love of his youth, 
 as a 'wicked-looking cat.' Byron had his 
 reputation, and though at this time he 
 seems to have been 'faithful' to his wife — 
 for the Clairmont episode is proved to have 
 been subsequent to the separation — his wife, 
 with all her virtues and mathematics, was 
 jealous. He came, we may suppose, to 
 deriding her perfections, and she, in a fury 
 of outraged vanity, rushed to the conclusion 
 (honestly, I do not doubt) that such a trans- 
 gression could be explained only by madness. 
 The doctors said he was not mad, and her 
 vanity had no resource but to hit out. She 
 was a cold-blooded woman, and vanity 
 proved stronger than physical ties. She held 
 Byron to his promise, incautiously given, 
 of a separation when she should wish for it ; 
 
88 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 she refused to go into court or make any 
 definite charge against him — though she told 
 some story to her legal adviser, under a 
 pledge of secrecy, to make him desist from 
 attempts at reconciliation. Rather than 
 expose the petty nature of her quarrel, she 
 preferred to ruin her husband's reputation 
 by her silence, and of course justified herself 
 with ease. 'I think it a great error to 
 regard "worldly disgrace" as a serious evil 
 compared to some that must ensue, with his 
 character, from worldly prosperity. . . . Not 
 that I would voluntarily be the means of 
 chastisement,' etc. : so she wrote, and so she 
 wrote herself down an example of selfish 
 canting cruelty for all time. And so much 
 for Lady Byron, on whom one's fancy cannot 
 linger with much pleasure. 
 
 It is not the separation, but the consequent 
 conduct of the country — the word is not too 
 large — which astonishes and perplexes me. 
 For it is neither an unjust nor a cowardly 
 country, and on this occasion its conduct 
 was a miracle of cowardly injustice. Here 
 was a famous poet, a young man of twenty- 
 eight, an idol of society, of whom the 
 worst that was known was that before his 
 marriage he had had certain connections 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 89 
 
 with tolerably well-known women in his set 
 — connections to be regretted, but not un- 
 usual in such a set then, or now ; the country 
 heard that he had separated from his wife, 
 an occurrence of every day ; immediately 
 such a storm was raised against him in 
 society and the newspapers that his ac- 
 quaintances were afraid to know him, and 
 his friends required courage (which Lady 
 Jersey, almost alone of them, had) to invite 
 him to their houses, that he was advised not 
 to appear in public, to go to the House of 
 Lords or the play (advice on which he did 
 not act), and that at last his friends and he 
 had to confess that it was idle to protest, 
 and that England was impossible for him : 
 he left it a veritable exile. Even then the 
 rancour followed him; people expressed 
 indignation at the mere idea of his return 
 (though not, of course, abstaining from 
 intrusion on his privacy when they went 
 abroad), silly calumnies of all kinds about 
 him were sent home — he was a cockshy for 
 universal slander and hatred. 
 
 Such is the bare fact, which we have to try 
 to understand. A few aids to understanding 
 of course exist. Without doubt there had 
 been a great deal of latent hostility to Byron 
 
90 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 personally. He was not generally popular 
 with men. We know that he was frank and 
 modest in conversation, but we know also 
 that such an intellect as his could not endure 
 empty chatter for ever, and sought solitude, 
 and that such a quick and passionate tem- 
 perament was not likely to suffer fools 
 gladly. Now, in general society the average 
 man is commonly a bit of a fool. Again, a 
 sense that he had been unfairly treated 
 rankled in him even in the time of his 
 London vogue, and though he was modest 
 he could be haughty with men, and that 
 without the stolidity which was then, as 
 now, largely the national ideal of good- 
 breeding. Again, he was known to have 
 extraordinary success in attracting women. 
 Again, his long periods of abstinence, his 
 biscuits and soda-water, must have annoyed 
 the Englishman of that period severely, 
 though he atoned for it on occasion with 
 his three bottles — 'a fair holiday drinker,' 
 Scrope Davies called him. For more 
 serious causes of unpopularity, there 
 were many people who were honestly 
 offended by his poetry, some perhaps who 
 were honestly scandalised by the reports 
 of his early dissipation, which he, in un- 
 
I 
 
 BYRON— TO 1816 91 
 
 happy bravado, had countenanced, and 
 there were many more who hated his 
 politics : he had praised Napoleon and 
 offended the Regent, that miracle of chas- 
 tity, and his Court. 
 
 Now if Byron had been convicted of some 
 crime, it would have been natural that all 
 this dislike and jealousy and disapproval 
 should have come to a head and sent up a 
 prolonged howl: that is the way of the 
 world. But the point is that not only was 
 he not so convicted, but that no definite 
 charge was ever brought against him. I 
 confess I used to think that there must 
 have been such a charge ; that it was known 
 that he was afraid to fa?e an accusation of 
 something generally abhorrent, which, if 
 true, would have justified his ostracism. 
 But it was clearly not so. Between the 
 times of his separation and his leaving the 
 country, he and his friends did their utmost 
 to trace a definite accusation to some man 
 who could be called out. Hobhouse, on his 
 behalf, insisted to the last with Lady Byron's 
 advisers that Byron was prepared to meet 
 any charge publicly in a court of law. There 
 was no question of his shirking inquiry ; he 
 demanded it, and bitterly complained that it 
 
92 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 was not given him. It seems as though the 
 whole country had entered into a conspiracy, 
 none the less vile because it was but half con- 
 scious — a conspiracy of cowardly innuendo 
 and silence under question. 
 
 Speaking roughly, I take it to have been 
 the case that the waxing conscience of the 
 nation had grown impatient of notorious 
 immorality in high places, and that Byron 
 was a scapegoat. The hue and cry well 
 started, some joined in it from private 
 malignity, others from the mere contagion 
 of a craze. It is a very poor explanation, 
 and it leaves a stain of social injustice on 
 the country. Happily the injustice was im- 
 potent to crush its victim, and happily we 
 can afford to admit it, for it is unique in our 
 social history. 
 
 So we leave Byron in 1816, in the twenty- 
 ninth year of his age, a man of many small 
 faults and many commanding virtues; a 
 mass of contradictions, as are most men 
 whom force of intellect and temperament 
 throws into relief; reckless and shrewd; 
 tempestuous and placable ; modest in regard 
 to his intellect, vain of his good looks; an 
 unselfish egotist; fickle in his realised pas- 
 sion, constant to an ideal. But the warmth 
 
BYRON— TO 1816 93 
 
 and generosity of his friendships have no 
 contrast in his character. 
 
 After the year 1816, as his mind and his 
 temperament deepened and broadened, his 
 letters grow more and more pregnant with 
 matter and delightful in expression : one 
 will look for the new ones with interest both 
 curious and profound. 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 
 
 It was in ' Maga ' of November 1899 that the 
 first three volumes of Mr. Murray's new 
 edition of Byron's Letters and Journals 
 were discussed, and it was not until the 
 middle of October 1901 that the sixth and last 
 volume was published. The dates suggest, 
 first of all, the great labour involved in the 
 editing, and it is pleasant to offer Mr. 
 Rowland Prothero a sincere compliment on 
 its most successful completion. But they 
 also suggest a certain weakness in this pre- 
 valent method of publishing a great work. 
 To read a volume of Byron's letters is to 
 desire the next at once. Life is complex, 
 and the making of books is both endless 
 and continuous : the reader cannot remain 
 in the right atmosphere all the months of 
 waiting, and although when they are over 
 he may need to make but a slight effort to 
 regain his attitude and interest, an ordinary 
 memory at least will have let slip some 
 minutiae it had been well to keep. Would 
 
 M 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 95 
 
 not a true lover of such good cheer have 
 been content to go hungry till the feast 
 was really ready? In this case there was 
 an especial disadvantage in the delay. Of 
 the very few objections made against Mr. 
 Prothero on the former occasion, the most 
 important was that, except in a very general 
 way, he had not told us which was new 
 material and which old. He was undis- 
 turbed by the criticism, and now appears 
 his justification. At the end of vol. vi. is a 
 table of the letters, giving their sources, and 
 indicating which of them had been already 
 published by Thomas Moore or Halleck — 
 whose edition added seventy-four given to 
 the world in the meantime by Dallas and 
 Leigh Hunt, or used but not numbered by 
 Moore. All's well that ends well; but the 
 painful student sadly missed that table in 
 reading volumes one to five. Probably there 
 are important publishing reasons, beyond 
 the understanding of a mere reader of books, 
 why such a work cannot be given him all at 
 once, but the humble plaint may be allowed 
 to stand. 
 
 All that was said in praise of the first half 
 of the edition may be said of the second: 
 with greater force, indeed, since the op- 
 
96 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 portunities for excellence were more. There 
 are 500 new letters in the six volumes, there 
 is other new material of great interest, and 
 material old, but scattered and obscure, has 
 been usefully collected. Examples of these 
 merits will appear in the course of this 
 essay, if I may be allowed as before to ex- 
 press my views about Byron, which this 
 new edition has suggested or strengthened. 
 Mr. Prothero's notes have continued to be 
 models of completeness. He has considered 
 — rightly, it is probable, though some people 
 may find the result a little too abundant — 
 the reader who needs to know every possible 
 date, the source of every quotation, the pre- 
 cise act and scene in which even the most 
 familiar of Shakespeare's sentences appear, 
 and the whole history of every person men- 
 tioned or adumbrated in the text. What 
 this means in the case of over a thousand 
 letters, written nearly a hundred years ago 
 by a man of Byron's variousness of interests, 
 allusive habit, and immense reading, may be 
 seen, but can hardly be imagined without 
 seeing. Mr. Prothero gives a list of the 
 authors quoted by Byron, and there are 
 eight columns of them. And here is an in- 
 stance of Mr. Prothero's care. Byron refers 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 97 
 
 (in vol. V.) to his wife as ' Vittoria Caramljana 
 the White Devil,' whereon Mr. Prothero 
 gives you an account of Webster's play, The 
 White Devil, quotes Charles Lamb's criticism 
 of it, and relates the historical facts on which 
 it was founded. Such a system of annota- 
 tion, though it may give more than is strictly 
 relevant, certainly adds a mass of instruction 
 to the book. But with it all Mr. Prothero 
 never confuses the reader, and never, as your 
 voluminous commentator is too apt to do, 
 shirks the really difficult points. He is to 
 be complimented also in another regard. 
 His asterisks are very few, Byron's plain 
 speaking considered ; he has not hesitated 
 to print words supposed to be banished from 
 'polite society.' Any critic who complains 
 of Byron's 'coarseness' should remember 
 that Englishmen educated at public schools 
 and universities generally use plain words 
 in speaking to one another when the plain 
 words express their sense, and are apt to 
 look upon the periphrases of a certain kind 
 of refinement as rather silly. But coarse or 
 not, the thing is to have Byron as he wrote. 
 For my part I regret such asterisks as there 
 are, because Byron's letters are not for 
 the schoolroom, and they give an undue 
 
 G 
 
98 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 importance to the words omitted : besides, 
 the words might have been interesting for the 
 history of colloquial English. But the diffi- 
 culties of an editor in this matter are obvious. 
 In writing of so complex an affair as the 
 character of a man, to say nothing of a 
 Byron, I think an essayist is ill-advised if 
 he limit himself too strictly to divisions of 
 periods and qualities. He may be clear in 
 the particular, but is likely to be contra- 
 dictory and dubious in the whole. In Byron 
 as he was between 1816 and 1824 we may 
 see three main periods — the Venice, the 
 Guiccioli, the expedition to Greece — in which 
 one side of him or another is the most 
 apparent. But it is the same complex Byron 
 in all three, and the reader will forgive me 
 if, after touching on these periods, I go 
 freely to and fro, taking those incidents in 
 his life and those passages in his letters 
 which seem to me most to help us in real- 
 ising him. I will write very briefly of the 
 Venice dissipation, because such periods in 
 a great man's life are apt to be given a false 
 importance. But I am writing of the man ; 
 and even in regard to the poet, it is much 
 to the point in the case of one who wrote 
 passionately of love, and cynically of women. 
 
 I 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 99 
 
 to know if he was a rake or a celibate. My 
 opinion of Byron's life in this respect is 
 that one time or another he may have been 
 rather more dissolute than the average men 
 of his class at the same ages, and that on the 
 whole he was about the same as they were 
 and are. It was the custom in his lifetime — 
 echoed since — to talk of him as a libertine, 
 as having * exhausted every species of vice,' 
 and so forth. It was to play with words and 
 mistake them for things. How could a man 
 who died at thirty-six and left behind him 
 such a mass of written work — the quality 
 even apart — as did Byron — to say nothing of 
 his reading, and Mr. Prothero's eight columns 
 of authors — be a libertine, steeped in vice 
 and the rest of it? Or, if we consider the 
 quality of his work, where are the signs of 
 the weakening of intellect which such ex- 
 travagance of vice as has been laid at Byron's 
 door must produce ? If one thing is certain 
 about his work, it is that in width and grasp 
 of intellect it waxed tenfold after he left 
 England, and was strong to the end. But it 
 is quite true that he dissipated in Venice. 
 His letters about Marianna Segati and 
 Margarita Cogni prove it. I am far from 
 affirming that every young man under thirty 
 
100 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 dissipates now and then; but I do affirm 
 that of very many young men of Byron's 
 antecedents and traditions. Only it is not 
 talked about ; if ever known, it is forgotten ; 
 whereas in Byron's case every jabbering 
 traveller to Italy thirsted to hear and repeat 
 anything to Byron's discredit; his friends 
 moralised about it, his enemies howled over 
 it, and he himself, alas ! was only too ready 
 to admit it. To the end of his days he 
 could not break himself of the habit of 
 stuffing the credulous with fables about 
 himself, as Medwin's depositions remain to 
 prove. Then consider the circumstances. 
 He had been driven out of England, ostra- 
 cised from most of the society of his class, on 
 an absurdly inadequate pretext : was, in fact, 
 in the condition of mind in which the facile 
 consolations of Mariannas and Margaritas, 
 to a warm-blooded young man with thwarted 
 affections, are a most potent temptation. 
 And he was living in a city where such a 
 life as he led offended nobody: Madame 
 Benzoni, a great lady in Venice, told Moore 
 that before the Guiccioli affair, ' II se condui- 
 sait si bien.' I think we ought to discount 
 Shelley's testimony on the subject. Shelley's 
 native delicacy shrank from the animalism 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 101 
 
 of such commonplace intrigues as he found 
 Byron engaged in; he seems especially to 
 have been shocked by the lowness of 
 Byron's society : whereas to Byron's broader 
 humanity it was the ' pantaloon humour ' of 
 these low-class Venetians that was half their 
 attraction. 
 
 I should like to leave this part of the 
 subject, but that there is an admission to be 
 made in honesty, without which any small 
 value that may attach to my estimate of 
 Byron would disappear. In Moore's Diary 
 he mentions having seen in John Murray's 
 famous ' parlour ' a letter from Byron which 
 disgusted him. He did not print it in his 
 Life, and I hoped that there was some mis- 
 take. But it is printed now — it is letter 734 — 
 and it is not pleasant reading. It merely 
 relates an 'affair,' but one of the kind a 
 gentleman ought not to write about — what- 
 ever the ethos of his surroundings — even to 
 an intimate friend. It is egotism of a bad 
 sort. One is not an Old Bailey advocate for 
 the defence, and one admits that here is an 
 unworthy lapse even from the morality 
 which may admit of palliation by circum- 
 stance. It is to be said, however, that Byron 
 wrote it in a fever which followed a ducking 
 
102 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 in the Grand Canal. It is also to be said 
 that there is no evidence that Byron meant 
 John Murray to show all his letters to any 
 one he pleased. I do not doubt that Murray 
 supposed he had such a licence, but years 
 after this time (to be fair to Murray) Byron 
 is found rebuking him for showing a letter 
 without permission. 
 
 Madame Guiccioli took Byron out of this 
 Venetian licence, and he never returned to 
 it, in Venice or elsewhere. It is superfluous 
 to discuss this connection. Whatever be 
 thought of the morality of it, and whatever 
 his or her excuses, which were held good by 
 better people than most of the hostile critics, 
 it is certain that they remained fond and 
 faithful to one another. (According to Lord 
 Malmesbury, her second husband, the Mar- 
 quis de Boissy, introduced her as ' ancienne 
 maitresse de Lord Byron.') But the occasion 
 is offered to venture a little deeper into the 
 psychology of Byron's emotions. The more 
 I read in his letters and in the accounts of 
 those who knew him best, the more I am 
 convinced that the popular idea of Byron as 
 a man whose life was bound up in his love 
 affairs, whatever their nature, is the very 
 reverse of the truth : that, on the contrary, 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 103 
 
 his heart was very little concerned in them, 
 and that his strongest amotions were his 
 friendships with men whom he respected, 
 whom he took for his intellectual peers. He 
 seems to me to have longed to be understood, 
 and liked, and affectionately regarded by his 
 men friends with far more real feeling of the 
 heart than is shown in any one of his affairs 
 with women. He took women lightly, just 
 a trifle in the Mohammedan way, and did not 
 really care deeply about them in any other. 
 No doubt he was chaffing when he said they 
 ought not to eat with men : he said this sort 
 of thing to annoy important ladies like Mrs. 
 Shelley and Mrs. Hunt. And no doubt he 
 exaggerated when he wrote in his diary — in 
 1821 : it is not the least of Mr. Prothero's 
 good deeds to have given these diaries and 
 journals fully, as they were written — that 
 the present state of women is * a remnant of 
 the barbarism of the chivalric and feudal 
 ages — artificial and unnatural. They ought 
 to mind home — and be well fed and clothed — 
 but not mixed in society. . . . Music — draw- 
 ing — dancing — also a little gardening and 
 ploughing now and then.' But underneath 
 the humour there is a sort of conviction. He 
 wrote jestingly — and I do not think it was all 
 
104 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 affectation — even of his affair with Madame 
 Guiccioli. But there can be no doubt of his 
 affection towards the men he really liked, 
 of his eagerness to acknowledge the least 
 kindness from any one of them, of his un- 
 stinted return of appreciation. 
 
 Much of what is called Byron's vanity I 
 believe to have been this eagerness for the 
 friendship of intellect and understanding. 
 His pleasure when Walter Scott wrote to 
 him, and his almost effusive replies; his 
 hearty acknowledgment of Isaac Disraeli's 
 appreciation ; his delight in Goethe's — this is 
 not vanity, but the best kind of human 
 response, of mind leaping to mind. His 
 patience under the criticism of those he liked 
 is as notable as the vigour of his replies to 
 that of his enemies. It is almost ludicrous 
 to read of his allowing the first two cantos 
 of Don Juan to be submitted to a committee 
 of friends, who were to decide if they 
 ought to be published. Of this surprising 
 committee, two members, Moore and Frere, 
 were poets, and of course in their own view 
 rivals, and there were also Kinnaird, a 
 banker, Hobhouse, a sincere but very candid 
 friend, and Scrope Da vies, a 'buck.' The 
 committee decided that the cantos should 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 105 
 
 not be published, and Byron in the first 
 instance positively acquiesced, with a shrug 
 at the ' cant of the day ' and a humorous 
 complaint, quoting Tony Lumpkin, that he 
 should be ' snubbed so while I am in spirits.' 
 Not only about Don Juan, but about most of 
 his other poems, Murray his publisher plied 
 him with remonstrances and criticisms, and 
 Byron met them all with careful argument 
 and counter-appeal to be allowed to write 
 his own poems. Even when Murray took 
 upon himself to omit stanzas, dedications, 
 and what not without leave, Byron, though 
 exasperated, did no more than complain. He 
 even writes to Moore : ' Murray has shuffled, 
 and almost insinuated that my last produc- 
 tions are dull. Dull, sir! — damme, dull! I 
 believe he is right.' There is not much 
 vanity or arrogance in that. His relations 
 with Murray are interesting, if only because 
 the bulk of the letters, and especially of the 
 new letters, were written to that personage. 
 They have their comic side, and both poet 
 and publisher made extraordinary demands 
 on human patience. Byron seems to have 
 looked on Murray as a sort of Whitely, a 
 ' universal emporium.' I have noted down 
 some of the things the unfortunate publisher 
 
106 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 was required to send out to Italy: Tooth- 
 powder, Peruvian bark, magnesia, Macassar 
 oil, a bulldog, a terrier, two Newfoundland 
 dogs, of course innumerable books, and 
 ' Burkitt's soda powders.' The poet was 
 difficult in the matter of proofs. 'None of 
 your damned proofs ; . . . don't let me have 
 any of your cursed printers' trash to pore 
 over,' he writes at one time, and at another 
 is furious when printers' mistakes appear in 
 his books. He sometimes patronises Murray 
 with a sort of mock offensiveness, telling 
 him that he is 'a little spoilt by " villainous 
 company" — wits, persons of honour about 
 town, authors, and fashionables — together 
 with your " I am just going to call at Carlton 
 House: are you walking that way,"' and 
 banters him on 'the ferine nature of a 
 publisher ' : but it is clear that the mutual 
 regard of the two men was never seriously 
 interrupted. It was only when Byron's good 
 nature was persuaded by Shelley to help the 
 luckless enterprise of the brothers Leigh and 
 John Hunt that even the business relation 
 ceased — tried as it had been on both sides, by 
 Murray's fears and Byron's irritations. 
 
 Byron had to complain, and justly, as 
 Moore admitted in his Diary too late, of 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 107 
 
 neglect from old friends — 'thinking con- 
 stantly, as his letters prove him to have been, 
 of distant friends, and receiving few or none 
 equal proofs of thoughtfulness in return.' 
 He had to find, as others have found, how 
 little active is the good nature we hopefully 
 attribute to our acquaintance. But his own 
 good nature was proof against that. With 
 Moore he never quarrelled at all, nor varied 
 in his affectionate tone. There was a fresh — 
 and an amusing — breeze with Hobhouse, but 
 it was Hobhouse who took offence. When 
 that ardent reformer was sent to Newgate 
 for a brief period, Byron sent a funny ballad, 
 in which it is hard to see more than friendly 
 chaff, to Murray, from whom it leaked into 
 the papers. Hobhouse was furious, not 
 remembering his own lines on Byron, his 
 parody of * Though the day of my Destiny 's 
 over' — 'Dear Byron, this humbug give over,' 
 etc. — which are a good deal more severe. (It 
 is a very funny and strictly verbal parody, of 
 a sort we see too little of now : our parodist 
 in chief, Mr. Seaman, parodies the spirit, a 
 more difficult task, but the other sort is 
 worth having as well.) It was later, how- 
 ever, that they quarrelled more angrily, the 
 cause, which had something to do with a 
 
108 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 bust, being obscure. Hobhouse wrote Byron 
 an abusive letter, and Byron asked of 
 Murray : ' By the way, you do not happen to 
 know whether Mrs. Fry had commenced her 
 reform of the prisoners at the time when 
 Mr. Hobhouse was in Newgate? there are 
 some of his phrases and much of his style (in 
 that same letter), which led me to suspect 
 that either she had not, or that he had 
 profited less than the others by her instruc- 
 tions.' (I venture to quote, as it is part of 
 the new material, but of course one could 
 quote such delightful fun for ever from 
 the letters.) But with Hobhouse, as with 
 Kinnaird and a few others of his oldest 
 friends, afPection survived the trials of dis- 
 tance and consequent mistakes. One would 
 give much to have more of his letters to 
 Lord Clare. Madame Guiccioli describes 
 Byron's emotion when he and Lord Clare 
 parted in Italy, and in the last year of his 
 life we find him still writing to this old 
 Harrow chum as ' my dearest Clare.' Friends, 
 cronies, confidants and sympathisers among 
 men — that is what was really important to 
 Byron's heart. 
 
 Of the men with whom he consorted after 
 1816 one thinks first of Shelley. It was an 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 109 
 
 intellectual friendship, based on a mutual 
 admiration which — in spite of the phrase's 
 evil meaning — was genuine and proper. 
 Their tastes were not alike, and Shelley's 
 sensitiveness sometimes was hurt by Byron's 
 manner. But Byron wrote to Murray after 
 Shelley's death, 'You were all brutally mis- 
 taken about Shelley, who was, without 
 exception, the best and least selfish man I 
 ever knew. I never knew one who was not 
 a beast in comparison.' It is a tribute to 
 rank with that of Gibbon to Henry Fielding, 
 and it may be a finer. 
 
 It is not necessary to discuss the Leigh 
 Hunt trouble. Hunt seems to have been 
 one of those men born to justify cynics : he 
 resented an obligation, though he made no 
 effort to requite it; and that Byron should 
 house and finance him and give, among other 
 of his finest works, the Vision of Judgment 
 to John Hunt's wretched paper, weighed 
 nothing against fancied slights. The quarrel, 
 such as it was, I suspect was a woman's 
 affair. Byron disliked Hunt's kraal, as he 
 rather rudely called it, and, especially, the 
 'six little blackguards,' Hunt's sons, and 
 foolishly wrote this sentiment to Mrs. 
 Shelley. That good lady, I am strongly of 
 
110 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 opinion, would have shown at once such a 
 letter to Mrs. Hunt. The opinion is not 
 harsh, for Mrs. Shelley's generosity is re- 
 vealed to us. Byron had refused Shelley's 
 legacy to himself of £2000, had done all he 
 could to get his widow an allowance from 
 Sir Timothy Shelley, and had offered her 
 money of his own, which she refused, pre- 
 ferring to accept Trelawney's. When Byron 
 started for Greece (taking with him £10,000 
 to spend on the Greeks as a beginning) Mrs. 
 Shelley inveighed against his 'unconquer- 
 able avarice ' which ' prevented his supplying 
 me with money,' and related how * a remnant 
 of shame caused him to avoid me.' Not, I 
 think, the nicest sort of woman. As for 
 Trelawney, he disliked Byron, and is not a 
 trustworthy chronicler; moreover, his ac- 
 quaintance with Byron was at a time when 
 the poet's nerves, as many incidents show, 
 were irritable. We know little of his Italian 
 friendships, about which he would not be 
 likely to write very much to his English 
 correspondents. The Counts Gamba, the 
 father and brother of Madame Guiccioli, were 
 his constant allies, and Pietro Gamba seems 
 to have been the most intimate of his foreign 
 men friends. They seem rather to have ' let 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 111 
 
 him in ' during the revolutionary movement 
 at Ravenna — storing condemnatory arms in 
 bis house when the plot was discovered — but 
 your patriot is often careless. 
 
 In labouring to be clear, I become long: 
 I must quit this more exclusively personal 
 aspect of Byron in Italy with a very few 
 more words. The circumstances of his life 
 were not likely to check the egotism obvious 
 in him from the first, and the new letters, 
 of course, are full of it. But it remained 
 for the most part an egotism of the head 
 and not of the heart — a harmless egotism 
 which made him analyse himself in his 
 diaries, and write accounts of the same 
 trivial incident that had happened to him 
 to half a dozen friends, and linger over his 
 feats at swimming and recall his 'notches' 
 at Lord's, but which never stood in the way 
 of the sympathetic ear and the open hand. 
 Without the egotism he could not have been 
 the poet we admire, without the obverse side 
 the Byron whose memory it is possible to 
 love. Practical sense, judgment, observa- 
 tion, a grip of things — those qualities waver, 
 as with all men, but grow steadily all the 
 while. The humour becomes mellower, but 
 remains as gay. A bitter gibe at his wife 
 
112 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 from time to time we have, yet also a curious 
 desire she should be kept in mind of him, 
 and a real solicitude for his daughter, Ada. 
 As for his old loves, he obliged my theory 
 by hardly mentioning them : we find him 
 trying to reconcile Lady Frances Webster 
 and her husband at Leghorn with a friendly 
 gravity. 
 
 This is not an occasion to write of the 
 poetry, even if to do so would not be worse 
 than superfluous. But questions of literary 
 criticism fill a good space in the letters, 
 especially in vol. v., and some of them are 
 focussed by Mr. Prothero in his appendices. 
 Passages in the new letters, in vol. v., which 
 depreciate Keats have caused a good deal 
 of not unnatural annoyance to present-day 
 critics. Now, if Byron's abuse of Keats — 
 for I fear it amounts to that — had been 
 a cold-blooded and accurate expression of 
 opinion, it would reflect without doubt on 
 Byron's taste and judgment. But the reverse 
 is the case. In that day literary 'schools' 
 and parties were furiously fighting bodies. 
 Keats, in the eye of the world, belonged to 
 the school of Wordsworth and Coleridge — 
 a school which offended Byron by its really 
 excessive claims to be the only prophet of 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 113 
 
 'nature,' and by an equally excessive and 
 unreasonable belittling of Pope. The con- 
 troversy between the classical and the 
 romantic is dead : we are content to see the 
 merits of both and enjoy what is best in 
 them, but in the first quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century this reasonable course was 
 almost impossible. Byron, also, would have 
 been more than human if he had not been 
 influenced by a very personal consideration. 
 His own genius, stimulated by emotion 
 though it was, grew, more strongly as years 
 went on, intellectual, observant, epigram- 
 matic, worldly, and it led him to forsake his 
 first passionate manner and incline to the 
 classical mode. He thought, and rightly, 
 that his later work was far better than 
 his earlier. But the later work was by 
 no means so popular as the earlier. He 
 wrote to Shelley in 1822 : ' Murray writes 
 discouragingly. . . . You see what it is 
 to throw pearls to swine. As long as I 
 wrote the exaggerated nonsense' — was ever 
 poet so candid before or since? — 'which 
 has corrupted the public taste, they ap- 
 plauded to the very echo; and now that 
 I have really composed, within these three 
 or four years, some things which should 
 
 H 
 
114 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 "not willingly be let die," the whole herd 
 snort and grumble and return to wallow in 
 their mire.' Pope was Byron's idol : he 
 spared no pains to defend him, writing pro- 
 digious long attacks on the Rev. Mr. Bowles, 
 and Keats was closely associated with his 
 dispraise. It is, moreover, to the credit of 
 Byron's judgment that he saw in Keats the 
 strong man of the school he disliked — though 
 of course, being a fighting critic, he did not 
 say so — the man ' to go for,' and he went for 
 him accordingly. As for the strength of his 
 language, violence was the fashion of the 
 time: the curious may see, in one of Mr. 
 Prothero's appendices, remarks of Southey 
 upon Byron as violent as anything Byron 
 wrote against Keats or even Southey him- 
 self, and far — far — more venomous. When 
 Keats died, Byron hastened to request 
 Murray to 'omit all that is said about him 
 in any MSS. of mine, or publication,' and 
 added, 'His Hyperion is a fine monument, 
 and will keep his name.' This was more 
 generous dealing than Byron's critics meted 
 to himself : the amiable Southey was moved 
 to be 'sorry' for Byron's death, 'because it 
 comes in aid of a pernicious reputation which 
 was stinking in the snuff.' (It is worth 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 115 
 
 turning to this appendix to admire an exer- 
 cise in malevolent, canting self -righteousness 
 more remarkable than any of Southey's 
 poems.) But even in our own impartial 
 times, critics sometimes say things in their 
 haste which their judgment might correct. 
 I read the other day in a serious 'weekly' 
 the expression of a wish that Mr. Kipling 
 • would give up writing altogether,' and the 
 critic had just read Kim. If Byron was a 
 little blind to the merits of Keats there was 
 much excuse, and we are justified in thinking 
 that he was not so blind as he seemed. 
 
 It was not a new Byron who sailed for 
 Greece in 1823 ; it was not a quality hitherto 
 dormant that suddenly took the lead of the 
 rest. Dr. Drury at Harrow had thought he 
 should be an orator and a statesman, and 
 he had never been a sedentary poet, but of 
 his nature, though not in results, essentially 
 a man of action. For all that he wrote and 
 read he had to thank his vitality of consti- 
 tution : he could never live without mixing 
 with men and lending his weight to their 
 affairs, and had his strength not admitted 
 of both it was action that would have come 
 first. A happier start in public life at home 
 and happier circumstances in his private life 
 
116 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 might easily have lost the poet in the states- 
 man. The countenance of English society, 
 you must remember, was not given him until 
 he had written a famous poem, and to start 
 political life in the House of Lords poor and 
 friendless was no likelier an opportunity then 
 than now. And before he had run through 
 the romantic and other pleasures which the 
 brief worship of society threw in his path, 
 before he had had fair time for such a tem- 
 perament as his to set steadily for ambition, 
 he was driven out of the country. This is 
 perhaps a vain speculation, but at least 
 action — adventure — the affairs of men, played 
 as it was an invariably important part with 
 him. First his travels, then tumultuous 
 social action, so to call it, in England, then 
 the dissipation and society of Venice, and 
 then the revolutionary plots, into which he 
 threw himself heart and soul at Ravenna. 
 The spies of the Austrian Government, as 
 their reports show, looked on Byron as a 
 powerful conspirator — making all kinds of 
 mistakes about him, as such gentry do, but 
 obtaining plenty of corroboration for their 
 fears. It is probable that the comparative 
 calm of his last two years in Italy, only 
 relieved by silly Hunt squabbles and the 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 117 
 
 like, had thoroughly bored him: his joy at 
 escaping for an adventure is on record. 
 
 His motive in going can hardly have been 
 merely enthusiasm for ' liberty.' The gener- 
 ous souls of that day had the privilege of 
 believing that 'liberty' would really bring 
 happiness to little nationalities, and Byron 
 shared sincerely in this belief — which was 
 at times a little strangely in contrast with 
 his ultra-aristocratic habit of mind and con- 
 tempt for the mob. But he could have had 
 no illusions about the Greeks. He had seen 
 them as a young man, when he thought 
 them 'plausible rascals,' with the vices of 
 the Turks without their virtues. Or, if he 
 had any, he must have been quickly unde- 
 ceived. One of his first actions at Misso- 
 longhi was to release several Mohammedan 
 women and children whom the revolted 
 Greeks had enslaved, after butchering the 
 men; and from first to last almost every 
 Greek who approached him tried to swindle 
 him, or at least to make a private haul from 
 the money he was ready to supply to the 
 cause. ' Damned liars ! ' he wrote in a journal, 
 and applauds St. Paul for seeing no differ- 
 ence between a Greek and a Jew. What 
 sort of ambition he may have had for him- 
 
118 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 self cannot be known. There were great 
 chances in the game, for the quarrels of the 
 Greek leaders were already making a foreign 
 ruler indispensable. A large governorship 
 at least he might have looked for, if not for 
 something grander. But I fancy it was just 
 the adventure that moved him most. 
 
 The upshot makes pitiable reading. In- 
 trigues, worries, revolts, impossible leaders, 
 impossible followers — illness, death. To the 
 last he was indefatigable, keen, practical, 
 and far-seeing. The might-have-beens crowd 
 on one's imagination. If Byron had lived 
 to the Psalmist's limit, he would have been 
 alive in 1858. What would he have thought 
 of Tennyson, of Dickens, of Thackeray ? Of 
 Disraeli, of Gladstone? These superficial 
 questions give way to others less plausibly 
 to be answered. But I cannot see that there 
 was any radical twist in Byron's nature that 
 was sure to bring an explosion, a madness, 
 in the end. I cannot see why the strengthen- 
 ing of judgment, of the hold on practical 
 life, of the curb on waywardness should not 
 have continued. If he had returned from 
 Greece he would have returned to England : 
 that is certain. ' Why did I not go to Eng- 
 land before I came here?' he said on his 
 
BYRON, 1816-1824 119 
 
 deathbed. His old disgust of his country- 
 men had been waning, and was probably 
 near its end in Cephalonia, where the good 
 fellowship towards him of the English 
 officers surprised and touched him. If he 
 had returned to England the old 'literary* 
 enemies and their war-cries would have been 
 loud, of course, but they could not have 
 stopped his course. With the fresh glamour 
 of his Greek exploits on him another splendid 
 chance would have been his, and this time 
 it would not have been stolen from him. 
 How would he have used it ? His vigour as 
 a poet was still at its greatest when he died, 
 but there are signs that he was weary of 
 the literary hubbub, and he was not one to 
 write for writing's sake without regard to 
 his effect. It was a time of great doings in 
 politics, but not of very strong men, and 
 such a force as Byron's must have weighed 
 heavily then, if he had chosen. Vain dreams I 
 — but I think that the loss of his intellectual 
 honesty to English life was hardly less than 
 that of his fire and his wit to English letters. 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 
 
 I DOUBT the impertinence of writing about 
 Horace Walpole may not be forgiven. One 
 may hardly hope profitably to sound those 
 praises which have been told a thousand 
 times by better men, and if one likes to dis- 
 criminate in qualities, what signifies that 
 discrimination to other whole-hearted lovers? 
 But I am full of gratitude from a long re- 
 reading of the letters, and one whose voca- 
 tion is, or ought to be, to record himself one 
 way or another in print, may fitly raise in 
 gratitude his little heap of words out of sight 
 of more imposing monuments — a scribbler so 
 often has to write of things and books and 
 people that have bored him to death. So I 
 hope you will bear with me, and after all I 
 shall be none the wiser if you don't. 
 
 I have read nothing but these letters for 
 the last month; and if a phrase or two should 
 slip from them along my pen, I hope you will 
 not count it profanation or affectation — I 
 can't help it, and the subject justifies them 
 
 120 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 121 
 
 more than another. A strange thing, by the 
 way, is an archaism. To these it is irresis- 
 tible at the risk of sense or sincerity, to those 
 it is as infuriating as though you had called 
 them a bad name. I like to use one now and 
 then, and would make it criminal in other 
 people. Horace Walpole in his letters hardly 
 uses one, preferring the sauce of cant phrases 
 current with his intimates, which was odd in 
 a man who loved the past so much and so 
 belittled the present. 
 
 There is one of the qualities that warm his 
 readers, for to read him at all presupposes 
 sympathy with it. The dear past with its 
 charming letters! It was an out-patient 
 of Bedlam who first suggested that Mr. 
 Walpole's were written with an eye on pos- 
 terity, or else it was an envious generation 
 that can write no better than it can talk, 
 that has exchanged good letters for bald, as 
 it has exchanged good manners for bluff 
 rudeness, amusement for insipid dissipation, 
 endeavour after excellence for the tricks 
 of undeserved advertisement. Mr. Walpole 
 despised posterity : he made a shrewd guess 
 of the rascal it would be. And, by the way, he 
 made the same charges against the genera- 
 tion that came in with his old age as I have 
 
122 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 made against this; they are good honest 
 charges to bring against any generation. 
 But he did not write his charming letters 
 for posterity. He wrote them because he 
 had parts and was good-natured, and wished 
 to amuse his friends. If we had his ability 
 and good-nature we should write the like. 
 He was idle and we are busy? Pray how 
 many of our idle people — and we have a good 
 number in the second generation from pro- 
 fitable trade, if our aristocrats are idle no 
 longer — how many of them write good 
 letters ? The best I ever got were written 
 by the busiest woman of my acquaintance — 
 I have Horace's word that women write 
 better letters than men — but she was not of 
 this generation. Mr. Walpole complains that 
 his letters are shown about ; he writes often 
 hurriedly in the intervals of society, often 
 painfully, with gouty fingers. Besides, it is 
 possible to be quite as busy in collecting 
 pictures and curios, in writing books and 
 printing others, and in obliging one's friends, 
 as in cheating one's neighbours in the city 
 or blackening innocence in a law court. 
 
 To talk of pessimism — the last touch of it 
 was not very wise — have you ever observed 
 that men who are good men in practice are 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 123 
 
 often pessimists in theory, whereas your 
 genial and vehement optimist is often a very 
 dirty rogue? Mr. Walpole was good-natured, 
 serviceable, generous, incorruptible, and yet 
 his mistrust of his fellow-creatures' virtues 
 was only equalled by his contempt of their 
 abilities. While there is a man who seems 
 to be convinced that the world is stocked full 
 of courage and honour and generosity, who 
 loses his self-control when anybody — in a 
 book or play for example — suggests that it 
 contains any quality but these, and whose 
 life has been — a life I would not care to 
 describe. The one man found that experience 
 left him but very few people for friendship, 
 but these he loved and they loved him ; the 
 other is boisterously fond of all the world, 
 and would not give, nor be given, a sixpence 
 to save a death in a ditch. I suggest no con- 
 clusion, but I know so many instances of 
 these states, that unless I have proof of an 
 optimist's virtue, I doubt he is a rascal. 
 
 In this I am not writing as a philosopher 
 (but a philosopher, Horace Walpole said, was 
 a supercilious brute); by pessimism I mean 
 merely a rough opinion of one's fellows or 
 one's age. Who shall say which is the better 
 justified, Mr. Walpole's or mine ? Politics I 
 
124 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 suppose, remain mucli the same, with the 
 motives of politicians. In his day self- 
 interest was more crudely unabashed, and 
 the distinction between money and other 
 bribes — a distinction convenient to a richer 
 period — was thought of less importance than 
 now. In the art of letters I maintain the 
 advantage was with Mr. Walpole, albeit his 
 complaints of the minor vices of authors have 
 ceased entirely to have ground. It is true 
 that ' the mob of gentlemen who write with 
 ease ' is considerably greater in this our day. 
 But in his time — since it was people of 
 taste, not board-school millions who set the 
 fashions of literature — writers were better 
 educated than now; some equipment of 
 scholarship was counted an advantage to 
 them ; to be illiterate was not then the 
 common condition of a ' literary man.' They 
 were better paid, to boot, oddly enough, if 
 you except our popular novelists; even 
 Goldsmith, the unlucky, got £100 for a poem. 
 And if you come to names and achievements 
 — Johnson, Gray, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Field- 
 ing, Sterne — I can tell you of a greater poet 
 and (in my opinion) a greater novelist now 
 alive, but the humorists ? I think, on the 
 whole, that Mr. Walpole's time will stand a 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 125 
 
 close scrutiny of names. By the way, three of 
 those I have mentioned were quite unappre- 
 ciated by Mr. Walpole, their contemporary : 
 I leave the moral to you. Let us turn to the 
 stage, which in his time was not, as a living 
 and producing thing, divorced from letters. 
 They had Garrick : we have — but it is idle to 
 talk of acting. For plays they, as we, were 
 largely the lucky slaves of Shakespeare. 
 But they had Goldsmith and Sheridan, and 
 had not forgotten Congreve. It may be that 
 there are no comedies in English unquestion- 
 ably great save certain of Shakespeare's and 
 The Way of the World ; still the comedies 
 of Sheridan and Goldsmith were comedies, 
 not farces dashed with sentiment or melo- 
 drama. 
 
 What is it that charms us most in him ? 
 Is it wit ? Or humour ? Or egotism ? Or 
 unselfishness ? Or — I will come to my own 
 creed in a moment, but first I am old- 
 fashioned enough to insist on talking of wit 
 and humour. It is a common observation 
 that jokes — and jokes must largely form the 
 wit of letters — do not pass current to another 
 generation. Even those but twenty years 
 out of date fall flat — perhaps more especially 
 those. When they linger on, as in the pages 
 
126 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 of Mr. Punch, we do not shriek and roar at 
 them, much less smile. On the whole, those 
 in Horace Walpole are exceptionally apt, 
 and even the puns are generally good, though 
 they had a context and manner that are 
 hard to recover. But they are not always 
 even happy, and I am sometimes tempted 
 to suspect that his quotations of George 
 Selwyn are not always so kind as they seem. 
 Humour is another thing: rare humour is 
 for all ages. Mr. Walpole's vein of irony 
 when, as often happens, it is sustained in the 
 bland, subtle method, is irresistible. There 
 is an occasional odd touch of sympathetic 
 and unexpected humour — a ' modern ' touch, 
 it often is. Such as his 'laughing for half 
 an hour' over the death of the negus- 
 drinking baronet, a laugh which echoes as 
 one reads. And sometimes a story with a 
 point of humour goes straight to one's sense 
 of the comical. Do you remember the story 
 of the stile and the passing coach and ' there 
 was Mr. Conway and Lady Ailesbury looking 
 on'? A little coarse, our pedants of delicacy 
 would say, but it is a story for hearty 
 laughter. Yes, and the pedants of delicacy 
 if they told it — and since it happened it 
 positively had to be told — would have left it 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 127 
 
 far less delicate, with their foolish obscurity, 
 than Mr. Walpole. 
 
 Yet wit and humour do not account, to my 
 mind, for all the charm. You may add the 
 antiquarian interest, the interest of customs, 
 the friendship, the tact, the genuine good 
 sense. All these you may add and I am not 
 satisfied. Something is left, and alas! I 
 have no better name for it but a trite and 
 much misused one — atmosphere. The at- 
 mosphere is of a compact, intimate society, 
 found, not made by individual choice, yet 
 impregnable. A very few hundred people, 
 secure of position, there by indubitable right 
 of accident, formed English society, were 
 England in a sense. That society was, as it 
 were, a fixed stratum of caste, and therefore 
 there was hardly room for snobbery, which 
 belongs to societies of shifting sand. Of 
 course I do not mean to say that a com- 
 munity of strata is an ideal social polity: I 
 am aware that the shifting sand may bring 
 more happiness to a nation at large. But 
 for those who belong to it that compact 
 society meant — sua si bona norant — advan- 
 tages of social life quite beyond the vulgar 
 advantages of wealth and power. To those 
 who belonged to it: no doubt if one had 
 
128 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 lived then and not been of this society, its 
 advantages might have been a nuisance. 
 But reading of it a hundred years later one 
 feels the charm, of course, as not outside it. 
 A society of equality, with courtesies well 
 understood, with familiarities regulated but 
 sufficient, on a friendly acquaintance, for 
 pleasant intercourse : a society in short, 
 where everybody knew everybody and of 
 everybody, and there need be no hesitations 
 nor mistakes. In the flowing, unregulated 
 multitudinous society of modern England 
 there may be greater pleasure in the bulk; 
 the pleasures of snobbery, of social ambition, 
 and progressive exclusiveness, and the rest 
 of it, are all an addition, no doubt. I do 
 not despise snobbery: it is convenient to 
 the minor satirist, and I firmly believe that 
 it is mainly responsible for keeping our 
 Government — of either party — stable and 
 respectable. And the other society could 
 not last ; it was almost an anachronism a 
 hundred years ago, and it would be ridiculous 
 now. But it afforded an unembarrassed 
 scope for those who had ability to impart 
 or to receive the added charm of grace or 
 intellect, and it surrounded its best examples, 
 in St. James's or in country houses, with a 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 129 
 
 vanished atmosphere of which the pleasant- 
 ness lingers, as nowhere else, in Horace 
 Walpole. 
 
 But one must not leave off without a note 
 of more obvious humanity. One likes Horace 
 Walpole's sturdy loyalty and care for his 
 father's memory, even though it strength- 
 ened that Whiggery of his which to me is 
 one of his few antipathies. And here I 
 wish to do penance for an offence. In the 
 days of my comparative youth I believed 
 a scandalous story, to the effect that Horace 
 Walpole was really the son of Car, Lord 
 Hervey, the brother of the more famous 
 John, who preceded him in the title — the 
 second of the then Earl of Bristol — and 
 wrote the interesting memoirs and married 
 the renowned Molly Lepel, the lady who 
 was in due time to receive some of Horace's 
 most agreeable letters. I used to believe 
 this wicked story; it was attractive, and 
 if it had been true, it would have fitted 
 in very nicely. For the Herveys were a 
 distinguished, lettered, eccentric, brilliant 
 family, and the Walpoles were very much 
 the reverse ; if you except Sir Robert, whose 
 genius was as unlike Horace's as an elephant 
 is to a greyhound, who was there? It was 
 
 I 
 
130 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 pleasant to see resemblances in Hervey'a 
 Memoirs. But that was no justification for 
 believing a scandal on wholly insufficient 
 evidence and printing one's belief in a little 
 book. I hereby do penance, and beg pardon 
 in the shades of Horace, Sir Robert, Car 
 Hervey — if that is necessary, and more 
 especially of Lady Walpole, the first wife, 
 not 'the Skerrit.' To resume, one likes 
 Horace Walpole's loyalty to his cousin, 
 General Conway, and admires that close 
 friendship of sixty years. One likes perhaps 
 even more his tender affection and care for 
 his old blind friend, Madame du Deffand. 
 But how much there is in reading the letters 
 of sixty years to make one sad. I think the 
 saddest imagination of a novelist never 
 affected me more than that record of how 
 in a long life a man's friends die or are 
 changed. After a series of letters to a friend 
 his name drops out; there are no more 
 letters : presently you read in a letter to 
 another a regret for the friend's death. One 
 reads — it is the keenest example — the many 
 long letters to George Montagu, ranging 
 over forty years, and varying from jolly 
 fun to earnest advice; there is a long in- 
 terval; and when his death is mentioned 
 
AFTER READING HORACE WALPOLE 131 
 
 (to Mr. Cole) it is added: 'he had dropped 
 me, partly from politics and partly from 
 caprice.' It distresses one though — or is it 
 because? — it happened so long ago, and 
 all the more if one cannot add the senti- 
 mentalist's ' Let us hope ' — and so forth. 
 
 I have mentioned antipathies, and I confess 
 to a very few, that are minor and accidental. 
 He was intolerant, politically, to Catholics, 
 and he took a somewhat exceeding care of 
 himself in the way of temperance. His 
 creed was Whiggery, though as reasoned 
 as Whiggery may be. It followed that he 
 was unfeeling to those executed for treason 
 in '46. But all this matters little — still, I 
 wish with all my heart that he had ap- 
 preciated Charles ii. 
 
 Horace Walpole is for every humour. If 
 you are wise he confirms you with a pleasant 
 philosophy, though he hated the name; if 
 you are flippant, he tells you a comical, 
 perhaps a wicked story; if you are com- 
 plaisant, he charms you with agreeable 
 courtesies ; if you would rail at your age, 
 he turns you many a contemptuous text 
 from his. When first I read him it was as 
 he would have liked to be read, in an old 
 country house, which he would have tasted 
 
132 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 (but I think he never went thither), lying 
 on the grass in a hot summer. The edition 
 was Peter Cunningham's best, the volumes 
 easy to handle on one's back. I was really 
 young then, and care was a whimsical, tooth- 
 less, puppy. When last I read him it was in 
 London and the weather was mostly savage, 
 and care was grown to as vicious a dog as 
 Madame du Deffand's Tonton. The edition 
 was in one huge volume, three large ones 
 bound together, and making the very fattest 
 book I ever saw outside Holy Writ, which 
 I suppose is made awkward to read to 
 augment the piety of the reader. Both 
 times was I charmed all through and lived 
 altogether in the days of the Georges, Second 
 and Third. And so I have taken the liberty 
 of exhibiting my gratitude with such de- 
 cency as I might. In doing this, I am grown 
 equanimous, and if I have made any odious 
 comparisons I beg pardon. I did not mean 
 them. 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES THE 
 SECOND 
 
 Not only Plutarch, but historians without 
 number have loved to draw parallels and 
 contrasts between heroes, philosophers, and 
 statesmen, brace by brace. Sometimes the 
 process is as full of suggestion and instruc- 
 tion as an egg is full of meat, sometimes it 
 is not. But it is always easy. As thus : If 
 your A and your B suggest obvious like- 
 nesses, 'just as A,' you remark, with such 
 pomp and gravity as may be yours to com- 
 mand, ' was this and did that, so B was this 
 and did so-and-so.' Or if you cannot hit on 
 the likeness — but there are likenesses be- 
 tween most people — your contrast swells 
 your page. ' Whereas A,' say you, * was 
 this, B was that; whereas A did so-and-so, 
 B did t'other thing.' There are no two per- 
 sonages in history who may not be coupled 
 or separated in this honoured manner. In 
 adopting it for the case of Charles the 
 Second and Charles James Fox, I do not 
 
 133 
 
134 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 pretend to make any profound discovery 
 or to solve any important problem. The 
 idea of heredity, which many absurd people, 
 ignorant of their Bibles, thought to have 
 first occurred to the human race a few years 
 ago, must be as old as family life ; but since 
 men of science still dispute about its most 
 elementary applications, we can hardly learn 
 much scientific truth from the case of a man 
 and his great-great-grandson. But it is at 
 least interesting, or so I would hope, to find 
 in two of the most distinguished figures — 
 distinguished for their personal qualities 
 — in English history who stood in this re- 
 lation some notable likenesses in habits, 
 qualities, and tastes, however merely a 
 coincidence those likenesses may have been, 
 and in one particular it will be found that 
 the likeness is something more than curious. 
 Charles Fox's mother was, you remember, 
 Lady Caroline Lennox, granddaughter of 
 the first Duke of Richmond of that family, 
 who was the son of Charles the Second and 
 Louise de Querouailles, Duchess of Ports- 
 mouth. It is an odd circumstance, by the 
 way, and a rather interesting example of 
 'links with the past,' that old Stephen, the 
 founder of the Fox family, was Charles 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 135 
 
 the Second's contemporary, though his son 
 (born when he was eighty years old) mar- 
 ried Charles's great-granddaughter. Charles 
 Fox's father, the first Lord Holland, made a 
 runaway match of it, — but I am bound to 
 assume that my reader knows all these 
 things, having read his Lord John Russell 
 or his Sir George Trevelyan, or at least 
 Jesse's Selwyn and his Contem'poraries, that 
 fascinating panorama of social England in 
 the last half of the eighteenth century, from 
 which Sir George Trevelyan, by the way, 
 draws most of his liveliest passages. Regret- 
 fully I make that assumption, and refer to 
 the knowledge we both, my reader and I, 
 possess merely to illustrate and embellish 
 my little parallel. 
 
 First, in the approved fashion, we will get 
 rid of the obvious differences. It is some 
 years since I took the liberty, in The New 
 Revieio, of eulogising Charles the Second, but 
 I still remember the solemnity with which 
 the Spectator, a literary paper, taking me 
 perhaps a little too literally, warned my 
 editor against having anything more to do 
 with me. I will say now only that, com- 
 pared with the general run of kings, Charles 
 the Second was a person of remarkable abili- 
 
136 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 ties, and performed in some directions — in 
 spite of the errors the Whigs have made so 
 notorious, but which were surpassed by many 
 other kings before and since — a very useful 
 work, and that he had many attractive quali- 
 ties as a man and an artist in social life. 
 And I am ready to admit that Charles James 
 Fox was in natural genius the greater man 
 of the two. Certainly he had far greater 
 * educational advantages ' in the ordinary use 
 of the phrase. At an age when the king was 
 being knocked about in the Civil Wars, and 
 intriguing abroad as best he might, the states- 
 man was using his extraordinary powers of 
 absorption in making himself a finished 
 scholar at Eton — though of course he was a 
 pickle there, and was accused, alas ! of having 
 lowered the tone of the place — and at Oxford, 
 until Lord Holland, that strange parent, in- 
 sisted on his leaving his studies for the dis- 
 sipations of Paris. (Not a judicious father — 
 he allowed Charles to choose his school at ten, 
 and started him as a gambler at sixteen — 
 but one cannot help smiling at the excellent 
 Dr. Jesse's denunciations of these ' criminal 
 indulgences,' and Sir George Trevelyan's cold 
 severity concerning the mismanagement of 
 the * poor fellow,' Charles's, early life. With 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 137 
 
 all the facilities for raking of his time and 
 class, Charles could hardly have been re- 
 strained by parental authority.) Also, of 
 course, their periods were different, though 
 not by a thousandth part so different as 
 either from our own : Fox's was more com- 
 fortable and less vehement, more widely 
 cultivated, especially in the case of its women 
 — Madame du Deffand, Lady Hervey, and the 
 Duchess of Devonshire were women of greater 
 knowledge and sense than the high-spirited 
 wantons of Charles the Second's Court, or 
 even than the Frenchwomen of Moliere's 
 ridicule — more complex, though not much, 
 in its interests ; less open, though not a great 
 deal, in its passions. 
 
 The fact that Charles the Second was a 
 king and Charles Fox was not, does not 
 imply so important a difference as it might 
 be supposed. Since the nobles of the later 
 Roman Republic and the Venetian oligarchy 
 there had not been— and most assuredly there 
 has not been since— a ruling class so com- 
 pactly powerful, so wealthy, or with such a 
 free hand generally, in the world, as that 
 into which Charles Fox was born. It was in 
 a truth 'all kings.' With few exceptions, 
 which were succoured by Government jobs 
 
138 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 or the friendly generosity of a non-com- 
 mercial age, its members were set all together 
 above the sordid needs of life. They visited 
 one another in their country houses and 
 palaces ; they were at home together in St, 
 James's Street; they knew practically the 
 whole of their class in a personal sense, and 
 were intimate with all its private affairs, 
 which they discussed with a reasonably 
 justified air of discussing the affairs of 
 England; so compact and secure was their 
 society that its great ladies, as Sir George 
 Trevelyan reminds us, had no need to send 
 invitations to men for their parties. Now, 
 the most important result of all this com- 
 pactness in a class impregnable and ruling 
 without question was to make possible the 
 widest liberty of public and private action. 
 It could afford such liberty to a degree 
 absolutely unknown in our political men on 
 the one hand, or the lives of our aristocracy 
 and their friends on the other — unknown, 
 that is to say, without subsequent disaster. 
 It is indeed an odd comment on the virtues 
 of our ' Great Revolution,' that it should have 
 produced a society in which were possible 
 the private — the word is one of courtesy — 
 and public excesses of Charles Fox. 'Charles' 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 139 
 
 might do precisely that which he pleased, 
 lose his money, lose his friends' money, at 
 cards and dice, drink and rake with all the 
 joyous effusion of his wonderful constitu- 
 tion; he might openly attack the king and 
 wear Washington's livery in the House to 
 show his sympathy with the Americans — 
 which even they, now happily our friends, 
 will understand was not kind to his country : 
 but he was ' Charles,' a privileged and widely 
 beloved personage of society, and society 
 never thought of giving him the cold 
 shoulder. A little good-natured bantering 
 from George Selwyn at White's or Brooks's 
 — that was the only penalty. I am not accus- 
 ing the society; it could afford to do what 
 it did, and what it did was determined by 
 socially logical considerations. Still less do 
 I accuse 'Charles,' being one of the few 
 persons who still think — in spite of Thack- 
 eray's depriving genius of its indulgences — 
 that the unlucky results of hot blood are a 
 small price to pay (as it sometimes has to be 
 paid) for such genius or such charm as that 
 of Charles Fox. But it was an odd society 
 to be established by the principles of the 
 ♦ glorious Revolution,' the 'liberties' of which, 
 indeed, seemed to have been the liberties of 
 
140 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 public aggrandisement and private licence 
 enjoyed by a small and favoured class, just 
 as the liberties of the early Liberals, the 
 heirs of these Whigs, v^ere the public impor- 
 tance and private enrichment of the manu- 
 facturers. The comparison with the Venetian 
 oligarchy was pushed as far as it would go 
 by Disraeli : as for the nobles of the Roman 
 Republic, it was not an inept comparison 
 which Fox's contemporaries made between 
 him and Julius Csesar — they never thought of 
 mine — whose early manhood, with its ijro- 
 fligacy and debt and public influence and 
 fame combined, was indeed a close prototype 
 of Fox. ' I do not think,' so Horace Walpole 
 wrote to Conway, ' I can find in Patin ^ or 
 Plato, nay, nor in Aristotle, a parallel case 
 to Charles Fox : there are advertised to be 
 sold more annuities of his and his society, to 
 the amount of five hundred thousand pounds 
 a year ! I wonder what he will do next, when 
 he has sold the estates of all his friends ! ' 
 And Gibbon, when Fox had distinguished 
 himself in a debate about the Thirty-nine 
 Articles, wrote to Lord Sheffield : ' I con- 
 gratulate you on the late victory of our dear 
 
 1 Guy Patin, to wit, in whose letters Walpole found a 
 passage maliciously applicable to the Fox history. 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 141 
 
 mamma, the Church of England. By the bye, 
 Charles Fox prepared himself for the holy 
 work by passing twenty-two hours in the 
 pious exercise of hazard; his devotion cost 
 him only about five hundred pounds an hour 
 — in all, eleven thousand pounds.' Fox was 
 about twenty-one at this time, followed 
 minutely (as Sir George Trevelyan shows 
 from the betting-book at Brooks's) by the 
 eyes of English society in all the surprises of 
 his parliamentary successes and financial dis- 
 asters. I doubt if any other society could 
 have produced him : in any case, even Charles 
 the Second had to bear more unkind criticism 
 and more troublesome consequences of his 
 passions than this younger son of a Georgian 
 great man. 
 
 Let us pass to the likenesses. The most 
 obviously important and fortunate for either 
 man was their extraordinary power, consti- 
 tutional and enduring, of shutting the door 
 of their minds on what was unpleasant. No 
 two men were ever less haunted by their 
 troubles or difficulties. The power which 
 enabled the king after Worcester field to 
 take his hardships with a light heart and 
 enjoy whatever was to be enjoyed in his 
 hidings, though it were only a dinner of 
 
142 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 bread and cheese, or later, in the midst of 
 troubles from Court and Parliament and an 
 empty exchequer, to write amusing letters 
 to his sister, the Duchess of Orleans, full of 
 chatter and jesting and affection, and to 
 leave off with, ' and so good night, for I am 
 f aste a sleepe ' — that power enabled Fox (for 
 so runs the extraordinary tale), after an 
 afternoon of hot debate in the House and an 
 evening of incessant and prodigious losses at 
 cards and dice, to lay his head on the gaming- 
 table and literally fall fast asleep like his 
 royal ancestor. The stolidity of stupid men 
 may sometimes imitate the effects of this 
 power, but I doubt if men of brains and 
 temperament often enjoy its indulgence. 
 A fortiori, both men could turn from one 
 engrossing pursuit to another with complete 
 detachment. On the king's politics hung his 
 own position, almost his existence, and the 
 existence of monarchy in England : on Fox's 
 hung genuine principles and a leaping and 
 keen ambition. Each, as we know, was a 
 sensualist. But both could turn from plea- 
 sures to politics with ready attention and 
 brains unduUed, from politics to pleasures 
 with zest and good-humour unimpaired. 
 Charles the Second played with his spaniels, 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 143 
 
 studied his favourite physics and chemistry, 
 or showed his friends his curiosities of art, 
 though the Dutch had declared war or Parlia- 
 ment had refused money. Charles Fox was 
 deep in his beloved classics before the town's 
 interest in his defeat at politics or play had 
 had time to begin. And this was not insen- 
 sibility in either case, as Horace Walpole, 
 for example, thought it was in Fox's; you 
 remember his conversation with Charles a 
 few minutes after seeing Charles's furniture 
 carried out by his creditors into St. James's 
 Street. The king's letters prove his warmth 
 and eagerness, at least in the early years of 
 his reign, in public affairs ; and Fox proved 
 the reality of his feelings — in the case of play, 
 by having the strength to give it up when 
 his folly was brought home to him ; in the 
 case of politics, by the devotion of his 
 life. But both had that great quality of 
 abstraction. 
 
 That was the most important, though not 
 (as I hope will be seen) the most curious like- 
 ness. To come to more common attributes, 
 both were men of great family affection. 
 Putting passion on one side. Fox's attention to 
 his father, who in his letters quite forgot his 
 son's extravagance in dwelling on the charm 
 
144 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 of his companionship, his delight in the 
 society and care for the interests of his 
 nephew Holland — the host of Holland House 
 when it was most famous — and his long 
 tenderness for his wife, remind me of his 
 ancestor's love and friendship for his sister, 
 Henrietta, and his kindness — in all their 
 scrapes — for his natural children. Both had 
 a personal fascination which was universally 
 acknowledged. Both were sportsmen, per- 
 haps a thing of course, but both, more curi- 
 ously, were famous for their love of walking 
 for walking's sake, a rare taste in English- 
 men who have the opportunity of sport, as 
 walkers who seek for comrades know : the 
 king tired out his courtiers up and down 
 St. James's Park, and Fox tested by walking 
 the exact distance of the villages within a 
 wide circuit of his house at St. Anne's 
 Hill. Both were spendthrifts and comically 
 impecunious. 
 
 ' He has met, I 'm afraid, with so many hard knocks, 
 That cash is not plenty with this Mr. Fox. 
 
 And he always must lose, for the strongest of locks 
 Couldn't keep any money for this Mr. Fox,' 
 
 wrote a contemporary poet; and 'a merry 
 monarch, scandalous and poor,' was the 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 145 
 
 summary of Rochester, while both accepted 
 their impecuniosity with good temper. Lord 
 Carlisle to Selwyn : ' Charles Fox left us this 
 morning. He has been excellent company, in 
 good spirits, and not the worse for having 
 levanted every soul at Newmarket, after 
 having lost everything he could raise upon 
 Stavordale's bond.' Poor Stavordale! Both 
 desired to mitigate the brutality of their 
 ages towards criminals or alleged criminals 
 — the king in the case of witches. Fox in that 
 of unhappy women who had concealed the 
 birth of natural children. Both were in 
 private fond of French friends and manners, 
 and in public over-indulgent to France. Fox 
 in his early days was a fine gentleman down 
 to his dress, smuggling, as all his set used, 
 his clothes from Paris — a Macaroni, in fact : 
 
 ' But hark, the voice of battle shouts from far ; 
 The Jews and Macaronis are at war : 
 The Jews prevail, and, thundering from the stocks, 
 They seize, they bind, they circumcise Charles Fox.' 
 
 But in later days he was the first important 
 person to set a fashion of plain and simple 
 attire; and I am reminded — a little inevit- 
 ably, I know— of Charles the Second's trying 
 to start, on Evelyn's advice, a fashion of 
 plain • Persian ' dress, to supersede the costly 
 
 K 
 
146 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 French mode, meeting with as poor success 
 as another royal innovator, and being mocked 
 by Louis xiv., who straightway put the 
 'Persian' dress on his footmen. But I am 
 growing too minute for my reader's patience. 
 At this point I am assailed by a doubt, a 
 fear, that somebody should make an obvious 
 but at first sight quite fatal criticism. In 
 most of Charles Fox's qualities mentioned, 
 I may be told, he took after his father, the 
 first Lord Holland, who was no relation 
 whatever to Charles the Second. But, after 
 all, I should be undisturbed, for all I have 
 claimed so far is an interesting coincidence. 
 I think, however, that the resemblance found 
 between the two Foxes — I admit that the 
 people who knew them both always found 
 it — was greatly exaggerated. Holland had 
 been a spendthrift in his youth ; but he lived 
 to amass an enormous fortune (by public 
 peculation), a getting habit of which his 
 worst enemy could not accuse the son. And 
 what of course made a great impression on 
 their contemporaries, the elder and younger 
 Fox had an elder and younger Pitt for 
 opponents. ' History repeats itself,' said the 
 wiseacres, and when Charles Fox rose to 
 speak in the House he was declared the 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 147 
 
 image of his father in voice and bearing, as 
 the sons of famous men have been invari- 
 ably declared. But Holland had not his 
 son's power of detachment, or anything like 
 it, or all his good-humour either. His later 
 letters are full of querulous diatribes against 
 the politicians who had 'betrayed' him, al- 
 though his ill-gotten fortune — and it is diffi- 
 cult to see for what else he had been a 
 statesman — was left to him entire, until 
 Charles began to run through it. When he 
 wrote from Nice of the climate and scenery 
 and so forth, he interrupted himself to heap 
 curses on the unlucky Rigby, his chief 'be- 
 trayer,' a proceeding altogether impossible 
 to Charles Fox or Charles the Second. He 
 was an agreeable, good-natured man in the 
 main, and among a great deal of insufferable 
 verse wrote those lines to the beautiful Lady 
 Sarah Lennox — the lady whom George the 
 Third wished to marry — about the infatuated 
 Lord Carlisle which are quite charming. But 
 he was altogether, in genius and character, 
 on a different plane from his son's, and I 
 decline to allow him to stand in the way of 
 my comparison. 
 
 I come to my most interesting fact, which 
 I have tried to foreshadow importantly, 
 
148 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 and which in fact started me on my essay. 
 Charles James Fox and Charles the Second 
 were both remarkable refutations of the 
 people who infer characters from faces. 
 They were unlike in body, the king being 
 lean and his descendant fat, — 
 
 ' I pity the horses of this Mr. Fox,' — 
 
 but in face they were notably alike, both 
 swarthy and harsh-featured. (Here again 
 that annoying Lord Holland comes in: he 
 also was a dark man. 
 
 ' If that black face and that black heart 
 Be not old Holland's counterpart, 
 Holland himself 's unlike the devil,' 
 
 — so wrote an agreeable satirist. I mention 
 the fact, not to be an unscrupulous upholder 
 of a thesis — but let it rest.) Stern, harsh- 
 featured, forbidding, swarthy, black-browed, 
 such were the faces of Charles Fox and 
 Charles the Second; gentle, kindly, affable, 
 good-humoured, easy to others and their 
 own tastes and passions, such were both 
 their characters in an eminent degree. You 
 will grant it is curious. No one, of course, 
 can explain how such a contradiction re- 
 peated itself after four generations. But 
 with many ordinary instances of the * throw- 
 
CHARLES FOX AND CHARLES II. 149 
 
 back' in my mind, I cannot but think that 
 this peculiar combination of faces and dis- 
 positions did really imply an inheritance of 
 both. But I fear the men of science would 
 contradict me. . . . 
 
 The other question, of the combination of 
 those opposites in one man or the other, 
 being also insoluble, suggests one other 
 question yet : How much is worth that 
 science of character which so many writers 
 have had the air of understanding? Since 
 history began to be written historians have 
 gone through the easy process of inferring 
 qualities from actions, and when these 
 actions are contradictory — 'In this instance, 
 perhaps,' say the historians, 'he was not 
 so-and-so'; or, 'It is strange that one who 
 was so much this should have been so much 
 that.' But that is statement, not explana- 
 tion. How often are the contradictions ex- 
 plained? How often does any writer on 
 character even attempt the scientific process 
 of searching inductively until he finds some 
 probable hypothesis of a cause from which 
 deductions to include all contradictions may 
 be derived — arguing, whether inductively or 
 deductively, with all the facts before him? 
 Very seldom. We are told that a brave 
 
150 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 man had a strain of cowardice in him, or a 
 generous jnan a strain of meanness ; meta- 
 phors tumble over metaphors, and in the 
 end we are merely left with contradictions as 
 difficult to be reconciled as before. Charles 
 Fox had a profound love of quiet study — 
 we know that from the amount of time he 
 spent over his books ; but Charles Fox loved 
 also the noisy assembly and racecourse. 
 Where one love excludes the other the 
 limitation is held to be natural, and, as it 
 were, inevitable: where both exist we are 
 told that the man was complex in his tastes. 
 It is all words and words, and we are no 
 nearer understanding the complexities and 
 contradictions. I doubt the science of re- 
 conciling them will make little progress in 
 my time. I cannot explain the contradic- 
 tions of Charles Fox's character, any more 
 than I can explain why Charles the Second 
 looked fierce and was kind. I take an easier 
 line, and content myself with musing over 
 my suggestion — that some essential genius 
 in the king's strong blood went down to the 
 greatest of his descendants. 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 
 
 The prima facie importance of the recent 
 discovery of George Selwyn's letters among 
 the MSS. at Castle Howard to people in- 
 terested in the society of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury is obvious. George Selwyn, we knew 
 from universal testimony of the time, was 
 one of the most important figures in it, of a 
 great and enduring reputation as a wit at 
 large and as everybody's friend. We knew 
 a great deal about him — his life in London, 
 his sojournings in Paris, his intimacy with 
 that splendid profligate and racing-man, the 
 Earl of March, who lived to be • old Q,' the 
 last Duke of Queensberry, his lazy jokes 
 and chaff, his adoption of Mie Mie and his 
 troubles with her fiery and flighty mother, 
 the Marchesa Fagniani, — we knew all this 
 from that delightful collection of letters to 
 him which every one quotes, and which prove 
 very pleasantly in what sincere affection 
 'dear George' was held by statesmen and 
 ne'er-do-wells, by wives, wits, and wantons. 
 
 151 
 
152 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 But we had of Selwyn's own writing two or 
 three letters only, and those when he was 
 a very young man and was bothered about 
 money — letters sufficiently unremarkable. 
 
 Now we have all his letters to the fifth 
 Earl of Carlisle, and for those to whom the 
 cumbrous volumes of the Historical MSS. 
 Commission are over-formidable there has 
 been made a manageable selection. First, 
 as to the merits of the selection. It can 
 be safely recommended to those whom the 
 subject attracts, but who are not already 
 familiar with the persons and topics which 
 occur. The editors' notes are clear, succinct, 
 and sufficient. The late Mr. Jesse was some- 
 what diffuse, and the incessant biographies 
 which interrupted the letters were some- 
 times superfluous. Mr. Roscoe and Miss 
 Clergue have avoided this mistake : enough 
 is told one of the important people, the 
 very minor characters are swiftly dismissed. 
 The style of biography of which Moore's 
 Byron and Lockhart's Scott are the earliest 
 examples, the style in which the letters are 
 interrupted by a thread of narrative, was 
 not in this case open to the objection occa- 
 sionally noticed in the others, that one is 
 confused by the two voices of the biographer 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 153 
 
 and the biographeed ; because the events of 
 Selwyn's life were so few that the narrative 
 consists merely of an occasional note on 
 politics and the position of his correspondent, 
 as Commissioner in America or as Lord 
 Lieutenant in Ireland. But a drawback to 
 easy and continuous reading exists for a 
 reason in which, practically, I find my only 
 ground for criticism. Selwyn was a careless 
 writer. Evidently he did not watch his pen 
 closely. He has gone so far astray as to 
 write 'make take' for 'may take,' and he 
 habitually writes a great deal more 'like a 
 gentleman ' than like a grammarian : nomin- 
 atives and accusatives were all one to him, 
 and he always writes * neither . . . or.' Well, 
 that being the case, it was surely enough 
 to note it and assure the reader that the 
 faults were Selwyn's and not the printer s. 
 But both the Historical mss. Commission 
 and the editors of the selection correct him 
 every time. As thus : ' neither . . . [n]or,' 
 'I [me],' 'who[m],' and a whole army of 
 *(sic)'s. Selwyn writes, 'terrible long': and 
 why not? 'Mighty fine' continues to this 
 day. It annoys one to see ' terrible (sic) long,' 
 and confuses one's attention. But perhaps 
 this is a small matter. The selection, as a 
 
154 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 selection, is good. Many of us have a violent 
 prejudice against all selections as selections. 
 But in this case if any but genuine amateurs 
 were to read the book a selection had to be 
 made. Many details of past politics which 
 are (or are not) familiar from other sources 
 were wisely omitted, and many lengthy 
 passages dealing with the more technical 
 aspect of Charles Fox's debts, his multi- 
 farious bonds and annuities and so forth, 
 were perhaps (though personally I find the 
 whole story entertaining) rightly thought 
 too voluminous. One principle of omission 
 which in such books I believe to be a 
 radically bad principle was not in question. 
 I refer to omissions made on grounds of 
 'decency' or 'refinement' or whatever it is 
 called when people are afraid of the common 
 possibilities of life, and I call it a bad 
 principle, because one reads such books 
 largely to observe differences in manners, 
 and greater freedom of language and al- 
 lusion is one of those very differences — so 
 that the omissions give a false effect. In 
 this case there are two omissions — one con- 
 cerning the wild Lord Baltimore and a 
 wickedness he committed, and the other a 
 son of Lord Onslow and a very unpleasant 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 155 
 
 event which ruined him — which, I think, 
 might have been kept, if only to show that 
 the period was no better than our own; 
 but the editors have the justification that 
 such things were alien to the general tone 
 of the letters. Selwyn hardly ever uses a 
 coarse expression, and is far apter to ask kind 
 questions about a man's children than to talk 
 scandal about a man's wife. On the whole, 
 then, the selection is to be cordially praised. 
 To speak, now, of the letters as a whole. 
 The date of the last of those to Selwyn 
 published in Jesse's book was September 
 1780. The last of these was dated but a 
 month before Selwyn's death in January 
 1791. So there is a gain of ten years. On 
 the other hand, the correspondence in Jesse 
 begins when Selwyn was at Oxford: the 
 first of these was written in 1767, when 
 Selwyn was forty-eight : he was thirty years 
 older than Lord Carlisle. However, the in- 
 tervening years are not largely represented 
 in Jesse, and it is probable, to judge from 
 the rather jerky letters to Selwyn which 
 occur in the interval, that he himself was 
 not so assiduous a correspondent as he be- 
 came with cooling blood. There is a break 
 between 1767 and 1773 ; but since Jesse prints 
 
156 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 several letters from Lord Carlisle in those 
 years, the unfortunate explanation must be 
 that Selwyn's were not kept. As for the 
 matter and manner, it must be said at once 
 that whoever was sanguine enough to expect 
 another Horace Walpole must be entirely 
 disappointed. Walpole's cold and imper- 
 sonal habit of regarding life may be a less 
 sympathetic quality than Selwyn's affection- 
 ate and intensely human disposition, but it 
 made a far more entertaining writer. Sel- 
 wyn wrote, it is true, of everything in the 
 purview of a man who lived almost entirely 
 in London — save for his long stays in Paris 
 in the earlier years — who went everywhere 
 and knew everybody, and who had, on the 
 whole, better opportunities for intimate ob- 
 servation in important matters even than 
 Walpole: he writes of all this more or less, 
 but also he hurries quickly from it to write 
 of Mie Mie's health, or to inquire after the 
 health of Lord Carlisle's children. That was 
 what really interested him, and no one but 
 a churl could read the result and not love 
 him therefor : no one but a nurse could read 
 the result and not wish that his zeal had 
 been a little less incessant. Selwyn was lazy, 
 and whether Walpole wrote for posterity or 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 157 
 
 not, his observation and wit are incompar- 
 ably keener. As for style, Walpole's we 
 know; Selwyn's carelessness of grammar is 
 beside the point, except to a pedant, but he 
 was also careless in thought, and therefore 
 often involved and obscure in phrasing. His 
 habit, too, of frequently using French where 
 English would have done as well, though in 
 him a natural habit, does not make for an 
 easy style. 
 
 The letters, then, are no such possession 
 as Horace Walpole's. We ought to remem- 
 ber, of course, that we have only these to 
 one correspondent — a few at the end to Lady 
 Carlisle— a man thirty years younger than 
 the writer, and one whose attraction was 
 largely that he was the father of children 
 to whom Selwyn felt as a grandfather. We 
 have not — and would that we had! — his 
 letters to Gilly Williams, or Edgecumbe, or 
 Horace Walpole himself, which three with 
 Selwyn formed the ' out-of-town ' society at 
 Strawberry Hill, or March or * Bully ' as they 
 called the second Lord Bolingbroke, or his 
 brother Harry St. John, ' the Baptist,' or in 
 the younger group to Charles Fox or Storer, 
 to whom he was not concerned to be a 
 mentor as he was to Carlisle. We have not 
 
158 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 those letters ; but those we have, apart from 
 their interest and attractiveness as touching 
 the writer's character, to which we shall 
 come later, give us both innumerable details 
 of social interest and a complete picture, 
 painted unconsciously and little by little, of 
 perhaps the most agreeable society these 
 islands have known. Something was said in 
 another essay of the licence which power, 
 exclusiveness, and security made possible in 
 this society. Something might now be added 
 of the social ease and gay intimacy and 
 understanding, the light-hearted but not 
 insolent assumption that 'Charles's' faro 
 bank or 'Bully's' divorce were matters of 
 prime moment, which were made possible at 
 the same time, and the like of which can 
 never exist for cultivated and intelligent folk 
 again. We may build up an agreeable little 
 society ; but it is accidental and partial, and 
 that greater bully the spirit of the age has 
 ordained that if it is to be intelligent it may 
 not be gay. Something of this might be 
 added, but ineffectively ; the charm is not to 
 be had at second-hand; you may get it of 
 Walpole or Selwyn, not of me. 
 
 At one point the political interest is 
 considerable — the time (1782) when Fox 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 159 
 
 overthrew Lord North's Ministry and Lord 
 Rockingham came in. Selwyn's position was 
 typical of the intelligent sinecurist of the 
 period ; but no one else has given us so frank 
 and amusing an exposition of the intelligent 
 sinecurist's dismay. He had commanded 
 four votes in the House, and still commanded 
 two : as a matter of course he held one of 
 those lucrative posts with no duties attached 
 which rewarded such 'political services.* 
 Such an arrangement seemed to him to be 
 natural, and indeed necessary to the stability 
 of the country. He does indeed admit a hint 
 that, as a matter of theory, he saw objec- 
 tions to it. When Burke brought in his bill 
 to abolish certain of these posts, Selwyn 
 wrote: 'I believe there is no actor upon 
 the stage of either theatre who, repeating 
 what the author has wrote, does not at the 
 same time recite his own private sentiments 
 oftener than our pantomimes in Parliament' 
 — impartially of both sides; but he voted 
 quietly against the bill. The passage, by 
 the way, contains the first reference to the 
 younger Pitt in the letters: 'Jack [Towns- 
 hend] did better than the time before, but 
 was so eclipsed by Mr. W. Pitt that it ap- 
 peared to impartial people but an indifferent 
 
160 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 performance. This young man, Mr. Pitt, 
 gained an universal applause. I heard Lord 
 North say it was the best first speech of a 
 young man that he had ever heard.' He 
 disapproved of measures, obviously thinking 
 the American War mismanaged — as indeed 
 so did every one else : ' I cannot divert myself 
 of thinking upon what must occupy every- 
 body's mind, which is our public calamity 
 and disgrace.' But he was not for dismiss- 
 ing men — men who had made that excellent 
 little arrangement about the sinecure. So 
 that when Lord North fell he was appalled : 
 he thought Fox and his friends mad. It was 
 natural enough. That system of ' the king's 
 friends,' by which George iii. had contrived 
 to do such enormous damage to the country, 
 had existed a good many years ; and Selwyn, 
 who knew Charles Fox as an unprecedented 
 and shameless spendthrift and gambler, could 
 not ' see ' him as a Minister. But his lugubri- 
 ous fears for the constitution, for Carlisle's 
 future, for his own place, are curious and 
 entertaining reading. Fox's abuse of the 
 king horrified him. ' He spoke of all coming 
 to a final issue now within a very short space 
 of time; he talked of the King under the 
 description of Satan ; ... he has adopted all 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 161 
 
 the supremacy he pretended to dread in his 
 Majesty. It seems a dream when I survey 
 his figure and know his history.' There is 
 an odd passage in this connection of Lord 
 Selborne imitating George ii.'s manner in 
 the House of Lords in the presence of his 
 grandsons ; this other and very curious pass- 
 age (in the light of history) concerning Pitt : 
 'He is a young man who will undoubtedly 
 make his way in the world by his abilities. 
 But to give him credit for being very extra- 
 ordinary, upon what I heard yesterday, 
 would be absurd ' — one is reminded of Charles 
 Greville's doubts of the young Disraeli ; — and 
 in the beginning of the American War it is 
 ' a little dispute.' But Selwyn had not a 
 political mind, and in this regard he is acci- 
 dentally curious only, not important. 
 
 Through all the letters marches that grand, 
 noble, ironic procession of Charles James 
 Fox. As a statesman he was not understood 
 by Selwyn, who nevertheless remained on 
 good-humoured terms with him socially. But 
 as the prince of impecunious spendthrifts, 
 Selwyn observed him with unfailing humour 
 and irony, really scandalised though he some- 
 times was, and really indignant on Carlisle's 
 behalf, who was one of the many victims of 
 
 L 
 
162 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 Charles's complicated system of loans and 
 bonds. Early in the correspondence he urges 
 Carlisle to sue Charles : • If you are shocked, 
 you will be singly so; Charles will not be 
 so, it is my firm belief.' Later on, when Fox 
 was in funds, Selwyn 'contrived to wrench 
 out of Charles's black hands 50 pounds for 
 Spencer by watching the opportunity of his 
 play.' Fox had a brief period of prosperity 
 when he ran his famous faro bank at 
 Brooks's. That faro bank indeed marks an 
 epoch in our social history, and the mere fact 
 that it was held in the face of the world at 
 Brooks's — at Brooks's ! — by the chief member 
 of the Opposition, on the verge of being a 
 Minister, tells us what a long journey we 
 have made since then. (It was at this time, 
 I suppose, when Fox's friends came to con- 
 sult him on politics in the intervals of his 
 banking, that Brooks's first took its tone of 
 a Whig club.) Fox went into partnership 
 with other congenial spirits, of whom Hare 
 — 'the Hare with many friends' — was the 
 chief, and they seem to have run their bank 
 day and night, relieving one another for 
 statesmanship and sleep. They were success- 
 ful, and if only they could have resisted the 
 temptation of punting against one another, 
 might have made fortunes. *I saw Charles 
 
GEORGE SELWYNS LETTERS 163 
 
 to-day in a new hat, frock, waistcoat, shirt, 
 and stockings ; he was as clean and smug as 
 a gentleman, and upon perceiving my sur- 
 prise, he told me that it was from the Pharo 
 bank.' (There is a neat pun about ' Pharaoh's 
 daughter ' in another place.) ' He then talked 
 of the thousands it had lost, which I told 
 him only proved its substance, and the ad- 
 vantage of the trade. He smiled, and seemed 
 perfectly satisfied with that which he had 
 taken up : he was in such a sort of humour 
 that I should have liked to have dined with 
 him. His old clothes, I suppose, have been 
 burned like the paupers at Salt Hill.' At 
 another time, by the way, Fox's ingenuity, 
 in talk at White's, 'planned out a kind of 
 itinerant trade, which was going from horse- 
 race to horse-race, and so, by knowing the 
 value and speed of all the horses in England, 
 to acquire a certain fortune' — so do great 
 minds anticipate the future. Selwyn has a 
 longer passage than Walpole's on the seizure 
 of Charles's furniture : — 
 
 'You miist know that for these two days past, all 
 passengers in St. James' Street have been amused with 
 seeing two carts at Charles's door filling, by the Jews, 
 with his goods, clothes, books, and pictures. He was 
 waked by Basilico yesterday, and Hare afterwards by 
 his valet de chambre, they being told at the same time 
 that the execution was begun, and the carts were 
 
164 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 drawn up against the door. Such furniture I never 
 saw. Betty and Jack Manners are perpetually in a 
 survey of this operation, and Charles, with all Brooks's 
 on his behalf, in the highest spirits.' 
 
 A year later Charles was Secretary for 
 Foreign Affairs. But even Charles was not 
 allowed to go all lengths without some mild 
 protest. 'This Pharo Bank is held in a 
 manner which, being so exposed to public 
 view, bids defiance to all decency and police. 
 The whole town as it passes views the dealer 
 and the partners, by means of the candles 
 and the windows being levelled with the 
 ground. The Opposition, who have Charles 
 for their ablest advocate, is quite ashamed 
 of the proceeding, and hates to hear it men- 
 tioned.' What ivould the present Liberal 
 party have said to its ablest advocate? 
 Regretfully I tear myself from Charles, and 
 proceed to other points of interest I have 
 noted. 
 
 There is, of course, a great deal about Mie 
 Mie. At the end of Jesse's book she was 
 still a baby ; by the end of this, a young lady 
 going to her first ball. (Selwyn had taken 
 her on a visit when she was four: one can 
 hardly help wondering if his friends did not 
 sometimes find Mie Mie rather in the way.) 
 She goes with Lady Caroline, Carlisle's 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 165 
 
 daughter, to the Richmond Theatre to see 
 •that etourdi Lord Barrymore play the fool 
 in three or four different characters.' There 
 is nothing to clear up the mystery of her 
 parentage. But, in fact, I do not think there 
 was a mystery. The town of course said 
 that Selwyn was her father, because he 
 adopted her, and Jesse was undecided be- 
 tween him and the Duke of Queensberry. 
 I agree with the editors of this selection 
 that the latter was the likelier man, else he 
 would never have left her the fortune he 
 did leave, being by no means an affection- 
 ate person; but I go farther, and think it 
 conclusively proved by a letter to Selwyn 
 himself (in Jesse) from the Rev. Dr. Warner, 
 in which 'Old Q.'s' likeness to her is noted 
 quite casually. If poor Mie Mie was the 
 daughter of one profligate, she lived to marry 
 another and a worse, even that Lord Hert- 
 ford who was the original of Thackeray's 
 Steyne and Disraeli's Montford, and who was 
 very easily treated by both novelists, if 
 Charles Greville's account of him is to be 
 believed. Mention of the Rev. Dr. Warner 
 reminds me that when I first read Jesse's 
 volumes, many years ago, I was indignant 
 with the picture Thackeray drew of him, 
 
166 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 a picture of an unprincipled parasite, with 
 'Rabelais and Horace at his greasy finger- 
 ends' and so forth — why greasy? — a picture 
 which I imagine suggested Parson Sampson 
 in The Virginians. Selwyn's own testimony 
 confirms the opinion of Dr. Warner's good 
 sense and good feeling which any impartial 
 reader of his letters in the books Thackeray 
 saw would have formed. 
 
 ' I believe him to be a perfectly honest man ; he is 
 uncommonly humane and friendly, and most actively 
 so. . . . The Archbishop, who had been applied to in 
 his favour by the late Mr. Townshend, said he was too 
 lively, but it was the worst he could say of him. Lord 
 Besborough served him once essentially, and esteems 
 him. The family of Mr. Hoare, the banker, has assisted 
 him, and so he has been able to support his mother and 
 his nearest relations, whom his father, with a great 
 deal of literary merit, had left beggars.' 
 
 Some of the most amusing of Warner's 
 own letters dealt with the matter of the 
 Dowager Lady Carlisle and 'the baron,' as 
 the foreign adventurer whom she unwisely 
 encouraged is always called. Jesse, by the 
 way, with perhaps excessive scruple, omitted 
 the lady's name. Selwyn, the good-natured, 
 tried to interfere, and the lady 'has called 
 me every name but that by which I should 
 be described, and that is your friend,' and 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 167 
 
 the baron wanted to cut his throat. But at 
 this point there is some slight confusion of 
 dates, and I think that Jesse or the His- 
 torical Mss. Commission or the editors of 
 the selection are at fault. It is clear, how- 
 ever, that Selwyn and Warner refer to the 
 same transaction. The baron was ulti- 
 mately discomfited. ... As early as February 
 1781, there is a mention of George iv. and 
 his engaging habits. 'Where the Prince 
 sups, and lies, and with whom, are the chief 
 objects of the politics of a certain class of 
 people. All agree that at present the agree- 
 ment between him and the King is perfect. 
 The speculation is only how long it is likely 
 to last. His Royal Highness stoops as yet 
 to very low game. In some respects it may 
 be better.' The mss. of Lord Carlisle, by the 
 way, contain a few characteristically frothy 
 and effusive letters from the Prince. ... In 
 1781, there is a mention of White's which 
 reads a little oddly. 'Our Club at White's 
 commence cl tomher; la grande jpresse ny est 
 pas ; cest un asyle toujours pour les caducs, et 
 pour ceux qui nont pas une passion d4cid4e 
 
 pour le jeu ' the stage would seem to 
 
 have been transitory. ... In 1782, Selwyn 
 met Beckford — not the famous alderman. 
 
168 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 Chatham's friend, but his (now) more famous 
 son, who wrote Vathek, and built Fonthill, 
 and lived to acquire the very evil reputation 
 which Byron noticed in one of his letters, 
 and commemorated (I am pretty certain) in 
 his To Dives, a Fragment, which was not 
 published till 1832. 'I was last night at 
 Lady Lucan's, to see young Beckford, who 
 seems to possess very extraordinary talents : 
 he is a perfect master of music, but has a voice, 
 either natural or feigned, of a eunuch. He 
 speaks several languages with uncommon 
 facility, and well, but has such a mercurial 
 turn, that I think he may finish his days aux 
 petites maisons ; his person and figure are 
 agreeable.' ... In the later years of the 
 letters, there is of course a good deal about 
 the French 67nigr4s, who gathered in great 
 numbers at Richmond, where Selwyn, the 
 Duke of Queensberry, and other of their 
 English friends, had houses. English society, 
 indeed, had never — with the possible excep- 
 tion of Charles ii.'s court — been so cosmo- 
 politan as in Selwyn's day, and has hardly 
 been so since. Indeed, the society of Paris, 
 as he and his friends knew it, was never 
 recreated. That society was France, just as 
 Selwyn's was England, and the two were 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 169 
 
 intimate and familiar: Selwyn himself, and 
 hi8 friend Lady Hervey — widow of the 
 famous Hervey of the memoirs — were almost 
 more at home in Paris than in London. The 
 editors of the selection think that the 
 English did not rise to the occasion of 
 hospitality at the Revolution, and of course 
 we all have read of well-born Frenchmen 
 turning fiddlers and dancing-masters at the 
 time ; but at first there was a very genuine 
 and substantial outburst of sympathy on the 
 part of their English friends for the 4migr48 
 who had entertained them in France, and 
 Selwyn's letters show it in more than one 
 passage. . . . Admiral Biron's name, the 
 poet's grandfather, is spelled sic, and so 
 Byron spells it once, saying that it was 
 the old form. . . . Last of these miscel- 
 laneous matters, I must mention one which 
 has a personal interest for me. George, 
 Lord Morpeth, Carlisle's eldest son, was a 
 little boy in 1772, at school at Neasden, and 
 Selwyn writes : ' When George meets me, he 
 accosts me with these words, " Quomodo 
 vale my petite sodale"; oil il a peche cette 
 plaisanterie I do not know.' But if any one 
 who was at my preparatory school, Temple 
 Grove, chances to read this article, he will 
 
170 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 remember a certain dear ungrammatical 
 chant — 
 
 ' Quomodo vale Mi sodale 
 
 Visne edere pomum 
 Si non vis Mirabilis 
 Dulce redire domum ' 
 
 — we sang it without stops, — and it is quaint 
 to find that there were small boys singing it 
 a hundred years ago. 
 
 A word of Selwyn's correspondent. It is 
 the tendency of most biographical writers to 
 make their geese into swans, and I think 
 that Carlisle's qualities have been exag- 
 gerated. Because he wrote verses, and was 
 at the same time a man of society and of 
 the world, he has been compared with his 
 kinsman Byron. Jesse goes so far as to say 
 that, if they had been of an age, Byron, 
 instead of abusing him heartily, would have 
 found in him a congenial spirit. I hardly 
 think so. Carlisle was really a very colour- 
 less, ordinary person. He wrote extremely 
 bad verses. Byron's 'paralytic puling of 
 Carlisle ' was quite a fair description (and 
 Byron did not know that Carlisle was 
 actually paralysed at the time) : he fell in 
 love with Lady Sarah Bonbury, with whom 
 all the world fell in love; he had some 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 171 
 
 ambition, and got no farther than being 
 Lord Lieutenant ; he lost £10,000 in a sitting 
 at play, which, on the whole, was rather 
 foolish than otherwise, and about which he 
 made a tremendous to-do, bewailing and 
 repenting. No doubt he was an amiable 
 youth when Selwyn first began to be his 
 friend, grew into an amiable man, and begot 
 amiable children for Selwyn to pet. No 
 doubt when Byron came of age, he was a 
 very respectable old gentleman, and was 
 quite justified in looking askance on his 
 unmanageable ward. But he was not a 
 remarkable man. 
 
 And now for Selwyn himself. Mr. Roscoe 
 and Miss Clergue's little biography of him is 
 very pleasantly written, and says enough of 
 the events of his uneventful life. Those 
 events do not of themselves promise any- 
 thing very wonderful, and I am inclined to 
 think that for preliminary interest, it is 
 necessary to read the letters in the oft- 
 referred-to Jesse, and see how various and 
 strong were his powers of friendship : then 
 will the allusions in his own letters to his 
 many friends be read in their true signifi- 
 cance. For his outward life, the new letters 
 do little more than emphasise the reluctance 
 
172 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 with which he went down to his jjretty 
 house of Matson, the loathing he had for the 
 fuss of his election for the neighbouring 
 town of Gloucester, and the terror with 
 which he looked forward to dinners with 
 aldermen and judges. They are not often 
 witty, in the strict use of the word. But it 
 has long been clear that even when we allow 
 for the gloom which time casts over jokes 
 and puns, Selwyn's reputation as a wit must 
 have been due in reality (an allowance of 
 jokes being of course presupposed) to his 
 more general gifts for society, his instinct 
 for the right tone at the right time, his 
 good-humour and quaint imperturbability. 
 I noticed the other day an account of him 
 Lord Holland (Fox's nephew) gave to Charles 
 Greville : ' He describes him as a man of 
 great gravity and deliberation in speaking, 
 and after exciting extraordinary mirth by 
 his wit and drollery, gently smiling and 
 saying, "I am glad you are pleased.'" I 
 fancy the great gravity and the rest of it 
 lent reflected colour to the wit and drollery. 
 And all of us remember sayings w^hich at 
 the time and on their occasion have gone 
 straight to the very heart of our sense of 
 humour, and repeated afterwards are quite 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 173 
 
 without effect. In the letters, however, the 
 context of atmosphere which the reported 
 witticisms cry for is supplied, and Selwyn's 
 demure flashes of irony or pleasant nonsense 
 are often delightful. 'Mr. Brereton is re- 
 turned to the Bath, and the street robbers 
 seem dispersed' — Mr. Brereton's play was 
 suspected. And here is a passage on 
 Ministers much in Horace Walpole's vein. 
 Selwyn had been asked to take a long 
 journey to meet Pitt and dine on turtle. 
 'The turtle I should have liked, but how 
 Mr. Pitt is to be dressed I cannot tell. The 
 temptation is great, I grant it, but I have 
 had so much self-denial as to send my 
 excuses. You will not believe it, perhaps, 
 but a Minister of any description, although 
 served up in his great shell of power, and all 
 his green fat about him, is to me a dish by 
 no means relishing, and I never knew but 
 one in my life I could pass an hour with 
 pleasantly, which was Lord Holland' — the 
 first Lord Holland, Fox's father. But no, no ; 
 in this respect Selwyn is not Horace Walpole. 
 When Selwyn was dead. Dr. Warner wrote 
 a letter to the Gentleman s Magazine to urge 
 that his reputed love of executions was 
 merely the chaff of his friends; and though, 
 
174 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 as Jesse pointed out, the testimony against 
 this view was too universal not to be be- 
 lieved in part, I think Dr. Warner was so 
 far right, that Selwyn was too lazy and 
 indifferent to contradict many of the stories 
 told against him. This opinion is borne out 
 by the letters. In 1777 a satire called ' The 
 Diaboliad' appeared, in which this taste of 
 Selwyn's was dragged in, and he writes : ' I 
 am only attacked upon that trite and very 
 foolish opinion concerning le pene ed i delitti, 
 acknowledging it to proceed from an odd 
 and insatiable curiosity, and not from a 
 mauvais cosur. ... I forgive him his mention 
 of me, because I believe that he does it 
 without malice, but if I had leisure to think 
 of such things, I must own the frequent 
 repetition of the foolish stories would make 
 me peevish.' In another place : ' It is my 
 singular fate for ever to pass for something 
 which I am not, nor cannot be, nor desire to 
 be — sometimes indeed for what I should be 
 ashamed to be. But I am used to this.' One 
 must remember that to see executions was 
 a general amusement of the time, and that a 
 general habit is sometimes a sufficient ex- 
 planation of contradictions in character: 
 there is no doubt that the thinking and 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 175 
 
 acting Selwyn was kindly and humane. 
 . . . His good-humour hardly ever fails, but 
 it is clear that the politics of 1782, as I have 
 said, both aroused his seriousness and upset 
 his equanimity, and at this time his expres- 
 sions grow more violent: Lord Melbourne, 
 who asserted that he had bought a seat in 
 Parliament of Selwyn, is ' this fitz scrivener, 
 fitz coachman, this fitz cook ' ; and the Duke 
 of Portland, who was spoken of as Carlisle's 
 successor in Ireland, is ' that jolt-headed calf.' 
 But the note which is never silent for half 
 a page is his love for children. It is pleasant 
 enough to think of him, a man with no 
 'natural' ties, save to a few nephews and 
 nieces, constituting himself the universal 
 godfather to all the little girls and boys he 
 knew, and finding in that, as even friendships 
 dropped out one by one in his old age, a 
 sufficient employment and consolation. ' The 
 christening is to be, as I understand, to- 
 morrow. I hope in God that I shall be well 
 enough to assist and name the child, and eat 
 cake, and go through all the functions of a 
 good gossip. If I am obliged to give up that 
 which seems to have been my vocation, cest 
 fait de moi ; I must declare myself good for 
 nothing.' He repeats (the letter, by the way, 
 
176 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 might have been in the selection) some chaff 
 of Gilly Williams : * Heaven is remarkably 
 indulgent to you, to secure you a nursery in 
 perpetuo. The moment the old one is fledged, 
 and takes to wing, you have another, with 
 clouts, and a pap-spoon, to which you are 
 equally attentive.' That — a little unkindly 
 put — was because Selwyn refused an invita- 
 tion when he was anxious about Lady 
 Caroline and her baby, and rather indig- 
 nantly he asserts the reasonableness of his 
 affections. But to be a good gossip had 
 indeed become his vocation. 
 
 I have quoted a little lengthily, because the 
 letters are new, are of a most sympathetic 
 writer, and will bear the process. But I do 
 not pretend to have quoted anything very 
 wise or witty. That is not the order of the 
 letters, and, once more, we must remember the 
 correspondent, whom Selwyn loved but who 
 was not (it may be) one who stimulated his 
 powers, and we must in fairness believe that 
 if we had others — to other correspondents — 
 the wit would be found. Where are those 
 others? I will not believe they were all 
 destroyed and lost. Somewhere, in some 
 rubbish room in some old house, are lying 
 bundles of letters in which Selwyn exchanged 
 
GEORGE SELWYN'S LETTERS 177 
 
 pleasantry for pleasantry with Horace 
 Walpole, satire for satire with the first 
 Lord Holland, or chaff for chaff with Gilly 
 Williams. I exhort all representatives or 
 inheritors of old families — they need not be 
 so very old either — to hunt in those rubbish 
 rooms. 
 
 Meantime I think that something more 
 than a case has been made out for the interest 
 of the letters we now have. And interesting 
 or not for their matters of fact, they perform 
 the good work of rousing one's affection 
 for a man. I have always thought that 
 Thackeray, who made him out nothing but 
 a pleasant-humoured loafer and consumer of 
 good things, spoke in his haste and for effect; 
 and now I am certain that had he read these 
 letters he would havo changed his mind. 
 They show us the other side of the good- 
 natured man of the world who loved clubs 
 and good dinners, a little quiet gambling, 
 a little cynical talk at night — the side on 
 which lay playful tenderness for children 
 and deep and anxious affections. He who 
 had no child of his own was above all things 
 in the best sense of the phrase a fatherly man 
 — also, in his age, just the least little bit in 
 the world of a dear old woman. 
 
 M 
 
LADY SARAH 
 
 No one, I suppose, of all those whose fancies 
 have lived pleasantly in the world of Selwyn, 
 and Horace Walpole, and Charles Fox, but 
 has longed to see more of Lady Sarah Lennox. 
 Glimpses we had of her radiant and beautiful 
 youth, when George the Third wanted to 
 marry her, when she married Sir Charles 
 Bunbury and drove Lord Carlisle to despair, 
 and eloped, alas ! with Lord William Gordon. 
 We had observed a rare touch of fervour in 
 Horace Walpole, when he described her at 
 the Coronation and in the theatricals at 
 Holland House ; we had a charming letter 
 she wrote to George Selwyn ; and Sir Joshua 
 has left us the picture of a beauty which no 
 changing fashion can deny. But there was 
 more than this to engage our attention. 
 Wise historians are never uninterested in 
 the mothers of great men, and this beautiful 
 giddy girl, who dazzled the world in London 
 and at Newmarket, and lost it for love, lived 
 to rear and give her country the most famous 
 
 178 
 
LADY SARAH 179 
 
 fighting family in its history. To run away 
 at twenty-five, and to die at eighty rever- 
 enced and adored by her sons, the Napiers 
 — that was her lot, and it is matter for your 
 hasty moralist to perpend. To know more 
 of such a life must have been an ardent 
 desire with a host of worthy readers. And 
 all the w^hile the letters she wrote to her 
 most intimate friend, letters covering nearly 
 all the years of her long life, were in the 
 possession of Lord Ilchester's family ! It is 
 a striking reminder of a fact I have just 
 now rejoiced at and bewailed — that thousands 
 of profoundly interesting letters must lie 
 unknown (at least to the world) in the 
 libraries and lumber-rooms of old houses. 
 Well, we have Lady Sarah's at last, piously 
 exposed as they were written, and carefully 
 annotated by the present Lady Ilchester and 
 her son Lord Stavordale, and I for one am 
 most deeply obliged.] 
 
 Not that the letters are very brilliant or 
 witty, or that they clear up mysteries, or 
 throw strong fresh lights on persons and 
 events. The earlier are intelligently lively 
 and humorous, and the later full of strong 
 sense and wide benevolence — more than 
 enough so to furnish yet another refutation 
 
180 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 of the preposterous pretence of those voci- 
 ferous modern ladies who will have it that 
 capable and broad-minded women began 
 with themselves. The writing is often curi- 
 ously interesting for its own sake, and there 
 is much to delight an interest in the persons 
 and society of the time. But the first and 
 chief value of the letters is that they give us 
 an intimate knowledge of an attractive and 
 instructive character, of an instructive and 
 romantic history. Even readers who care 
 nothing for the world I have spoken of may 
 safely be recommended to these volumes if 
 they care either for human character or for 
 a significant story: they will find, I assure 
 them, better entertainment here than in 
 most of the silly romances they read in their 
 thousands. 
 
 The letters begin with the matter most 
 interesting to us in Lord Holland's memoir, 
 printed now for the first time — the love of 
 George the Third. Lady Sarah, whose 
 parents died in her infancy, lived much with 
 her elder sister Caroline, the lady who had 
 eloped, very sensibly, as it turned out, with 
 Mr. Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, 
 and so lived Lady Susan Fox Strangways, 
 daughter of the first Lord Ilchester, the elder 
 
LADY SARAH 181 
 
 son of old Stephen Fox. It was a gay and 
 affectionate family party at Holland House 
 in those days, but no doubt the atmosphere 
 was of the world, worldly. It is no wonder 
 that the passion visible in the young king 
 enraptured Henry Fox and his wife, or that 
 Lady Sarah, simple hearty girl of sixteen as 
 she was, with most of her affections fixed on 
 animals, was ready to be tutored how to be a 
 Queen. There was never the least idea of 
 anything left-handed, and the marriage of 
 the king to the daughter of an English duke 
 was by no means so much out of the way 
 then as it would be thought now. Furious 
 resentment would have been aroused in 
 envious quarters, but there was no impos- 
 sibility about the matter. Henry Fox, a 
 shrewd and experienced man of affairs, 
 evidently thought the chance a fair one. 
 So Lady Sarah was coached how to behave 
 towards her royal suitor — if such he should 
 veritably be — as she writes to her friend. ' I 
 am allowed to mutter a little, provided the 
 words astonished, sut'prised, understand, and 
 meaning are heard. I am working myself up 
 to consider what depends upon it, that I may 
 me fortifier against it comes— the very 
 thought of it makes me sick in my stomach 
 
182 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 already.' We need not be concerned to 
 rebuke her levity : she was to find out 
 bitterly enough what passion really meant. 
 At this time it was all an affair of a dazzling 
 future and being a great personage, and 
 when George was over-persuaded and gave 
 up this desire of his youth she was more 
 afflicted at the death of her squirrel. Natu- 
 rally enough, however, she resented the 
 slight and the double-dealing, — for George 
 was still throwing out plain hints when his 
 marriage with Charlotte of Mecklenburg 
 must have been arranged, — but had the spirit 
 to keep her feelings in the family, consent- 
 ing to be a bridesmaid to the Queen. Natu- 
 rally, also, she was inclined to recur to those 
 tinsel possibilities in later life, and thank 
 God — with a little human vanity — that she 
 was not Queen, and at the end, with a gentler 
 feeling, to pity the old man who like herself 
 was blind. 
 
 The marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury 
 was, as marriages go in the world, a suitable 
 arrangement, and but for more than usual 
 warmth in her heart and (it seemed) less 
 than usual in his, would have gone well 
 enough. She pleads guilty to 'giddiness,' 
 but it is clear that they were fairly good 
 
LADY SARAH 183 
 
 friends — and she most certainly was always 
 loyal in what she wrote of him — until 
 Lady Sarah found in herself capacity for 
 something more. Followed the elopement 
 with Lord William Gordon. It is not, as 
 a rule, profitable to dwell on these cases, 
 but here is an exception. Given the fact 
 of two young people forgetting duty and 
 experience in their passion — a fact about 
 which an ethical disquisition would be out 
 of place — what followed showed an ad- 
 mirable sense of conduct in every one con- 
 cerned. One may almost say — if one may 
 say it without offence — that it was a triumph 
 of good sense and good breeding over un- 
 happy circumstance. Lady Sarah set an 
 example which, mutatis mutandis, might 
 well be noted by the creators of unhappy 
 heroines in our modern fiction, to say nothing 
 of real life. Recovering herself after a brief 
 time, she went to her brother's house and 
 lived there, with other members of her 
 family, or in the house he built for her in 
 his park at Goodwood, for eleven years, in 
 unaffected but strict retirement, bringing 
 up her daughter, and otherwise interested 
 in family affairs. Her husband. Sir Charles, 
 had notoriously neglected her, and it is 
 
184 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 alleged in a general way he had been a 
 most unsatisfactory husband. But she her- 
 self never made the least attempt to excuse 
 her conduct by any fault of his. She simply 
 admitted that she had done him a great 
 wrong, and was sincerely grateful for the 
 kindness he and his family showed her child. 
 Towards the world she maintained the same 
 attitude of dignity and sense. It did not 
 occur to her to rail at its 'injustice'; she 
 recognised that she had broken its laws, 
 and by those laws was in a sense beyond 
 its pale. Consequently when ladies of her 
 own class sought her society, she recognised 
 frankly that they were doing her a favour, 
 and since that was the case avoided those 
 from whom a favour would be distasteful. 
 So, too, she made up her mind that her 
 daughter should be introduced into the world 
 by another than herself. I daresay there are 
 readers who will see in all this a humility 
 abhorrent to their ideas of social freedom, 
 but to my mind it is the right sort of pride. 
 Lady Sarah knew perfectly well that she 
 was not a tenth part as guilty as many 
 women received everywhere, but she made 
 no fuss on that account: she had known 
 the way of the world and the consequences 
 
LADY SARAH 185 
 
 of her act, and she accepted them. Sir 
 Charles, again, showed a magnanimity which 
 those who reverence him as a father of the 
 turf must be pleased to observe. Marriage 
 had not suited him, and he preferred a 
 bachelor's life. He showed no animosity 
 against his wife, and had the good sense 
 not to call Lord William out. He divorced 
 her in natural course; but he more than 
 once went to see her afterwards in friend- 
 ship — it was even rumoured (but Lady Sarah 
 contradicts it) that he wished to remarry 
 her. Her account of one such interview 
 does, I think, some credit to both. ' He said 
 he saw no sort of reason why he might not 
 see me just when he pleased, nor why he 
 was to put me out of countenance. I could 
 not argue that point with him, but I told 
 him how glad I was that he could see me 
 with such good humour, to which he an- 
 swered, "Why should not I? You know 
 I'm not apt to bear malice!" This set me 
 into such a fit of crying again. . . .' Her 
 brother, too, the Duke of Richmond, and 
 most of her family did what was right, 
 neither shunning her nor insisting on the 
 world receiving her, but simply taking her 
 back into their midst. Surely, as I said, 
 
186 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 even this part of the book is one to read 
 with profit. 
 
 The letters are broken off for seven years 
 after the elopement so far as we are con- 
 cerned ; whether they were lost or destroyed 
 by Lady Susan appeareth not. We miss 
 what light they would have thrown on her 
 character in the most critical time, and we 
 miss what she wrote of seven years socially 
 interesting. When the letters recommence 
 we find much of the old vivacity gone, and 
 in its stead the sharp wisdom which comes of 
 looking life in the face. With her marriage, 
 four years later, to Captain Napier, began 
 a new life for her, a life full of material 
 anxieties, and even, her nurture considered, 
 of hardships, but sustained with mutual 
 trust and devotion. It was a marriage 
 entered into deliberately, and after listen- 
 ing to all dissuasions, by two people who 
 knew the world very well and were sure of 
 themselves. It seems to have been one of 
 uncheckered happiness, so far as husband 
 and wife were concerned, until his death in 
 1804. For us it is enough to judge of its 
 wisdom by its fruits. She was, indeed, 'a 
 mother of men.' For twenty-two years 
 after her husband's death she lived for 
 
LADY SARAH lg7 
 
 these sons and her daughters, who, all but 
 one, died young— that one, Emily, oddly 
 enough married a nephew of Sir Charles 
 Bunbury — wisely and carefully educating 
 them, indefatigably helping their careers, 
 anxiously following their fortunes. But she 
 was not exclusively absorbed in them. It 
 was a personal age, and we need not desider- 
 ate in her great zeal for great principles; 
 but through her connection with, and keen 
 affection for, all the Lennoxes and Foxes and 
 FitzGeralds — Lord Edward was her nephew 
 — she had incitement enough for her sensible 
 mind to play round politics and society, and 
 not even the blindness of her later years 
 made her a negligeable friend and adviser. 
 A brave and truthful and loving soul, if ever 
 there was one, this old lady, in whose youth 
 had been such splendour and shame. 
 
 So much for a rough hint of Lady Sarah's 
 own history and character. I come to what 
 she says of famous people, and to some 
 slight reflections she suggests about her 
 world. An examination of her language, 
 showing minutely the differences between 
 a hundred years ago and now in the con- 
 versational style of the English ' upper 
 classes,' would amuse the present writer 
 
188 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 vastly, but I fear would bore my readers. 
 Surely, though, they are interested in the 
 history of slang? A word I have just used 
 reminds me that Lady Sarah saw its useful 
 birth, and has what should really be a locus 
 classicus upon the fashionable slang of the 
 period. ' I told you,' she writes in 1766, * the 
 word *' boar "is a fashionable expression for 
 tiresome people and conversations, & is a 
 very good one & very useful, for one may 
 tell anybody (Ld. G. Cavendish for example), 
 "I am sure this will be a boar, so I must 
 leave you, Ld. George." If it was not the 
 fashion it would be very rude, but I own I 
 encourage the fashion vastly, for it's delight- 
 ful, I think; one need only name a pig or 
 pork, & nobody dares take it ill but hold 
 their tongues directly.' Spelling was rather 
 muddled in those days, but whatever the 
 etymology of the word it is odd it should 
 have lost its porcine connotation. She goes 
 on: 'To "grub up such a one" is also a new 
 expression, which cannot be better illus- 
 trated to you than by supposing you were 
 talking to Mr. Robinson, who diverted you 
 very much, in comes the D. of York or 
 Gloucester, & by sitting down by you " grubbs 
 up" poor Mr. Robinson, perhaps for the 
 
LADY SARAH 189 
 
 whole evening. The Dukes,' she adds un- 
 kindly, 'will either of them serve for an 
 example of a boar too.' ' Lending a tascusa,' 
 it appears, was a phrase (quite meaningless) 
 for to snub. Grammar took its chance then 
 as now : ' those sort ' is regularly written by 
 Lady Sarah. In the early high-spirited 
 letters, • oh Lords ! ' dot the pages, and • who 
 
 the d ],' etc., denote a freer style than 
 
 the * middle- Victorian ' young lady's — a freer 
 style, to which, it is alleged, this generation 
 has returned. 'Did you ever hear of such 
 a toad as 'tis?' she asks, referring, by the 
 way, to the Princess Augusta, sister of 
 George iii. Royalty was generally held in 
 less awe then than it is now; but Lady 
 Sarah, in addition to her private reason for 
 dislike, was of course in the very thick of 
 the Whig society, which made a point of 
 despising the king and all his family. So 
 when the Duke of Gloucester, the king's 
 brother, fell in love with Lady Waldegrave, 
 whom he married, although she was only 
 Sir Edward Walpole's illegitimate daughter, 
 Lady Sarah considered the match a poor 
 one for her. 'What's more extraordinary 
 is that she appears to be in love with him. 
 I don't think it possible to be so really, & 
 
190 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 he is not of consequence or rich enough to 
 make it worth her while to feign it, I should 
 think.' It is amusing to find that she had 
 the same experience of a royal nurse in 
 regard to the future George iv. as the Duke 
 of Wellington had in regard to Edward vii. 
 ' I went to see the little animal & I kissed it, 
 for 'tis a beautiful, strong, handsome child, 
 & my sister said it was wrong to kiss it, & 
 the nurse reprimanded me for calling it child 
 & said 'twas a fine young pi^nce.' This baby, 
 when he grew up, was to receive her praises 
 as those of other expectant Whigs. He did 
 her as Regent a kindly favour for one of her 
 soldier sons, and did it with the gracefulness 
 his worst enemies allowed him. 
 
 But more interesting than any royalty is 
 the authentic likeness of Charles Fox, which 
 smiles more than once in her letters. He 
 was four years her junior, and, of course, 
 as a girl, she looked on him with a pro- 
 tecting eye, and watched his growth into 
 a brilliant youth with affectionate approval. 
 He charmed her, as he charmed every one 
 else, and she never mentions a fault in him 
 without at once recurring to his merits. 
 That Charles neglected his affectionate re- 
 lations — I speak now of his manhood — who 
 
LADY SARAH 191 
 
 naturally forgot that statesmanship and 
 gambling take up a man's time, seems to 
 have been a commonplace in his family. 
 ' Can one expect any mortal to excuse his 
 intoUerable negligence? I don't love him a 
 bit the less for it, because I know it's the 
 nature of the beast, as my poor sister used 
 to say, & I know him to be as capable of 
 friendship & to have as good a heart as 
 it's possible.' Even when Charles, in his 
 ministerial days, failed to get Captain Napier 
 a berth. Lady Sarah always found excuses 
 for him. (It is odd that in an age of jobs 
 Captain Napier, whose character and services 
 really deserved promotion, for all his wife's 
 powerful relations, was always passed over.) 
 We have a sight of Charles frolicking with 
 Mrs. Robinson — the Regent's famous Perdita 
 — electioneering at Westminster and fighting 
 his duel with Mr. Adam. So far from his 
 seeking greatness, said Lady Sarah, 'great- 
 ness pursues him into gaming-houses.' But 
 we have also a sight of Charles in his latter 
 days, the devoted husband; and in his last 
 illness, when ' the privy council of his heart 
 are Ld. Holland' — his nephew, the host of 
 Holland House in its greatest days — ' & Mrs. 
 Fox ; with them he indulges I hear in low 
 
192 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 or high spirits as he feels, sometimes crying, 
 always tender & grateful to them for loving 
 him so much, & never quite comfortable if 
 they are not within call.' Of other famous 
 people there is mention of the Duchess of 
 Devonshire, over whose dissipations Lady 
 Sarah (aged 32) moralises sadly, lamenting 
 how that she ' dines at 7, summer as well 
 as winter, goes to bed at 3, & lies in bed 
 till 4: she has hysteric fits in a morning, & 
 dances in the evening,' and so on. George 
 Selwyn and his Mie Mie are mentioned at the 
 happy moment when the child was given up 
 to him, and Lady Sarah, like all who wrote 
 letters at the time, shuddered at the murder 
 of Miss Reay by Parson Hackman. But 
 of the passion Lord Carlisle made such a coil 
 of in his letters to Selwyn we hear nothing, 
 and of him merely that his manners were 
 charming, but that Lady Sarah 'can't help 
 looking upon him as a school boy for the life 
 of me.' I was sure he was a dull young man. 
 Lady Sarah's political views were those of 
 her Whig relations, as I have said. But her 
 own good sense tempered them now and 
 then. She thought with her friends that 
 George in. was utterly wrong in the American 
 war, but she also thought the American 
 
LADY SARAH 193 
 
 colonists were to blame as well. We, even 
 those of us who are Tories, ought to re- 
 member that to most Englishmen of that 
 date — which was half as near again as ours 
 to the beginning of English settlements in 
 America — this war was a domestic business 
 in which it was quite fair to take, in theory, 
 the side that pleased you, and that to many 
 the Americans had seemed overwhelmingly 
 in the right. It was the verdict, too, of cap- 
 able Englishmen who served there, that the 
 English Government could never hold the 
 country against the Americans' will. Thus 
 Harry Fox, returning in April 1779, ' laughed 
 at the folly of supposing it.' But my point 
 is that the affair was a domestic one, not in 
 a true sense a foreign war: a certain com- 
 parison which has been made will not hold 
 for a moment. Lady Sarah, if she used her 
 own good sense, used also her own dear 
 feminine nonsense, and ' I hate the King 
 should conquer too, because he sits there at 
 his ease at Windsor, and fancies he has 
 nothing to do but to order to conquer such a 
 place as America.' It was also her opinion 
 that ' he uses poor dear Ireland so ill already 
 that he don't deserve to keep it.' That was 
 in 1775. Between '85 and the terrible '98 she 
 
 N 
 
194 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 lived in Ireland, and was consistently bitter 
 in her invective against the Government, 
 charging it roundly in '97 with deliberately 
 bringing on civil war to pave the way to the 
 Union. Exaggeration of party feeling there 
 is again, no doubt, but the evidence she gives 
 of Government muddling and provocation 
 is dismal reading. She was heart and soul 
 with the oppressed Catholics, and had an 
 intense admiration for Edward FitzGerald : 
 *He lived and died the most benevolent of 
 mankind,' she writes. There is also an in- 
 teresting word of Pamela in '93: *I never 
 saw such a sweet, little, engaging, bewitching 
 creature as Ly. Edward is, & childish to a 
 degree, with the greatest sense. The upper 
 part of her face is like poor Mrs. Sheridan. 
 ... I am sure she is not vile Egalit^s child ; 
 it's impossible.' 
 
 In the early letters there is much of the 
 theatre and acting, as we should expect: it 
 was almost a mania with English society at 
 the time. A curious point in social history 
 arises in regard to Mr. O'Brien, who ran 
 away with Lady Susan Fox Strangways. He 
 was apparently an actor by profession, and 
 yet he seems to have met and played with 
 the amateurs at Holland House on equal 
 
LADY SARAH 195 
 
 terms: it seems odd for the period, for of 
 course he had not, like Garrick for example, 
 the prestige of success — which in all periods 
 has appealed to English society. I forget, 
 by the way, if it was this elopement that 
 suggested to Thackeray his Lady Maria and 
 O'Hagan, but in this case also the loving 
 relations followed the beautiful instinct of 
 human nature, and packed the wayward 
 couple off to America. It is pleasant, though, 
 to read that old Lord Holland, remembering, 
 perchance, his own marriage, allowed his 
 niece. Lady Susan, £400 a year when her 
 father would give her nothing. Lady Susan 
 was a woman of sense and spirit, refused, in 
 the long-run, to stay in America, and managed 
 to lead a perfectly happy life with O'Brien, 
 who turned out an excellent man, at home. 
 Her sisters, one gathers from the letters, 
 showed a certain snobbishness over the 
 matter, which, again, is odd for a time of 
 really powerful aristocracy, refusing to be 
 seen with her in public and so forth : the fact 
 that the Foxes, after all, were only in their 
 third generation may have had something to 
 do with that. The student of feminine 
 methods will find refreshment in this part 
 of the correspondence. And the student — I 
 
196 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 trust I am not alone — of even smaller things 
 will find information to his heart about the 
 influenza, dress, dinner hours, and habits of 
 all sorts. 
 
 The first Lord Holland's memoir is now 
 published for the first time, although both 
 his grandson and the late Lord Holland had 
 it in mind. We learn from it the detailed 
 account of George iii.'s almost definite pro- 
 posal of marriage to Lady Sarah, an account 
 confirmed in a memoir by her son, Henry 
 Napier, gathered from talk with her and 
 written nearly seventy years afterwards. 
 Confirmed substantially, that is to say, for I 
 think in Mr. Napier's account we find a 
 bolder and more forward manner on her 
 part, which does not correspond with her 
 letters either, and is probably the exaggera- 
 tion of old age. Apart from this. Lord 
 Holland's memoir is interesting for a minute 
 account of the beginning of George iii.'s 
 reign, and for a frank statement of the origin 
 of his riches. That was known before, but 
 it is agreeable to find Lord Holland in- 
 dignantly explaining that all he did was to 
 speculate in the Funds with the country's 
 money lying in his hands as Paymaster, and 
 that in doing so he used (of course) the judg- 
 
LADY SARAH 197 
 
 ment of a man of sense only as to likely 
 events. The second volume contains several 
 interesting documents from the Holland 
 House Mss. and elsewhere, the most interest- 
 ing being an extract from Mrs. Charles Fox's 
 journal recording the last days and death 
 of her husband. It has not, I think, been 
 quoted — certainly not published before, Fevr 
 such accounts have been more touching than 
 this of Charles Fox : his follies and ambition 
 put by, his great brain at rest, and only his 
 great affectionate heart left at the last. 
 There are also two short papers by Lady 
 Susan O'Brien, recording the changes she 
 had seen in her length of days : she survived 
 Lady Sarah Napier. They are brightly 
 written, and make the time-honoured com- 
 plaints of age, how that unmarried girls had 
 more liberty, and so on; and they remark, 
 with a touch of sarcasm, the ' refinements ' in 
 language. But — and here I end on the note 
 I began with — Lady Susan O'Brien kept a 
 journal. She was a clever and observant 
 woman, knew the best of England, and lived 
 in New York before the war of Independ- 
 ence : surely Lady Ilchester and her co-editor, 
 who so clearly love those things, will give us 
 this journal also. 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 
 
 At a time when the security of our country's 
 greatness seems, to the least imaginative 
 mind, likely to call for a strenuous national 
 effort urgently and soon, it is pleasant to 
 contemplate the social English as they were 
 in a quiet time, not our own, but not un- 
 familiarly remote. Consequently I have 
 betaken myself to Anthony TroUope, an old 
 and constant friend, and for months at a 
 time almost my only reading in fiction. 
 There was an essay in a magazine about him 
 some time ago which I read with surprise 
 and indignation. It had a Good Samaritan 
 air towards a neglected unfortunate. It 
 picked Anthony TroUope up, so to speak, 
 and, having brushed him down, called the 
 attention of passers-by to the fact that in 
 spite of many unlucky deficiencies he was not 
 altogether an unpresentable object. It is 
 the recollection of that essay that moves 
 me to hazard one on my own account. I was 
 surprised. That Anthony TroUope should be 
 
 108 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 199 
 
 neglected by the great mass of readers was 
 likely enough. He was popular in his own 
 day, because people recognised in him the 
 accurate picture of their human and other 
 surroundings. But few people care about 
 accurate pictures of their fathers' surround- 
 ings, and his other qualities are not those 
 which command popular success. His plots 
 are not startling, and his language is quiet 
 and unpretentious. But that a writer who 
 had made a study of him should think him 
 an object for affable encouragement was 
 remarkable. I imagine that few students of 
 fiction and few students of social history 
 have not a better appreciation of his excel- 
 lence and value. 
 
 To begin with his value for the history of 
 manners, he is by far our greatest realist 
 since Fielding. Miss Austen uniformly 
 approaches him in her own field, but that 
 field was a very much smaller one than 
 his. George Eliot approaches him in some 
 passages of some of her books, but in the 
 rest she is in no way his competitor. Lovers 
 of Dickens are apt to attribute to that great 
 master of sentiment and caricature the per- 
 fection of every conceivable quality; but I 
 hardly think the well-advised of them would 
 
200 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 claim for him a literally exact portraiture of 
 manners ; and it is in that sense I am speak- 
 ing of realism, putting any esoteric views 
 there may be about a higher realism on 
 one side. A comparison with Thackeray 
 may perhaps help my estimate. Thackeray 
 was by far Trollope's superior in the per- 
 ception of the humours of life and in a 
 humorous presentation of them, but in fidelity 
 to the facts of life, or at least the facts 
 which eye and ear tell one finally, he was 
 by far Trollope's inferior. Thackeray would 
 seize on a mode of eccentricity and exploit 
 it to its full value, but even in this he would 
 exaggerate for effect. Fred Bayham and 
 Paul de Florae would be all the better for 
 a little less exuberance. With commonplace 
 people and incidents he was careless. Even 
 when moralising in his own person, he 
 could write, to take a trivial but conclusive 
 instance, of a gentleman 'bawling out the 
 odds he would give or take ' on a racecourse. 
 But you are defied to find in Trollope a 
 remark or an action out of keeping with 
 the character concerned. I would give a 
 pound for every such instance found by an 
 objector, if he would give me a penny for 
 every strictly consistent speech or instance I 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 201 
 
 might find in return. One might go further 
 than the mere details of speech and action, 
 and compare these authors when they are 
 dealing with the same significant situation 
 in social or domestic life. An instance is the 
 treatment of an unhappy marriage in The 
 Newcomes and in The Claverings. Both Sir 
 Barnes Newcome and Sir Hugh Clavering 
 were hard and selfish men who misused their 
 wives. And when due allowance has heen 
 made for the fact that Barnes Newcome was 
 a cad and Hugh Clavering a gentleman, 
 which is the more characteristic and the 
 truer picture: Barnes Newcome swearing 
 at his wife before servants and flinging 
 sarcasms at her about nothing, or Hugh 
 Clavering instinctively chilling his wife's 
 affection with persistent and unstudied in- 
 difference and curt reasonableness? I have 
 no doubt which of these manages is the more 
 human and interesting ; the Newcome one is 
 empty violence, and, as it were, abstract evil, 
 and the Clavering a subtle exposure of con- 
 flicting temperaments. But on the point 
 of realism only, remembering that Barnes 
 was a snob, a slave to convention, and had 
 married 'above him,' we must surely pro- 
 nounce that his violence and causeless cruelty 
 
202 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 are exaggerated ; while Sir Hugh is natural 
 throughout — merely a heartless man who 
 was quite sure he was treating his wife 
 fairly, and was right in chastening her 
 sentimentality and 'trash and nonsense.' 
 If it is added that all of us have met many 
 Hugh Claverings and few of us a single 
 Barnes Newcome, it might be replied that 
 common experience is irrelevant, that the 
 creation of an exceptional character might 
 be the greater feat. But surely that is only 
 the case if the exceptional character is true 
 to itself. If you find Barnes Newcome ' con- 
 vincing' or 'inevitable,' or whatever the 
 proper phrase of criticism may be, there is 
 an end of it. But at least it is a serious 
 question if he be so, and there can be no 
 question about Sir Hugh. Other parallels 
 might be given, but I dislike finding fault 
 with Thackeray; to me it always seems a 
 sort of domestic treachery, like abusing one's 
 friends to strangers. Nor would it serve 
 to make comparisons with Mr. Meredith. 
 Characters portrayed with splendid realism 
 he has given us, like Squire Beltham in 
 Harry Richmond, far and away greater in 
 profundity and effect than anything in 
 Trollope. But Mr. Meredith is seldom a 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 203 
 
 realist, and his general absorption in psycho- 
 logy forbids the discursive panorama of life 
 we find in Thackeray and TroUope; and, 
 after all, no number of comparisons can 
 prove the justness of my opinion. If, how- 
 ever, one is content to keep to the super- 
 ficialities of life only, I think that no one 
 will dispute TroUope's absolute and minute 
 trustworthiness. It was amply endorsed by 
 those who could test it by experience, and 
 we may accept it without misgiving. 
 
 The aesthetic value of it, as an end in itself, 
 varies of course with temperament. Merely 
 to note small differences in the manners of 
 the last generation from those of my own is 
 to me a very great enjoyment, and the 
 smaller, the subtler they are, so much the 
 better. I can read carefully every word of 
 the conversation at a dinner party in the 
 palace at Barchester without a moment of 
 weariness, however commonplace that con- 
 versation may have been. The little differ- 
 ences in modes of address, the existing point 
 of view intellectually and morally, the social 
 values and distances of this or that distinc- 
 tion in class— all this I love to ponder and 
 carefully to compare with my memory of 
 such commonplace conversations conducted 
 
204 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 by the present representatives of the people 
 in the book. This, as I said, is an end in 
 itself. But the broader and more bravely 
 soaring minds of other people, impatient of 
 trivialities, would not necessarily waste their 
 time in the same relaxation. These trivial- 
 ities of manner and address, these intellectual 
 and moral points of view held by common- 
 place people, imply many important facts of 
 our social system, and the subtle changes in 
 them may connote great changes to be gradu- 
 ally produced in that system. To take, for 
 example, the changes in the intellectual and 
 active importance of women in everyday 
 social life : I do not refer to exaggerated and 
 generally ineffective propagandism, but to 
 the gradual changes which every experienced 
 man or woman of the world acknowledges. 
 Trollope's evidence on this point is of a very 
 sound value, chiefly, in my opinion, because 
 like all the other trustworthy records of the 
 past, it is a corrective to exaggerated ideas 
 about the former backwardness or present 
 advance of women, but also because it shows 
 in what ways the avowed attitude of women 
 has changed, as it has changed. Or to take 
 public affairs. Those of us who make it our 
 business to study them, or hope haply some 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 205 
 
 day to influence their course, are necessarily 
 dependent on current sweeping generalisa- 
 tions about the temperament and views and 
 intellectual condition of our fellow-country- 
 men. Statesmen and politiciansand publicists, 
 those who speak and those who write about 
 public affairs,are in this matter,necessarilyf or 
 the most part, at the mercy of generalisations 
 which may or may not be true, which appeal 
 to their sense of probability, but which they 
 cannot test. * If there is one thing certain 
 about the English people . . .' says the speaker 
 or the writer ; but does he really know this 
 certain thing? Daily life, converse with 
 different classes and sets of people, help to 
 correct inevitable ignorance in those who 
 avoid the disaster of getting into a soci- 
 ally narrow groove. And I maintain that 
 TroUope's books are a most useful assistance, 
 because by showing tendencies in develop- 
 ment they very greatly increase the value of 
 contemporary observation. 
 
 But of course the value of this realism, as 
 a means and not as an end, is conditioned by 
 its extent, and it has been alleged against 
 TroUope that his scope is narrow, that he 
 only deals with a section of the upper middle 
 class— with parsons and civil service clerks. 
 
206 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 The allegation is quite untrue. The chief 
 male personages of most of his books are, to 
 be sure, parsons and civil servants. If he 
 had drawn no other characters than these, it 
 is no narrow scope of observation which 
 includes Bishop Proudie and Bishop Grantly, 
 Archdeacon Grantly, Mr. Arabin, and Mr. 
 Slope. Surely here are types of human 
 nature and social tradition and moral and 
 intellectual equipment sufficiently diverse? 
 This same consideration holds in a less degree 
 of his civil service clerks. Johnny Eames 
 and Adolphus Crosbie, and the trio of The 
 Three Clerks, with their colleagues and 
 official superiors, make up a tolerably exten- 
 sive fraction of humanity in its essentially 
 different qualities and capacities. But his 
 subsidiary persons in these clerical and civil 
 service books come of many classes and types 
 of training and character. It would be too 
 long to give instances enough to establish 
 my remark, but I cannot refrain from men- 
 tioning Mr. Sowerby, an original and brilliant 
 study of a familiar result of changing social 
 conditions. Moreover, there are other books ; 
 The Claverings, in my opinion, one of his very 
 best, has little to do with parsons, and no- 
 thing with civil servants. Sir Hugh Claver- 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 207 
 
 ing and his brother Captain Archie, Count 
 PaterofP, the inimitable Doodles and 'the 
 man who dusted his boots with his pocket- 
 handkerchief — these distinct and different 
 people are worlds apart from parsonages and 
 Somerset House or Downing Street. And 
 think of his gallery of women, prudes and 
 coquettes, dowagers and adventuresses, 
 bullies and slaves, beautiful and ugly ! And 
 remember that he has done several times 
 what Thackeray hardly did once : he has 
 drawn interesting, clever, and individual 
 women who were also good and serviceable. 
 All this array of characters is paraded in 
 detail; you follow them in their rising up 
 and going to bed, their businesses and plea- 
 sures and meals and love-affairs, their finan- 
 cial distresses — which no one but Thackeray 
 in the case of Sir Francis Clavering has de- 
 scribed with such minute knowledge and 
 appreciation: modern novelists are all so 
 rich — and their deaths and burials. A nar- 
 row field ? It is as big as China. 
 
 So much of TroUope's value as a realist. 
 But I am by no means minded to stop here. 
 Dr. Garnett, whose study of TroUope in The 
 Dictionary of National Biography is most 
 exhaustive and appreciative, nevertheless 
 
208 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 commits himself to the statement that *he 
 never creates — he only depicts.' It is an 
 almost distressing instance of the modern 
 taste for irresponsible paradox that so sound 
 and scholarly a critic as Dr. Garnett should 
 make this reckless assertion. The man who 
 gave Mrs. Proudie to the world 'never 
 creates ' ! It takes one's breath away. What- 
 ever be the fate of Trollope's books generally, 
 it is at least certain that Mrs. Proudie will 
 live as one of the great creations of English 
 fiction. So completely realised she is that 
 thousands and thousands of unimaginative 
 readers have known her as familiarly as 
 they know their nearest relations; and she 
 has not been known to them merely by 
 phrases and peculiarity of manner, but in 
 her full, vigorous character. To say that 
 this is mere observation is really monstrous. 
 Trollope never listened to the intimate col- 
 loquies of bishops and their wives, but who 
 doubts the absolute truth of Bishop and Mrs. 
 Proudie's ? Dr. Garnett indeed directly con- 
 tradicts himself on this point. 'His success 
 in delineating the members of social classes, 
 such as the episcopal, of which he can have 
 had but little personal knowledge, is most ex- 
 traordinary, and seems to suggest not merely 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 209 
 
 preternatural quickness of observation and 
 retentiveness of memory, but some special 
 instinct.' TroUope, as a matter of fact, had a 
 considerable personal knowledge of clergy- 
 men, and, even if he knew but few bishops, 
 had plenty to go upon in drawing them. 
 But when a writer has produced such a char- 
 acter as Mrs. Proudie, seen all round and 
 through and through, to say that he 'never 
 creates ' but has * some special instinct ' is to 
 play with words. This * special instinct ' was 
 an imaginative and sympathetic power of 
 realising the complete characters of people 
 whom either Trollope could only know in 
 their outside aspects, or invented altogether : 
 why this power should be distinguished from 
 creative genius, or how the distinction is to 
 be made, I must leave to subtler critics. But 
 I should very much like to know in what 
 way Mrs. Proudie is less of a creation than 
 Becky Sharp, for I do not think Dr. Garnett 
 would suggest that Thackeray ' only depicts.' 
 The fact is that the exact portraiture of 
 manners— in which sense of realism I claimed 
 that Trollope was a great realist— though his 
 most valuable quality for history, is not his 
 greatest gift in point of intellect. It was the 
 gift readiest to his hand, and one with which 
 
210 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 he was for the most part content. But when 
 he chose, when the^ subject attracted him, 
 when he took the trouble, he could go deeply 
 into the sources of character. He wrote 
 plainly ; he hated any parade of philosophy ; 
 he would have scoffed at the word ' artist ' ; 
 and it is true enough to say that he did not 
 take his vocation of novel- writing very seri- 
 ously. But it is not true that because a man 
 does not take his work seriously therefore 
 his work is not serious. One would, indeed, 
 wish it were true — if only the converse were 
 true also, and the multitude of contemporary 
 mediocrities, who prate about their wonder- 
 ful aims and inspirations, by virtue of their 
 prating made themselves worth the trouble of 
 reading. When Trollope went deeply into char- 
 acter, he did so not because he took his work 
 seriously, but because the subject interested 
 him. That does not matter ; what matters is 
 that he did go deeply into character on occa- 
 sion, as Mrs. Proudie and her husband, as the 
 persecuted Mr. Crawley, and as a dozen other 
 results are extant to prove. It is done with- 
 out parade, and, except perhaps in the case 
 of Mr. Crawley, is done without an appear- 
 ance of continued intention ; but it is done 
 all the same. With a few hints and sugges- 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 211 
 
 tions, with a few casual asides, TroUope has 
 shown often that the wfeole nature of a type 
 of human being is clear to him. It may be 
 the case that the manner is not that of an 
 artist — that it is rather that of a man of 
 the world wishing to interest and fearful of 
 wearying you ; but none the less is the result 
 most interesting, and respect for the know- 
 ledge and intellect which produced it most 
 clearly due. Too much has been made of the 
 fact that TroUope was regular in his habits 
 and wrote so many words a day. It is a sign 
 of the crude and unsympathetic character of 
 our literary appreciation that we should be 
 reminded of this fact whenever TroUope is 
 mentioned. He had been trained to task- 
 work and punctual habits, and he found them 
 convenient. Why not ? A man's intellect is 
 not necessarily the worse because its working 
 is not dependent on sunshine or rain, on the 
 society he has been frequenting, on the 
 thousand other irrelevant accidents of life. 
 To be able to set them aside does not mean 
 that a man is stupid, but that he is strong. 
 A poet might not be able to do this. But 
 TroUope's method is one of prose; it works 
 with sound knowledge of life on the lines of 
 reason. Imagination was needed too, and. 
 
212 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 as I contend, he used it in full measure. But 
 it does not follow that because he wrote so 
 many words a day he had not previously 
 thought out what he was going to write. 
 The form of his work was sufficiently pedes- 
 trian to allow him to use what his gift of 
 imagination had provided for him at such a 
 time as he chose. That is all, and that is to 
 his credit. There is no need to apologise for 
 an intelligence because it is not only great, 
 but alert and ready for use, nor any need to 
 apologise for TroUope at all ; and I trust that 
 my remarks may not be so interpreted. 
 
THE GREAT DUCHESS 
 
 Whenever, in my casual reading, I meet 
 with even the slightest mention of Sarah, 
 Duchess of Marlborough, I pause to offer her 
 memory a silent salutation. I have just now 
 read two rather large volumes about her, and 
 it becomes necessary to me to break into 
 articulate homage. It is an instinct with 
 most of us to be struck (whether we are 
 catholic enough to admire or not) by the 
 spectacle of any person wholly and absolutely 
 consistent with himself and with some simple 
 elemental law of his being. Now I know of 
 no man or woman in history who, on any- 
 thing like a large scale and with recognisable 
 strength of will and action, is at all compar- 
 able to Sarah Jennings for unity of life and 
 feeling. In her slightest aside and most 
 vehement speech, in her least and her greatest 
 actions, the same spectacle is presented to 
 my admiring vision — a procession of strong 
 
 unfaltering, straightforward, frank, remorse- 
 sis 
 
214 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 less, heartless selfishness. She was a perfect 
 expression of egotism, without compromise 
 or exception — a^ type, an example for ever. 
 The moralist may say this or that, but the 
 artist cannot choose but applaud. 
 
 It is not my purpose to ' review ' Mr. Fitz- 
 Gerald MoUoy's Life of her which I have just 
 read. (He calls it The Queen's Comrade, in 
 which title I doubt poor Queen Anne would 
 have seen irony or cynicism.) But it would 
 be less than civil not to thank him for much 
 material new to me, and to compliment him 
 on the pleasant manner of its presentment. 
 To people who have not made a study of the 
 sort of thing the book should be both illumi- 
 native and interesting, and an excellent 
 corrective, so far as it goes, in regard to 
 Revolution times of that arch-manipulator 
 of truth. Lord Macaulay. To me, who knew 
 something of the subject, it was an increase 
 of detailed knowledge and a confirmation of 
 opinion. The latter very decidedly, especially 
 as regarded Sarah Jennings. In every fresh 
 detail she was the same as I had always 
 seen her, never swerving to the right or the 
 left, grasping everything with her strong 
 hands, and striking hard with them if she 
 were thwarted — old friends, old benefactors. 
 
THE GREAT DUCHESS 215 
 
 her own children : it was all one to her. A 
 perfectly consistent woman. 
 
 You can express her life with the simplicity 
 and finality of a problem in Euclid. The 
 theory which guided her throughout, and 
 which I will not believe could have been 
 less than half-conscious, was clearly this: 
 that the world was created for the benefit of 
 Sarah Jennings; that those who aided this 
 wise design of Providence by advancing her 
 fortunes, heaping money and titles on her, 
 and so forth, were simply doing their duty, 
 and deserved neither return nor any feeling 
 of gratitude on her part ; that those who 
 ceased so to do, or who were indifferent, 
 or who did the opposite, were wretches 
 for whom no punishment could be too 
 severe : they were thwarting the nature 
 of things. There is something almost im- 
 personal in the even, unhesitating retribu- 
 tion with which she pursued any one who 
 had crossed or offended her in the slightest 
 degree; such a person was an undoubted 
 reptile, and when it raised its head — when- 
 ever or wherever — Sarah Jennings hit at it. 
 And, mark, there was very little cant of self- 
 righteousness about all this. She was not like 
 Queen Mary ii., who, whenever her treachery 
 
216 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 to her father had been brought home to 
 her, went and congratulated Heaven on her 
 virtues in her diary. 
 
 No misconduct, you may be sure, was ever 
 brought home to the mind of the Duchess 
 of Marlborough. When Queen Anne finally 
 dismissed her, the Duchess simply excused 
 herself for ever having put up with the 
 society of such a creature as her Sovereign. 
 *I am afraid,' she wrote to Sir David 
 Hamilton, • you will have a very ill opinion 
 of one that could pass so many hours with 
 one I have just given such a character of; 
 but though it was extremely tedious to pass 
 so many hours where there could be no con- 
 versation, I knew she loved me.' You see 
 the kindness had been all on the Duchess's 
 part, not on the Queen's, who had endured 
 all kinds of affronts in the last reign, because 
 she would not part with her favourite, and 
 since her accession had heaped every benefit 
 she could on the Duchess. Of course Sarah 
 had given her Sovereign a direct piece of her 
 mind before her dismissal, in terms even 
 then, when English people were far less 
 obsequious to Royalty than they are now, 
 very much out of the way, but not as one 
 defending herself, rather as one painfully 
 
THE GREAT DUCHESS 217 
 
 pointing out a child's naughtiness. To say 
 that she did not blame herself for the rupture 
 is to understate the truth; in her mind no 
 conduct of hers, whatever it was, could justify 
 a revolt against her. With the same beauti- 
 ful and, I do not doubt, sincere simplicity, 
 when she had to leave England, she bewailed 
 the necessary ruin of a country which had 
 ceased to pay the Duke and her ninety 
 thousand a year. There was no cant in 
 this; it flowed inevitably from her theory 
 of life. 
 
 For the expression of this theory — and it 
 was surely a fine theory to live with — Nature 
 had been kind to Sarah Jennings and us. 
 It had given her every quality necessary to 
 make it clear to our edification. To begin 
 with, she was only passionate when her 
 interests were concerned, not otherwise. 
 People who are passionate in their love 
 affairs may be selfish, but their selfishness 
 is superficially obscured now and then by an 
 apparent regard for the other person. Sarah 
 Jennings escaped that obscuration. More- 
 over her coldness of blood, in that regard, 
 probably ministered to the extreme uxorious- 
 ness of the Duke, lasting from young man- 
 hood to old age. Wherever he was, cam- 
 
218 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 paigning or not, he sent her constant letters 
 of devotion, and was lucky, it seemed, if he 
 escaped a douche of criticism in return. He 
 mentions a ' kind ' letter of hers as something 
 extraordinary. No one could throw stones 
 at the Duchess on the score of her morals, in 
 the usual sense of the term, so that she was 
 invulnerable to the general criticism of 
 English moralists ; in fact, I venture to 
 think they ought to acclaim her as a ' good 
 woman.' But her husband could not stand 
 against her theory ; she could not curb her 
 indignation with Anne for taking a new 
 favourite, and so give him a chance of keep- 
 ing his places. It is not an extended selfish- 
 ness that we contemplate in Sarah Jennings ; 
 it is the real thing ; self with her meant 
 self. 
 
 Again, she had a splendid constitution, a 
 strong will, and a good head; necessary 
 qualities, because if she had been ailing, 
 weak, or a fool, her selfishness might have 
 been just as complete, but it would not have 
 been so fine a spectacle for us. Also she was 
 naturally frank and straightforward. Had 
 she been more inclined to subterfuge and 
 double-dealing she might, it is true, have 
 had even greater success in life, but her 
 
THE GREAT DUCHESS 219 
 
 memory would not be so finely simple to 
 appreciate. She was not an intriguer. She 
 felt it due to her theory of life to march 
 straight to her goal and seize on what she 
 wanted in the eye of the world. Of course 
 she dropped people who had ceased to be 
 useful to her, but openly and as a natural 
 consequence. When James's cause was hope- 
 less she dropped him; it was his fault that 
 he could no longer promote and enrich her 
 husband, and so he forfeited her patronage. 
 It is really misleading to call such plain-deal- 
 ing as that treachery. The great successes 
 in her life were due to her influence over 
 Anne, and that was gained by no flattery or 
 intrigue, but by the frank imposition of a 
 strong will on a weak one. Anne became her 
 creature and took her orders. "When Anne 
 had revolted and that source of power was 
 gone, even then she did not intrigue. She 
 made one straightforward threat, to publish 
 the letters of 'Mrs. Morley' to 'Mrs. Freeman.' 
 It was rather like blackmailing, to be sure, 
 and no doubt the Duchess thought it hard 
 that Providence should drive her to such 
 means to her just ends, but it was not 
 intriguing. Nor, in the absence of direct 
 evidence, do I believe that she coquetted 
 
220 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 between St. Germain and Hanover as her 
 husband did. He was a born intriguer, a 
 man natively underhand, but it was not her 
 way at all. She did not plot to bring people 
 into power; when they were in power she 
 went to them and demanded everything they 
 had to give. Moreover, she honestly disliked 
 St. Germain, and was true to her dislikes. 
 Fairly consistent in an age of turncoats, 
 fairly truthful in an age of liars, and very 
 strong in an age of weaklings — her good 
 qualities in this kind all minister to the 
 supreme effect of her life. 
 
 Accident and circumstance as well as 
 natural qualities conspired to bring her 
 theory into relief. If she had been success- 
 ful without interruption, had never met with 
 a rebufip, we should have missed the sublime 
 spectacle of her indignation, of her wrath 
 with those who had defied the right order 
 of the universe. The first rebuff came 
 with William and Mary. Mary hated Lady 
 Churchill, a fact which Lady Churchill was 
 very slow to grasp. But when she did grasp 
 it, and the fact that she and Lord Churchill 
 had little to hope for from the new Court, 
 she said very forcible things. Other people 
 were disappointed as well. It is, indeed, 
 
THE GREAT DUCHESS 221 
 
 rather refreshing to observe the indigna- 
 tion of the patriots who had brought in 
 William of Orange when they perceived 
 that he preferred his Dutch minions, the 
 Bentincks and the Keppels, to his English 
 traitors, driving the latter from his presence 
 that he. might get drunk in peace with the 
 former. The Princess Anne said things 
 about him which we may fairly trace to the 
 more trenchant style of her favourite — * Cali- 
 ban' and 'the Dutch monster' I am sure 
 were phrases of Sarah Jennings. But Sarah 
 was generous ; those who sinned against her 
 had to be punished all their lives, but her 
 just wrath stopped short at the grave. 
 ' When the King came to die,' she beautifully 
 wrote, 'I felt nothing of that satisfaction 
 which I once thought I should have had 
 upon this occasion ... so little is it in my 
 nature to retain resentment against any 
 mortal (however unjust he may have been) 
 in whom the will to injure is no more.* 
 Surely a grand passage! But familiarity 
 with the injustice of kings did not prevent 
 this great woman from taking infinite pains 
 to punish humble people. When Sir John 
 Vanbrugh had the temerity to criticise her 
 she ' was very sorry I had fouled my fingers 
 
222 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 in writing to such a fellow ' ; but, mindful of 
 her duty to the world, she took the trouble 
 to fill thirty sheets of paper with charges 
 against Sir John. 
 
 In her old age, indeed, she found time to do 
 a good deal of polemical writing against her 
 enemies. Among other such efforts she 
 wrote an elaborate account of her daughters' 
 misconduct towards her, and sent the agree- 
 able brochure to various friends and rela- 
 tions. ' Having boare what I have done for 
 so many years, rather than hurt my children, 
 I hope nobody will blame me now,' etc., etc. 
 Also she dictated to Hooke her famous 
 Account of her Conduct, and composed with 
 Henry Fielding her Vindication. (What 
 would one not give to have heard these two 
 geniuses in consultation !) Her vindication, 
 it need hardly be said, took the form of ex- 
 posing the wickedness of other people rather 
 than of defending herself. . . . But I protest 
 that as I think of this splendid old woman, 
 bed-ridden at last and so near her end, still 
 indomitable, still strong in thought, and still 
 keenly humorous, I feel sympathy for her 
 human qualities rather than admiration for 
 her superhuman perfection. But that is a 
 sentimental weakness and must be sup- 
 
THE GREAT DUCHESS 223 
 
 pressed. An artistic wonder and joy in the 
 contemplation of life and character absolutely 
 thorough, absolutely true to itself — that must 
 be one's emotion when one reads of Sarah 
 Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough. 
 
Ill 
 
 VARIOUS 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 
 
 It is often complained that the world of 
 ideas and of art has been for many years a 
 rather dull place. The complaint may be 
 well or ill founded. If the accepted view 
 of the relations of art and ideas to national 
 life and events be right the complaint is odd, 
 for no one can deny that national and politi- 
 cal events have been stirring and that the 
 signs of more stirring events to come can be 
 read by the naked eye. In England, at least, 
 the national stress and national emotion 
 which are held to inspire poets and philo- 
 sophers have not been lacking. We have 
 had to pull ourselves together, and we have 
 had a grim proof that we may not relax 
 again speedily. We have had much to hearten 
 us. South Africa has proved that our man- 
 hood is as spirited and enduring as ever. It 
 has proved, too, that our boasted civilisation 
 in tenderness for the weak and conquered is 
 not a sham; that, on the contrary, we are 
 ready to prolong our own suffering and loss 
 
 227 
 
228 VARIOUS 
 
 for its sake. On the other hand, we have 
 been fairly and squarely warned that the 
 world, as it goes now, calls for mental as well 
 as moral qualities in the nation that is to 
 win. We cannot afford our cherished stupid- 
 ity; we must seek for and use our brains. 
 And in the future it is plain we shall have 
 to act strongly and together, that our in- 
 differentism and individualism must go by 
 the board. We have to see to it that the ties 
 of sentiment which bind our colonies to us 
 shall be strengthened by ties of common 
 interest, and not loosened by any folly of 
 theorists, and we shall have to hold this 
 great Empire well together, against the 
 attacks, in one way or another, of the rest 
 of the world. In fact, we have been, and 
 shall have to be in infinitely greater degree, 
 on our mettle. All this, surely, ought to have 
 something to say to ideas and to arts. Will 
 it? It remains a question; so far the re- 
 sponse, if in one or two quarters brilliant, 
 has been slight. But we must remember that 
 the national consciousness of all this has 
 existed, if it yet exists, but a short while, and 
 it is the national consciousness and not the 
 beliefs of one here and one there, which calls 
 to art to express it when the theme is a 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 229 
 
 great one. The right appealing idea and the 
 perfect form are still to seek; let us pray 
 they may be found. 
 
 Meanwhile, if in our art or our ideas we 
 have been dull, we have been dull with differ- 
 ences. I was reminded very strongly of such 
 differences the other day in reading again 
 Mr. Mallock's New Republic. Certainly those 
 of us who talk about art and philosophy 
 and society, talk differently now from Mr. 
 Mallock's talkers. In fact, the change at first 
 sight is almost amazing. Every one admits 
 that this book is a very accurate statement 
 of the ideas of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Dr. 
 Jowett, and Mr. Pater, and so forth : every- 
 body admitted it at the time the book was 
 published. It was said that the people were 
 all portraits, but the truth is that they 
 represent the writings and not the conversa- 
 tion of their prototypes. One or two, I 
 know from credible evidence, were not in the 
 least like their supposed originals, and Mr. 
 Mallock was, of course, aware of this. He 
 simply took certain distinguished people and 
 made them talk like their books. He did not 
 design to be realistic, nor, I fancy, dramatic 
 either. The affair gives one no illusion of 
 real conversation ; no one out of a pulpit or 
 
230 VARIOUS 
 
 off a lecture platform could talk like these 
 eloquent theorisers. But the point is that 
 the conversation does represent, and very 
 accurately — given a trifle of satire and cari- 
 cature — the ideas which were in the air 
 and influenced the talk of cultivated people 
 at the time, and was taken, and rightly 
 taken, to express the particular ideas and 
 deductions from the ideas of the celebrated 
 men in question. For my part, when I first 
 read it some fifteen years ago, being young, I 
 hailed it as a gospel, or rather as several 
 gospels, to enliven by turns. And how old- 
 fashioned it all seemed the other day ! Not 
 that it was stale, withered, and of intolerable 
 entrails ; it is far too well done for that, and 
 far too sympathetic, as belonging to one's 
 youth. But with what pleasant smack of the 
 past it returned. Old ideas, old enthusiasms ! 
 I protest it smelt sweetly of lavender. 
 
 It is worth while — ^^since at least it is agree- 
 able to the writer — to consider the matter 
 more particularly. The general setting need 
 not detain one; people still have house 
 parties and lunch and dine. Nor need the 
 supernumerary characters. The host, the 
 young man who his friends think ought to 
 do something great, because in spite of being 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 231 
 
 very rich he liked to talk about books, and 
 who never does, is a constant type in real 
 life. Leslie, the young man who conceals a 
 breaking heart by rather violently cynical 
 remarks, is perhaps a trifle more of books 
 than of life, and we do not take him quite so 
 seriously as they did in the eighties; he 
 dated, even then, from a misunderstanding 
 of Byron. Lady Ambrose, the rich woman 
 whose delight is in duchesses, would now- 
 adays be less rigid in her judgment about 
 people's 'infidelity* and all that, but — some 
 of us would say — decidedly more vulgar. 
 Miss Merton is merely the hint of a character 
 which might or might not have been in- 
 teresting if it were worked out. 
 
 But Dr. Jenkinson and Mr. Herbert and 
 Mr. Saunders and Mr. Luke and Mr. Rose — 
 one might write a volume about the most 
 superficial delivery of any one of them, to 
 explain what changes in tone and thought 
 and feeling it records for us. Of course, they 
 are sometimes caricature. Mr. Saunders, for 
 example, who was always denying anything 
 except progress 'which could be verified by 
 statistics,' and who had ' disproved the exist- 
 ence of God,' is a bit more powerful than the 
 militant atheist of the period could really 
 
232 VARIOUS 
 
 have been. But the militant atheist was — 
 that is the point — and is no more. How 
 many years is it since he was heard in the 
 land ? There are many men, no doubt, who 
 agree with Mr. Saunders about God, though 
 few intelligent men may agree with him 
 about progress; there are many, that is to 
 say, who are not merely agnostic, but re- 
 pudiate the possibility of anything approach- 
 ing to any notion of theism, and believe all 
 'faith' to be not only foolish but noxious. 
 But even they do not trouble themselves to 
 contradict or hold forth ; they do not think 
 it worth while. Twenty years ago they did ; 
 they wanted to convert the rest of the com- 
 munity. It seems, indeed, to pass from 
 extreme instances, as though the whole war 
 between faith and philosophy had collapsed. 
 The armies march their own ways, through 
 different countries, and if haply the soldiers 
 of either meet, they bivouac together in 
 peace. The quarrel between statesmen and 
 ecclesiastics, from time to time acute in 
 France and Italy, is social and political, not 
 one of belief and disbelief. In England the 
 national genius for compromise produced 
 the Broad Church — and Dr. Jenkinson. But 
 the compromise was found to be unnecessary, 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 233 
 
 or impracticable, and the Broad Church is 
 defunct. I wonder if any dignitary of the 
 Church or eminent philosopher is engaged 
 on a work to reconcile Christianity and 
 Science. I imagine not. It is all as dead as 
 Robert Boyle, who began it two centuries 
 and a half ago. We have agreed that there 
 are different sorts of intellect, and they have 
 given up, almost with mutual respect, the 
 attempt to convert each other. Mr. Mallock's 
 Dr. Seydon, whose zeal was all for coalescing 
 the Anglican and Eastern communities, is a 
 more modern figure than Dr. Jenkinson, who 
 thought that Christianity ' really embraces 
 all religions, even any honest denial of 
 itself.' But it is rather a large change for 
 twenty years, and was not, I believe, antici- 
 pated then. I doubt if there is a single man 
 in England now at all entitled to be called a 
 philosopher or a man of science, who cares 
 what dogmas the mass of people believe, or 
 a single churchman of repute who would try 
 hopefully to convert him. 
 
 But were this militant spirit to revive, it 
 would find its objective very much changed. 
 The anxious reconciler of Christianity and 
 Science would find no longer stubborn and 
 rude opposition in the enemy's camp, but he 
 
234 VARIOUS 
 
 would find what he would like far less. He 
 would find himself treated like a child, his 
 arguments listened to, and the briefest reply 
 consistent with courtesy. His listeners 
 would be of opinion that his mind, however 
 equipped with learning and accomplishment, 
 lacked a certain faculty, and would try to 
 change the conversation. This is not to 
 speak offensively: I write as an observer 
 only — but I am sure that thus, and not 
 otherwise, would the men of science conduct 
 themselves. A complete rejection of the old 
 dogmas is none the less real because it is not 
 vociferated. But the militant atheist, could 
 he be born again, would be just as much 
 annoyed as Dr. Jenkinson. For while the 
 philosophers and a very large proportion of 
 all educated men would tell him that his 
 attacks on religion were not worth while, he 
 would find also that among the general 
 there was far more profession of dogma, far 
 more mysticism and delight in symbols of 
 faith, than in his day. He would say that a 
 wave of obscurantism had passed over the 
 country. Reason and logic he would find, 
 however unobtrusively potent with the 
 educated, were certainly not, as he had 
 thought they would be, ruling in the market 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 235 
 
 place. So it is. The philosopher's attitude 
 to Christianity, as to one of many religions 
 historically interesting or socially important, 
 but without relation to fact or probability, 
 is that of many who, when The New Republic 
 was published, would have been struggling 
 with reason and tradition: but also faith, 
 Catholicism, mysticism — call it what you 
 will — is stronger numerically now than then. 
 Between the two, the Broad Church and Dr. 
 Jenkinson have fallen. It is astonishing 
 now to the unhistorically minded to read of 
 the famous struggles and heart searchings 
 of an earlier generation. Pathetic, if we 
 understand them rightly, but difficult so to 
 be understood. 
 
 Then Matthew Arnold, who on his culture 
 and ' sweetness and light ' side is very fairly 
 expressed in the book, is not he, too, fallen ? 
 On that side only, I think. The classical 
 poet of The Scholar Gipsy lives, and even his 
 biblical criticisms, his Literature and Dogma, 
 remain as a stage, at least, of an intellectual 
 procession, a work which in its time had a 
 large effect. But was ever * movement ' more 
 futile than Matthew Arnold's crusade of 
 'culture'? It was, in fact, foredoomed to 
 futility. To enlarge the culture of the 
 
236 VARIOUS 
 
 cultivated, to lead them where they shall 
 find useful food and widening of vision, is an 
 attempt of which the success is according to 
 the power of him who attempts it. To show 
 those who crave culture where they may 
 find its beginnings, is the successful endea- 
 vour of him who has the teaching genius. 
 But to rail at the uncultivated, to preach 
 the advantages of culture with a view of 
 enticing those who do not even understand 
 the preacher's language — that is a proceed- 
 ing on which no success awaits. If you 
 explain to those who have an instinct and a 
 desire for culture, how beautiful a thing it 
 is, you are superfluous ; if you explain it to 
 those who have no such instinct or desire, 
 they will not understand you. First it is 
 necessary to wake the instinct or implant 
 the desire. There may be more than one 
 way of doing this. Every way must be 
 difficult, and can be found only by inspiration 
 or by infinite pains. But the way of bullying 
 is most certainly a hopeless way. It implies, 
 too, the fault it seeks to correct. If you 
 wish to improve the manners of an ill- 
 mannered man, and by way of doing so first 
 call him opprobrious names and then draw 
 his attention to your own superiority, he 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 237 
 
 can make a tolerably obviouB retort, and 
 whether he makes it or not, he is hardly 
 likely to be impressed, to tremble and turn 
 and be changed. To express a plain disgust 
 for the mass of your fellow-countrymen, and 
 claim for an infinitesimal minority a mono- 
 poly of social merits, is not likely either to 
 convert the former or to improve the latter. 
 And, in fact, the effect has been nothing. 
 The really cultivated gained nothing. The 
 uncultivated — those of them who heard 
 anything of the matter — were merely an- 
 noyed. The sham cultivated were confirmed 
 in their own conceit, and certain misleading 
 phrases — Barbarians, Philistine, and so forth 
 — remain for the misuse of journalists. And 
 that is all. But twenty years ago many 
 people thought that this crusade of Matthew 
 Arnold was to work such miracles in social 
 life as he declined to accept in theology. 
 
 Matthew Arnold is very fairly represented 
 in The New Republic, given, of course, the 
 touch of satire which came, and comes still, 
 naturally to the author. I imagine that Mr. 
 Mallock did not intend to give us Mr. Pater 
 with the same verisimilitude. Mr. Rose's 
 complacent and languid eulogies of life for 
 art's sake are not to be fairly paralleled in 
 
238 VARIOUS 
 
 his writings. I often think that even his 
 admirers do Mr. Pater an injustice, from the 
 inveterate habit of giving every man a label 
 and never more than one. Mr. Pater was 
 labelled a master of style, and so hardly any 
 one was able to see that this style clothed a 
 coherent, and by no means an unmanly, 
 philosophy. This philosophy assuredly did 
 not recommend its disciples to sever them- 
 selves from the common life of their 
 country : Mr. Pater was too really Greek for 
 that heresy. Nor, apart from that, would 
 the charming folly of Mr. Rose's ideas be 
 fair, in point of intellect and imagination, to 
 the artist who did in very truth widen the 
 culture of his time, by showing it a mode of 
 reconstructing, valuing, and living in the 
 past in its way unique. Nor, again, have I 
 gathered from his friends that Mr. Pater 
 talked like Mr. Rose. But Mr. Rose is a 
 very fair caricature, sometimes a very fair 
 portrait of a school, of a ' movement,' which 
 found its best inspiration in Mr. Pater — and 
 this, probably, was Mr. Mallock's intention. 
 Well, that movement also is gone from 
 among us. For my part, I regret it a good 
 deal. At its best it made a genuine appeal 
 to detachment of appreciation in the arts. 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 239 
 
 and even in its popular effect it produced 
 something better than preceding ugliness. 
 In some of its professions it was false, no 
 doubt. It was not ' Greek,' nor even like the 
 Italian or French Renaissance — not in the 
 least. Plato and Aristotle alike would have 
 regarded its ideal of a life apart from the 
 State, solely devoted to artistic enjoyment, 
 as something monstrous and horrible, and in 
 the Italy of the Renaissance artists were 
 active artists, and their patrons statesmen. 
 In this remoteness and exclusiveness it 
 shared the fault of Matthew Arnold's move- 
 ment, a fault fatal to vitality. But beside its 
 advantages of being both charming in some 
 respects, and amusing in others, it had the 
 indirect advantage of varying the monotony 
 of English life and ideals. From being 
 notoriously a nation of humours and eccen- 
 tricities, we English seem to be becoming all 
 exactly like one another, and the man whom 
 we all try to be, and many of us are, is a 
 man incessantly talking about sports and 
 games, and devoting the chief energies of his 
 body and mind to their pursuit. I do not 
 depreciate their value. All men need ex- 
 ercise, and some men need violent exercise. 
 But the monotony is tedious, and, moreover. 
 
240 VARIOUS 
 
 it is a handicap to us as a nation. The 
 fanatical eulogists of ' athletics ' have per- 
 suaded themselves, heaven knows how, that 
 our Empire was won by sports and games. 
 If they will kindly go over in their minds 
 the lists of our greatest statesmen, soldiers, 
 sailors — to say nothing of our poets and 
 philosophers — and observe how many con- 
 formed to their own idea of the perfect 
 Englishman, they may conceivably observe 
 their mistake. The fact is that our greatest 
 men have been as unlike that boasted hero, 
 'the average athletic Englishman,' as it is 
 possible to imagine. This by the way. The 
 'aesthetic' movement, an extreme on the other 
 side, was a useful counterpoise and variety, 
 and as I read of its beginnings in The New 
 Republic^ I sighed for its passing. 
 
 Out of all this change — slight in itself, 
 perhaps, but remarkable for the brevity of 
 the time — I find persons in the book whose 
 ideas have sustained or increased their 
 potency. The first is the old uncle, in whose 
 classical villa the scene is laid. He, or his 
 memory — for you remember he is dead — 
 would be merely part of the background if 
 it were not for the pages his nephew reads 
 from his memoirs. One set of pages is an 
 ironical recommendation of Christianity on 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 241 
 
 the ground that its prohibitions have added 
 to our humour, and made our vices the 
 more enjoyable. The other set form a 
 vigorous satire, brilliantly imitated from 
 Aristotle's Ethics, against British snobbish- 
 ness (I trust an apology is needed for re- 
 freshing your memory). The partial and 
 wicked truth of such a recommendation of 
 course continues to be true, and so — alas! — 
 does the truth of the satire. If old Mr. 
 Lawrence had lived another twenty years, 
 he would have noticed, to be sure, that there 
 are differences in our snobbishness, as for 
 example that we value titles less and money 
 more, and he might have observed also that 
 a larger number of people — in the greater 
 uncertainty of our social hierarchy — are 
 content to take out the national character- 
 istic in contempt of sets and coteries not their 
 own. But these are trifles. Otherwise the 
 deceased Mr. Lawrence remains truer for 
 our time than most of the advanced folk 
 who stayed in his house. The value of him, 
 however, is literary and not historical. 
 
 The other person in the book whose 
 doctrine, as then presented, has not lost its 
 force, but, on the contrary, makes a warmer 
 appeal to us is— some of my readers may be 
 
 Q 
 
242 VARIOUS 
 
 surprised to learn — Mr. Herbert, who stands 
 for Mr. Ruskin. We are not concerned with 
 his criticism of art, which has now been 
 rejected by the experts. Though (by the 
 experts' leave) his criterion of morality for 
 the judgment of art was not so much 
 radically false as narrow in his own conno- 
 tation of it — for that the greatest art has 
 been concerned with the genius of races and 
 ages, and is, therefore, not a mere affair of 
 arrangement of lines and colours, is surely a 
 tenable view — still his criticism was narrow 
 and inadequate, and it has passed away. It 
 does not come into The Neio Republic. There 
 we have Mr. Ruskin in two aspects — in his 
 fierce denunciation of certain features of 
 contemporary civilisation, and in his sym- 
 pathy with the unequal lot of the poor. I 
 think that in both these aspects he would 
 meet with a far better understanding and a 
 far more extensive agreement than ho met 
 with when The Neiv Republic was written. 
 He would have to rise from the grave to meet 
 with it, because we do not read the books of 
 his period. But if he could do that, and talk 
 to us in lecture-rooms, and write to us in our 
 Reviews, I am sure we should know what he 
 meant far better than his contemporaries. 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 243 
 
 When Mr. Mallock wrote his first book, 
 modern civilisation was still cock-sure of its 
 virtues. Its critics were, one and all, re- 
 garded as eccentrics and dealers in paradox. 
 Hardly any one doubted that swiftness of 
 communication, extension of commerce, and 
 all that, were of the essence of civilisation, 
 even if they were not the whole of it. The 
 great leaders of commerce gazed upon their 
 new hideous houses, patted their capacious 
 stomachs, and were convinced that they 
 were the flower of all the ages. Thackeray 
 had laughed at soldiers as an ornamental 
 anachronism. The men of science crowed 
 over discovery as though it were the same 
 thing as understanding. The quality of 
 towns did not matter; the great thing was 
 that you could get from one to another ten 
 times as quickly as your ancestors. You 
 might have nothing better in your head than 
 the latest price of corn, but being able to 
 communicate this fact to a man thousands 
 of miles away in a few minutes, you were a 
 finer example of civilisation than Plato. In 
 England, twenty years ago, we were hardly 
 beginning to come to the end of our national 
 monopoly of commercial prosperity; naturally 
 we thought a merely material civilisation 
 
244 VARIOUS 
 
 the best possible. The corresponding virtues, 
 repression of violence, free scope for enter- 
 prise, and also for cunning, and • respecta- 
 bility,' which is the universal cloak of 
 cunning, had it all their own way. Mr. 
 Ruskin laid his finger on the weak spots in 
 all this. But we did not wince, we merely 
 grinned at him. Then he waxed angry, and 
 accused our civilisation of ruining all that 
 was fair and wholesome ; he pointed to our 
 factory chimneys shutting out the sun, and 
 the pale faces of our factory hands. There 
 was a murmur of surprise, because our 
 manufacturers had been taught by Messrs. 
 Bright and Cobden that they were the people, 
 and that it was only wicked aristocrats and 
 landowners who were oppressors. But few 
 cared. . . . Now it is different. Seeing the 
 results of our material civilisation for our- 
 selves, its monotony and dreariness, the 
 insipidity and vulgarity of the men it makes 
 wealthy, and the excessive toil and emptiness 
 in the lives of the men whose labour is the 
 means, we begin to have our doubts. We 
 find that the promised blessings of peace and 
 universal goodness have not been secured, 
 and that the incidental evils which were to 
 pass away have grown and grown. Are we. 
 
TWENTY YEARS SINCE 245 
 
 after all, on the wrong lines? Many of us 
 think so ; many more now, than twenty years 
 ago, agree with Mr. Ruskin. 
 
 We have a stronger social reason than we 
 had then for feeling that the lot of the poor 
 — the labour which leaves no time nor 
 energy for civilised recreation, and the pay 
 which only just supports a tasteless life — is 
 grievously unequal. The process which in 
 this country is substituting, in the position 
 of the main holders of wealth, for a class 
 which had traditions of its own and had 
 been there, so to speak, since our national 
 memory a class which has risen in the im- 
 mediate past by the exploitation of labour 
 or by successful cunning — this process had, 
 of course, been going on for a very long 
 time when The Neio Republic was written. 
 But the last twenty years have seen a 
 rapid acceleration of it. The philosophical 
 difference may not be great. It may not, 
 philosophically, matter to the unlucky man 
 whether the lucky one is 'the tenth trans- 
 mitter of a foolish face,' or the first trans- 
 mitter of a bulging pocket. Imaginatively 
 it does matter to him, and we who, per- 
 haps, are in neither category are more 
 apt than twenty years ago to sympathise 
 
246 VARIOUS 
 
 with him. So when we read Mr. Herbert's 
 strictures on his cultured audience for 
 thinking only of themselves, for taking no 
 thought of the poor in their ' new republic,' 
 and for calmly accepting the results of 
 others' labour, we find ourselves less sur- 
 prised than they were. We feel that there 
 is even less essential difference between 
 poor and rich than there was, and under- 
 stand better the former's discontent. Mr. 
 Herbert's exhortations to preserve the belief 
 in a future life in order to keep up the spirits 
 of the poor in this one, has a keener ring in 
 its sardonic irony than it had then. 
 
 I have written a dull essay on a lively 
 book. But that is the way of comment. We 
 go to the dull books when we want to make 
 fun. I have simply written down these 
 notes of differences, of decay, and growth, 
 as they struck me. I will leave them as 
 they stand, their connection unexplained, 
 their central idea undeveloped. It is 
 not worth while to do more, for all these 
 ' movements ' and phases are but fag-ends of 
 a national principle which has well-nigh 
 exhausted itself. If the race is taking a fresh 
 start there will be movements of better 
 worth. If it is not, heaven help us. 
 
THE PARADOX OF THE JEW 
 
 The poor Jew fasted or ate dry bread when 
 he could not get meat which had been duly 
 killed; the rich Jew eats meat unclean to 
 his fathers because the other is not served 
 at the Savoy Hotel. The poor Jew bound 
 his phylacteries round his arm in the sight 
 of the heathen; the rich Jew is ashamed 
 of the Day of Atonement. The poor Jew 
 gloried in his race when it was most despised 
 and rejected ; the rich Jew — now that no one 
 but a fool in this country despises his race — 
 changes his name and hopes to be taken for 
 a Scotchman. The poor Jew clung to his 
 heritage though the world battered him ; the 
 rich Jew gives it up to win a contemptuous 
 smile. The poor Jew was a strenuous man, 
 worthy in the main, despite his faults, of a 
 glorious past ; the rich Jew is a sham, barely 
 worthy of an ignoble present. That is the 
 paradox of the Jew. 
 
 I speak of rich Jews living now in Eng- 
 land, and I add at once that I do not speak 
 
 247 
 
248 VARIOUS 
 
 of them all. That many, and some of them 
 the most honoured names among them, are 
 as proud of their race as the poorest refugee 
 from Russia, I am well aware. But my anti- 
 theses are true of a large and increasing 
 number of prosperous English Jews, and at 
 least as far as they are concerned it seems 
 to me a miserable ending to a noble struggle, 
 a feeble unnecessary abandonment of a cause 
 that has been sustained with almost in- 
 credible heroism. I write as a Gentile whose 
 imagination has for long been stirred by this 
 wonderful history, who has admiration and 
 sympathy for the best racial qualities of the 
 Jew, and who is anxious to disclaim both 
 ignorant prejudice and ridiculous patronage. 
 It is as an admirer of the best that I take 
 leave to be distressed by the degenerate, not 
 by those who have avenged the faults pro- 
 duced by persecution on the Gentile world, 
 the money-lenders and their like, but by those 
 who in prosperity and without compulsion 
 have done to the Gentile world a mean 
 obeisance. 
 
 More brilliant pens than mine have written 
 of the great men, poets, musicians, states- 
 men, philosophers, whom in all ages the 
 Jewish race has given to humanity. But it 
 
THE PARADOX OF THE JEW 249 
 
 is to my purpose to write a few words about 
 the race in general, its history and qualities. 
 It is surely as wonderful as the Greek. The 
 Greeks, in a flash of the world's history, 
 reached the pinnacle of abstract thought, 
 and wrote and sculptured art of an imperish- 
 able perfection, and in another flash their 
 genius was gone. The Jews through two 
 thousand years of oppression preserved an 
 ideal of faith and an ideal of family life, and 
 in the end were still the same, indomitable. 
 There is no useful comparison to be made, 
 but to my mind — while I feel Greek poetry 
 to be part of my inheritance, and regard the 
 Jews from the outside — the moral miracle is 
 more wonderful than the intellectual. It is 
 easier to excite and improve intellect than 
 it is to implant and sustain morality. The 
 mind of man, in this age or that, in this 
 country or that, has shot up in rare ex- 
 amples. But a whole race wandering over 
 the earth in poverty and hardship, not yield- 
 ing an inch of its ancient custom, keeping 
 to itself and reproducing itself unchanged, 
 and with it all cheerful, good-natured, wise 
 and kindly in its family relations, lettered 
 and civilised when the nations that hemmed 
 it in were barbarous, yet never emasculated 
 
250 VARIOUS 
 
 — that fact is unique. It is a triumph of 
 character over circumstance more wonderful 
 to my mind than any triumph of intellect 
 over nature. Can there really be a member 
 of that race who with no fear of persecution 
 before him is ashamed to belong to it ? 
 
 There is another side to the picture, no 
 doubt. We are all familiar with the common 
 charges against Jews; that they cringe in 
 adversity and swagger in prosperity, that 
 they are mean and sharp -dealing, and 
 physical cowards. When we have duly 
 remembered that there are good and bad 
 members of every race we find still some 
 considerable truth in the charge. It is cus- 
 tomary to explain their vices by persecution, 
 which may be a good explanation, but is a 
 poor excuse, for we must take people as 
 we find them, and anybody's vices could be 
 accounted for by antecedents if we only 
 knew them. It is more to the point to re- 
 mark that these vices, servile as they are in 
 appearance, do not as a rule mean servility 
 in the Jew; he still instinctively and (in 
 England now) unreasonably regards himself 
 as the world's victim, and believes that all 
 arts are justified against it ; he is a conscious 
 actor when he cringes and has a high con- 
 
THE PARADOX OF THE JEW 251 
 
 tempt for those on whom he fawns, which 
 feeling may not increase his amiability in 
 your eyes, but at least preserves his self- 
 respect. But to take the Jew with this 
 reputation upon him : your rich English Jew 
 of to-day must know well that any fair- 
 minded Englishman will individually accept 
 him on his merits. The exceptions to these 
 faults are too numerous for any intelligent 
 observer to predicate the faults of any un- 
 known Jew. We all, if we know any Jews 
 at all, know those who are independent 
 and generous and good fellows. And the 
 Jew can point if he will to virtues of his 
 race, outside the toughness and miraculous 
 patience and moral courage which have pre- 
 served it — virtues common among them, and 
 quite enough to set against those faults. 
 He can point to the intelligence of Jews, to 
 their good nature, their sense of humour, 
 their geniality. He can point to their savoir 
 vivre, to the old saying that the Jew is 
 neither a drunkard nor a teetotaler, to their 
 support of one another, to their primitive 
 virtues as husbands and wives, mothers and 
 fathers. Or does he blush because Ikey Mo is 
 a fund of laughter? Then he is an ass, for 
 Paddy from Cork and Taffy and M'Phairson 
 
252 VARIOUS 
 
 are all laughed at in turn, foolishly but 
 good-naturedly, by the Englishman to whom 
 there is always something absurd in not 
 being English. 
 
 But if these trivial temptations to the 
 prosperous Jew to dissimulate his Judaism 
 were a million times stronger, it would still 
 amaze me that any Jew can wish to forego 
 his heritage in the history of his race. How 
 can he remember that the prayer his grand- 
 father, or even his father, said on the eve 
 of every Sabbath was said before the Cap- 
 tivity and said ever since, and then wish to 
 dissociate himself from it all? I allow for 
 the advance of thought, and know that it 
 may be impossible to a Jew to accept the 
 creed of his fathers. But after all, that 
 creed in its essentials is simply a broad 
 theism, with the addendum that a particular 
 race was chosen to express the will of God 
 upon earth, and remembering how many 
 scholars can still accept the far more com- 
 plex dogmas of Christianity, I find it hard 
 to believe that the ordinary stockbroker is 
 intellectually convinced that Judaism is un- 
 true. True that its ceremonialism is involved 
 and irksome, but still that ceremonialism is 
 intimate and kindly ; it sanctifies the joys as 
 
THE PARADOX OF THE JEW 253 
 
 well as the sorrows of life; it even ordains 
 temperate good cheer as on occasion a duty. 
 I should feel kindly to it if I were a Jew. 
 If I were a Jew I should even hesitate to 
 abandon my Kosher food, seeing that the 
 sanitary laws of my people have kept it vital 
 in every extreme of want. However, I can 
 understand he may give all that up, both 
 because it is inconvenient and for the better 
 reason that, being a citizen of England, he 
 wishes to live as an Englishman. But to let 
 it be understood that he wishes his race to 
 be forgotten — that indeed amazes me. And 
 it takes such a wretched, material, middle- 
 class sort of prosperity to promote this 
 apostasy. The Spanish Jews, who were real 
 aristocrats, owning broad lands and holding 
 high offices, gloried in their race, and when 
 the Inquisition forced some of them — many 
 preferred to be burnt — to profess Christianity 
 they remained secret Jews, and again in 
 many cases after generations proclaimed 
 their Judaism when they could. It is said, 
 I hope truly, that Benjamin Disraeli was of 
 such a family. He, to be sure, though the 
 observance of Protestantism was part of the 
 game he played, was far from being ashamed 
 of his race. But now an ordinary stock- 
 
254 VARIOUS 
 
 broking English Jew, with no Inquisition 
 and nothing worth calling public opinion 
 against him, will change his name and wish 
 to be taken for an Englishman. 
 
 It is amazing. When I see Isaac Solomon 
 under his real name I know that whatever 
 be his humble calling, and whatever the 
 nature of his manners and customs, this 
 man's ancestors had a civilisation and a 
 great literature when mine were savages. 
 But if he calls himself Macintosh or some- 
 thing of that sort, I observe his features and 
 recognise him for a humbug, and a very 
 poor one too. I know his excuse. It is 
 given by a young man in Mr. Zangwill's 
 Grandchildren of the Ghetto. He was an 
 artistic and clever young man, and he said 
 that if he called himself Abrahams, his right 
 name, he would be a living lie, because 
 the public's idea of Abrahams was Fagin 
 or Shylock. So he called himself Graham. 
 (He was not so clever as Braham the singer, 
 who by dropping merely the first ' a ' of his 
 father's name had an old-English-sounding 
 name at once.) But the wretched creature 
 should have reflected that art is a glory of his 
 race, and most Jews in one way or another 
 lovers of it, and carried his right flag gaily. 
 
THE PARADOX OP THE JEW 255 
 
 It is an old saying that every country has 
 the Jews it deserves. In Russia the Jews 
 would absorb the wealth of the country 
 if they were not persecuted, whereas in 
 Hungary they strike a fair bargain with 
 the Hungarians. In France and even in 
 Germany their share of wealth is just exces- 
 sive enough to make them hated. But few 
 Englishmen outside the Stock Exchange are 
 inconvenienced by Jews, and as a nation we 
 see their enjoyment of equal rights with 
 neither envy nor alarm. Then why should 
 any English Jew be ashamed of his birth? 
 Professed and recognised Jews are to be 
 found in both our Houses of Parliament, and 
 eminent in our Law Courts. Their native 
 love of the theatre is invaluable to our stage, 
 in front of it and on it. They are not yet 
 on the whole such good citizens as we hope 
 they will be, since there is too much of them 
 money-lending and financing, too little manu- 
 facturing, doctoring, soldiering, policing, but 
 we understand the historical reason, and 
 hope confidently for an improvement. But 
 why should any of them wish to be — super- 
 ficially even — merged in the English middle- 
 classes? They are Orientals; the figures of 
 the men and the beauty of the women pro- 
 
256 VARIOUS 
 
 claim it. And they do not wish to be really 
 mixed with the West. They may change 
 their names, but they still marry one another. 
 The instinct of race is stronger than the 
 conscious loyalty of race. 
 
 Long may it remain so. I would not have 
 this Eastern colouring element merged away, 
 nor is it likely to be. But when a Jew gives 
 up all his customs, changes his name and 
 goes to Christian churches, though his race 
 be indestructible in him, he has consciously 
 given up the fight, and struck the flag his 
 forefathers carried through persecution and 
 disdain, selling matches by day and studying 
 the Rabbis at night, elbowed and mocked 
 by Christian rowdies, in imagination sitting 
 with Abraham their father and Moses their 
 teacher on thrones in Heaven. And their 
 grandchildren are ashamed of them! It is 
 a pitiful present to follow a noble past, and 
 it amazes me — a Gentile — beyond words to 
 express my feeling. Has the spirit that 
 mediaeval kings could not break succumbed 
 to the modern snob? What dirge will the 
 daughters of Israel sing to lament this cap- 
 tivity ? 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 
 
 In all ages and in all languages the praises of 
 youth have been joyously or pathetically 
 sounded. From time immemorial men have 
 been exhorted to make the most of their 
 youth, remembering that it would quickly 
 pass away, and the catalogue of the ills 
 which old age brings with it has been drawn 
 out with dismal iteration. In a sort of half- 
 hearted way men learned the lesson. They 
 enjoyed themselves as much as possible when 
 they were young, and when they were old 
 made things as unpleasant as they could for 
 their juniors, to revenge their own short- 
 comings in the joy of youth, and spent the 
 rest of their time grumbling to one another. 
 But it has been reserved for our practical age 
 and for us practical Anglo-Saxons to learn 
 the lesson in its fulness, and to draw the 
 proper conclusion. We have determined to 
 remain young until we die, and already the 
 success we have achieved is remarkable. We 
 made up our minds twenty years ago at most, 
 
 R 
 
258 VARIOUS 
 
 and already the percentage of young men 
 who have defied all the prosaic limitations of 
 their ancestors is amazing. By young men I 
 mean, of course, men who are visibly and 
 characteristically young, who by the mere 
 tale of years may be anything up to sixty. 
 For some time I have diligently read the lists 
 of new books, and looked through tables of 
 contents in the sterner reviews, in the hope 
 that some philosopher might be found ex- 
 plaining the extraordinary duration of youth 
 in the present day. I have been disappointed 
 in my search, and am driven to make a few 
 poor suggestions of my own, somewhat as a 
 man wishing to study law takes a pupil in- 
 stead of a tutor: by dint of writing about 
 the matter I may haply light upon some 
 cause or causes other than the determina- 
 tion which I have mentioned and which is 
 not sufficient in itself, since in other ages 
 men have tried to remain young and have 
 somehow or other failed. 
 
 But let us first review the facts. I propose 
 to confine myself to men, because in regard 
 to women the change has been already noted 
 and much exaggerated, and in their case it is 
 confused with literary and other conventions 
 and fashions, Moreover, that branch of the 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 259 
 
 subject has the danger that one's philosophi- 
 cal intention might be confused with a spirit 
 of uncouth and vulgar sarcasm, which is far 
 from one. We will keep to men. Now, in 
 the early part of last century a man was a 
 man at twenty or so, a middle-aged man at 
 thirty, and old at fifty. At the present time 
 he is a boy up to about thirty-five, a young 
 man up to fifty, and he is hardly regarded as 
 old until he has exceeded David's maximum 
 of life by six or seven years. 
 
 For the first half of my statement I refer 
 my readers to the literature of the period 
 passim. 
 
 ' Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue 
 Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty,' 
 
 says Byron. Is anybody now regarded as a 
 confirmed bachelor on account of his age? 
 Not, I am certain, under seventy. But one 
 might quote for ever. Even in the middle of 
 the century Thackeray made elaborate fun of 
 his Paul de Florae for posing as a young man 
 at forty. I am acquainted with a young 
 fellow whose friends and relations are mak- 
 ing serious efforts to wean him from dis- 
 sipation and bad companions and settle him 
 in some regular business, and he is fifty-four. 
 
260 VARIOUS 
 
 As to the second part of the statement, my 
 readers can supply their own instances by 
 the thousand from their observation, the 
 newspapers, and the conversation of their 
 friends — instances of a youthful persistence 
 which would have amazed our grandfathers. 
 In the year 1900, when the Ministry was 
 being re-formed, the newspapers were all 
 commenting on the extraordinary youthful- 
 ness of Mr. Wyndham and Lord Selborne. It 
 was thought really audacious of Lord Salis- 
 bury to give high office to these lads. They 
 are both about forty, and Pitt and Fox were 
 in the blaze of their reputation and influence 
 fifteen years earlier in their lives. It is, of 
 course, a commonplace that we are served by 
 older politicians than was the case in past 
 times, but the interesting thing is that the 
 comments on Lord Selborne and Mr. Wynd- 
 ham referred to their absolute, not their com- 
 parative youth, rejoiced in the vigour and 
 capacity for receiving new ideas which their 
 youth implied, and were inclined to be ner- 
 vous about the want of caution to which it 
 might expose them. The same thing hap- 
 pened in Lord Randolph Churchill's case. I 
 well remember hearing, when he resigned 
 the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, people 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 261 
 
 complain of his boyish petulance. I well 
 remember it, because I was in my teens 
 myself, and was rather disturbed by the 
 length of time which had to elapse before I 
 should be grown up. Lord Randolph was 
 about forty at that time. 
 
 These instances, however, though they are 
 properly germane to the subject, may be 
 suspect because of the convention of politics, 
 as of the bar, which speaks of men as young 
 when all that is meant is that they are com- 
 paratively young at their trade. Let us take, 
 therefore, a calling which notoriously can be 
 and is pursued by anybody over seventeen. 
 There is a 'dramatic critic' who is about 
 forty-five years old and has been a dramatic 
 critic for about twenty years, I believe. Until 
 a very few years ago he was always referred 
 to as a 'young gentleman.' That reminds 
 me of Mr. Max Beerbohm (if he will not 
 object to my mentioning it), who is thirty 
 or so, and who is generally described as a 
 'youth.' If an author of twenty were to 
 burst upon the world (such things have been), 
 the critics would hardly admit that he was 
 born. 
 
 These instances show the public tendency. 
 They are, perhaps, partly explained by public 
 
262 VARIOUS 
 
 intelligence. It takes the average person 
 about three years to grasp a simple change 
 in facts, if it is mentioned to him at least 
 twice a week. Years and years ago I was 
 a dramatic critic for a few months, and I 
 have still numerous acquaintances who have 
 consulted me regularly ever since on the 
 merits of every new play, though on every 
 such occasion I have mentioned that I seldom 
 go to the theatre. Suppose, then, when Mr. 
 Wyndham was twenty-one, the average man 
 was informed that he was a year older than 
 when he was twenty. The average man 
 could not grasp that fact until Mr. Wynd- 
 ham was twenty-four. Accordingly, when 
 Mr. Wyndham was forty the average man 
 would have only advanced to the fact that 
 he was twenty-six. Some such explanation 
 may be brought against me when I advance 
 my own theory that these men are called 
 boys and youths and young gentlemen be- 
 cause they really are so. 
 
 I will therefore abandon these public in- 
 stances and refer my readers to the host of 
 men with whom they and I are personally 
 acquainted, who are over forty and who are, 
 veritably and actually, still very young men 
 in appearance, in habits, and in conversation. 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 283 
 
 You must know them. Let me describe one. 
 He has a slight, youthful figure, dressed in 
 the latest mode. His face is smooth and 
 bland, adorned with an adolescent mous- 
 tache. He has neat, smooth hair, growing 
 quite low on his forehead, and showing as 
 little tendency to baldness as when he was 
 sixteen. He has bright, amiable, and abso- 
 lutely expressionless eyes. His habits are as 
 simple as his face. He rises at a reasonably 
 early hour, and after a good breakfast reads 
 all about cricket or football, as the case may 
 be, in the paper. He reads rather slowly, and 
 this occupation, together with answering a 
 a few invitations to play games — he writes 
 more slowly than he reads — takes up his time 
 till lunch. After lunch he plays an athletic 
 game. In the evening he may possibly go to 
 a play, avoiding those which are suspected of 
 having anything clever in them, or he may 
 dance, or play a mild game of cards. If he 
 has no such amusement, he is quite willing to 
 talk from dinner to bed-time about the game 
 he has played in the afternoon. This is his 
 life in London : healthy and English. In the 
 country there are more games and less news- 
 papers. He never talks or listens to others 
 talking about politics, or literature, or any- 
 
264 VARIOUS 
 
 thing of that kind, not so much because it 
 bores him as because he does not understand 
 a word of it. I doubt if he was really aware 
 until lately that anybody really cared for 
 anything except games. The war forced him 
 to recognise that other transactions take 
 place in life, but I think he will soon forget 
 it. For the moment he has slightly modified 
 his habit of estimating all men according to 
 their proficiency in some game or sport, but 
 the habit will reassert itself before long. 
 Even now he never mentions General Baden- 
 Powell without adding that he kept goal at 
 Charterhouse. 
 
 Such is an acquaintance of mine. Such he 
 has been and looked for twenty years, and 
 such he will be and look for twenty years 
 more. On his own subject he is full of 
 impetuosity. I have known him return to 
 the house after a long day's fishing and say 
 as he entered the room, 'Papers come? 
 What 's the cricket ? For Heaven's sake tell 
 me the cricket ! ' He has a son at the Uni- 
 versity, and I often think what an ideal 
 parent he must have seemed to his son's 
 schoolmasters. No nonsense about intellect, 
 or education, or that sort of thing. If his 
 son learned to play football skilfully the 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 265 
 
 school was the best of all schools in this 
 best of all educated countries. 
 
 If all young men of forty were like this 
 one the explanation would be easy. Devotion 
 to athletic games would account for it all. 
 But I know vicious young men of forty — 
 young men who smoke too many cigars and 
 sit up late and play cards for high stakes, 
 like M. le Vicomte de Florae. Thackeray 
 was, of course, mistaken in supposing that 
 these practices were ever peculiar to youth. 
 It is a lamentable fact that no age or country 
 has universally accepted our own ideal of 
 regular work and economical habits as the 
 perfection of human life. But what is signifi- 
 cant in the young men to whom I refer is 
 that they do these things with the high 
 spirits of youthful enjoyment, and in spite 
 of their vices continue to look young. Dissi- 
 pation in middle life used to become a habit, 
 a necessity — not a joyous affair at all. And 
 the middle-aged dissipators used generally to 
 have, or affect, some more serious interest. 
 CsBsar, for example, happened to rule the 
 world and change its constitution. Charles 
 Fox was a serious statesman with ideas in 
 which he believed. Even 'Old Q.' had his 
 side and interest in politics. Moreover, Caesar 
 
266 VARIOUS 
 
 was bald and Charles Fox was fat. But 
 these slim, smooth-faced, bright-eyed young 
 debauchees of forty, who neither have nor 
 pretend to have any interest in life but their 
 dissipation, how do they do it ? I remember 
 hearing a woman refer to one of them as ' a 
 nice boy.' I doubted his niceness and his 
 boyhood, but she was right in her sense. 
 There was nothing really wicked in his 
 dissipation : it was the exuberance of a boy ; 
 and from a civilised point of view he had no 
 claim, except the physical, to be thought a 
 man. 
 
 These by no means exhaust the types of 
 young men of forty ; and if one passes from 
 extreme cases to those in which boyishness 
 is modified, a little and at times, by the 
 rather serious pursuit of a profession or 
 trade, one may include in the ranks of these 
 young men the greater number of English- 
 men belonging to the comfortable classes. 
 How many are there, for example, who pro- 
 fess some sport or game as by far the chief 
 interest of their lives — and I am loth to 
 think them all hypocrites. If they are in- 
 duced to talk on any other subject at all it 
 will be in half-ideas, loosely expressed in 
 comprehensive slang — just, in fact, as school- 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 267 
 
 boys talk. They have the intolerance of 
 schoolboys for ideas not traditional and 
 familiar to themselves, and the pride of 
 schoolboys in their own ignorance. This 
 may sound like harsh criticism, but I mean 
 it for praise. Youth is everything. These 
 young men of forty — nay, of fifty and sixty — 
 are not naturally stupid, I am sure ; but they 
 feel instinctively that brains make a man 
 grow old, and are determined to avoid 
 them accordingly. One merely admires their 
 astounding success. It is conceivable, indeed, 
 that the national distrust and contempt of 
 intellect may not be conducive to our con- 
 tinuance in high place in the competition of 
 nations. But what a pity that is! If the 
 world would only recognise that the accom- 
 plishment of perpetual youth is a far greater 
 thing than the elaboration of intelligence, 
 and, instead of taking advantage of our 
 nobler work, seek with a whole heart to 
 follow in our footsteps, how wise the world 
 would be ! 
 
 There is one consequence of this duration 
 of youth over which one chuckles. The 
 merely young in years, those who had the 
 exclusive title of youth a few generations 
 ago, no longer, so to speak, have the place 
 
268 VARIOUS 
 
 to themselves. The young man of twenty no 
 longer triumphs in his young-manhood over 
 his seniors. They are all young men too. 
 Young men of forty bar his way and elbow 
 him aside. It is very good for him. But this 
 odd revenge of time tends to disappear, 
 since at twenty a man nowadays is more and 
 more a child. The extreme youth of under- 
 graduates strikes every older person who 
 revisits his University. It is quite common 
 to meet young men, as they once were, of 
 twenty, who tell you they intend to smoke 
 when they are thirty. Such young men are 
 of opinion that their enjoyments must be 
 literally confined to athletic games for the 
 next ten years or so, and have no desire to 
 compete with the young men twenty years 
 their seniors. 
 
 We grow up more slowly — there is no 
 doubt of that. But that is a little off my 
 subject, which is not the slow development 
 of youth, but its persistence at the same 
 point. How is it done ? I have half suggested 
 the neglect of the intellect and the studious 
 cultivation of stupidity, which certainly be- 
 comes more and more the quality most 
 sympathetic to the majority of our contem- 
 poraries. Almost anything will be forgiven 
 
THE PERSISTENCE OF YOUTH 269 
 
 a man of whose stupidity our world is con- 
 vinced, and our high places are always at his 
 service. But it is possible that this may be 
 a consequence and not a cause of our per- 
 petual youth, or both may be consequences 
 of a common cause. Perhaps we work less 
 than our fathers; for it is one of the 
 numerous facts with which nature mocks 
 our ideals that hard work ages a man more 
 quickly than most things. But then we are 
 told that our fathers were more leisurely 
 than we are. Or we drink less? True that 
 we no longer sit over our wine like gentle- 
 men, but prefer horrible mixtures at odd 
 times, like bar loafers; but the doctors say 
 that a bottle of sound wine after dinner did 
 our fathers less harm than the casual ' drink ' 
 does ourselves. We play games more; but 
 then our play is hard work. ... In fine, I 
 give the explanation up, and must be content 
 merely to admire. 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 
 
 A STUDY OF CHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCE 
 
 It annoys me that the world, which is often 
 roughly right in its judgments of men it 
 knows personally, should persist in mis- 
 understanding one who is my old and valued 
 friend, and what follows is partly an attempt 
 to set him right with it. But I think also 
 that the case is not without significance for 
 our times; that there are many men of a 
 temperament and an intelligence akin to 
 those of Francis Gordon whose relation to 
 the world is much the same as his: men 
 whom other periods would have treated 
 differently and yet for whom this period 
 assuredly should find a use. I fancy it in the 
 case of some other men of my acquaintance ; 
 I know it in his, for I am the oldest and, I 
 believe, the most intimate of his familiars. 
 I cannot say what this use may be ; I am an 
 observer, not a practical politician. You, 
 perhaps, may be able to tell me. 
 
 270 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 211 
 
 The average fool holds that Francis Gordon 
 is a sulky brute, and that he has no business 
 to be so because his income is over ten 
 thousand a year. His face and manner alike 
 are grave ; his courtesy is a little stilted and 
 his joints seem slightly to creak when he 
 unbends. Hardly anybody but myself calls 
 him Frank. Wiser men say that he is a 
 sentimentalist, though none of them, I am 
 sure, ever heard him talk sentimentally, and 
 add that plenty of hard work would make 
 a different man of him. Women are apt to 
 think him interesting when they first meet 
 him, and cold or sarcastic when they know 
 him better. One of them, a woman very 
 zealous about charities and causes and things, 
 told me she would like to shake him, and 
 this although he had given her a considerable 
 sum for one of her institutions. Another 
 woman confided to me her opinion that his 
 life was shadowed by some passion that went 
 wrong, and that it was most unfair to his 
 wife who was devoted to him. 
 
 All these opinions are wrong. Francis Gor- 
 don is not sulky, but is on the contrary 
 anxious that his guests should enjoy them- 
 selves, though I admit he does not care much 
 what they think of him. Work would not 
 
272 VARIOUS 
 
 have made him very different, though, as 
 things have turned out, it might have made 
 him a shade happier. But he was quite 
 honest in thinking that since it was un- 
 necessary for him to work for a living he 
 might do more good in his generation by 
 independent effort than by increasing its 
 competition ; he had and has plenty of energy 
 and far more than the average brains. As 
 for women, I am quite certain that no ' un- 
 happy passion ' business has bothered him at 
 all, and if it had I am even more certain that 
 he would soon have got over it. He is one of 
 those men — far more numerous than women 
 novelists imagine — in whose lives women are 
 more of an accident than an influence. If 
 they marry it is from the ordinary attraction 
 of healthy manhood, evanescent in itself and 
 succeeded by a relation of pleasant friendli- 
 ness, given good luck. If they do not marry, 
 they think little of women, in a personally 
 sexual way, when they are past thirty. In 
 the sum there is far more emotional interest 
 for them in their friendships, many or rare, 
 with men they know well and who meet 
 them on their own plane of intellect. Frank 
 Gordon is one of them. His wife is not 
 'devoted' to him, but they are excellent 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 273 
 
 friends. They both recognise human duties, 
 and their child— they have a daughter five 
 years old — would be a restraining hand if 
 they needed one. They do not, and as far as 
 their mutual relation is concerned their lives 
 are smooth and eventless. I have been a 
 little particular in this matter, because a 
 fiction-fatted public is slow to remember, 
 in spite of its personal experience, that 
 there are men in whose lives women (unless 
 they happen to marry an abnormally vicious 
 one) count for little. 
 
 Then why is Frank Gordon's face so sad in 
 repose? why are his eyes sometimes so wist- 
 ful? Why, in spite of his honest efforts to 
 look interested, do people hate him for look- 
 ing bored ? Why is he so restless, pacing the 
 smoking-room after a long day's sport, and 
 going for aimless journeys? He has fair 
 health, a quick and sound intelligence, many 
 minor interests, at least, in books and art, an 
 untroubled home and a good income. Why is 
 he essentially a discontented man ? It needs 
 but few words to tell you. Francis Gordon 
 is an enthusiast without an enthusiasm, a 
 born reformer with nothing to reform. Time 
 and again his nature has struggled into an 
 outlet, and time and again his intelligence 
 
 s 
 
274 VARIOUS 
 
 has pushed it back. I fancy an outline of his 
 history so far — he is thirty-five or there- 
 abouts — contains a slight remark, a whisper 
 or so, for his age and country. 
 
 He is not so Scotch as his name, for his 
 great-grandfather, who married an English 
 heiress, settled on her lands in Kent, and 
 there this offshoot of the Gordons has re- 
 mained ever since. We are all rather mixed 
 in race, and Frank's mixture is of the usual 
 English proportion; there is the original 
 Highland stock, a Lowland Scotch grand- 
 father on his mother's side ; Kentish squires, a 
 remote drop of Irish, a dash of successful com- 
 merce. The preponderating element — these 
 questions interest me — has been the land- 
 holding, essentially though not technically 
 aristocratic class. The physical result in 
 Frank is a tall, rather lanky, raw-boned, 
 sanguine, blond creature, with a broad fore- 
 head and big dark-blue eyes. It is the con- 
 quering type, as the ethnologists say, the 
 type that pushes and succeeds and sways, 
 actively intelligent and organising, not as a 
 rule reflectively poetical, or subtle. 
 
 The first typical recollection I have of him 
 is one which I hope will not offend anybody ; I 
 give it simply as an indication of character ; 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 275 
 
 the theology of a boy of sixteen need hardly 
 be taken to heart. It was at school. We had 
 been confirmed at the same time, and were 
 walking from the chapel together after our 
 first communion. Suddenly Frank stopped, 
 laid a hand on my arm and looked hard at 
 me. Then, * There 's nothing in it, old man,' 
 said he, 'nothing whatever.' I was more 
 surprised than shocked, I confess, for I had 
 taken my confirmation rather calmly, in a 
 spirit of routine. But Gordon had been 
 extraordinarily zealous and attentive to our 
 instructions, had studied the books he was told 
 to read with immense care, and had avoided 
 light reading or conversation all the time. I 
 was not shocked, but I thought his remark 
 rather bad form under the circumstances and 
 told him so. He looked at me contemptu- 
 ously and was silent for a while. Then he 
 said : ' I 've been thinking it all out, and it 
 won't do. I can't believe in any of i^.' ' You 
 don't believe in Christianity?* I asked sar- 
 castically. It seemed absurd then that any- 
 body should not believe in Christianity. * No, 
 I don't,' he said stoutly. ' It 's just like any 
 other superstition.' He walked me round 
 and round the cloisters, arguing and explain- 
 ing. So far as I can remember he had 
 
276 VARIOUS 
 
 arrived independently — more or less — at the 
 common objections, the difficulty of recon- 
 ciling the omnipotence of Providence with 
 its benevolence, inconsistencies of accounts, 
 the facts of science, the kind of evidence 
 for the orthodox view, and so on. It would 
 be stupid and shallow to dismiss the youth 
 Gordon as a prig. His emotions had been 
 genuinely stirred on behalf of the mystery 
 he had been lately taught, and it was with 
 painfulness and reluctance that he came to 
 disbelieve. You must remember that young 
 people, when they have the premisses, are 
 far more relentless logicians than their 
 elders. I suppose he had heard sceptical 
 talk at home and something had brought 
 it back to him, and his interest being now 
 alive, the argument was pursued with vehe- 
 mence. He had gone through in his boyhood 
 the kind of struggle which many men went 
 through fifty years ago, which few men go 
 through now. He told me that it was just 
 after the communion that he had felt con- 
 vinced he could never believe in it all again. 
 After this he read a good deal on the subject, 
 but cared little to talk about it ; he ceased 
 rapidly to trouble himself, having once made 
 up his mind. 
 
 This incident may seem absurd to my 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 277 
 
 readers, because we are accustomed to our 
 boys and young men having the minds of 
 babies, and the race seems to be losing its 
 interest in all abstract questions. But every 
 now and then you find a boy, who is not a 
 prig, reproducing the more active intelligence 
 of our ancestors at the same age. Gordon, so 
 far as I can remember our school days, never 
 wanted to air his ideas, nor was he ever 
 remarkably reflective ; he simply had an in- 
 quiring mind and acquiesced in its conclusions. 
 
 This was his first disappointment, and it is 
 interesting to me because it shows a sort, a 
 type of intelligence which prevents its pos- 
 sessor from entering upon the recognised 
 modes of spiritual endeavour. But for that, 
 Francis Gordon might easily have become a 
 parson zealous among the poor, or might 
 have enlisted himself among the active 
 spirits of the Roman Church. 
 
 At the university he paid the customary 
 toll to athletics, but was unable to regard 
 them as the summum bonum. He spoke a few 
 times at the Union but soon gave it up. ' It's 
 all humbug,' he said, 'it's all playing at being 
 politicians. No one's really keen about a 
 question ; no one really cares what happens 
 in the country; it's all swagger and posing.' 
 
278 VARIOUS 
 
 His reading used to amuse me. He would 
 start on a philosopher, and peg away at his 
 theories, until he convinced himself that they 
 had no practical bearing on the world — a con- 
 viction he invariably came to — when he would 
 decline the philosopher's future acquaintance 
 altogether. As for ancient history, he was 
 interested in learning which state beat which 
 and how and why, or in following the de- 
 velopment of policies, but names and dates 
 he simply waved on one side. Naturally he 
 took no distinction in the schools. In our 
 time there was no particular 'movement' 
 going on, religious or aesthetic. The place 
 had settled down into a playground, in which 
 condition I believe it remains. Nor would 
 Gordon have been an easy disciple for either. 
 What he wanted was a good tangible fighting 
 cause and a big field for it. He disbelieved 
 in the influence of the university, and was 
 eager to be done with it. ' And what are you 
 going to do?' his tutor asked him in his last 
 term. 'The bar? Politics?' ' Politics, I think,' 
 said Gordon. ' You see, if one hasn't got to 
 work it 's a chance for backing up one's side.' 
 ' And what is your side ? ' 'I don't know yet. 
 I shall see.' His tutor smiled, and probably 
 thought Gordon was a trifler. 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 279 
 
 The fact is that he was far too much in 
 earnest to label himself. 'You see,' he said 
 to me, ' The Conservative party *s a collection 
 of vested interests, mostly bad. The only 
 good vested interest, the interest which did 
 something for the country in keeping up its 
 manhood, has been hopelessly betrayed. The 
 landed interest, of course, yes: you think 
 because I'm going to be a squire: never 
 mind. Well, then, the Liberals are simply 
 grinding away at meaningless catchwords: 
 they 're no good. I wish to heaven I believed 
 in Home Rule for Ireland ' — it was in 1890 — 
 ' there would be something tangible to fight 
 for. But I don't, and there's no need of 
 anybody to fight against it. What we want, 
 my dear chap, is to knock this beastly pluto- 
 cracy on the head; to kill this infernal 
 reverence for money ; to put people in their 
 right places and give the country a decent 
 ambition.' 
 
 ' Well, knock it on the head,' said I. 
 
 'But don't you see,' he replied, without 
 noticing my irony, ' if we did that we should 
 probably destroy British commerce at the 
 same time, and where would the country be 
 
 then ? ' 
 
 He did not stand for Parliament, but 
 
280 VARIOUS 
 
 on leaving Oxford was extremely busy in 
 London and in other large towns investi- 
 gating the condition of the people. I 
 saw him at intervals at this time and he 
 used to distress me with horrible accounts 
 of overwork and destitution. He never 
 raved; I should give a very wrong idea of 
 Frank Gordon if I implied that he was a 
 foolish sentimentalist, running hither and 
 thither. He was quietly, and so to speak, 
 glowingly determined to find some way of 
 succour. He failed, of course. He gave 
 away nearly all his large allowance, but 
 ' what,' as he asked, ' is the good of pouring 
 a quart bottle of oil into the sea?' He 
 formed a great alliance with a very mili- 
 tant working men's M.P., and he was in- 
 terested in Trades Unions. He was soon 
 disillusioned. 
 
 * Their methods are rotten,' he said. ' They 
 can't protect the weak without spoiling the 
 strong — the good strong, I mean. They won't 
 let a workman get above the average ; they 
 put a premium on incapacity. If this goes 
 on America will cut us out all over the 
 shop.' 
 
 He joined the Fabian Society, remained in 
 it a year, and left it because (as he said) it 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 281 
 
 was all theorising. 'There's nothiog to get 
 your teeth into,' said he. 
 
 After that he got on to the London School 
 Board, and enjoyed fighting what he thought 
 was class selfishness. But he ended by dis- 
 approving of the ideas and methods of his 
 friends. He inclined to the opinion ex- 
 pressed in after years by Sir John Gorst 
 that they cared for their own importance 
 more than for education. They would not 
 listen to his view of what popular education 
 should be, and he left the School Board in 
 disgust. 
 
 About this time — in 1895 1 think — his father 
 died, and Gordon had £12,000 a year to give 
 to a cause if he liked. But in the interval 
 he had married — talking politics hard all 
 the time — and was about to become a father. 
 He showed (I think) good sense in this con- 
 nection. * My wife didn't marry me for my 
 money, but still the money, the place, and 
 all that, was an implied part of the con- 
 tract. It wouldn't be fair to give it away. 
 Besides, show me the cause that deserves 
 it.' I did not show him such a cause : 
 there are not too many charming places in 
 the country where one can go when one 
 likes. Frank, however, does give largely to 
 
282 VARIOUS 
 
 hospitals and other charities. Under pro- 
 test, however ; he says it is a crying scandal 
 that they are not run by the State; he 
 believes his gifts to be immoral and has an 
 uneasy conscience about them. When the 
 Grseco-Turkish war broke out I wondered 
 if Gordon would take a turn with the 
 Greeks. When I spoke of it he fetched a 
 copy of the Times which contained an 
 account of the increasing poverty and hard- 
 ships of the Italians. ' There,' said he, ' is 
 the result of fighting for distressed nation- 
 alities. It 's all true ; I 've seen it for myself. 
 I 'm glad the old man never realised it.' I re- 
 membered then that his father had lost an 
 arm and spent a large part of his fortune 
 in the cause of Italian Independence. Frank 
 broke out fiercely. 'Yes! That's the end 
 of it. To enrich a horde of cursed bourgeois 
 place-hunters and swindlers. That 's what it 
 always comes to. Look at France. Liberty ! 
 By Jove, how I envy those other chaps, 
 Byron and all that. They believed in liberty 
 — thought it worth fighting for — had no 
 misgivings. What can we fight for ? ' 
 
 I was less surprised than his other friends 
 when Frank Gordon joined the Imperial 
 Yeomanry. He went out to South Africa 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 283 
 
 at a time when events looked black for 
 England, and that motive was, I am sure, 
 more than a quest of excitement or than 
 discontent with him. I looked to find him 
 changed on his return a few months ago. 
 But he was just the same. 
 
 ' I was keen enough at first,' he said. ' Oh, 
 yes, I do know what fear means. But I was 
 keen enough not to care, and one gets used 
 to the chance of being hit all right. But — 
 don't repeat this — I don't mind admitting to 
 you that after we'd got to Pretoria, and it 
 was certain that it was only a question of 
 time for us to settle things — after that I 
 hated it. It seemed as though it wasn't my 
 business quite so much as before, somehow, 
 and I just the least bit grudged the chance 
 of being maimed for life — the killing didn't 
 so much matter. And then I hate the whole 
 business. Not our fault? No; not in one 
 sense. But it is our fault that we didn't 
 stop the Boers arming years ago. Public 
 opinion wasn't ready, of course ; there 's 
 never a government that will do its duty 
 if it's not sure of being backed up. It's 
 damnable. And then the Boers — poor devils ! 
 They're simply the victims of the Kruger 
 gang and our infernal apathy. Of course, 
 
284 VARIOUS 
 
 one gets to understand and like our own 
 chaps, and all that. We had to go on, of 
 course. But I lost my enthusiasm.' 
 
 So Francis Gordon is home again. It is 
 not much in my way to commiserate the 
 troubles of the well-to-do ; as a general rule 
 I wish they had more of them. But Francis 
 Gordon's case I do think a pity. He has 
 parts and energy ; he would not shirk work ; 
 he is disinterested and honestly wishes to 
 do something for a generation he holds to 
 be in a bad way. He is, to be sure, con- 
 stitutionally incapable of going on with 
 details when he sees nothing more than 
 details ahead. He must have a recognisable, 
 large object for which to work. But that 
 given, he would work hard as a subordinate, 
 though I firmly believe him to be a born 
 leader. He showed that in South Africa, 
 so far as opportunity went ; his men (he 
 held a commission) were not only devoted 
 to him, but a conspicuously effective unit. 
 He is the organiser of all kinds of useful 
 things in his district of Kent. But there 
 is no large recognisable object for his work. 
 He refuses to go into Parliament: he sees 
 nothing there but personal competition of a 
 rather dingy order, an ignoble compromise. 
 
FRANCIS GORDON 285 
 
 an insistent zeal to do the least possible. 
 He deplores the materialism of his fellow- 
 countrymen, but he has nothing better to 
 offer them. He detests the modern con- 
 ditions of labour, but he sees no way of 
 effectually improving them, which would 
 not further handicap the country in the 
 competition of the nations. He still rails 
 at the plutocracy, but he sees no way of 
 dispensing with it. For books and all kinds 
 of art he has the normal Englishman's view 
 that they are a bye-work, an amusement, 
 though he has not the normal Englishman's 
 unspoken contempt for them. He is fond 
 of books and pictures and music, but they 
 could never supply an object for his un- 
 employed enthusiasm. He is an engine 
 rusting off the rails. 
 
 I can think of no duty incident to his 
 position which he does not perform. He 
 looks after his tenants as well as in these 
 independent days he is allowed. He does 
 what he can to promote the prosperity and 
 social pleasures of his part of the world. 
 (He has even called on a plutocrat Jew who 
 has bought a neighbouring place that he 
 may keep the Jew up to the mark as a 
 landlord.) He is hospitable, and does his 
 
286 VARIOUS 
 
 best for a succession of guests who generally 
 complain of his aloofness afterwards. All 
 this would occupy the whole time of many 
 men, but Frank does it with his left hand. 
 His right hangs by his side. The times are 
 out of joint for him, but unlike Hamlet he 
 would be only too delighted to set them 
 right, or do his share of it, if he were 
 shown the way. He has the qualities, is 
 of the type of Englishmen who succeed in 
 life, but that he has no selfish ambition, 
 and will not work for personal success 
 alone, and he has found no cause which he 
 has not found out. As we count years now- 
 adays, he is only just middle-aged. Still, 
 if the world is to find a use for him, it 
 must find one soon. It seems a pity to 
 waste him altogether. 
 
AT THE OPERA 
 
 It is a large place, and it is full of signifi- 
 cance. A Londoner, but more especially a 
 poor Londoner, cannot take it lightly. One 
 — a poor Londoner to wit — can go to it but 
 seldom; and then, it is probable, as for the 
 moment a parasite. I regard it as I regard 
 yachts and country houses and other things 
 beyond the scale of my humble life to pro- 
 cure at will — things for which I must be 
 dependent on the benevolence of richer 
 people. At the Opera, as at the rich man's 
 table, the anarchical feelings I nurse in my 
 attic give way to a proper meek subservience. 
 That, at least, is my first condition as I take 
 my seat ; I confess that my awe is lightened 
 as I look about me, and it is lightened chiefly 
 by the diamonds. 
 
 I congratulate myself that I have at least 
 one advantage over a large number of my 
 more comfortable fellow-creatures, in that 
 I have some idea of the proper and improper 
 application of jewels. Love of jewels may 
 
 287 
 
288 VARIOUS 
 
 be barbarous, but it is not vulgar. The 
 wearing of jewels may be vulgar, and I 
 regret to think that it generally is so. For 
 exuberant joy in the possession of them 
 blinds the majority of women to the fact 
 that profuse adornment by them beseems 
 but a small minority. A certain sort of 
 distinguished beauty and a certain sort of 
 distinguished ugliness gain an increase of 
 distinction by them. But merely pretty, 
 merely commonplace, merely unattractive 
 women are made ridiculous. It is a niggardly 
 dispensation of nature, no doubt; but it 
 should be accepted. One woman has a bosom 
 of snow, and one is as brown as a berry ; one 
 has a pair of blue eyes, and one is a nymph 
 with but one, sir. It is all a lottery. But 
 even so Madame Calve might blaze in jewels 
 from head to foot, and she and they be the 
 more beautiful, while that little average 
 simpering woman in the stalls merely has 
 her natural commonplaceness thrown into 
 relief by her big pearls and her tiara — 
 commonplaceness, be it noted, which, pro- 
 perly attired, would be a right background, 
 a thing respectable and amiable enough. 
 However, there is comfort in all this for the 
 poor Londoner who credits himself with taste. 
 
AT THE OPERA 289 
 
 A box at the Opera is a symbol of the strength 
 there is in riches; inappropriate pearls and 
 diamonds are symbols of its weakness. 
 
 But there is a finer significance in the 
 Opera than this of riches and good or bad 
 taste. The Opera is a fixed point and a point 
 of social departure, a symbol of coherence in 
 our hierarchy and of our unity with many 
 generations. The literature of social London 
 takes it as an institution. People wrote 
 papers about it in the old Spectator. In 
 Thackeray, the master of ceremonies to the 
 middle of the nineteenth century, allusions 
 to it are innumerable. Jack Belsize was 
 arrested as he left it ; Arthur Pendennis was 
 going to it when he met George Warrington. 
 Mr. Meredith has not omitted it; you re- 
 member the scene there after the Derby in 
 Rhoda Fleming, when Algernon the Fool 
 bustled about in the lobby. One thinks of 
 all that as one looks round the house and 
 walks about between the acts ; one treads on 
 traditional ground, and one is materially 
 linked with the past and the future. From 
 the bottom of my heart I pity the poor 
 musical critics who go to it as to a place of 
 business, and take its significance as a matter 
 of course. 
 
 T 
 
290 VARIOUS 
 
 That is a general impression. The last 
 time, however, that I went to the Opera all 
 these reflections were swallowed up in a 
 glowing enthusiasm. When the curtain was 
 up my eyes and ears were wholly and with 
 intensity for the stage ; when it was down 
 I could only stammer praises. It was a joy 
 in art, than which I have hardly known a 
 greater. It was Calve in Carmen. All 
 things are accidents, just as nothing is an 
 accident. As in the matter of jewels, so one 
 woman is born with brains and heart and 
 imagination, and another an idiot; one has 
 a beautiful voice, another a penny whistle. 
 It may be illogical, therefore, to make a 
 hierarchy of qualities. But I confess that 
 when a great singer has a fine voice, a sound 
 training, and a skilful use of it, and no more, 
 I rather grudge her her divinity and the 
 homage the world pays her. I keep my own 
 homage for other qualities, gifts too, but 
 gifts to my mind nobler — the brain and 
 instinct and emotion and imagination which 
 make a great actress. 
 
 Calve is a great singer and a great actress 
 as welL It was not a question of amuse- 
 ment, interest, entertainment. It was the 
 perfect embodiment and expression of a 
 
AT THE OPERA 291 
 
 permanent and universal human type. The 
 part is a lucky one for her, of course. Her 
 physical genius, as it were, her bountiful and 
 vigorous beauty, goes a long way. A far 
 inferior actress who had Calve's physical 
 gifts would be able pleasantly and in a way 
 inevitably to express the good-humoured, 
 life-loving, passionate wanton. But no physi- 
 cal disadvantage could have spoiled this 
 acting. Her gay assurance of life and love, 
 her humorous coquetry in the first two acts, 
 her weariness and depression in the third, 
 her terror in the last — all were complete and 
 enthralling. Calve may or not be able to 
 play a subtler part as finely. In this simple 
 and elemental one she was perfect. Opera 
 is in its nature an absurdity, more or less; 
 its mode must be a hindrance to realism in 
 emotion. The opera of Carmen is pretty and 
 clever enough, but has moments of fatuity, 
 and would not of itself stir one inevitably : 
 Calve triumphed over everything, made one 
 forget everything in mere enjoyment of a 
 fact in nature and art. Such an achievement 
 is one which deserves all the homage that 
 can be paid it. We talk glibly about art, but 
 even those of us who can feel it fritter away 
 our power to feel it over mediocre and 
 
292 VARIOUS 
 
 commonplace examples. Calve's achieve- 
 ment takes one out of this slough to the 
 high land of absolute truth; in vision and 
 imagination one is stronger and better for it. 
 If I were a poet or a painter I would give 
 the best of my own art to celebrate it. As 
 it is, I can only say in a plain pedestrian 
 fashion that I am grateful for a sensation 
 of absolute joy. 
 
A CONVERSATION 
 
 I WAS taking a long walk in the country, 
 and stopped for my lunch at an inn I had 
 known some years before, but had not visited 
 since. A shower of rain came on while I 
 was eating, and having finished my meal I 
 repaired to the little smoking-room to await 
 the sun. I smoked my pipe and looked into 
 the yard, and reflected, in a sufficiently 
 prosaic vein, that the inn had changed far 
 less than I. Then to me there entered a 
 young man, who also smoked and looked at 
 the yard, when he and I had agreed about 
 the weather. One often thinks that one has 
 met a stranger before, somewhere and some 
 time or other, but in this case my impres- 
 sion was both more intimate than that and 
 vaguer. The young man seemed to corre- 
 spond to a dream, but a dream that had lasted 
 a long time or had many times recurred. I 
 was certain that something about him was 
 familiar to me, but seeking in vain to deter- 
 mine the matter concluded that it was 
 
 »s 
 
294 VARIOUS 
 
 nothing more than his clothes. I had raked 
 out an old knickerbocker suit for my walk, 
 and he seemed to a short vision to be wear- 
 ing one of the same material. But beyond 
 this he affected me as a casual stranger can 
 do but seldom. I was interested in the 
 young man. Something about him won my 
 sympathy, and then something irritated and 
 repelled me. It was such a discord of feel- 
 ing as happens when a man whose vices we 
 dislike charms us with his manners. But 
 this young man had not spoken three sen- 
 tences to me, and I have no instinct for 
 detecting the secret vices of strangers. The 
 rain continued, and to rid myself of unpro- 
 fitable speculations, I resumed the conversa- 
 tion. Soon the young man was talking about 
 himself with an ingenuousness and freedom 
 I am un-English enough to like, though the 
 habit of the world has taught me it is un- 
 wise to indulge in them. To some extent I 
 responded to the compliment, to keep the 
 conversation, which rather interested me, on 
 the same plane. 
 
 He had lately, it seemed, left Oxford, and 
 the place had disappointed him. His impres- 
 sion of it, he said, was too much encumbered 
 with dinners, and cards, and racing, and 
 
A CONVERSATION 295 
 
 tobacconists' shops, to say nothing of the 
 incessant pursuit, or, at least, talk of athletic 
 games and exercises, and was too little con- 
 sonant to the atmosphere of scholars and 
 recluses and quiet eccentrics of which he 
 had read in books. I assured him that if 
 he were to return to Oxford in a few years 
 for a day or so the atmosphere he wanted 
 would surround him. No longer distracted 
 by the appeals to a newly emancipated blood 
 he would feel the tradition of ancient halls 
 and chapels, and taste the remoteness and 
 exclusive silence of Fellows' gardens. 'But 
 then,' said he, 'it will be too late.' I ex- 
 plained to his ignorance that the perception 
 of all pleasures, save those few which Nature 
 teaches us to take betimes — of all pleasures 
 that come of man's artifice or finer senses 
 in ourselves — is joined to a regret that we 
 did not perceive them sooner. I was pleased 
 that I could oppose to his quick glance of 
 distress a face of good-humoured resignation. 
 Then I asked him if he was going to do 
 any work, or was lucky enough to idle in 
 comfort. Did I think it lucky? 'Yes,' said 
 I; 'work is the primal curse, and the pro- 
 verbs in praise of it were made by masters 
 for slaves, or by slaves to cheat their slavery. 
 
296 VARIOUS 
 
 Or they are repeated by the cowardly fortu- 
 nate to propitiate Nemesis. Work not at 
 all, or, if you must work, work as little as 
 possible. Above all, don't, please, work hard 
 three-quarters of your life to enjoy the 
 remaining fourth at leisure. You will have 
 lost the power of enjoyment, or you will die 
 before the time comes ; in either case you 
 will look a fool to the laughing gods.' He 
 looked surprised, as though the precepts of 
 his elders had been ordinarily different, and 
 I, remembering how little original was my 
 teaching, was pleased again. 
 
 I knew, before he told me, that he intended 
 to write things, and when I told him that 
 that might be no work at all — an art or an 
 amusement — or might be work for bread, in 
 which case it was damnable, he replied that 
 with him it would be art and bread too. 
 'But,' said he, 'you will advise me against 
 it, like everybody else.' 'Why, no,' said I, 
 and stepped on to the bench, 'not of neces- 
 sity. Can you live on a hundred and fifty 
 pounds a year ? For if you write in the way 
 of art, if you write only on themes which 
 interest you, and on which you have some- 
 thing to say, if your original work is an 
 observation of what (as things go) is fresh, 
 
A CONVERSATION 297 
 
 or a fresh observation of the old, even if 
 you can create what has not been created 
 before — a hundred and fifty pounds a year 
 will, with luck, be your commercial reward. 
 I assume in you taste, intelligence, and so 
 forth, things which in this way of writing 
 are important. In other sorts of writing, 
 self-advertisement, toadying, and the fre- 
 quenting of certain sets of people — probably 
 not an amusing way of spending your time 
 — are more important, but you speak of 
 writing as an art. There is, of course, a 
 thousand-to-one chance that your produc- 
 tions, made for their own sakes, may yet 
 appeal to certain numbers of your fellow- 
 citizens, but even then you must have the 
 additional chance in your favour of a pub- 
 lisher both honest and competent. Can you 
 live on a hundred and fifty pounds a year?' 
 
 The young man believed it to be impossible. 
 I remained on the bench. 'By no means,' 
 said I. 'In London, I grant you, the tastes 
 you probably have, the example of your 
 companions, the mode of life of people who 
 amuse you, will make it very difficult. But 
 you may take a labourer's cottage in the 
 country, have sufficient beef and mutton, 
 and shoe-leather for your long walks, and 
 
298 VARIOUS 
 
 subscribe to the London Library — all for a 
 hundred and fifty pounds a year.* He said 
 it would be dull. 
 
 I fixed my judicial eye on him and dared 
 him to affirm that London theatres, restau- 
 rants, and so forth, were not dull. He did 
 not dare, but fell back on the difference in 
 people : those who always lived in the country 
 were not intelligent enough for him. 
 
 •And do you really think,' I asked him, 
 * that the difference in intelligence which is 
 made by travelling in the twopenny-tube, 
 going to the music-hall and the Academy 
 and reading the evening papers, is a differ- 
 ence to be considered ? ' 
 
 This question rather posed him, but he 
 rallied. 'I don't mean,' said he, 'ordinary 
 respectable, or even distinguished people. I 
 mean the people you can meet in London 
 who live free, rational lives, who don't care 
 about conventions, and say what they really 
 think, and are good fun generally.' 
 
 I sighed. • My dear young man,' said I, * it 
 is cruel to destroy your illusions, and I know 
 very well that this one — that disreputable 
 people are more amusing than respectable 
 people — is one that dies hardest of all. 
 Nevertheless, it will die like the others. Dis- 
 
A CONVERSATION 299 
 
 reputable people are just as great bores in 
 the long-run as respectable people, I assure 
 you. In fact, they are worse, if you have 
 a sense of humour. The humorous heretic 
 gets more fun out of the orthodox than out 
 of the seriously heretical. Time will kill this 
 illusion of yours also. I am sorry for you.' 
 
 The conversation seemed a little to depress 
 the young man, and to re-establish his con- 
 fidence in life, I remarked that after all he, 
 in his comparative youth, had many advan- 
 tages. He answered politely, but I entreated 
 him to be frank. 'I have implied,' said I, 
 'that my view of people and places is 
 more equable than yours. There is no dis- 
 courtesy, then, if you correct the balance of 
 advantages.' 
 
 'Why, then,' said he, 'there is something 
 to be said for me. What you call equanimity 
 I call weariness. You have lost your zest 
 for London and your zest for society, even 
 disreputable society. I am still immensely 
 interested in both. There are people who 
 fascinate me irresistibly, and those who move 
 my curiosity and zeal for knowledge till I 
 must satisfy them at any cost. There I have 
 an advantage over you, I confess.' 
 
 • There are two sides of a medal,' I rejoined. 
 
300 VARIOUS 
 
 *No one has an infinite power of being in- 
 terested. Six men and women, or so, appeal 
 to you individually with the force you de- 
 scribe ; six at a time is even a large number. 
 No one, man or woman, interests me as much 
 as all that. But I can be mildly entertained 
 by thousands of strangers, and they need be 
 neither clever nor fascinating. A talk with 
 a farmer or a middle-aged country clergy- 
 man entertains me; you it would bore, unless 
 he discovered some eccentricity of habit or 
 opinion. Children, again; have you time to 
 watch them ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, yes,' he said. * I am fond of chil- 
 dren ' 
 
 ' Of some ; exactly. But I love them all. I 
 can watch with real pleasure and sympathy 
 a child toddling down a village street, or 
 nursing her dolls ' 
 
 ' You must be older than you look,' quoth 
 he, but I disregarded the interruption. 'While 
 with you, unless you observe some precocity 
 or some dreadful symptom of hereditary in- 
 fluences ' 
 
 •Not quite such a prig, I think,' he said. 
 * But if you stop short at watching chil- 
 dren, or mildly conversing with commonplace 
 people, you miss the possibilities of human 
 
A CONVERSATION 301 
 
 beings, the romance any one of them may 
 disclose to you. I suppose,' he added suddenly 
 and with a blush, as I thought I saw, *you 
 are not and will never again be passionately 
 in love ? ' 
 
 I smiled. ' One never knows,' I said ; ' it is 
 certainly a long time since it happened to me. 
 But is the sensation so completely delightful?' 
 
 ' It can be infernally painful,' he admitted. 
 'But it gives a meaning and reality to life 
 that nothing else can.' 
 
 * Perhaps,' I said ; ' let us by all means make 
 the best of it. For me, I am in this matter 
 something of a philosopher. I believe its 
 analysis to be simple, and your poetry and 
 my earthiness to have each its drawbacks 
 and compensations. But the rain would be 
 over before I could explain myself, and after 
 all my philosophy would cut a poor figure by 
 the side of your rhapsodies and beautiful 
 quotations.' 
 
 'I too,' feaid he, 'was a philosopher in my 
 time.' 
 
 'And you have gone on to something 
 better? It is a pity, my friend, that you 
 could not begin with the romance and the 
 poetry ; but few of us have Richard Feverel's 
 luck. But your boyish philosophy was cynical 
 
302 VARIOUS 
 
 and mine is human. . . . You are fresh from 
 Oxford and the schools. You are all for 
 ideas and theories in your thoughts and 
 reading, and facts are tedious to you.' 
 
 'Surely,' he said, 'ideas, the best fruits of 
 human intelligence and mental labour, are 
 more worthy of study than the irrelevant 
 accidents of human interaction ? ' 
 
 • The phrase is soothing, though barbarous : 
 no doubt you used it in your papers. The 
 misfortune is that you get to the end of the 
 ideas in time and the facts are inexhaustible. 
 You have been born into a generation (I 
 regret to inform you after much patient 
 observation of it) which is intellectually 
 sapless, and unless a change come quickly 
 is unlikely to increase the store of philo- 
 sophical speculation. You will probably be 
 thrown back on facts, and you will haply 
 find that they grow on you. Memoirs and 
 letters, all kinds of trivial habits and con- 
 versations and meetings will form the bulk 
 of your reading. There is little poetry now, 
 and our studies of character are elaborately 
 superficial, and our romances do not even 
 conceal the wires behind the puppets. You 
 will be thrown back on memoirs and diaries 
 and letters. 
 
A CONVERSATION 303 
 
 • I wonder,' said he, ' if your own intellect — ' 
 he stopped and seemed to lack words for his 
 idea. Seeing him embarrassed, I went on 
 talking. 
 
 ' You have decided to write for your bread. 
 Has it never occurred to you that a pro- 
 fession — which writing is not — might bring 
 you greater happiness? The bar, for ex- 
 ample ? ' He said that the details would bore 
 him, and that he could not afford to wait till 
 briefs came. 
 
 •But it is the process, not the subject 
 matter, which interests men in all such com- 
 petition ; the process and the personal results, 
 and as for waiting, intelligence, which I do 
 not doubt you believe yourself to possess, 
 tells everywhere in the long-run. Certain 
 very simple human qualities besides are 
 necessary, but there is no grand mystery 
 about success at the bar. But that is only 
 one of the regular callings of your country- 
 men. Now, mark me, young man. You are 
 taking up for a calling or a profession, that 
 which is an art, an amusement, an accom- 
 plishment. Excellence in it is very far from 
 meaning worldly success : why should it? In 
 the regular callings, efficiency in them, the 
 qualities suited to their practice, mean success 
 
304 VARIOUS 
 
 in the sense in which the world uses the term. 
 In this pursuit of yours, worldly success 
 conies either by a rare accident or by the 
 debasement of the qualities which might 
 make a proper excellence in it. Now you 
 think you can despise worldly success — 
 despise money and all it may imply. "Wait 
 till you come to forty year I " If then you 
 despise these things, yours is a rare spirit 
 indeed : the chances are you will regret. You 
 deliberately stand aside from the common 
 competition of your fellow-men. Well, com- 
 petition is an evil : the vaunted progress it 
 brings us is but a feather to the weight of 
 misery it inflicts on half of us, to the social 
 dulness it inflicts on almost all. But you 
 cannot stand aside from your fellows with 
 impunity. There will come a time when you 
 will regret the absence of things you now 
 despise — established position, though it be 
 established on vulgarity, the respect of your 
 neighbours, though it be the respect of fools, 
 even comforts and luxuries. Power: who 
 knows that if you joined in the common 
 competition you would not work your way 
 to power? At least the chance would be a 
 fair one : in your way it will be a million to 
 one.' 
 
A CONVERSATION 305 
 
 ' Power to influence fools ? ' he murmured. 
 
 ' Power is power,' I rejoined. ' To influence 
 your fellow-men, to order their doings, to 
 shape their fortunes — that is the natural 
 instinct of men of parts in your race. It is 
 dormant in you now, because you are dis- 
 tracted by art and philosophy, and because 
 in the conceit of knowledge, too rapidly and 
 easily gained, you let folly obscure humanity. 
 But you will find out humanity ' 
 
 * It was exposed long ago,* he rather rudely 
 suggested. 
 
 ' You will find out that you cannot ignore 
 it; that to have given up all chance of 
 influencing your fellow-creatures is bitter, 
 or at least to have missed their respect is 
 uncomfortable. Be warned in time.' 
 
 'Thank you,' said he, 'but I shall have a 
 shot at my own game. As for power, if I 
 were an Elizabethan nobleman I might aim 
 at it, because I could enjoy life at the same 
 time. You have contradicted yourself, you 
 know. Work — your great evil — is an ab- 
 solute necessity for success at the bar or in 
 afltairs generally. Now, the advantage of my 
 writing business is that you cannot work 
 conscientiously at it for more than an hour a 
 day : if you do more you are ceasing to give 
 
 u 
 
306 VARIOUS 
 
 the world your best. That is a great satis- 
 faction.' 
 
 He annoyed me, and I rose abruptly. * Go 
 your ways,' said I : ' go and live in London 
 and hunt for romances and be interested in 
 humbugs and run into debt and be worried 
 out of your wits. But don't suppose you can 
 keep up your idea of writing as an art. You 
 will have to do something which will degrade 
 it — you will write leading articles or dramatic 
 criticism. And even then — but go your ways 
 and God be with you.' 
 
 I walked to the fireplace and knocked out 
 my pipe. Then I raised my eyes to the 
 mirror above the mantel-piece. The young 
 man had followed me and was looking over 
 my shoulder. In a flash I knew him at last : 
 I had seen that face in a glass many times. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said, as I turned and faced him : 
 ' it is so. I was you ten years ago.' We shook 
 hands silently, and as men shake hands who 
 have met to quarrel. I understood my in- 
 stinctive antipathy : how often had I cursed 
 his exaggerations and mistakes and folly 
 and idleness! But he seemed to share the 
 feeling, and was indeed the first to express 
 it. 
 
 ' You complacent beast ! ' he cried. ' You to 
 
A CONVERSATION 307 
 
 lecture me on not going to the bar and 
 standing aside from ray fellow-men and all 
 that ! As though I had no ambitions ! Have 
 you forgotten them? What have you done 
 with them ? Why, man, it is ten years — ten 
 years ! — and you have had time to create a 
 new English drama and purify the public 
 taste and reconstruct a Tory party and 
 write a modern epic — you have had time for 
 a whole Renaissance, by Jove ! And what 
 have you to show? You have acquired a 
 capacity to live in a labourer's cottage and 
 watch with pleasure a confounded child 
 walking down the village street. That is 
 all, positively all. You 're a rare fellow ! ' 
 
 'My dear fellow,' I rejoined mildly, 'I 
 really do apologise, but the fact is I came to 
 the conclusion that these ambitions of yours 
 would involve a lot of infernally tedious 
 details. Besides, it's not the time for a 
 Renaissance. We may be going down hill, 
 I grant you — in fact I think we have been 
 doing so intellectually, as a people, since the 
 time of Elizabeth — but we have not reached 
 the bottom. We must wait till then, before 
 we can climb another hill : there is no going 
 up the same. Besides, I have written a few 
 little books ' — [' Ugh,' said he] — ' which — some 
 
308 VARIOUS 
 
 of them, ill parts — I still think rather good, 
 though no doubt they would not appeal to 
 you. My taste is more catholic' 
 
 *It is,' he answered grimly. 'What do 
 
 you mean by praising ? ' (I suppress the 
 
 name.) 
 
 ' Ah, I remember you had a great contempt 
 for that gifted lady. I forget if you had read 
 any of her works — I rather think not. Well, 
 it interests me more to explain than to 
 resent popular successes, and in doing so I 
 often come upon qualities which I admire — 
 as in the case you mention. You are really 
 rather negative, you know.' 
 
 * And you 're flabby.' 
 
 ' And you 're violent.' 
 
 * And you 're tame.' 
 
 * Your enthusiasms are absurd.' 
 
 * Your apathy is disgusting.' 
 
 ' Why didn't you adopt a decent trade ? ' 
 ' Why haven't you written a great book ? ' 
 ' You think yourself a rou4.' 
 
 * You think yourself a countryman.' 
 
 * You 're no judge of wine ; I am.' 
 
 ' I can drink it with impunity ; you can't.' 
 Then we both felt the unreason of our 
 dispute, and were silent. And then, some- 
 how, I felt a strange pity for this young 
 
A CONVERSATION 309 
 
 man, so honest in his self-conceit, so ignorant 
 of the forces against him. And he, it seemed, 
 was sorry for me. Our hands met in a grasp 
 of sympathy, and we turned to part. 
 
 * But, by the way,' I asked him ; * which of 
 us is real ? Am I a dreadful warning, or are 
 you a wistful memory ? ' 
 
 * You are real,' he said ; ' and are you 
 glad?' 
 
 •Upon my word I don't know,' I answered, 
 as I awoke. But I would rather not dream 
 that dream again. I have omitted the really 
 interesting things we said to one another. 
 
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 at the Bdiuborgh Unireraity Press 
 
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