LONDON FRIENDS
It was in 1874, as I have already mentioned, that on an introduction
from Matthew Arnold we first made friends with M. Edmond Scherer, the
French writer and Senator, who more than any other person--unless,
perhaps, one divides the claim between him and M. Faguet--stepped into
the critical chair of Sainte Beuve, after that great man's death. For M.
Scherer's weekly reviews in the _Temps_ (1863-78) were looked for by
many people over about fifteen years, as persons of similar tastes had
looked for the famous "Lundis," in the _Constitutionnel_ of an earlier
generation.
We went out to call upon the Scherers at Versailles, coupling with it,
if I remember right, a visit to the French National Assembly then
sitting in the Chateau. The road from the station to the palace was deep
in snow, and we walked up behind two men in ardent conversation, one of
them gesticulating freely. My husband asked a man beside us, bound also,
it seemed, for the Assembly, who they were. "M. Gambetta and M. Jules
Favre," was the answer. So there we had in front of us the intrepid
organizer of the Government of National Defense, whose services to
France France will never forget, and the unfortunate statesman to whom
it fell, under the tyrannic and triumphant force of Germany (which was
to prove, as we now know, in the womb and process of time, more fatal to
herself than to France!), to sign away Alsace-Lorraine. And we had only
just settled ourselves in our seats when Gambetta was in the tribune,
making a short but impassioned speech. I but vaguely remember what the
speech was about, but the attitude of the lion head thrown back, and the
tones of the famous voice, remain with me--as it rang out in the
recurrent phrase: _"Je proteste!--Messieurs, je proteste!"_ It was the
attitude of the statue in the Place du Carrousel, and of the
_meridional_, Numa Roumestan, in Daudet's well-known novel. Every word
said by the speaker seemed to enrage the benches of the Right, and the
tumult was so great at times that we were still a little dazed by it
when we reached the quiet of the Scherers' drawing-room.
M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and
daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his
aspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once ascetic
and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for
the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year
after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life,
becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance
was as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of French
literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic
reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with
the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knew
him--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion;
a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same
time was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtle
character to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important as
questions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, specially
conversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the
"French critic on Milton," on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his most
attractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--that
when French people _did_ make a serious study of England, and English
books, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakes
about us than English writers make about France.
Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless
rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs,
where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked,
learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English
junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year or
two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They
haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals
that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us
together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following
years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the
Universities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark
of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he
said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale
[i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great
many. _But they are all Modernists!_" Since then, again, we have seen
the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of
imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will
emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the
present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day.
But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that it
was he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the _Journal Intime_ of Henri
Frédéric Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me at
once; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented and
I plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end of
it I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For the
book abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed to
challenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with his
daughter Jeanne--a _schöne Seele_, if ever there was one--and we spent
hours in the Russell Square drawing-room, turning and twisting the most
crucial sentences this way and that.
But at last the translation and my Introduction were finished and the
English book appeared. It certainly obtained a warm welcome both here
and in America. There is something in Amiel's mystical and melancholy
charm which is really more attractive to the Anglo-Saxon than the French
temper. At any rate, in the English-speaking countries the book spread
widely, and has maintained its place till now.
The _Journal_ is very interesting to me [wrote the Master of
Balliol]. It catches and detains many thoughts that have passed over
the minds of others, which they rarely express, because they must
take a sentimental form, from which most thinkers recoil. It is all
about "self," yet it never leaves an egotistical or affected
impression. It is a curious combination of skepticism and religious
feeling, like Pascal, but its elements are compounded in different
proportions and the range of thought is far wider and more
comprehensive. On the other hand, Pascal is more forcible, and looks
down upon human things from a higher point of view.
Why was he unhappy? ... But, after all, commentaries on the lives of
distinguished men are of very doubtful value. There is the
life--take it and read it who can.
Amiel was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His
_Journal_ is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are
revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the
poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them.
Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic in one.
For myself [wrote Walter Pater], I shall probably think, on
finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have
added to those elements of natural religion which he was able to
accept at times with full belief and always with the sort of hope
which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs and the
function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those
obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is
powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely
accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed
facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have
become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the
same sort of assent we give to any assumptions, in the strict and
ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts are real
will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the
_natural_ questions of the human mind.
A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing light
upon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and most
important influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is no
sign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very much
the contrary.
* * * * *
But all this time, while literary and meditative folk went on writing
and thinking, how fast the political world was rushing!
Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, and
the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr.
Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five
dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in
Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr.
Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach,
Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift
development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had
first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at
Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough
and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far
from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr.
Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which, if I remember right, he was to
review for _Mind_.
He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in a
rather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the
"Goats"--i.e., the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir Stafford
Northcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But
compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought
of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful
companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing
consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a
peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was
a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful
evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely
literary or musical.
Then, with the Chief-Secretaryship there appeared a new Arthur Balfour.
The courage, the resource, the never-failing wit and mastery with which
he fought the Irish members in Parliament, put down outrage in Ireland,
and at the same time laid the foundation in a hundred directions of that
social and agrarian redemption of Ireland on which a new political
structure will some day be reared--is perhaps even now about to
rise--these things make one of the most brilliant, one of the most
dramatic, chapters in our modern history.
[Illustration: ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR]
It was in 1888, two years after Mr. Forster's death, that we found
ourselves for a Sunday at Whittinghame. It was, I think, not long before
the opening of the Special Commission which was to inquire into the
charges brought by the _Times_ against the Parnellites and the Land
League. Nothing struck me more in Mr. Balfour than the absence in him of
any sort of excitement or agitation, in dealing with the current charges
against the Irishmen. It seemed to me that he had quietly accepted the
fact that he was fighting a revolution, and, while perfectly clear as to
his own course of action, wasted no nervous force on moral reprobation
of the persons concerned. His business was to protect the helpless, to
punish crime, and to expose the authors of it, whether high or low. But
he took it as a job to be done--difficult--unpleasant--but all in the
way of business. The tragic or pathetic emotion that so many people were
ready to spend upon it he steadily kept at a distance. His nerve struck
me as astonishing, and the absence of any disabling worry about things
past. "One can only do one's best at the moment," he said to me once, _à
propos_ of some action of the Irish government which had turned out
badly--"if it doesn't succeed, better luck next time! Nothing to be
gained by going back upon things." After this visit to Whittinghame, I
wrote to my father:
I came away more impressed and attracted by Arthur Balfour than
ever. If intelligence and heart and pure intentions can do anything
for Ireland, he at least has got them all. Physically he seems to
have broadened and heightened since he took office, and his manner,
which was always full of charm, is even brighter and kindlier than
it was--or I fancied it. He spoke most warmly of Uncle Forster.
And the interesting and remarkable thing was the contrast between an
attitude so composed and stoical, and his delicate physique, his
sensitive, sympathetic character. All the time, of course, he was in
constant personal danger. Detectives, much to his annoyance, lay in wait
for us as we walked through his own park, and went with him in London
wherever he dined. Like my uncle, he was impatient of being followed and
guarded, and only submitted to it for the sake of other people. Once, at
a dinner-party at our house, he met an old friend of ours, one of the
most original thinkers of our day, Mr. Philip Wicksteed, economist,
Dante scholar, and Unitarian minister. He and Mr. Balfour were evidently
attracted to each other, and when the time for departure came, the two,
deep in conversation, instead of taking cabs, walked off together in the
direction of Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens. The detectives
below-stairs remained for some time blissfully unconscious of what had
happened. Then word reached them; and my husband, standing at the door
to see a guest off, was the amused spectator of the rush in pursuit of
two splendid long-legged fellows, who had, however, no chance whatever
of catching up the Chief Secretary.
Thirty years ago, almost! And during that time the name and fame of
Arthur Balfour have become an abiding part of English history. Nor is
there any British statesman of our day who has been so much loved by his
friends, so little hated by his opponents, so widely trusted by
the nation.
* * * * *
As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the _Times_
attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forged
Parnell letter in 1887, our connection with the _Times_ brought us, of
course, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up,
half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in the
early hours of the morning my husband came back from the _Times_,
brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband,
however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was not
in the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both very
anxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries,
the Commission came to the _Times_ witnesses, I well remember the dismay
with which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Was
that _all_? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir George
Lewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the coming
catastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, and
suicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great.
The _Times_ attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of the
great paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound,
how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of the
Commission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters--
certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support of
English opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land League
methods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. After
thirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go,
and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution," with both the crimes
and the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen had
to organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder with
the other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods of
Irish disaffection was invaluable to those who were actually grappling
day by day with the problems of Irish government.
It was probably at Mrs. Jeune's that I first saw Mr. Goschen, and we
rapidly made friends. His was a great position at that time. Independent
of both parties, yet trusted by both; at once disinterested and
sympathetic; a strong Liberal in some respects, an equally strong
Conservative in others--he never spoke without being listened to, and
his support was eagerly courted both by Mr. Gladstone, from whom he had
refused office in 1880, without, however, breaking with the Liberal
party, and by the Conservatives, who instinctively felt him their
property, but were not yet quite clear as to how they were to finally
capture him. That was decided in 1886, when Mr. Goschen voted in the
majority that killed the Home Rule Bill, and more definitely in the
following year when Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer in a fit
of pique, thinking himself indispensable, and not at all expecting Lord
Salisbury to accept his resignation. But, in his own historic phrase, he
"forgot Goschen," and Mr. Goschen stepped easily into his shoes and
remained there.
I find from an old diary that the Goschens dined with us in Russell
Square two nights before the historic division on the Home Rule Bill,
and I remember how the talk raged and ranged. Mr. Goschen was an
extremely agreeable talker, and I seem still to hear his husky voice,
with the curious deep notes in it, and to be looking into the large but
short-sighted and spectacled eyes--he refused the Speakership mainly on
the grounds of his sight--of which the veiled look often made what he
said the more racy and unexpected. A letter he wrote me in 1886, after
his defeat at Liverpool, I kept for many years as the best short
analysis I had ever read of the Liberal Unionist position, and the
probable future of the Liberal party.
Mrs. Goschen was as devoted a wife as Mrs. Gladstone or Mrs. Disraeli,
and the story of the marriage was a romance enormously to Mr. Goschen's
credit. Mr. Goschen must have been a most faithful lover, and he
certainly was a delightful friend. We stayed with them at Seacox, their
home in Kent, and I remember one rainy afternoon there, the greater part
of which I spent listening to his talk with John Morley, and--I
think--Sir Alfred Lyall. It would have been difficult to find a trio of
men better worth an audience.
Mrs. Goschen, though full of kindness and goodness, was not literary,
and the house was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen's
study. I remember J.R.G.'s laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complained
that she could not get _Pride and Prejudice_, which he had recommended
to her, "from the library." "But you could have bought it for sixpence
at the railway bookstall," said J.R.G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, was
a man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent
German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe.
His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the present
life-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind of
symbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had become
one of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier German
life--with its measure, its kindness, its idealism--on which Germany has
turned its back. The writing of this book was the pleasure of his later
years, amid the heavy work which was imposed upon him as a Free-Trader,
in spite of his personal friendship for Mr. Chamberlain, by the Tariff
Reform campaign of 1903 onward; and the copy which he gave me reminds me
of many happy talks with him, and of my own true affection for him. I am
thankful that he did not live to see 1914.
Lord Goschen reminds me of Lord Acton, another new friend of the
'eighties. Yet Lord Acton had been my father's friend and editor, in the
_Home and Foreign Review_, long before he and I knew each other. Was
there ever a more interesting or a more enigmatic personality than Lord
Acton's? His letters to Mrs. Drew, addressed, evidently, in many cases,
to Mr. Gladstone, through his daughter, have always seemed to me one of
the most interesting documents of our time. Yet I felt sharply, in
reading them, that the real man was only partially there; and in the new
series of letters just published (October, 1917) much and welcome light
is shed upon the problem of Lord Acton's mind and character. The
perpetual attraction for me, as for many others, lay in the contrast
between Lord Acton's Catholicism and the universalism of his learning;
and, again, between what his death revealed of the fervor and simplicity
of his Catholic faith, and the passion of his Liberal creed.
Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirred
his blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and the
Papal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with the
Church of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things it
had done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do with
the excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from those
of another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly and
claim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century.
There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been
more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the
Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of
men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness
of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you
will come to tolerate them in the present and future.
It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed
me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's
handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical
principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were,
I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of
_Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written
to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop.
Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying
the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy.
These men [i.e., the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The
person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who
commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse
order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the
agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the
entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth.
These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend
of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the
promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council
of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never
did. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation with
him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of
Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in
general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated
Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he
was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a
serious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural mission
of the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on her
death-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you will
soon be with Jesus Christ." All his friends, except the very few who
knew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzled
by this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject of
Biblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing
_Robert Elsmere_, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddon
would have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, he
possessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men who
had written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and the
writers, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetic
tolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The New
Reformation," in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of
_Robert Elsmere_ by giving an outline of the history of religious
inquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met Lord
Acton one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we were
both waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulation
on the article. "I only wish," I said, "I had been able to consult you
more about it." "No, no," he said. "_Votre siège est faite_! But I think
you should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omitted
so-and-so." Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he poured
out that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest,
thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him.
As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it was
endless. I asked him once, when I was writing for _Macmillan_, to give
me some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter I
received from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge,
bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme"
of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to get
through, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number of
the books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves.
Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of
_Eleanor_, for which certain material was drawn from the life of
Chateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would have
thought it thrown away. He never despised novels!
Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of different
sorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morning
he had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60,000
volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whom
Mr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge.
In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit as
keen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poor
speaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always,
it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy and
distinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, his
influence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule struggle
gave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constant
friends and associates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all that
critical time. But the great split was rushing on, and it was also in
1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr.
Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. It
was a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party was
M. Clémenceau.
M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and
unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man
who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon
from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules
Ferry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime of
life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,[1] one of the
most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884,
was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at
that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from
the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.
How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were
still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral
Maxse's dinner-table!--Clémenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and
fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready
than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression
of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English
history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described
the interest we had both felt in M. Clémenceau. "Yet he seems to me a
light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!"
[Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow
of M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime
Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French
destiny (January, 1918).]
In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the
Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident,
I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of
that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up
deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day
to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any
other course than that they did take."
Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearly
how very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his great
leader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing the
rupture of 1886.
* * * * *
I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at a
Kensington dinner-party, where he took me down. A man who talked loud and
much was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit of
opposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning.
_À propos_ of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière,
and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which
was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the
white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet
scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's
flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"_Morbleu! vil
complaisant, vous louez des sottises_"; then the admirable fencing
between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his
contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out:
"_Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure,
Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature_!"
breaking immediately into the _vieille chanson_, one line of which is
worth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire.
Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, I
urging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he would
look up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it still
went on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tête-à-tête; till
the _chanson_ itself--"_Si le roi m'avoit donné--Paris, sa grand'
ville"_--had been said, to his delight and mine.
The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or
twice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of the
evening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, I
shall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without a
moment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost the
whole, of one of the immortal things in literature.
He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once or
twice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the London
world to know him well. His health began to fail just about the time
when we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico.
He did not like _Robert Elsmere_, which appeared the year before his
death; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his and
mine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house.
Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the
divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some
passion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt,
on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after
ranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added:
"But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of
mortality ... there is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to
come into the room, we should rise up to meet him; but if that
Person was to come into it, we should fall down and try to kiss the
hem of His garment."
Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near in
spirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work is
concerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the _Marriage of
William Ashe_, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of the
scenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if he
would allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was then
uninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked;
and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the
_mezzanin_. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palace
was shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding it
a little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was a
bust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and the
place was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come to
die, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored.
The _concierge_ pointed out to me what he believed to be the room in
which he passed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everything
was chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked to
imagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vast
chandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in the
Italian spirit which through such long years had passed into his, and
delighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of a
child's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of the
beautiful old place.
* * * * *
Mr. Lowell is another memory of these early London days. My first sight
of him was at Mr. and Mrs. Westlake's house--in a temper! For some one
had imprudently talked of "Yankeeisms," perhaps with some "superior"
intonation. And Mr. Lowell--the Lowell of _A Certain Condescension in
Foreigners_--had flashed out: "It's you English who don't know your own
language and your own literary history. Otherwise you would realize that
most of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which you
have thrown away."
Afterward, I find records of talks with him at Russell Square, then of
Mrs. Lowell's death in 1885, and finally of dining with him in the
spring of 1887, just before his return to America. At that dinner was
also the German Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, a handsome man, with a
powerful, rather somber face. I remember some talk with him after dinner
on current books and politics. Just thirty years ago! Mr. Lowell had
then only four years to live. He and all other diplomats had just passed
through an anxious spring. The scare of another Franco-German war had
been playing on the nerves of Europe, started by the military party in
Germany, merely to insure the passing of the famous Army law of that
year--the first landmark in that huge military expansion of which we see
the natural fruit in the present Armageddon.
A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given the
Conservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the full
passion of economic and military development--all her people growing
rich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet I
have still before me the absent, indecipherable look of her
Ambassador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table.
Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips with
Germany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It would
have been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in Lowndes
Square, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to credit
the absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane!
A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a private
capacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here is
a characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters:
I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to
you for saying so. Nobody but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of
sympathy, and he started there!