MEREDITH TOWNSEND (_Continued_)
Though I cannot resist writing upon the picturesque side of Townsend's
character, I must take care not to give a wrong impression. Nobody must
think, because of Townsend's emphasis and vividness of language, and
that touch of imagination he introduced into every thought and every
sentence, that he was an oddity or an eccentric. In spite of the fact
that he would never take life plain when he could get it coloured, he
was a perfectly sane person. As I have said, the more you knew him the
more you felt that, though you might be shocked by the first rashness of
his thought, it would very likely turn out to be a perfectly sane
judgment--proper discount being allowed for his brilliance of vision. I
used sometimes to put some of his most wonderful and hair-raising
statements into dull English, and then ask him whether that wasn't what
he meant. I generally received the instant assurance that my sober
version exactly represented his view.
His attitude of mind might, indeed, be summed up by a thing that he once
said to me in a period of political calm in the middle of August in the
'nineties. "_Strachey, I wish something dramatic would happen._" He
went on to explain how he was fretted almost beyond endurance by the
dullness of the world. And yet I often wonder whether even he might not
have found the last six years almost too highly "accidented" even for
him. But I know one thing. If he had the anxious mind developed to the
highest point, he was essentially a brave man and a true lover of his
country. If he had been destined to live through the war there would
have been no stouter heart than his, and none would have given a more
stimulating expression to the spirit of the nation than he.
I wish profoundly that I had made during his life, as I ought to have
done, a proper collection of Townsend's aphoristic and sensational
sayings. They would have been not only a source of delight and
entertainment, but also a storehouse of what might be called the
practical wisdom of an imaginative mind. A good example of what I mean
is the following. Townsend was once having an exciting and not to say
violent argument with a younger man. In the course of the combat
Townsend, we may presume, used a generous freedom of language, and it
was returned in kind by his opponent. The clash of mind was fierce. Then
the younger man pulled himself together. He felt he had gone too far in
some of the things he had said, and apologised to Townsend. If he had
been rude or over-vehement in the way in which he had maintained and
insisted upon his view--he hoped he should be forgiven. "Not at all,"
was the instant reply. _"You have a perfect right to be wrong!"_
There was here a great deal more than a felicitous epigram. This
acknowledgment of every man's right to be wrong underlay Townsend's
philosophy of life and his religious attitude. Though, curiously enough,
he had borrowed a certain touch of fatalism from his intercourse as a
young man with the philosophies of the East, he felt very strongly the
essential freedom of the will. But that freedom he saw could not exist,
could not be worthily exercised, could not, as it were, have its full
reward in a man's own soul, unless it were a true freedom. Unless a man
had the freedom to do wrong as well as the freedom to do right he was
not really free. It was idle to pretend that you were giving people a
choice of freedom if you put restrictions upon them which would
effectually prevent their doing anything but that which the inventor of
the restrictions considered to be right; if the doing of the right
resulted not from their own impulse but from the application of exterior
force over which they had no control, no virtue, no moral force. "There
is no compulsion, only you must" meant to him, as it must to every man
who knows what truth and justice are, the utmost derogation of freedom.
I have spoken of the influence of the East upon Townsend's mind in
matters of religion. Though he never became a mystic, and had not
naturally the mystic's attitude or even any true understanding of what
mysticism is, as a young man he had looked through the half-open door of
the Eastern world not merely with wonder and delight but with a great
deal of sympathy. He went to Calcutta, or, rather, to one of its
suburbs, when he was a boy of eighteen, and remained there without
coming home for over ten years. In that time he acquired a fair
acquaintance with several Indian languages, and an intimate knowledge of
Bengali, which he always regarded as the Italian of the East. In Bengali
he was so accomplished that he was given the post of Government
Translator.
In the old daguerreotype here reproduced he is seen sitting, by his
moonshee, a Brahmin of the highest caste,--see the mystic Brahmin
thread which the Jesuits were accused of wearing,--from whom he learned
Hindustani and, I think, a certain amount of Sanskrit. With the moonshee
he had many long talks upon those subjects on which the intellectual
Brahmins have discoursed and delighted to discourse ever since the day
when Alexander took his bevy of Hellenic Sophists across the Indus.
Greeks bursting with the new lore of Aristotle--Alexander's own tutor--
at once got to work on the Brahmins and began to discuss Fate, Free-
will, the Transmigration of Souls, the nature of thought, the power of
words, and the mystery of the soul. The Brahmins met them half-way, as
today they meet any wandering European metaphysicians. Townsend had an
active, eager spirit, and he and the moonshee tired the sun with talk.
But there was more than eternal talk between them. They grew to be real
friends, in spite of an interval of some forty years. Townsend used to
say of the moonshee, "If there is a heaven, that old man is there."
Though belonging to the caste of the High Priests of the Hindu faith, he
was poor in worldly possessions. But though holy and learned he had no
touch in him of sacerdotal arrogance--difficult achievement, considering
the sort of veneration with which Brahmins of his exalted spiritual rank
were treated in Bengal.
To illustrate the depth of this veneration, Townsend was fond of telling
a story of how he had in his employment in the printing office of his
paper, _The Friend of India_, a high-class Brahmin engaged, I
think, as a proof-reader, at low wages. It chanced that on some occasion
Townsend was interviewing a very rich Bengal magnate, a mediatised
Prince, so far as I remember, though of comparatively humble caste. When
the Brahmin entered to bring Townsend a proof, or upon some other
business of the paper, the rich noble rose, and, as Townsend
picturesquely put it, "swept the dust off the Brahmin's feet with his
forehead." The Brahmin received the obeisance without the slightest
embarrassment, as a right entirely his due. "There," said Townsend, "is
the whole of the East." Fanciful shapes of the plastic earth, the wealth
and the power of the rich man, and the man of semi-royal rank, are
perfectly real and fully recognised, but they make no difference to the
essential fact of religion. Caste in its religious aspects is something
of which we English people have no conception.
I remember pleasing Townsend with an illustration of the truth of how
English people cannot conceive of great rank without a considerable
amount of riches. When reading for the Bar, I came across a short Act of
Parliament, in the reign of Henry VI, which was passed to deprive the
existing Duke of Buckingham of all his rank and titles "because he was
so poor." The two Houses of Parliament were sorry, no doubt, to have to
act, but they felt it was no more respectable for a Duke to go about
without money than for an ordinary man to go about without clothes. They
were doing the right thing by him in reducing him to the ranks of the
proletariat in name as well as in fact. English people, insisted
Townsend, never seem to realise that the distinction of birth is so
valuable because it is incommunicable. That, of course, is quite true.
English people, happily, as I think, never have, and never will, regard
mere birth with any veneration or even interest. What affects them is
that potent, if rather indefinite, thing, position--the aura of
distinction which surrounds great office, great wealth, and even great
learning; and, oddly enough, most of all by the acclamation of fashion.
The Committee of Almack's put the thing exactly, when a certain Duchess,
to whom they had refused invitations for a ball, writing in
expostulation reminded them of her rank. They simply replied that "the
Duchess of Newcastle, though undoubtedly a woman of rank, was not a
woman of fashion." It was only to "persons of fashion" that the doors of
Almack's stood always open.
Townsend's conversation was a curious contradiction. Half of it
consisted of tremendous generalities, which made the hearer gasp with a
kind of mental deflation. The other side consisted of specific
statements of the most meticulous kind. And these contradictory forms of
attack upon the intelligence with whom he was in conversation were mixed
together in the most admired disorder. I remember well a lady who met
Mr. Townsend for the first time at a luncheon-party in London, telling
me that at a pause in the conversation she heard him say of a Polish
actress, Madame Modjeska, then performing in town, "She has the most
mobile face in South-western Europe." On another occasion the oracle
gave forth this tremendous sentence: _"Musicians have no morals"_
but then, remembering a musician who was a close friend of his and mine,
Townsend added, "Except G--."
This is a beautiful example of the extreme generalisation followed by a
headlong descent to the minutely specific. If you had suggested to
Townsend that this was rather a large order, he would have replied,
without turning a hair, that you were no doubt perfectly right, and
would probably have limited himself in a lightning flash--"Statisticians
would probably put the figure at 27 1/2 per cent, or some such figure."
If he had been made to choose in his writings between the specific and
the general, he would, however, I am convinced, have chosen the
specific, for the specific statement was his leading rule in journalism,
as no doubt it was one of the sources of the charm of his style. You
should always be specific even if you could not be accurate, might be
given as an accurate parody of his principle.
This predilection sometimes led him into strange difficulties,
especially in medicine, where he loved to use all the "terms of art."
Technical expression had a fatal fascination for him, especially when he
did not understand them. I remember his saying, with a naiveté which was
quite delightful, apropos of a common friend in illness, "I have
discovered the nature of H's ailment. There is no doubt now that he is
suffering from the true Blankitis. By the way, Strachey, what is
Blankitis?" I am afraid in the case in question I did not know, and he
did not know, and in fact none of us but didn't know what the word
meant. (I have adopted the phraseology of the little boy when the
magistrate asked him if he knew where he would go to if he gave false
evidence.) But Townsend had no sympathy with agnosticism of this kind.
In spite of the vastness of his view, he loved placing things neatly,
correctly, and in order.
He used to tell an excellent story about himself and of the kind of
answer you are apt to get if you try to catalogue English people too
exactly, especially in regard to their religious opinions.
Twenty-five years ago [said Townsend], when I first came here on leaving
the East, I did not realise this peculiarity. I was very much interested
in finding out the religious views of all sorts of people, and
especially of uneducated people; and so I asked Mrs. Black (the then
reigning housekeeper at the _Spectator_ office) what her religious
views were. I expected to be told that she was either Church of England,
or Chapel, or Presbyterian, or something of the kind. To my surprise
this is how she met my inquiry. She looked me straight in the face, and
said, "I am a moderate Atheist."
By that name she always went in the secret councils of the office. After
all, only an English person could have invented that particular form of
religion. I always felt that answer would have delighted Voltaire and
given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in
negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the
principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a
moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist or a moderate logician.
Townsend had a capacity for wit, but, as he was fond of saying himself,
no sympathy with farce or mere high spirits. I doubt even if he had a
sense of humour in the ordinary meaning of that term, or in the
Frenchman's definition: "la mélancholie gaie que les Anglais nomment
'humour.'" To say this is not to say that he did not enjoy a humorous,
an ironic, a witty, or an epigrammatic story or saying. He enjoyed such
things immensely and would laugh heartily at them. But he had no use for
a "droll," as I must fully admit I have. I can thoroughly enjoy the
long-toed comedian, and feel quite sure that if time and opportunity
could combine to let me see once a week a film figuring Charlie Chaplin
I should be transported with delight. Good clowning, or even bad
clowning, or what people call the appalling, or melancholy, or "cut-
throat," jokes in a comic paper I always find captivating.
Of good stories and laughable stories Townsend was in many ways an
admirable _raconteur_. Many people would say that cannot be true.
On your own confession he was too much of an exaggerator. I don't agree.
Exaggeration is not a fair word for what he did to his stories. He had
in him a kind of mental accelerator, and upon this he depended, no
doubt, too much on occasion, as do so many motor-drivers. All the same,
his stories always got home, and, strangely enough, this perpetual
speeding-up of his mind never seemed to injure it or to wear it out. On
the whole, his stories and his quotations were splendid, though I
confess one dared not verify his dates and facts and quoted words, for
fear of spoiling a real work of art. Strangely enough, he was nearly
always accurate in the spirit if not in the letter. Some day I should
like to tell some of the stories that he told me of Lord Dalhousie, or
Lord Canning and the White Mutiny, and of Lady Canning as a hostess.
That Townsend was a masterly letter-writer this account of him will, I
feel, have already suggested. He was vivid, picturesque, and attractive
to a high degree. The place he lived in when he was taking a country
holiday was always the most wonderful place in the world and the people
he met there marvellous and mysterious beyond words. Even if they were
bores, they were bores raised to such a high power as to become
intensely attractive.
A curious example of the impact made upon his mind by the Eastern
religions was shown in his belief that there was a great deal to be said
for the Eastern view that Almighty Providence had entrusted the world
and its government to a "demi-ergon" or angelic Vizier, who was given
the governance of the world under certain conditions of rule which he
had to observe. I remember well Townsend once saying to me: "Some day I
will write a book upon the neglected religion--the religion which holds
God to have 'devolved' the government of the world on a great Spirit or
Angel." It was his belief, or an assumed belief (for the thing to him was
really a day-dream), that in this way the great antinomy between free-
will and that predestination which is implicit in omnipotence, could be
got rid of. Townsend thought that this matter had never been discussed
as fully as it ought to have been. I am not theologian enough to know
how far this is true, but I suspect that this is just the sort of point
upon which Townsend would have been misinformed. It seems almost certain
that every conceivable abstract point of view, in pure theology not
depending upon examination and observation, must long ago have been
discussed exhaustively. Not only did the Schoolmen and the Jesuits sound
every space of water, but the Byzantine Greeks in the early days of the
Christian Faith produced "heresies" of every imaginable kind. The union
of Semitic revelation and neoplatonic mysticism, first at Alexandria and
later in the City of the Christian Emperor Constantine, constituted a
forcing-house of theological systems.
Before I leave my recollections of Mr. Townsend, I want to say something
of a curious incident in his last illness; and I must also attempt to
describe his personal appearance. During the last six or nine months of
his life--he was nearly eighty and his health had been undermined by his
hard work in the Delta of the Ganges--his brain and memory failed him
almost completely. His intellectual life sank, indeed, to what was
practically a perpetual delirium. Occasionally, however, there would be
a lucid interval, in which he became for a short time truly conscious
and could make sensible and rational remarks. For example, on one
occasion when he was in the middle of a paroxysm of loud, violent, and
incoherent talk, almost approaching raving, he suddenly turned to his
wife or daughter with an apology of bewildering poignancy. "I do wish
that man on the sofa would keep quiet. I am afraid his noise worries
you. It worries me quite as much." Even stranger, more curious, and more
suggestive of the double personality is the following circumstance.
Though I remember his telling me only some six or seven years before his
death that he had entirely forgotten his Bengali and did not suppose he
could now speak a word of it, he talked when his memory went a very
great deal in the Indian vernacular and apparently with great fluency.
And here I may note that he was always very fond of correcting people
who talked as if the inhabitants of Bengal talked Hindustani, saying
that it was Bengali that they talked, that the language was entirely
different from Hindustani, and was also the language of some fifty or
sixty million people and not by any means a patois. On the first
occasion, when the doctor was present, when Mr. Townsend reverted to the
language of the East, Mrs. Townsend in explaining what was happening,
made a very natural slip, and said: "You hear, he is talking in
Hindustani."
Immediately there came from the bed a voice in Townsend's old tone and
manner, and making a correction quite in his old style: "No, not
Hindustani, Bengali." But though the true consciousness was, as it were,
on the watch and quite able to make a correction, its force was spent,
at any rate for the time. Nothing more was said for a long interval by
the consciousness.
Here I should like to put in a plea for a much closer psychological
study of the sayings of the delirious, the insane, and of persons in the
hour of death. Such words are not, as a rule, recorded and are often
passed over in fear or pity. This seems to me a great mistake. No harm
could be done, but, rather, a great deal of good, if nurses were taught
to record such expressions. This would result, I feel sure, in a greater
kindness to delirious persons and to those who are insane or on the
verge of insanity, quite apart from the benefit which would accrue to
scientific investigation. If people understood something of the double
or multiplex personality there would be less terror and surprise at some
of the phenomena of the emergence of the uncontrolled subconsciousness.
It might at first be thought that the doctor was the proper person to
make a record of the kind I am suggesting. But the doctor is, as a rule,
too busy to do this sort of work, and, what is more, it is not he who
generally has the opportunity to note the real expressions of the
subconsciousness or to witness the struggle between the two
personalities. Even in the case of delirious or semiconscious persons,
the patient, when the doctor is there, makes an effort and pulls himself
together and so reconstructs the normal personality. It is the nurse who
sees the patient mentally off his or her guard, and who is, as it were,
in a position to note the things of most value to the psychologist.
Townsend's personal appearance is difficult to describe. He had, from
the time I first saw him in '85, grey hair and a grey moustache. He was
a small man, wiry and full of energy, and in the first ten years of our
friendship quite capable of taking long country walks. He always wore,
even in the country, black or dark-grey clothes, which indeed
constituted for him a kind of uniform. His eyes were grey and glittered
brightly and keenly behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. These he never
removed, except for a moment of polishing on a large silk bandana
handkerchief. He smoked comparatively little, but was a perpetual snuff-
taker. Nothing was more amusing than to hear him discourse on snuff-
taking and describe his adventures with snuff merchants. In fact, snuff-
taking in his mind had become endowed with a kind of freemasonry. All
snuff-takers, he declared, knew each other. They were so few in number.
He was also very interesting about snuff-boxes, and the lost art of
making hinges through which the almost impalpable dust of well-ground
snuff would be unable to penetrate.
I might indeed have exampled his snuff-taking as a proof of his power of
endowing everything with a sense of adventure and pregnant interest.
His step was light and very quick, his voice pleasant and refined, and
his manner of talking, as may be imagined, what I must--in spite of the
associations--call arresting. The saying that if you had taken refuge
under an arch during a rainstorm and found yourself next to Dr. Johnson
you would have realised in his first ten words that you were face to
face with a man of true distinction might well have been applied to
Townsend himself.
But, after all, Townsend is not a man who can be described. You may
describe a Mrs. Siddons with a faultless profile, a great statesman or
writer with what an old family servant of ours called "an iron
countenance"; but it is impossible to describe the intelligence, the
nervous energy, the versatility of expression which quick-coming, eager
thoughts throw upon the human face. Who can paint a thought, or number
the flashes of wit? Townsend was to be appreciated, not to be described.
Moreover, he was a man who impressed you more the hundredth time you saw
him than on the first. It is the old mystery, the old paradox set forth
by Wordsworth:
You must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
It was only when you had learned to love his wit and the gallant
cataract of his mind that you could fully understand and value its
fascination.
As a postscript to Townsend's oracular sayings I must add one of his
dicta on women. Here his generalisations were enormous and almost always
included a wild nosedive from the empyrean of generalities to that
purely specific element, the hard earth. For example, he was never tired
of saying--in various forms, for he never really repeated himself--that
women were far more trustworthy in money matters than men. He used to
say that he had never in any single instance in his whole career been
repaid a loan of money made to a man. On the other hand, he had never
been cheated by a woman.
It may perhaps be said that, considering I am writing a biography of
myself and not of Townsend, I have dwelt too long on my predecessor in
title. But, in truth, I have hardly dwelt long enough, for I am
describing the making of my mind. I could hardly be too detailed or too
particular in my description of Townsend, for his influence upon my
journalistic career was of enormous importance. Though I very soon
realised Townsend's defects as an editor, as a critic of public affairs,
as a man of letters, and as a user of words, my admiration for him as a
great journalist did not diminish but grew year by year.
I learned as time went on to disregard the faults and exaggerations
which so often greatly displeased the statesmen or men of letters who
had not the time or the patience really to understand and so to be
tolerant. Townsend had to some extent done what is very rarely done in
England, though it is so much done in America; that is, he had thought
out a good many of the problems of publicity and arrived at very sound
conclusions. If he had lived in America, I have no doubt that, with the
encouragement of a public that understands publicity, he would have
carried his ideas much further than he was able to carry them here, and
would have been hailed as a master in his art. As it was, he never wrote
anything on the function of the newspaper editor, and it was only in the
shape of sparkles from the wheel that one saw the tendency of his mind
to do what the Americans have done. They have succeeded in isolating
publicity and making it a special art, so that it has now become with
them a special art with special conditions of its own.
Townsend, as far as I remember, never talked about the ethics of
journalism or the duties of the journalist. It must not be supposed for
a moment that this was because he did not realise or respect those
duties, or was indifferent. It was rather due to the fact that he had a
kind of innocence, a _sancta simplicitas_, on this as, indeed, on
many moral and social questions. He took sound and honourable behaviour
as a matter of course, and he would no more have thought of praising
other people or himself for having a strict sense of honour in their
conduct of a newspaper than he would of praising them or himself for not
committing petty larceny, perjury, or fraud. He took, indeed, a very
hopeful view of mankind and did not the least believe they were really
bad, even if they did show themselves to be tigers on occasion. For
instance, I remember his saying to me once, with that naive gaiety which
was peculiar to him, that though he and Hutton differed a great deal in
matters of theology they never had any differences as to the line the
paper should take. Though Hutton inclined to an extremely "high" section
of the Church, to what, indeed, might be described as a kind of
sublimated sacerdotalism, and Townsend to a Broad Church
Presbyterianism, buttressed by an intense opposition to every form of
priestly function, he went on to point out that everything was made easy
"because both Hutton and I are at heart on the side of the angels."
Apropos of angels, I remember with intense delight one of Townsend's
most characteristic sayings. In the course of a conversation which began
on some mundane theme and drifted on to spiritual lines, I remember his
suddenly throwing the noble horse of dialectic on to his haunches with
the catastrophic remark: "Strachey, remember this. If there are angels,
they have edges." Here was the whole man. The idler or the fool will
think, or pretend to think, that this was simply ridiculous nonsense,
and will pass on with the comment, "We are not amused." As a matter of
fact, there was a great deal of good sense packed under a kind of semi-
humorous hydraulic pressure in this amazing dictum. What he meant was
that if there were angels, they were not vague, fluid, evanescent
creatures, some times part of a general angelic reservoir and sometimes
in single samples, but definite personalities. His was only a fierce and
violent way of saying what Tennyson said so exquisitely in the immortal
lines:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside,
And I shall know him when we meet.
There can be no eternal form without an edge. The edge, the dividing-
line, is the essential thing in individuals, and Townsend's mind had
pounced upon this as a cat will fall like a thunderbolt upon a mouse. It
was in this vivid, practical way that his mind worked. He jumped all the
intermediate things and came out with the essential in his mouth. But
those who had slow or atrophied minds and did not see the process often
failed to recognise what he was after, or what a clever kill he had
made.