UNWRITTEN CHAPTERS
The writing of memoirs is a pleasant exercise. At any rate, I have found
it so. It has led me back to many curious and delightful things which I
had wholly forgotten. They came unbidden in the train of events which I
had always remembered "in principle" and was at pains to evoke in
detail. But though the process has obvious advantages, it has had one
drawback. My recollections, and still more my reflections, and what I
may call my self-comments Conscious and Subconscious, have been so many
that at times I have felt like a man struggling in a mighty torrent.
The result has been that, though I have written more than I intended to
write, I have not covered anything like the amount of ground which I
hoped to cover. I am left staring at a list of unwritten chapters. A
list as long as that of those chapters included in my book or else
eliminated lest the volume should swell to the size of the London
Directory or to one of those portentous catalogues which Mr. Bernard
Quaritch used to put forth in the days when I first began to love books,
not merely for their contents, but as books.
The titles of the unwritten chapters have, however, so fascinated me,
and seem so necessary to my life and, therefore, to my book, that I
must, at any rate, put their names on record, together with some faint
indication of their nature, lest my readers should think there is some
deep reason why I do not touch them. It is, I feel, only natural that
people should think the worst of an Autobiographer.
The unwritten chapter which I most deeply regret is that chapter on the
War Hospital which we opened in the house in which I am writing--a
Hospital which my wife, though I suppose I ought not to say this,
managed, in spite of ill-health and many difficulties, with
extraordinary success. Though physically disabled, she, for nearly five
years, maintained practically single-handed, the organisation and
direction of a well-equipped surgical and medical institution in a house
not built for that purpose, though, oddly enough, one which in certain
ways lent itself to hospital purposes. The Newlands Corner Hospital had
an average of forty beds.
Four and a half years is a long time to be out of one's house. It is a
still longer time in which to turn your home into an institution and
yourself into a matron. Altogether some eight or nine hundred men passed
through the hospital. The doctors of the Royal Herbert Hospital,
Woolwich, with which we were affiliated, and Colonel Simpson, the
A.D.M.S. of that Hospital,--a man of marked ability in his profession
and with a natural gift for administration,--soon found out that
Newlands air and Newlands care were excellent things for difficult and
anxious cases. Therefore we had our full share of bad, or, as the
Sisters and nurses put it, good, cases.
As I had nothing to do with the hospital except on the proprietory side--
I
was very busy with war--work of my own--I cannot be accused of self-
laudation if I say that my wife won the praise, not only of the Medical
Authorities, but, which was still more to her and to me, the confidence
and gratitude of her patients. No small part of her success was due to a
very simple fact. She early saw the necessity of dividing the
administrative side of the hospital from the nursing side. Nursing is so
fascinating in itself that many Commandants were drawn from their proper
sphere of administration into surgical and medical work. My wife, partly
from an instinct for sound administration, and partly also because at
the moment she lacked the physical strength, confined herself strictly
to her own side. In a hospital in which the patients were continually
changing, which was four miles from a town and two miles from a railway
station, that side was in war-times and during the period of rationing,
by no means a light job. But the fact that there was one person, and
that the person in supreme charge of the institution, who did nothing
else except attend to the smooth running of the machine, meant that
there were no arrears of correspondence, that all Army forms were filled
up exactly and not, as many Commandants were inclined to think was far
better, in accordance with what they themselves judged to be reasonable
and necessary. Indeed, I was wont to tell my wife that I was appalled at
the bureaucratic spirit which she developed! I believe I am right in
saying that she never got an Army form wrong, though on several
occasions she was able to point out to her official superiors that they
had mistaken, or at any rate forgotten, their own elaborate rules.
The result was an extremely easy functioning of the official engine.
While other Commandants could be heard complaining that they could not
get answers from the authorities, or get the Army payments made
properly, my wife, I believe, never once failed to get the War Office
cheque, on the day it was due. There were never any complaints that she
was in arrears with her correspondence or with necessary information.
But then, instead of raging, as no doubt, she might have been quite as
much inclined to do as anyone else, at the absurdities of "red tape" and
so forth, she accepted them as necessary evils, like hailstorms and the
"all dreaded thunder-stroke."
Six months before the War, believing the catastrophe was coming, she
took instructions from an R.A.M.C. staff sergeant-major in all the
intricacies of yellow, blue, and red tickets, and of forms from A to Z,
or rather, from the first wound to the burial, required by the R.A.M.C.
The result was that when the War broke out she knew a great deal more
about the details of the Army Medical system than did many Staff or
Regimental Officers, and even more than many Medical Officers.
But I am breaking my rule of not writing about living people, and I must
stop. I may, however, say something about my own place in the hospital,
for my position was curious, and of very great interest to me. During
the four and a half years that the hospital was open, I lived in it as
what might be called a parlour-boarder. I kept my own bedroom, but my
house contained, as it were, forty guests, and guests of a very
fascinating kind. Our family life was embedded in the hospital. My
daughter was working in the wards, and my son used to come back from
Eton to spend his holidays in his hospital home. I was working at the
time, not only at _The Spectator_, but also at recruiting for the
Regular Army, which I regarded as my special duty, for I happened that
year to be Sheriff of my county. In addition I was at the head of a
curious little corps called the Surrey Guides and further was a member
of the Executive Committee for the Volunteer Training Corps--a body
whose activities alone would be well worth a chapter.
But though my work lay outside Newlands, and though I always spent two
nights a week in London, conducting, besides my editorial duties at
_The Spectator_ office, the duties I have already described in
connection with the American Correspondents, I gained a most valuable
experience from the hospital. In the first place, I did something which
was almost unique. I lived for four and a half years in a community of
women-the only man amongst nine. The house, of course, was full of male
patients, but I lived with the staff.
Besides my wife and daughter, there was a Sister-in-Charge, and, when
needed, an additional professional nurse, a staff of _masseuses_
which varied in number in accordance with the nature of the cases sent
to us, and four or five resident V.A.D.'s, including the night nurses.
In a house in such an isolated position as ours it was not possible for
the V.A.D.'s to live at home and come in for their duty hours.
I suppose the conventional cynic will expect me to say that I found out
how much more quarrelsome, jealous, and feline is a community of women
than one of men. Though I amused myself very much by watching how women
work in association, I am bound to say that I saw nothing which led me
to any such conclusion. I have seen plenty of men's quarrels in offices,
in clubs, in the common rooms of colleges, at schools, and still more,
perhaps, in mess-rooms and barracks, and I am bound to say that,
according to my experience, my sex is quite as bad as, and, on the
whole, rather worse than, women at the communal quarrel. Women are a
little less noisy in their quarrels, and little more ingenious, but that
is as far as I should care to generalise.
"They did not let you see."--That will not do as an explanation, for I
am sure that after the first seven or eight months, the ladies of the
staff came to ignore me completely, or to regard me rather as a part of
the furniture. Consequently, I saw them in what, if they had been men,
one might have called their shirt-sleeves. When you see hard-worked and
anxious people, as they come down to breakfast in the morning, when they
rush in to lunch, and when they sink, tired, into their chairs at
dinner, you have a pretty good opportunity for finding out all about
them. Under such conditions they cannot keep up the veil of convention
and of company manners. However, I cannot go into all these details,
much as I should like to, but must give only a general verdict.
I ended up my four and a half years as a parlour-boarder in a semi-
convent with a respect for women and their work, which had always been
very high, made still higher. If perhaps I found women a little less
sensitive than I thought, I certainly found them a great deal more
sensible, and, of course, as I suppose is the universal experience, a
great deal less easily shocked by things that ought not to shock them
than they are supposed to be. I mean by this that women are much less
afraid to look life full in the face and much more willing to understand
and to pardon, than is supposed. Also, I came to the conclusion that
women, though great disciplinarians, and often hard upon each other, are
not essentially merciless.
They are certainly, on the whole, less lazy than men, which is probably
a misfortune. I think Matthew Arnold was right when he spoke of women
being "things that move and breathe mined by the fever of the soul." The
fever of the soul, especially in a Sister, who, as is the case with most
of them, was grossly overworked in the hospital where she was trained,
is apt to prove a great evil.
If I learned a good deal about women at the hospital and if the result
of that learning was respect and admiration, I acquired an equally great
respect and admiration for the British soldier. I had always loved those
"contemptible regiments" who, as Sir Thomas Browne says, "will die at
the word of a sergeant," but I loved them still more when I saw their
good-natured, unostentatious way of life. They were, above all things,
easy and sympathetic livers. Almost the only thing that shocked and
disgusted them was being treated as heroes. Dr. Johnson talked about the
"plebeian magnanimity of the British common soldier" and meant the right
thing, though, in truth, there was nothing plebeian in the said
magnanimity,--nothing which would not have been worthy of the highest
birth and the highest breeding.
But the hospital did not raise my admiration merely for the soldier. It
raised it equally for the British working-man, who composed by far the
larger part of our patients. Ours, remember, was a soldiers' hospital,
not an officers'. We had, I think, in the whole course of our hospital
not more than four men who had been public-school boys or University
men. All the rest were labourers or artisans. When the hospital doors
closed, I respected the English working-man as much as ever, and added
to that respect a love and sympathy which I may record, but shall not
attempt to explain or to express in detail. I could fill a book with
stories and studies of our friends, for so they became, and so they
still remain.
My wife is constantly in touch with her old patients, and this does not
mean applications for help or for work, but letters and visits of
pleasure. That is good, but what is even better is that we constantly
come across references to the Newlands feeling, for around it quickly
grew up an indefinable _esprit de corps_. For example, on the day
on which I write these pages, one of our local newspapers contains a
letter from a Yorkshireman who had somehow seen an article in the
aforesaid paper in regard to some Red Cross work done by my wife. He
talks of the happy hours he spent at Newlands Corner, "hours which will
live for ever in my mind." That, of course, is commonplace enough and
sounds trivial, but it is repeated often enough to provoke a sense of
true communal fellowship.
One of the things with which I think my wife and I were specially
pleased about the hospital was the rapid way in which this sense of
_esprit de corps, i.e._, the public-school feeling, grew up. After
the first month or two, patients talked quite seriously and candidly
about "the old hospital." Again and again men told us that they should
never forget Newlands. Like the true Englishmen they were, they partly
loved Newlands because of the beauty of the scenery. The Englishman,
though generally insensible of, or at any rate irresponsive to, the
arts, is never irresponsive to a view. (John Stuart Mill's Autobiography
contains, by the way, a curious passage in regard to this point.) I
remember my wife telling me, the day after she had admitted a very bad
case, that the patient had said to her, "I am sure I shall get well
here, Commandant. It's such beautiful scenery."
But no more of the hospital here. I live in the hope that some day I may
write its history, and may be able to say something which will not be
open to the charge of, "Oh! Another boring book about the War!" As I
conceive it, my hospital book will be an analysis of the mind and
character of the British working-man with his defensive armour off, and
not an attempt to give any views on military or medical reform and so
forth.
One word more. My position in the hospital with the men was a strange
one. They soon saw that I played the game, and that if I saw them
breaking rules, met them, when I was riding, out of bounds, or
discovered them at any other of their wicked tricks, I never told tales,
or got them into trouble, or evoked any disciplinary reprisals. This
intensive cultivation of the blind eye raised me to the position of a
friendly neutral and gained for me their confidence. Besides, I believe
it soothed them to think that I, too, had to endure the regiment of
women to which they were exposed. They suspected that I also quailed, as
they must, before "the Sister in charge."
Their manners, by the way, were always perfect without being formal or
absurd. They seemed to have an instinct for absolute good breeding. Yet
they were all the time what Whitman called "natural and nonchalant
persons." Neither my wife, nor her staff, nor I ever made any pretence
to ourselves that they were plaster saints because their manners were
good. They were as wicked as demons and as mischievous as monkeys, and
seized every occasion for natural wrong-doing. In fact, they were just
like schoolboys, but they observed always the schoolboy law. Quarrel
they might, and dislike each other as they often did very bitterly, they
never told tales of each other. The Belgians, of whom we had some at the
beginning, were very different. They, curiously enough, gave each other
away quite freely, and complained of each other to the Commandant. But,
as one of our men said to me in excuse for the bad behaviour of the
Belgians, "They was never taught any better. They hadn't the training
we've had."
Another unwritten chapter, which I desire particularly to write, is a
chapter on Newlands, the history of the house which I love only less
than I love Sutton Court,--the house which I and my wife built, if not
with our own hands, at any rate with our own heads,--the house in which
my children were born, and two of my grandchildren,--the house from
which my daughter was married,--the house which I have seen grow like a
tree out of the ground,--finally, a house sanctified by the sufferings
of brave men, who had fought for a great cause and laid us all under an
obligation never to be expressed in words. Newlands, with its keen,
almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of
ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and
deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one
can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am
grateful for the health and strength which Newlands has given me. But
this must be told, if I ever write it, in the history of the house.
Still, I regret not to have done more honour to Newlands here, as I
regret not to have been able to make my salute to the wounded in better
form.
Another chapter "arising out of" Newlands, which I should like to have
written, would have been on my work as Chief of the Surrey Guides. My
readers need not be afraid of some burst of amateur militarism. I should
have treated the Surrey Guides simply as a kind of "new model" version
of Cobbett's Rural Rides. It was my duty to explore all the paths and
roads of the county, and delightful work it was. My experiences must
certainly be put on record somewhere and sometime, for, alas! the horse
is dying out and with him will die the bridle-paths and the pack-roads.
The night-riding part of my Surrey Guide work was to me particularly
attractive. No one who has not tried night-riding across country will
realise how fascinating it is and, comparatively speaking, how easy.
Provided you ride a pony, instead of a huge, long-legged, heavy-
weighted, badly-balanced horse, there is neither danger nor difficulty.
I will not say that the secret of night-riding is to give yourself up to
your horse, for your horse may be as big a blunderer as you, and become
a mixture of stupidity and anxiety. What I advise is, give yourself up
to your sub-consciousness, if you can, and this will lead you through
the darkest places and the roughest roads in ample security.
Another chapter which I believed I was going to write in this book was
to be devoted to inscriptions. I have always loved the art of the
epigraphists, and I wanted to quote some examples, including (1) an
inscription for a sun-dial, (2) an inscription for a memorial to Lord
Halifax, the trimmer, the greatest of Whig statesmen, (3) another to
William Pitt, and (4) an inscription to the Quakers who fought and died
in the War,--men whose noble combination of patriotism and self-
abnegation impressed me profoundly.
Their ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, Their names a great example
stand to show How strangely high endeavour may be blest When Piety and
Valour jointly go.
Another Surrey chapter might have dealt with my activities as Sheriff
and my conceptions of that office.
Still another chapter ought to have centred in my personal life at
Newlands. It was at Newlands that my health broke down and I saw, or
thought I saw, as did my doctors, the advance of the penumbra, the
shadow of eclipse which was to engulf my life. I wanted very much, when
I began this book, to put on record a description of how utterly
different than is commonly supposed are the feelings of the occupant of
the condemned cell. I should also like to have recorded certain
reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a
drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the
nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts,
and contribute each in his order to the central theme. But this and "The
Adventure of Dying," a theme which has never yet been adequately
treated, but ought some day to be, must await not, of course, the actual
coming of the Gondolier, for that is too late, but that interval between
life and death which the Emperor Diocletian boasted that he had created
for himself.
Another unwritten chapter on a subject which may sound dull, but which
might very well have been one of the best, was to be called "The
Consolations of the Classics." It would have told how in his later years
new stars had risen for the adventurer in the voyage of life, while many
of the planets that were in their zenith in his youth have suffered
decline.
As a boy, and even in the prime of life, I knew nothing of Racine. I now
bend my head in adoration. Again, I knew little or nothing of Balzac. I
now think of him as one of the greatest of the analysts of human
conduct,--not as great as Shakespeare, but, all the same, very great,
and almost as terrible as he is great. If ever a man fascinates and is
intolerable, it is Balzac.
I should have liked, but that is not a thing which can be compressed or
sandwiched into any chapter, to have written quite frankly and fully
about my religious beliefs. Here, indeed, I had planned with some care.
I wanted to say not what I thought other men ought to believe, nor what
I thought I ought to believe myself, or, again, what I ought not to
believe in order to make my _credo_ look reasonable and "according
to plan." What I wanted to do was to say frankly, fairly, and truthfully
what I do believe as a matter of fact and not as a matter of ought or
ought not. I wanted to record an existing set of actualities, not to
write a piece of philosophy or metaphysics. _I wanted, in fact, to
photograph my soul._ But this, again, must wait, though I hope it
will not wait very long.
If I write such a paper I shall certainly take for my motto Lord
Halifax's words to Bishop Burnet: "I believe as much as I can: and God
Almighty will, I am sure, pardon me if I have not the digestion of an
ostrich."
I will neither be put off on the one side by making an effort to express
belief in more than I can believe, nor, again, refuse to record my
honest belief in some "fact of religion" because it will not be thought
creditable for me, or because certain people will think me superstitious
and unreasonable, just as other people will think me too rationalistic.
I will yield nothing to the demand, "You cannot possibly believe
_this_, when you have just said that you don't believe _that_.
The two things must hang together. You cannot pick and choose like this
at your fancy."
My answer is, I can, I do, and I will. My endeavour is not an attempt to
reconcile beliefs, but to say for good or for evil what I do believe. I
believe that London lies to the Northeast of the place at which I am
dictating these words. Faith is a fact, not a fragment of reasoning, and
I mean to put down the said fact for what it is worth.
How I wish I could write my chapter on the odd things that have happened
to me in life, and record the strange and inexplicable things that I
have heard of from other people. I don't mean by this that I have a
number of second-hand ghost-stories to tell. All the same I could t-ell
of certain things much more impressive because they are so much less
sensational. It was my habit as a young man, a habit which I wish I had
not abandoned, to ask everybody I came across, who was worth
interrogating, what was the oddest thing that had happened in their
lives. One would have supposed that I should often have got for my
impertinence a surly answer, or, at any rate, an elegant rapier-thrust,
or some other form of snub. Strangely enough, I never found anyone "shy"
at my question, but I did get many curious answers, and some of these I
have a perfect right to record. A section of this chapter should deal
with accidental conversations and accidental confessions. It has been my
good luck once or twice to listen to the most strange talk in trains and
other public places, and again, by straight questions I have sometimes
elicited very crooked answers.
For example, when I was a young man I once heard an old gentleman in a
third-class railway carriage remark vaguely and yet impressively to the
company at large, as follows: "I once saw six men hanged in a very
rustic manner." That, I think everyone will agree with me, was an
excellent conversational opening. The full story, though I cannot tell
it here, was quite as good. So was the story of William Harvey, "_the
girt big Somersetshire man_" and what he did in a fight with Spanish
Pilots in the Bilbao River. Of this story, told to me in the broadest
Somersetshire dialect by a Somersetshire boatman who was present at the
fight, I cannot resist quoting one passage: "They were all dressed in
white and fighting with their long knives. But William Harvey, who was
six feet six high, got hold of the axe we always kept on deck for
cutting away the mast if it went in a storm, and he knocked them over
with that. And as fast as he did knock them over, we did chuck the
bodies into the water."
Another of my accidental conversations opened with these words: "And she
never knew till she followed her to her grave that she was her own
mother." The personal pronouns are slightly mixed, but the story might
well develop like a Greek play.
Again, I planned a chapter to describe the four most beautiful human
beings seen by me in the course of my life. Strangest of all, and
perhaps most beautiful of all, using beauty in rather a strained sense,
was the man alluded to in my dedication,--the man my wife and I saw in
the Jews' Garden at Jahoni. We were resting in the garden after a very
long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young man in a white
tunic, with bare feet and legs. On his head was a wide hat of rough
straw, and across his shoulder a mattock. His face and form could only
be described in the famous words, "Beauty that shocks you." Why his
beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of
any sensibility, I cannot say. Thinking he was a gardener, we asked our
Dragoman to ask him some simple question but he could not, or did not,
obtain any information. The creature was like the figures of Faunus or
Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees
among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the
late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of
Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more
decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to
be living again in this amazing being.
Far more really beautiful, far more interesting, and far more impressive
was a woman whom I and my younger brother met with in a tram-car outside
the Porta del Popolo in Rome. Up till then I had spent much time in
wondering why the Italian population had declined in the matter of good-
looks and why one never saw anyone like a Bellini or a Raphael Madonna.
And then I looked up after having my ticket clipped and saw the perfect
youthful mother of the Cinquecento painters sitting opposite me. A more
exquisitely harmonious face and expression were never vouchsafed to my
eyes. She was a countrywoman of the richer peasant class, and was
apparently making her first visit to the city accompanied by her
husband. One would gladly have taken oath at first sight that she was
the perfect wife and mother, and yet there was no sentimental pose about
her--only the most naive and innocent delight told in smiles, laughter,
and blushes. The things she saw from the tram window seemed to make her
whole being ripple with pleasure. Happily I cannot here be judged as a
sentimental visionary for my companion will avouch the facts.
Curiously enough, though I think English women, as a whole, far surpass
the Italians in their looks, the other perfectly beautiful woman whom I
have seen was also an Italian. I was taking an early walk, with my
younger brother, from Baveno to the summit, or at any rate, to the
shoulder of the Monte Moteroni. The time was between five and six
o'clock in the morning, and the place a small peasant's farm just at the
fringe of the land between the open mountain and the cultivated slopes.
I looked over the hedge or wall, I forget which, and there was a bare-
legged girl of some seventeen or eighteen working in the field with her
father and her brothers, hoeing potatoes. Here, indeed, was something
worth writing home about--a figure like the Lombard girl in Browning's
"Italian in England, "--a face gentle, simple, kind, but, above all,
beautiful, and a figure worthy of the face.
The fourth figure in my gallery of the visions that the turn of the road
took from my eyes and "swept into my dreams for ever" was seen during a
purely prosaic walk in South Kensington. Unsuspecting, unperturbed, I
was bent on a constitutional, or maybe a shopping expedition, when there
suddenly arose before my astonished eyes, out of a man-hole in the
middle of the street--I honestly believe it was the Cromwell Road--a
young workman with flaxen hair and a short beard,--a man with something
of the face and figure which the Italian painters gradually came to
attribute to the Christ. But here again, as in the case of the Madonna
of the tram-car, the man evidently had never been told of, or thought
of, the resemblance. He seemed perfectly unconscious and natural. Though
the trained eye might notice a resemblance in the outline of the face,
the happy smile and negligent air showed nothing of the Man of Sorrows.
He was just an ordinary Englishman.
When I think of those four figures of resplendent beauty--and
especially of the two women, for the Syrian had something sinister and
uncanny about him and the young Englishman was too prosaic in
essentials--I recall the passage which I know is somewhere in Sir Thomas
Browne, though I am quite unable to find it, in which the Physician
Philosopher declares that when he sees specially beautiful persons he
desires to say a grace or thanksgiving to Heaven for the joy that has
been vouchsafed him.
As to the strange stories and strange things told me, I should have
liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a
tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other,
though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is
the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pass. The English
mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb. Suddenly he saw to
his astonishment a chamois, the shyest of all animals, standing stock-
still on a steep glacier. She actually let him come so close to her that
he could have touched her with his hand, and then he saw the reason. The
chamois stood at the very edge of a deep crevasse, and up from its cold,
blue depths came the cry of a terrified and agonised creature--cries
that were answered by the mother chamois. The little chamois had fallen
through the ice-bridge and lay some hundred feet or so below and beyond
all recovery. The narrator was an ordinary table-d'hote Smoking-Room
tourist, but he could hardly recount the story without tears. He tried,
but it was impossible to effect a rescue, and he had to leave the
wretched mother where she was. As he said, "Considering what chamois
are, it sounds absolutely incredible that the mother should have been
able to overcome her shyness of mankind and stay by the young one. I
wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. She took no more notice
of me and my guide than if we had been rocks. Poor brute!"
Another chapter would have recorded the influence upon my life of great
writers, great poets, great painters, great sculptors, and great
musicians. Next, I should have loved to give in detail accounts of my
travels, not in strange or dangerous parts of the earth, but through
some of the most beautiful scenery of Europe and in the fringes of
Africa and Asia. As a young man, I journeyed in sledges over most of the
Alpine passes in the winter, for, owing to my uncle John Symonds being
one of the discoverers of the High Alps in winter, I was early, so to
speak, in the snow-field. To this day nothing attracts me more than the
thought of a long day or night spent in a sledge.
I crossed the Splugen by day in the winter, and by moon-light in the
summer. I crossed the St. Gothard (before the tunnel was made) in a
Vetturino carriage. I have crossed the Simplon, and I have many times
crossed the Bernina and all the other passes of the Orisons in the snow
in mid-winter. For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent
sunlight, there is nothing more delightful, and if as sometimes happens,
one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it,
a pleasant spice of danger is added. But I did not love the Alps merely
in the winter. Though no expert climber, I was fond of the mountains to
the point of fanaticism, and though I never got higher than 11,000 feet,
or a little over, I had the extremely interesting experience of falling
into a crevasse. Fortunately I was well held by the rope against the
white grey edge of the blue abyss, while my legs kicked freely in the
illimitable inane.
Is there anything in the world like being aroused in the grey of dawn by
the man with the axe and the rope? Can anything equal that succession of
scenes, the Alpine village in sleepy silence, the pastures and the
cultivated land, the inevitable little bridge on the inevitable stream,
then the belt of pines, then the zone of rocks and flowers, best and
gayest of all gardens, and last the star gentians and the eternal snows?
A holiday heart, twenty years of age, a friend, a book of poetry, and a
packet of food in one's pocket!--Truly, "If there is a Paradise, it is
here, it is here!"
Horses that I have known and liked, and on whose backs I have felt
supremely happy--rides on mules in Spanish or African mountains, rides
in the Syrian or Libyan Deserts on true Arabs, or, perhaps most
thrilling of all, night rides on the Downs, would make a tale, whether
delightful to read by others I know not, but certainly delightful to be
recorded by me.
"Projects Fulfilled and Unfulfilled" would have made a good chapter, as
would also "Quotations and the Effects of Poetry on Everyday Existence."
Another chapter which I have not written, but should like to have
written, would have been "Some Uncles"--I use the word "some" in both
the common and the slang sense--for I may be said to have been specially
rich in this relationship. Two of my Indian uncles were well known to
the public. One was Sir John Strachey, for six months acting Viceroy of
India, owing to Lord Mayo's assassination and the delay in his successor
taking up the post. The other was Sir Richard Strachey, who began his
Indian life as a subaltern in the Hon. East India Company's Corps of
Sappers and Miners. He had a horse killed under him at the Battle of
Sobraon, and afterwards became one of the greatest of Indian Civil
Engineers, a Member of Council (Public Works Department), and one of the
greatest of canal and railway constructors. Henry Strachey, another
uncle, commanded a battalion of Gourkhas, and died over ninety years of
age. Though little known to the world, he was a man of memorable
character and in his youth accidentally and temporarily the talk of
London as a Thibetan explorer. William Strachey, a fourth uncle, was the
strangest of men. Like the "Snark," he breakfasted at afternoon tea and
lived by candlelight instead of sunlight,--a wholly fantastic man,
though one of great ability. At one time he was what our forefathers
called "a man about town,"--a member of Brook's Club during the Fifties
and Sixties, a friend of Thackeray and of "Flemming, the Flea," and a
clerk in the Colonial office. He was often selected by Lord Palmerston
for special work. Later, however, he developed such strangely nocturnal,
though by no means noisy habits, that he almost disappeared from the ken
of his family. He, by the way, once spoke to me of Lady William Russell,
of whom I have already written, describing her as one of the most
beautiful and in later years one of the most delightful people he had
ever seen, and the best of all hostesses--"You used to look up at the
fanlight over the door of her house in South Audley Street, and if you
saw the gas-jet burning you knew that she was at home, expecting the
company of her friends, and needed no further invitation. Whatever the
hour was, if the light was burning you could go in and finish your
evening in talk with her and her other guests." She was thus at home
almost every evening to the people favoured enough to have the entry of
her house.
Another uncle was Mr. George Strachey, a diplomat, and for some thirty
years Her Britannic Majesty's representative at Dresden,--a man of great
ability, but with a nature better fitted to a man of letters than to an
official. Of Strachey great-uncles I could tell many a curious and
entertaining tale, and especially of the man whom my father succeeded,--
the man we called "the second Sir Henry." It has been said of him that
he was "odd even for a Strachey," and I could prove that up to the hilt.
Almost as odd, from many points of view, though much more human, was his
brother, Richard Strachey, one of the prize figures of the Military and
Diplomatic Service of the East India Company. He is still commemorated
in Persia on the leaden water-pipes of Ispahan, but how and why is too
long a story for a chapter of apology.
Dearly should I have loved to write a chapter on "The Art of Living,"
for unquestionably "life demands art,"--an aphorism, by the way, not, as
most people think, of Pope but of Wordsworth. (Wordsworth, remember, had
a great deal of the Eighteenth Century in him.) That chapter, however,
would easily become a book or a serpent, as says the Italian proverb.
Last of all, how many are the men and women, now dead, whom I should
like to have mentioned and of whom I have something worth saying. They
are included in a rough list which I drew up when I first thought of
writing my autobiography. I give these names written down just as they
occurred to me. Some of them have been referred to in the body of this
book, but most of them are not even mentioned. Lord Roberts; Watts the
painter; Sir John Millais; Sir William Harcourt; Lord Houghton; Walter
Bagehot; Lord Carlingford; Lord Goschen; the Duke of Argyll of
Gladstone's Cabinets; Mr. Macmillan, the publisher; Mr. George Smith;
Lady Stanley of Alderley; Lord Carlisle; Lord Morpeth; Sir Edward Cook;
Lord Kitchener; the late Duke of Northumberland; Admiral Dewey; Mr.
William Arnold; Lord Burghclere; Sir William Jenner; Miss Mary Kingsley;
Lord Glenesk; the late Lord Grey; the late Lord Astor; Sir William
White, the naval constructor; the late Lord Sligo; Dean Beeching; Bishop
Perceval; Archbishop Temple; my uncle, Professor T. H. Green; Professor
Dicey; Professor Freeman; Bishop Stubbs; Mr. Lecky; Mrs. Humphry Ward;
Lord Bowen; Mr. Baugh Allen, the last of the Special Pleaders; Professor
Henry Smith, the mathematician; Lord Justice Fry, and Lord Balfour of
Burleigh.
There was another man, too little and too lately known, with whom I
wanted to deal at length, for he exercised a distinct and special
influence on my life. I mean Donald Hankey, "The Student in Arms." I
had, indeed, designed to speak of him in a special chapter on the effect
of the War on my life, but that chapter did not get written, or, rather,
remains over to be written when the perspective is easier and better,
and the world has given up its last, and to me very futile and foolish,
mode of talking as if we ought to be ashamed of the War, or, at any
rate, as if we ought to treat it as an utterly tiresome subject.
Here, then, I shall say only that the essential thing about Hankey was
that he was one of the true saints of the world, or, rather, one of the
saints who matter. Yet never was there a less saintly saint. He was a
man you could talk to rationally on any subject. I, who really knew him,
would not have called him a man of the world, because it would have been
in essence misleading; but I should have quite understood someone else
saying it and should have known exactly what he meant. Not only had he
not the temper of the zealot or the fanatic, but he was a kindly man,
with no fierceness about him. Yet somehow, and this was the miracle, he
contrived to have none of the easy unction of the pushing man of
holiness who realises that if he is to succeed in accomplishing what he
wants accomplished, he must assume a certain cunning suavity of manner
which is really foreign to his character. Hankey had no pose. He was at
bottom what Walt Whitman calls a "natural and nonchalant" person, who
happened to be made all through of sweetness and light, though never the
superior person, and never, as it were, too good for this world. Not for
one moment did you find in him the chill of sanctity. In the phrase of
John Silver, "he kept company very easy."
I should imagine that confession was the very last thing that Hankey
would ever have encouraged in anyone, for it is the most debilitating of
the virtues. All the same, a penitent would have found him an
extraordinarily easy occupant of the box. He was warm-hearted,
sympathetic, and full of the victorious spirit. One felt with Hankey
that he was born for whatever was arduous. In truth he was "God's
soldier." What gives the extreme characteristic impression of Hankey is
that last vision of him set forth in a letter by the soldier who,
happening to look into a trench, saw him kneeling in prayer with his
company gathered round him, just before they went over the parapet.
If he had lived, he would, I am sure, have talked about the scene. I
never saw a man so natural and so little embarrassed in discussing such
matters as prayer or other spiritual experiences. He had in a marked
degree that absence of _mauvaise honte_ which marks the good man at
all times, in all places, in all religions, and in all races.
There is a man, now dead, who told me something which I want to record
in this very convenient chapter. His words impressed me out of all
proportion to their intrinsic importance. I feel indeed that there must
be something in them which I cannot analyse, but which makes them worth
preserving. The vitamines of food, we know, are not strictly analysable,
though their presence can be detected. No one knows of what they
consist, but, nevertheless, we know two things about them. They exist,
and they have a great influence upon metabolism. So in the food of the
mind there are vitamines which we can recognise, but not analyse, and,
therefore, cannot wholly understand. My readers, if they will look into
their own memories, will, I am sure, recall experiences of these mental
vitamines, trivial or ordinary in themselves, and yet holding a place so
clear and often indeed so vehement as to suggest that they contain some
quickening quality of their own.
The man with whom I connect certain of these vitamines of the mind was
Sir George Grove, the compiler of the _Dictionary of Music_. I did
not know him well; but, as a boy, he did me a kindly service. He
accepted the first poem of any length that I ever published. When I was
seventeen, that is a year before I went to Oxford, I sent him a poem,
alluded to in another chapter of this book, called "Love's Arrows." He
liked it and published it in _Macmillan's Magazine_, of which he
was then Editor. Macmillan's was a magazine given up to good literature,
and to get a place in it was considered no small honour.
Grove possessed a keen sense of literature, and he had known many of the
famous people of the Victorian era. True to my plan of asking questions,
I asked him whether he had ever seen Cardinal Newman. He replied by a
story which was revealing as to a certain fierceness in Newman's
character and mental configuration. In any case, it had both
rhetorically and intellectually a considerable influence on my mind.
Here is a _précis_ of our conversation.
"Did you ever see Newman?"
"Only once, and then I heard him preach."
"Was he in a big sense eloquent?"
"Yes. Though he had none of the airs and graces of the orator, he had
somehow in a high degree the power of thrilling you. I heard him in Lent
preaching in a small Roman Catholic chapel in London. He was a gaunt
figure, extremely emaciated and hollow-cheeked, with a very bad cough,
and as he stood in the pulpit, coughing hoarsely, he beat his breast
with his hand and forearm, till it sounded like the reverberation of a
huge cavernous drum." Grove went on to describe how the time was one of
great spiritual excitement in the Church of England and in the Roman
Church,--a time when people thought that Rome was going to reassert her
ascendancy over English minds. During the very week or month in which
the sermon was preached, Stanley's _Life of Arnold_ had appeared.
"At the end of that book Stanley describes how when Arnold lay dying, he
had, one evening, a very long talk with him about the Sacraments and the
part they played in the religious life. He records that conversation and
the Broad Church view of Arnold, and then tells how he rose next morning
and went to enquire as to Arnold, and how he found that Arnold had died
in the night. Newman was preaching on the old, old maxim, '_Nulla
salus extra ecclesiam_,' and dwelt, as a preacher with his views
naturally would, on the contrast between the covenanted and uncovenanted
mercies of God. Those who were in the Church were absolutely safe. For
those who could trust only to the uncovenanted mercies of God there
could be no such safety. 'But,' he went on, 'it is not for me to deal
with them and their prospects of salvation and of life eternal.' And
then, with great feeling and emotion, 'Nor shall I presume to canvass
the fate of that man who, at night, doubted the efficacy of sacramental
wine, and died in the morning.'"
Though the words, of course, had no spiritual effect on Grove, he dwelt
upon the difficulty he had in conveying the profound emotional force of
these phrases when they were spoken by this strange figure in the
pulpit. Grove need not have made any apology. He amply managed, and this
was a proof of the preacher's power, to transfer the emotion of the
moment to me. The words in the spiritual sense mean nothing to me.
Indeed, they disgust, nay, horrify me as utterly irreligious. Yet I am
bound to say that I feel, and always have felt, their emotional appeal
urgently and deeply. Here, if anywhere, are the vitamines of oratory.
Again, I should like to have had a chapter on the links of the past,
because I have been fortunate in that respect. Some of these I have
recorded in other chapters, but I should like to put on record the fact
that I actually knew and spent several days in a country house with a
lady who actually received a wedding-present from Keats and also one
from Shelley. That lady was Mrs. Proctor, the widow of Barry Cornwall,
the poet. When I first saw Mrs. Proctor, who, by the way, was well known
to my wife and Mrs. Simpson, she was a fellow-guest with me and my wife
at a house-party at the Grant-Duffs'. Though, I suppose, nearly ninety
years old at that time (it was three or four years before her death),
there was not a trace of extreme old age in her talk. She was neither
deaf nor blind, but enjoyed life to the full. She did not seem even to
suffer from physical weakness, but was capable of hours of sustained
talk. She had known everybody worth knowing in the literary world and
had vivid recollections of them. For example, besides mentioning the
wedding-presents from Keats and Shelley, she was also proud to remember
that she had received a present from the murderer, Wainwright, Lamb's
friend,--who wrote under the name of Janus Weathercock--the man who
insured his step-daughter's life and then poisoned her. Owing to the
extraordinary way in which things were arranged in those days, the
murderer, though found guilty, had his sentence commuted to
transportation--apparently as a kind of recognition of his literary
ability.
Oddly enough, this was not the only time that accident put me in touch
with this singular and sinister figure,--the man too who first talked
about the psychological interest of colours and cared, as Mrs. Proctor
said, for strange-looking pots and pieces of china. My friend Willie
Arnold told me that when his mother was a girl, or a young married
woman, I forgot which, in Tasmania, she had her picture drawn by a
convict, and that convict was the celebrated Wainwright. According to
Willie Arnold, his character was not supposed to be of the best even in
those days, and great care was taken that during the sittings someone
else should always be in the room!
Another link with the past, which is worth recording, is that I knew
well a man, Sir Charles Murray, who told me that he had seen Byron. When
I cross-questioned him, he told me something that I think must have been
an error of memory. He said it was at a ball in Paris that he saw the
poet. Now, I feel pretty sure that Byron never was in Paris. In the
earlier part of his life he could not have got there because of the war,
and after the peace, as we all know, he began his travels at Antwerp,
and journeyed up the Rhine into Switzerland and then crossed the Alps by
the Simplon into Italy.
Perhaps, however, my most sensational link with the past was as follows.
When I first came into Surrey, the old Lord Lovelace--the man who
married Byron's daughter, and who built Horsley Towers--was still alive
and could be seen, as I saw him, driving about our Surrey lanes in a
pony-chaise. Lord Lovelace is reported to have made the following entry
in his diary about the year 1810, that is, when he was a boy some ten or
twelve years old--"Today I dined with the old Lord Onslow [a neighbour
then, presumably, of about ninety years of age], and heard him say that
as a boy he had known one of the Cromwellian troopers--Captain
Augustine--who was on guard round the scaffold when Charles I was
executed."
Oddly enough, I have another link with the Cromwellian Wars. I remember,
some forty years ago, my uncle, Sir Charles Cave, of whom I am glad to
say I can speak in the present tense, told me that he was shooting on
one of his farms below Lansdowne, the hill that rises above Bath. The
tenant of the land was a very old farmer, and he informed my uncle that
his grandmother, who lived to a great age, but whom he had just known as
a boy, used to say that she remembered how, when a girl, the soldiers
came into the village after the Battle of Lansdowne and took every loaf
of bread out of the place.
An even more personal link with the past was afforded by my mother's
aunt, Miss Sykes, and my great-aunt. She had seen George III walking on
the terrace at Windsor, old, blind, and mad, with his family and
courtiers curtseying to those poor blind eyes and vacant wits every time
he turned in his constitutional. Another of her recollections, however,
was far more thrilling to me as a lad. Miss Sykes, sister of my mother's
mother, belonged to a naval family, and her mother's sister had married
Admiral Byron, the seaman uncle of the poet. Therefore, Byron and Miss
Sykes were in that unnamed relationship, or pseudo-relationship, which
belongs to those who have an aunt or an uncle in common. It happened
that my aunt was on a visit to the Byrons when the poet's body, which
was consigned to the Admiral, was brought to London. The Admiral, who
lived near Windsor, posted up to receive the barrel of spirits in which
the remains were preserved. When he returned from his gruesome visit the
ladies of his family, and none more so than my aunt, then a girl of
fifteen or sixteen, were very anxious to know what he had seen and what
the remains of the most-talked-of man in the Europe of his day looked
like. "What did he look like, my dear? He looked like an alligator,"
said the Admiral, who did not mince his words. It is strange that men
should prefer to put their kin in what, in the naval records after
Trafalgar, is called "a pickle" rather than give them a burial at sea or
in "some corner of a foreign field"! But on such matters there can be no
argument. It is a matter of feeling, not of reasoning.
So much for unwritten chapters and unwritten books, though, perhaps, I
ought to add a postscript upon the writing of memoirs, describing how
pleasant, though arduous a task it is. At any rate, it has proved so in
my case. I began these memoirs with the feeling that, though it was
quite worth while to record my part in the general adventure of living,
I must expect that, even if I were to contrive to give pleasure to my
readers, the part of the writer must be hard, laborious, and ungrateful.
"Why," I asked myself, "should I munch for others the remainder biscuit
of life?" Yet, strange to say, what I had looked forward to almost with
dread, turned out to be by far the pleasantest literary experience of my
life. I have never been one of those people who dislike writing, or find
it, as some people do, agonising; but I was not in the least prepared to
find how pleasant it could be to dive into the depths of memory and let,
what the author of the anonymous Elizabethan play, _Nero_, calls
"the grim churl" of memory lead you through the labyrinth of the past.
But, though the path was pleasant, nay, exhilarating and stimulating, I
must confess to the fact that I have had no psychological experiences,
regrets, or disillusionments. I have had no temptation to write as to
the shortness and precariousness of human existence, or to reflect how
base I had found mankind, or, again, to deplore the past, curse the
present, and dread the future. Life to me, in looking back, seems on the
whole a very natural and simple show. No one, in one sense, feels more
strongly than I do that we are being swept along by the mighty current
of a vast river, without any clearer indication of what is the outlet of
the river than of what is its source. But though these things may be an
excuse for a great deal of rhetoric, they somehow seem to me, if I may
use the word again, natural and non-inflammatory. It is far easier to
trust what those who, liking the vagueness of theology, call "the larger
hope," but which I should be content to call plainly the mercy of God--a
mercy which I, for one, make bold to say I would rather have
uncovenanted than covenanted. Covenanted mercies are a kind of thing
which may do very well at an insurance office or for business purposes,
but they are not the mercies one would ever dream of asking for or
accepting from an earthly father. Then how can one dare to speak of them
in the same breath with God?
"But this," I hear some readers say, "is the illusion of faith and has
nothing of the permanence of fact." Well, I, for one, am content to rest
on faith, honest and instinctive. Faith, to my mind, is a fact and a
very palpable fact,--a fact as vital as any of the other great
incommensurables and insolubles of our existence.
If I am asked to treat of the river, or rather, the ocean of life and
the adventure of its voyage in terms that will satisfy those not
fortunate enough to have faith, let me commend to them that memorable
dream set forth by that most honest and exact of agnostics as of
jurists, Mr. Justice Stephen. The dream, published some fifty years ago,
is as noble a piece of literature as it is a monument of intellectual
insight.
I dreamt [he says, after Bunyan's fashion] that I was in the cabin of a
ship, handsomely furnished and lighted. A number of people were
expounding the objects of the voyage and the principles of navigation.
They were contradicting each other eagerly, but each maintained that the
success of the voyage depended absolutely upon the adoption of his own
plan. The charts to which they appealed were in many places confused and
contradictory. They said that they were proclaiming the best of news,
but the substance of it was that when we reached port most of us would
be thrown into a dungeon and put to death by lingering torments. Some,
indeed, would receive different treatment; but they could not say why,
though all agreed in extolling the wisdom and mercy of the Sovereign of
the country. Saddened and confused I escaped to the deck, and found
myself somehow enrolled in the crew. The prospect was unlike the
accounts given in the cabin. There was no sun; we had but a faint
starlight, and there were occasionally glimpses of land and of what
might be lights on shore, which yet were pronounced by some of the crew
to be mere illusions. They held that the best thing to be done was to
let the ship drive as she would, without trying to keep her on what was
understood to be her course. For the strangest thing on that strange
ship was the fact that there was such a course. Many theories were
offered about this, none quite satisfactory; but it was understood that
the ship was to be steered due north. The best and bravest and wisest of
the crew would dare the most terrible dangers, even, from their
comrades, to keep her on her course. Putting these things together, and
noting that the ship was obviously framed and equipped for the voyage, I
could not help feeling that there was a port somewhere, though I doubted
the wisdom of those who professed to know all about it. I resolved to do
my duty, in the hope that it would turn out to have been my duty, and I
then felt that there was something bracing in the mystery by which we
were surrounded, and that, at all events, ignorance honestly admitted
and courageously faced, and rough duty vigorously done, was far better
than the sham knowledge and the bitter quarrels of the sickly cabin and
glaring lamplight from which I had escaped.
Was there ever a nobler parable more nobly expressed? It may well end
the last page of the last chapter of _The Adventure of Living_.
_Academy, The_, 182
Adams, John, 72
Advocate journalism, 319-320
Ainger, Canon, 18, 22
Alps, 482-483
America, iv, 313
American Civil War, 90-92, 444-446
American journalists, 326-342
Americans, 326
Anonymity, 320-322
Antwerp, Siege of, 64
Arnold, Dr., 489
Arnold, Matthew, 283-285
Arnold, Willie, 284, 491
Arthurian legend, 98-100
_Asia and Europe_, 231
Asquith, Herbert, 12, 17, 328-329, 334, 452, 453, 454
Aubers Ridge, 349
Autobiography, 27-28
BAGEHOT, WALTER, 184-186
Bailleul, 344
Balfour, Lord, 401, 407
Barbellion's diary, 4
Barnes, Rev. William, 19-22
Bazaine, Marshal, 99, 101-102
Beaconsfield, Lord, 256, 387
Beautiful human beings, 478-481
Bedford, Duke of, 250
Beeching, Dean, 171-175, 200-204
_Beggar's Opera, The_, 182
Bell, Mr. Edward Price, 333
Berlioz, 80 Blenheim, 113
Brown, Mr. Curtis, 333
Browne, Sir Thomas, 3, 105, 481
Browning, Robert, 25, 285-289
Browning, imitation of, 132-133
Buckmaster, Lord, 336, 337
Bullen, F.T., 213-215
Buller, Charles, 48
Burke, 48,70,71
Byron, Admiral, 493
Byron, Lord, 124,254, 266,492-493
CAIRO, iv Callimachus, 47-48
Camelot, 99
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry,305
Campion, Thomas, 62-63
Capes, Bernard, 221
Carlyle, 48-49
Caste, 240-241
Cat, _Spectator_, 22, 24
Chamberlain, Mrs., 385-386
Chamberlain, Austen, 386
Chamberlain, Miss Beatrice, 389
Chamberlain, Joseph, 380-389,397-398
Chamberlain, Neville, 380
Chamois, 481-482
Charles I., 492
Cheap cottages, 402
Chicago riots, 418
Cicero, 157
Classics, 153, 161, 476
City Companies, 388-389
Civil War, 65
Clive, 66-70
Clough's _Amours de Voyage_, 86
Colvin, Mr. Ian, 228
_Conversations and Journals in Egypt_,280-281
_Conversations with the Statesmen of the Third Empire_, 277
Crabbe, 125
Cromer, Lord, 159, 308, 365-380,394,409
Cross, Sir Richard, 59
Curtis, Byron, 191-192
Damascus, iii Death, 58
De La Mare, Mr. Walter, 215-219
Delane, 313 Democracy, 425-433
Devonshire, Duke of, 11, 397-409
Devonshire, Elizabeth, Duchess of 272
Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of, 272
Dibdin, 364 Dicey, E. and A., 182-183
"Dickybush," 345
_Dictionary of National Biography_, 196
_Digitalis_, 235
Donne and William Strachey, 61
Dream of my son's death, 88-89
Dream, Mr. Justice Stephen's, 495-496
Economics, 163-167
_Economist, The_, 183-184
_Edinburgh Review_, 194
Ely, Lady, 183-190
_English Constitution, The_, 185
Erskine, 49
Faith, 494-496
Fayum, the, iv Fisher, Mr. Joseph, 192
_'48_, 262-265
Fouche, 260-262
Free Exchange, 163-167
French Revolution, 3
Friendship, 363-365
Furnes, 357
Gambetta, 101
Garden City, 402-403
Gay, 182
George III., 73, 492
George, Lloyd, 263, 452, 454
German Ambassador, 393
Germany, 452-454
Gibbon, 272
Gifoon, Ali Effendi, 205-208
Gladstone, Mr., 11, 92, 186, 187, 304
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 131-132
Granville, Lord, quotes _Spectator_ article, 16-17
Graves, Mr. C. L., 193, 214
Green, Professor T. H., 102, 140-141
Grenville, George, 67
Grove, Sir George, 488-490
_Gulliver's Travels_, review of, 5-7
Hadspen House, 18-19
Haig, Lord, 352
Hankey, Donald, 486-487
Hartington, Lord, 11, 397-409
Harvey, William, 478
Hastings, Lady Flora, 254
Hastings, Warren, 70-71
Hay, Colonel John, 390-397, 4I3-418
Hayward, Abraham, 257
"Head Munky" letter, 73-74
Hekekyan Bey, 280-281
Henry of Prussia, Prince, 392-393
"Highbury," 385-386
Hobhouse, Henry, 18
Hodges, Captain Thomas, 63-64
Hutton, 4, 8, 22-23, 223-225
Illness, 58
Imperialism, 300-312
Indian spindle, 481
Ingpen, Mr., 215
Inscriptions, 475
_Ionica_, author of, 48
Ireland, 441-447
Irving, Edward, 48-49
_Isolement_, 80-88
Jahoni, iii, 479
Jerusalem, v Johnstone, 183-186
Jones, Sir William, 47-48
Journalism, 25-26
Jowett, Dr., 144-146, 148-149, 255
Judicial journalism, 319
"Junius," 105-107
Keats, 490-491
Kemmel, 344
Kerrere, El, 211-212
Khedive, 368-369
Kitchener, Lord, 212
Lamartine, 262-265
Landor, W. S., 285-288
Lansdowne, Battle of, 492
Leader-writer, the, 294-296
Leaker's, Mrs., Autobiography, 113-116
Liberal Party, split in (1886), 11-14, 400
_Liberal Unionist, The_, 193, 400
Life, 493-496
Lincoln, Abraham, n, 91, 390-391,395,410,444-446
London, first year in, 5, 6
Lovelace, Lord, 492
_Love's Arrows_, introduction to, 137-138
Lushington, Dr., 290
MACKAIL, 174-175
McMahon, Marshal, 101
Machell, Captain, 207-209
Mallet, Sir Bernard, 7, 162-170
Mallet, Sir Louis, 266-267
Mallet, Stephen, 7
Marshalls of the Lakes, 54
Martial, 51
Martin, Mr. Roy, 333, 336-337
Masaniello, 47
Maurice, Frederick, 50
Mehemet Ali, 280-282
Melville, Herman, 213
Milton, 109
_Moby Dick_, 213
Mohl, M. and Mme., 255
Monarchy, 434-437
Mont des Cats, Le, 348-349
Moore, Sir John, 273
Moore, Thomas, no Morley, Lord, 181
Mother, my, 52-58
Mudford, 186
Murray, Sir Charles, 491
NAPIER, SIR CHARLES, 280-281
Naples, 47
Napoleon I., 76,270-271
Napoleon III., 206
Nassau-Senior, 253, 275-283
Needham, Mr., 340-341
Negro-lynching, 419-420
Nettleship, Professor, 102
Newbolt, Sir Henry, 52
Newlands Corner, 473-474
Newlands Corner Hospital, 466-473
Newman, Cardinal, 488-489
Newspaper proprietorship, 323
New York, iv Nore, Mutiny of the, 112
Novel, unfinished, 177
_Observer, The_, 182
Onslow, Lord, 492
Otranto, Duke of, 260-262
PAGE, AMBASSADOR, 460
_Pages from a Private Diary_, 200-204
_Pall Mall, The_, 182
Parliament Act, 455
Parody, 174-175
Party system, 438-440
Patmore, Coventry, 126
Peacock, 49
Peyronnet, Mme. de, 255, 258-262
_Poems in the Devonshire Dialect_, 19-22
Pollock, Sir Frederick, quoted, 23
Pope, the, 421-422
Pope, Alexander, 125-127, 404
Poperinghe, 345-346
Power of the Press, 325
Pozieres, 353
"President's Cabinet," the, 412
Press-gangs, 115
Pritchard, Mr. Hesketh, 221
Private school, 121-122
Private secretaries, 394-396
Proctor, Mrs., 490
Protection, 449-450
Publicity, 250-251, 313-318
Pusey, Dr., 143
_Quarterly Review, The_, 194
RACINE, 259, 476
Reeve, Henry, 194, 282
Religious views, my father's, 50-51
Religious views, my, 476-477
Renan, 141, 154-155
Rennell-Rodd, Sir, 174
Rhodes, Cecil, 301-311
Robinson, Crabbe, 49
Robinson, Mrs. Douglas, 420
Rogers, Samuel, 276
Roosevelt, President, 409-423
Russell, Lord Arthur, 253, 266-274
Russell, Lord John, 270-271
Russell, Lord Odo, 255
Russell, Lady William, 254, 484
SADOWA, 93, 231
St. Vincent de Paul, Institute of,354-356
Salisbury, Lord, 187, 404
_Saturday Review_, 4, 181
Scherpenberg, the, 344-348
Schnadhorst, 304-305
Secrecy, 290-293
_Sejanus_, 60
Shakespeare, 108-109, 124
Shakespeare and William Strachey, 59-60
Shelburne, Lord, 71
Shelley, 491
Shenstone, 151-152
Shepherdess, 360-362
Simpson, Mrs., 253, 266, 276-277
Simpson, Mr., 289-293
Sligo, Lord, 256
Sligo, Lady, 257, 258, 262-265
Smith, Mr. George, 195-199, 216
Smith, Reginald, 198,216
Smith, Sydney, 276
Social revolution, 461-463
Socialism, 163-167
Somersetshire farmer, 96-98
Soudanese Soldier, Memoirs of a., 204-212
Spluegen, iv Standard, The, 182 186-190
Stanley, Dean, 489
Stanley of Alderney, Lady, 266
Stephen, Mr. Justice, 495-496
Stephen, Leslie, 196, 288
Strachey, Mrs. A., 466-469
Strachey, Sir Edward, 33-35, 41-43
Strachey, Lady, 52-58
Strachey, Sir Henry, 41, 66-74, 365
Strachey, 2nd Sir Henry, 33, 47, 75
Strachey, John, the friend of Locke, 38-39
Strachey, Mr. Lytton, 372
Strachey, William (friend of Ben Jonson), 38, 59-63
Strachey, William (the "Snark"), 484
Student in Arms, A, 486-487
Suffolk, Lord, 54 Supernatural, 116-118
Surrey Guides, 474
Sutton Court, Somerset, 29-36, 39
Sutton, Sir Walter de, 32
Swinburne, 110
Sykes, Miss, 493
Symonds, Dr., 56-57
TACITUS, 258, 261, 262, 279
Talleyrand, 271, 314
Tariff Reform, 448-451
Tattersall's, 122
Taxpayer, 378
Tempest, The, 59
Terrorists, 259
Thackeray, 291
Thiers, 278
Tocqueville, 255
Townsend, Meredith, 4, 8, 9, 22-24, 225-252
UNCLES, SOME, 483-484
Unionist Party, formation of, 11
VEAL, ISRAEL, 33
Venables, Mr. George, and Barnes, 21
Venus of Milo, 107-108
Versailles, 71-72
Victoria, Queen, 187-191
Virgil, 20, 361
Virginia Company, 59-63
Virginibus Puerisque, 197
WAINWRIGHT, 491
Waldegrave, Lady, 54, 57, 123
Waller, 131
War, the Great, 326, 457-463
War Hospital, 466-473
Warren, Sir Herbert, 102
Waterloo, 93-96, 114
Weathercock, Janus, 491
Wellington, Duke of, 25, 95-96
Western Virginia, 444-445
Whig traditions, 36-38, 433-434
White House, 410
Whitman, Walt, 86-87
Wilson, President, 340
Woak Hill, 19-20
Wood, General Leonard, 415
Wordsworth, William, 80-81, 84-86, 107, 282
Wotton, Sir Henry, 61
Wyndham, George, 186-187
YPRES, 345-347, 353-354
Yser, 357-358
End of Project Gutenberg's The Adventure of Living, by John St. Loe Strachey