WINTER SOCIETY AT TORQUAY
Early Acquaintance with Society--Byron's Grandson--Lord
Houghton--A Dandy of the Old School--Carlyle--Lord Lytton, and
Others--Memorable Ladies
Of the men--the noteworthy men--with whom I thus became acquainted
before I had escaped from the torture of my last examination at Oxford,
most had a taste for literature, while some had achieved renown in it.
Of these, however, the first with whom I became intimate was one whose
literary connections were vicarious rather than personal. My friendship
with him originated in the fact that he was an old friend of the
Froudes, and, as soon as Chelston Cross was completed, he would pay them
protracted visits there. This was the then Lord Wentworth, who for me
was a magical being because he was Byron's grandson. Another
acquaintance who brought with him a subtle aroma of poetry was
Wentworth's remarkable brother-in-law, Wilfrid Blunt, then the
handsomest of our younger English diplomatists, a breeder of Arab
horses, and also the author of love poems which deserve beyond all
comparison more attention than they have yet received. Others again were
Robert Browning, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Swinburne. These I met either at
Oxford or in London, but to those whom I came to know through the
William Froudes at Torquay may be added Aubrey de Vere, the Catholic
poet of Ireland, Lord Houghton, Lord Lytton, the novelist, and the
second Lord Lytton, his son, known to all lovers of poetry under the
pseudonym of "Owen Meredith." As figures then prominent in the winter
society of Torquay, I may mention also a courtly cleric, the Rev. Julian
Young, a great diner out and giver of dinners to the great, a raconteur
of the first order, a very complete re-embodiment of the spirit of
Sidney Smith, and, further, an old Mr. Bevan, who, sixty years before,
when he occupied a house in Stratton Street, had flourished as an
Amphitryon and a dandy under the patronage of the Prince Regent.
Of the ladies of Torquay who, together with men like these, were
prominent in my social landscape as I to-day recollect it, it is less
easy to speak, partly because they were more numerous, and partly
because many of them impressed me in more elusive ways. I may, however,
mention a few of them who were well known as hostesses--the Dowager Lady
Brownlow, Mrs. Vivian, Lady Erskine of Cambo, Lady Louisa Finch-Hatton,
Miss Burdett-Coutts, and Susan, Lady Sherborne. All these ladies were
the occupants of spacious houses the doors of which were guarded by
skillfully powdered footmen, and which, winter after winter, were so
many social centers. Lady Sherborne, indeed, was far more than a
hostess: she was unrivaled as a singer of simple English songs--songs
which her low voice filled with every trouble of which the human heart
is capable; and as such she was, under a thin disguise, celebrated by
the first Lord Lytton in one of his latest novels. To these ladies might
be added innumerable others whose claims on my memory do not in all
cases lend themselves to very exact statement. Most of them were
English, and some of them, then in the bloom of youth and beauty, have
between that time and this played their parts in the London world and
ended them. But not a few were foreign--vivacious Northerners from New
York, with the sublimated wealth of all Paris in their petticoats;
Southerners whose eyes were still plaintive with memories of the Civil
War; Austrians such as the von Hugels; Germans such as Countess Marie
and Countess Helen Bismarck; and Russians whose figures and faces I
remember much more accurately than their names.
It is idle, however, to say more of these, whose charms are with the
last year's snows. And yet of these there were two of whom I may, for
purposes of illustration, say something in detail. The two were
sisters--we may call them Miss X and Miss Y--whose invalid father, a
cadet of a well-known family, rarely left Torquay, where for some months
of the year his daughters, otherwise emancipated from parental control,
stayed with him. Both of these sisters were beautiful, and, so far as
the resident ladies of Torquay were concerned, they received what is
incomparably the sincerest form of homage that extraordinary beauty can
elicit from ladies who do not possess it. Each of them was labeled as
possessing that mysterious thing called "a history," or a shadow on her
reputation of some sort, which my imagination, as soon as I heard of it
(I was then about sixteen), turned into a halo iridescent with the
colors of romance. For me, in Swinburne's words, they were "daughters of
dreams and of stories" before I knew either by sight, or had any
prospect of doing so. Dreams, except unpleasant ones, do not often
fulfill themselves, but an exception to this rule was one day made in my
favor.
As I was going home for my holidays from Littlehampton to Devonshire, my
compartment at Eastleigh Junction was invaded by a feminine apparition,
accompanied by a French poodle, which she placed on the cushion opposite
to her. Her dress, though I divined its perfection, was quiet and plain
enough; but the compartment, as soon as she entered it, seemed to be
filled at once with the kind of fugitive flash which sunlit water
sometimes casts on a ceiling. Acting, I suppose, on the principle of
"Love me, love my dog," I had the temerity to express a commendation,
entirely insincere, of hers; and this being received with a graciousness
not perhaps unmixed with amusement, we were very soon in conversation.
She talked of Nice, of Baden-Baden, and London; then she got to
literature--I cannot remember how--and a moment later she was
vouchsafing to me the intimate information that she was a poetess, and
had contributed an anonymous poem to a certain lately published
collection. Then, having caught my name on a printed label, she said,
with a smile, "Is it possible that you are on your way to Torquay?" I
answered that I should be there shortly, and, while elaborating this
proposition, I managed to inspect the French poodle's collar, on which
was engraved the name of the fair owner. In a flash the personality of
this "daughter of dreams" was disclosed to me. This was Miss X, the most
talked about of the two wonderful sisters. As I gathered that she
herself would be soon at Torquay likewise, I tried, when she got out at
some intermediate station, to express a hope that, if we met in the
street, she would not have wholly forgotten me; but my modesty would not
allow me to find adequate words. On the Parade, however, at Torquay, a
fortnight later we did meet. She at once welcomed me with a laugh as
though I were an old acquaintance, and my intimacy with her lasted so
long, and to so much practical purpose, that it wrung from me at last a
poem of which the concluding lines were these:
Pause not to count the cost;
Think not, or all is lost--
Fly thou with me.
But the "incident," in parliamentary language, was soon afterward
"closed," partly because of her marriage to a very sensible husband,
and partly because, having become acquainted with her sister, I began to
look on the sister as the more romantic figure of the two.
The most successful rival, however, to the excitements of young romance
is to be found by some natures in the more complex stimulations of
society. In these the feminine element plays a conspicuous part; but a
part no less conspicuous is that played by the masculine. Moreover, as
the object of the social passion, unlike that of the romantic, is not
identified with the vagaries of any one individual, society for those
who court it is a corporation that never dies. It is for each individual
what no one individual ever can be--namely, a challenge to faculties or
acquirements which are coextensive with life. I will, therefore, turn
from Miss X, and the lines in which I suggested an elopement with her as
a project desirable for both of us, to some of the male celebrities
whose names I have just mentioned, and describe how they impressed me
when I first made their acquaintance.
Of the well-known visitors who wintered at Torquay none was more
punctual in his appearance than Lord Houghton, who found an annual home
there in the house of two maiden aunts. Through these long-established
residents he had for years been familiar with my family, and from the
first occasion on which I met him he exhibited a friendship almost
paternal for myself. Lord Houghton was a man who, as Dryden said of
Shadwell, would have been the wittiest writer in the world if his books
had been equal to his conversation. Certainly nothing which he wrote, or
which a biographer has written about him, gives any idea of the gifts--a
very peculiar mixture--which made him a marked figure in any company
which his ubiquitous presence animated. He knew everybody of note in the
fashionable and semifashionable world, and many who belonged to neither,
such as the Tichborne Claimant, and Calcraft, the common hangman; and
his views of life, from whatever point he looked at it, were expressed
with a weighty brilliance or a subcynical humor. One day when lunching
at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had
ever been, a Mason. "No," said Lord Houghton, "no. I have throughout my
life been the victim of every possible superstition. I am always
wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting
at dinner by the celebrated Lady E---- of T----, who was indulging in a
long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation.
"When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my
feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of
your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes told me
of a perplexing situation in which he had once found himself, and of how
he sought counsel about it from Lord Houghton, his kinsman. Gaskell's
difficulty was this. A friend for whom he was acting as trustee had,
without imposing on him any legal obligations in the matter, begged him
with his dying breath to carry out certain instructions. These seemed to
Gaskell extremely unwise, and objectionable, "and yet," he said to Lord
Houghton, "of course a peculiar sanctity attaches, itself to dying
wishes. What would you do in such a situation as mine?" For a little
while Lord Houghton reflected, and then answered, with an air of grave
detachment, "I always tell my family totally to disregard everything I
say during the last six months of my life."
Of his social philosophy otherwise he gave me in the days of my youth
many pithy expositions, with hints as to what I should do when I entered
the world myself. One of his pieces of advice was especially appropriate
to Torquay. This was to make the acquaintance of old Mr. Bevan, a
lifelong intimate of his own. Accordingly my introduction to this
mysterious personage was accomplished.
Mr. Bevan lived in a large villa close to that which was occupied by
Miss Burdett-Coutts. Its discreetly shuttered windows, like so many
half-closed eyelids, gave, when viewed externally, the impression that
it was asleep or tenantless; but to ring the front-door bell was to
dissipate this impression immediately. The portals seemed to open by
clockwork. Heavy curtains were withdrawn by servitors half seen in the
twilight, and the visitors were committed to the care of an Austrian
groom of the chambers, who, wearing the aspect of a king who had
stepped out of the Almanach de Gotha, led the way over soundless carpets
to a library. This was furnished with a number of deep armchairs; and I
recollect how, on the first occasion of my entering it, each of these
chairs was monopolized by a drowsy Persian cat. For a moment, the light
being dim, these cats, so it seemed to me, were the sole living things
present; but a second later I was aware that a recumbent figure was
slowly lifting itself from a sofa. This was Mr. Bevan. His attire was a
blue silk dressing-gown, a youthfully smart pair of black-and-white
check trousers, varnished boots, and a necktie with a huge pearl pin in
it, the pearl itself representing the forehead of a human skull. His
hands were like ivory, his face was like a clear-cut cameo. With the aid
of a gold-headed cane that had once belonged to Voltaire he gently
evicted a cat, so that I might occupy the chair next to him, and said,
in the language of Brummell's time, that he was "monstrous glad to see
me." He pointed to objects of interest which adorned his walls and
tables, such as old French fashion-plates of ladies in very scanty
raiment; to musical clocks, of which several were presents from crowned
heads; to sketches by d'Orsay, and to framed tickets for Almack's.
"Whenever the dear lady next door," he said, with a glance at the
seminudities of the French fashion-plates, and alluding to Miss
Burdett-Coutts, "comes to have a dish of tea with me, I have to lock
those things up. I fear," he said, presently, "I'm in a shocking bad
odor with her now." Only last night, he explained, he had received from
one of the French Rothschilds a magnificent _pate de foie gras_; and,
having himself no parties in prospect, he sent this gastronomical
treasure to Miss Coutts, who was about to entertain, as he knew, a large
company at luncheon. There was one thing, however, which he did not
know--the luncheon was to be given to the members of a certain society
which had for its object the protection of edible animals from any form
of treatment by which they might be needlessly incommoded. What, then,
were the feelings of the hostess when she suddenly discovered that a
dish which, with Mr. Bevan's compliments, had been solemnly placed
before her was the most atrocious of all the abominations which the
company had assembled to denounce! "It was sent back to me," said Mr.
Bevan, "as though it were the plague in person. It's a pity that you and
I can't eat it together. I'd ask you to dinner if only I were sure of my
new cook. My last cook was with me for twenty years. Shall I tell you
what he wrote in a letter when he had left me to join the army during
the Franco-German War? 'Alas! monsieur,' he said, 'I must now make
sorties instead of _entrees_.'" The banquet, however, which Mr. Bevan
had suggested--and it was followed by others--took place before many
days were over. The guests numbered eight or nine. I cannot recollect
who they were; but the cooking, the wines, and the decorations of the
table would have satisfied Ouida herself. The china, covered with royal
crowns, was a gift from Louis Philippe. The wines, of which the names
and dates were murmured by the servants who dispensed them, seemed all
to have come from the cellars of a Rothschild or an Austrian emperor,
while every dish was a delicacy unique in its composition and flavor,
the last of them being a sort of "trifle," which the artistry of a
_chef_ had converted into the form of a pope's tiara. Mr. Bevan, in
short, was a model of the ultrafastidious man of the world as he figures
in the novels of Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. I mentioned this impression
of him some time afterward to Lord Houghton, and he said: "There's a
very good reason for it. When Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli entered the
London world, Mr. Bevan was one of their earliest friends. He privately
helped Disraeli in social and other ways. To him Bulwer Lytton owed his
first personal knowledge of the then world of the dandies; and Mr.
Bevan," said Lord Houghton, "was the actual model from which, by both
these writers, their pictures of the typical man of the world were
drawn."
My acquaintance with Mr. Bevan, however, and even that with Lord
Houghton, were but minor experiences as compared with another meeting of
a similar yet contrasted kind. At the time of which I speak there was
one British author whose influence as a philosophic moralist eclipsed
that of any of his contemporaries. This writer was Carlyle. His fame
was then at its highest, and the moral consciousness of ultrapolite
drawing rooms was being stirred to its well-dressed depths by his attack
on "the dandies" in his book, _Sartor Resartus_, which many earnest and
ornamental persons were accepting as a new revelation. I was myself
sufficiently familiar with its pages, and, though some of them roused my
antagonism, I could not deny their genius. One morning, during a brief
visit to London, I received a note from Mr. Froude the historian, asking
me to come to luncheon, and I duly arrived at his house, not knowing
what awaited me. I presently learned that he was going to introduce me
to Carlyle, and, as soon as luncheon was over, he walked me off to
Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great
philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping
over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his
back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty
dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his
integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt,
unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his first act was to move
across the room to the fireplace and light a "churchwarden" pipe by
sticking its head between the bars. As I watched him perform this rite,
I noticed that close to the fender was a pair of very dirty slippers. To
me these things and proceedings were so many separate shocks, the
result of my reflections being this: If you represent fame, let me
represent obscurity. But worse was still to come. It was presently
proposed that we should all go out for a walk, and as soon as we were in
the open air, the philosopher blew his nose in a pair of old woolen
gloves. I here saw at once an illustration of the chapter in _Sartor
Resartus_ in which the author denounced what he christened "The Sect of
the Dandies," as described and glorified by Bulwer Lytton in _Pelham_.
Illustration could go no farther.
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE]
The very next famous man whom I met after this glimpse of Carlyle I met
a little later at Torquay. The famous man was Lord Lytton himself. He
was dining at Chelston Cross, and, owing to some lady's defection, I was
actually his nearest neighbor. I saw in him everything which the spirit
of Carlyle hated. I saw in him everything which was then in my opinion
admirable. All the arts of appearance, conversation, and demeanor which
in Carlyle were aggressively absent were in him exhibited in a manner
perhaps even too apparent. I was indeed, despite my reverence for him,
faintly conscious myself that his turquoise shirt stud, set with
diamonds, was too large, and that his coat would have been in better
taste had the cuffs not been of velvet. But it seemed to me that from
his eyes, keen, authoritative, and melancholy, all the passions, all the
intellect, and all the experiences of the world were peering. To have
sat by him was an adventure; to have been noticed by him was not far
from a sacrament.
Before very long, and likewise at Chelston Cross, I became acquainted
with his son, "Owen Meredith," afterward Viceroy of India. Having heard
that, like him, I was touched with the fever of the Muses, he at once
showed me signs of an amity which ended only with his life. Treating me
as though I were a man of the same age as himself, he would take my arm,
when wandering in the Froudes' shrubberies, and describe to me the poems
to the production of which his future years would be consecrated, or ask
me to confide to him my corresponding ambitions in return. Like most
poets, he was not without personal vanities; but never was a man more
free from anything like jealousy of a rival. To praise others was a
pleasure to him as natural as that of being praised himself.
To some of the celebrities associated with my youthful days I was
introduced, as I have said already, not at Torquay, but at Oxford. There
was one, however, whom, though essentially an Oxonian, I first met at
Torquay. This was Jowett, the renowned Master of Balliol, to whose
college I was destined to be subsequently either a disgrace or ornament.
Jowett was frequently at Torquay, having a sister who lived there, and
he was specially asked to luncheon at Chelston Cross to inspect me and
see how I should pass muster as one of his own disciples. His blinking
eyes, the fresh pink of his cheeks, his snow-white hair, and the
birdlike treble of his voice, have been often enough described, and I
will only say of them here that, when he took me for a walk in the
garden, I subconsciously felt them--I cannot tell why--to be formidable.
He inquired as to my tastes and interests with a species of curt
benignity; but to my interest in poetry he exhibited a most
disconcerting indifference, and I felt during the whole of our interview
that I was walking with a mild east wind. In this he was a marked
contrast to Ruskin, Robert Browning, and certain others--especially to
"Owen Meredith"--men between whom and myself there was at once some
half-conscious bond. There are no estrangements so elusive, and yet so
insuperable, as those which arise from subtle discords in temperament.
And yet in certain individual acts, to which I shall refer presently,
Jowett treated me, when I was safely settled at Oxford, with much
sympathetic good nature. But these and other Oxford experiences shall be
reserved for another chapter.