greater prominence to the Union Society than, we think, is consistent
with the facts. It might easily be argued, after reading it, that the
three Cambridge undergraduates had been selected by the Society to
represent it. This exaggeration of the part played by the Union was
perhaps only natural on an occasion when the speaker must have felt
almost bound to magnify the influence of that Society on all departments
of Cambridge life. After mentioning Arthur Hallam and Sunderland, he
says:
‘It was in company with Mr Sunderland and Arthur Hallam that I formed
part of a deputation sent from the Union of Cambridge to the Union of
Oxford; and what do you think we went about? Why, we went to assert the
right of Mr Shelley to be considered a greater poet than Lord Byron. At
that time we in Cambridge were all very full of Mr Shelley. We had
printed the _Adonais_ for the first time in England, and a friend of
ours suggested that as Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, and
greatly ill-treated, it would be a very grand thing for us to go to
Oxford and raise a debate upon his character and powers. So, with full
permission of the authorities[82] we went....
We had a very interesting debate ... but we were very much shocked, and
our vanity was not a little wounded, to find that nobody at Oxford knew
anything about Mr Shelley. In fact, a considerable number of our
auditors believed that it was Shenstone, and said that they only knew
one poem of his, beginning, “My banks are all furnished with bees.” We
hoped, however, that our apostolate was of some good...[83].’
Sir Francis Doyle is provokingly brief in his account of the
performances of his Cambridge allies. Sunderland, he tells us, ‘spoke
with great effect, though scarcely, I believe, with the same fire that
he often put forth on more congenial subjects. Then followed Hallam,
with equal if not superior force.’ Of Milnes he says but little. After
recounting the discomfiture of a speaker from Oriel, who while
declaiming against Shelley suddenly caught sight of him, he adds: ‘Lord
Houghton then stood up, and showed consummate skill as an advocate....
After him there was silence in the Union for several minutes, and then
Mr Manning of Baliol rose.’ He was on the side of Byron; and when the
votes were taken the members present agreed with him.
Mr Gladstone, in a conversation with the author of the life of Cardinal
Manning, has given a rather different account of the matter:
‘There was an invasion of barbarians among civilized men, or of
civilized men among barbarians. Cambridge men used to look down upon us
at Oxford as prim and behind the times. A deputation from the Society of
the Apostles at Cambridge, consisting of Monckton Milnes and Henry
[Arthur] Hallam, and Sunderland, came to set up among us the cult of
Shelley; or at any rate, to introduce the School of Shelley as against
the Byronic School at Oxford—Shelley that is, not in his negative, but
in his spiritual side. I knew Hallam at Eton, and, I believe, was the
intermediary in bringing about the discussion[84].’
This view, that the commission of the three knights-errant emanated from
the Apostles, and not from themselves, or from the Union Society, is
borne out to some degree by Blakesley’s account. But for this we have no
space. We will conclude with Manning’s admirable description of the
scene. It occurs in a letter dated 3 November, 1866—just after Lord
Houghton had made his speech at the Cambridge Union.
‘I do not believe that I was guilty of the rashness of throwing the
javelin over the Cam. It was, I think, a passage of arms got up by the
Eton men of the two Unions. My share, if any, was only as a member of
the august committee of the green baize table. I can, however, remember
the irruption of the three Cambridge orators. We Oxford men were
precise, orderly, and morbidly afraid of excess in word or manner. The
Cambridge oratory came in like a flood into a mill-pond. Both Monckton
Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam took us aback by the boldness and
freedom of their manner. But I remember the effect of Sunderland’s
declaration and action to this day. It had never been seen or heard
before among us; we cowered like birds, and ran like sheep.... I
acknowledge that we were utterly routed. Lord Houghton’s beautiful
reviving of those old days has in it something fragrant and sweet, and
brings back old faces and old friendships, very dear as life is drawing
to its close.’
Mr Milnes had always wished that his son should become distinguished in
that House of Commons where he had himself made so brilliant a _début_.
With this object in view, he had urged him to cultivate speaking in
public, and probably the only part of his Cambridge career which he
viewed with complete satisfaction was his interest in, and success at,
the Union Debating Society. But even in this they did not quite agree.
Mr Milnes urged his son to take a decided line, and to lead the Union.
But the only answer he could get was, ‘If there is one thing on which I
have ever prided myself, it is on having no politics at all, and judging
every measure by its individual merits. A leader there must be a violent
politician and a party politician, or he must have a private party. I
shall never be the one or have the other.’ Again, they were at variance
on the burning question of the day, the Reform Bill. Mr Milnes, though a
Conservative, was in favour of it; his son described it as ‘the curse
and degradation of the nation.’ Further, while exhorting his son to
prepare himself for public life, with a singleness of purpose that, if
adhered to, would have excluded other and more congenial pursuits, Mr
Milnes warned him that his circumstances would not allow him to enter
parliament. No wonder, therefore, that the young man became perplexed
and melancholy, and more than ever anxious to find a refuge for his
aspirations in literature.
While these questions were pending between father and son, the pecuniary
embarrassments to which we have already alluded entered upon an acute
stage, and in 1829 the whole family left England for five years. If Mr
Milnes ever submitted his own actions to the test of rigorous
examination, he must have concluded that he had himself brought about
the very result which he was most anxious to prevent; for it was this
enforced residence on the Continent which, more than any other
influence, shaped the character of his son. Mr Milnes evidently wished
him to become a country gentleman like himself, and, if he must write,
to be ‘a pamphleteer on guano and on grain.’ Instead of this, while he
kept his loyalty to England with unbroken faith, he divested himself of
English narrowness, and acquired that intimate knowledge of the other
members of the European family, and, we may add, that catholicity of
taste, for which he was so conspicuous. Probably no public man of the
present century understood the Continent so well as Milnes. In many ways
he was a typical Englishman; but he was also a citizen of the world.
The first resting-place of the family was Boulogne, and there Milnes
made his first acquaintance with Frenchmen and their literature. The
romantic school was beginning to engross public attention, and Victor
Hugo—then, as afterwards, the ‘stormy voice of France’—became his
favourite French poet. But, great as was the interest which Milnes felt
in France, he was too eager for knowledge to be content with one
language and one literature, and, rejecting his father’s suggestion that
he should spend some time in Paris, he spent most of the summer and
autumn of 1830 at Bonn, in order to learn German. We suspect that he
must have taken this step at the suggestion of Thirlwall, for it was he
who introduced him to Professor Brandis, and probably also to the
veteran Niebuhr. Thence, his family having migrated to Milan, he crossed
the Alps, and made his first acquaintance with Italy, which became, we
might almost say, the country of his adoption. He felt a deep sympathy
for the Italian people in their aspirations for liberty, and though, as
was natural at his age, he enjoyed the society of the Austrian
vice-regal Court, he longed to see the foreigner expelled from Italy.
Other Italian cities were visited in due course, and, lastly, Rome.
Where-ever he went, he managed, with a skill that was peculiarly his
own, to know the most interesting people, and to be welcomed with equal
warmth by persons of the most opposite opinions. It was no small feat to
have known both Italians and Austrians at Milan; but at Rome, besides
his English acquaintances, he formed lasting friendships with the
Chevalier Bunsen and his family, and with Dr Wiseman, M. Rio, M.
Montalembert, and other catholics of distinction. The Church of Rome
must always have great attractions for a young man of deep feeling and
with no settled principles of faith, and we gather that Milnes was at
one time not indisposed to join it. His feelings in that time of unrest
and perplexity are well indicated in the following lines, written at
Rome in 1834:
‘To search for lore in spacious libraries,
And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;
To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,
Watch every action, but not catch one tone;
Amid a thousand breathless votaries,
To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone—
Are images of that which, hour by hour,
Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.
‘The Beauty of the past before my eyes
Stands ever in each fable-haunted place,
I know her form in every dark disguise,
But never look upon her open face;
O’er every limb a veil thick-folded lies,
Showing poor outline of a perfect grace,
Yet just enough to make the sickened mind
Grieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.
‘O Thou! to whom the wearisome disease
Of Past and Present is an alien thing,
Thou pure Existence! whose severe decrees
Forbid a living man his soul to bring
Into a timeless Eden of sweet ease,
Clear-eyed, clear-hearted—lay thy loving wing
In death upon me—if that way alone
Thy great creation-thought thou wilt to me make known[85].’
An interesting picture of Milnes at about this period has been drawn by
Mr Aubrey de Vere, whom he visited in Ireland during one of his brief
absences from Italy.
‘He remained with us a good many days, though when he left us they
seemed too few. We showed him whatever of interest our neighbourhood
boasts, and he more than repaid us by the charm of his conversation, his
lively descriptions of foreign ways, his good-humour, his manifold
accomplishments, and the extraordinary range of his information, both as
regards books and men. He could hardly have then been more than
two-and-twenty, and yet he was already well acquainted with the
languages and literatures of many different countries, and not a few of
their most distinguished men, living or recently dead. I well remember
the vivid picture which he drew of Niebuhr’s profound grief at the
downfall of the restored monarchy in France, at the renewal of its
Revolution in 1830. He was delivering a series of historical lectures at
the time, and Milnes was one of the young men attending the course. One
day they had long to wait for their Professor; at last the aged
historian entered the lecture-hall, his form drooping, and his whole
aspect grief-stricken. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have no apology for
detaining you; a calamity has befallen Europe which must undo all the
restorative work recently done, and throw back her social and political
progress—perhaps for centuries. The Revolution has broken out again’
(vol. i. p. 115).
One episode of these foreign experiences deserves a separate notice. In
1832 Milnes spent some months in Greece with his friend Mr Christopher
Wordsworth, a scholar whose _Athens and Attica_ has long been a
classical text-book. But Milnes was more powerfully attracted by the
sight of Grecian independence than by the relics of her ancient glory.
The volume which he published on his return, called _Memorials of a Tour
in some parts of Greece, chiefly Poetical_ (his first independent
literary venture, it may be remarked), contains but scanty references to
antiquity. He was keenly interested in the efforts of Greece to obtain a
settled government of her own, and through all the drawbacks and
discomforts which, as a traveller, he had to endure from the Greeks, he
firmly adhered to the cause of freedom. He even advocated the immediate
restoration of the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon. But Milnes had a mind
which was singularly free from prejudice, and even in those early days
he had learnt to consider both sides of every question, and to keep his
sympathies controlled by his judgment. He probably approached Greece
with the enthusiasm for a liberated nation which had so deeply stirred
even the most indifferent in England; but he left it ‘with an affection
for the Turkish character which he never entirely lost, and which
enabled him in very different days, then far distant, to understand the
political exigencies of the East better than many politicians of more
pretentious character and fame.’
We have dwelt on Milnes’s early years at some length, because their
history throws considerable light on his subsequent career, and accounts
for most of the difficulties that he experienced when he made his first
entrance into London society. ‘Conceive the man,’ said Carlyle: ‘a most
bland-smiling, semi-quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianised
little man, who has long olive-blonde hair, a dimple, next to no chin,
and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public
society!’ If the rough Scotch moralist was not in an unusually bad
humour when he wrote these words, it is not to be wondered at that
Milnes was regarded for a time as a dangerous person, ‘anxious to
introduce foreign ways and fashions into the conservative fields of
English life.’ But this dislike of him was very transient, and in less
than a year after his return to England he had ‘made a conquest of the
social world.’ That he was still looked upon as an oddity seems certain,
and even his intimate friend Charles Buller could exclaim: ‘I often
think how puzzled your Maker must be to account for your conduct;’ but
people soon became willing to accept him on his own terms for the sake
of his wit and brilliancy, and, we may add, of his kind heart. Some
nicknames that survived long after their application had lost its point,
are worth remembering as illustrations of what was once thought of him;
perhaps still more for the sake of the letter which Sydney Smith wrote
on being accused, quite groundlessly, of having invented them.
‘DEAR MILNES,—Never lose your good temper, which is one of your best
qualities, and which has carried you hitherto safely through your
startling eccentricities. If you turn cross and touchy, you are a lost
man. No man can combine the defects of opposite characters. The names of
“Cool of the evening,” “London Assurance,” and “In-I-go Jones,” are, I
give you my word, not mine. They are of no sort of importance; they are
safety-valves, and if you could by paying sixpence get rid of them, you
had better keep your money. You do me but justice in acknowledging that
I have spoken much good of you. I have laughed at you for those follies
which I have told you of to your face; but nobody has more readily and
more earnestly asserted that you are a very agreeable, clever man, with
a very good heart, unimpeachable in all the relations of life, and that
you amply deserve to be retained in the place to which you had too
hastily elevated yourself by manners unknown to our cold and phlegmatic
people. I thank you for what you say of my good-humour. Lord Dudley,
when I took leave of him, said to me: “You have been laughing at me for
the last seven years, and you never said anything that I wished unsaid.”
This pleased me.
‘Ever yours,
‘SYDNEY SMITH[86].’
When we read that Milnes ‘made a conquest of society,’ it must not be
supposed that he was a mere pleasure-seeker. On the contrary, as Mr Reid
says in another place, ‘he had too great a reverence for what was good
and pure and true, too consuming a desire to hold his own with the best
intellects of his time, and, above all, too deep a sympathy with the
suffering and the wronged to allow him to fall a victim to these
temptations.’ From the first, then, he ‘sought to combine the world of
pleasure and the world of intellect.’ A list of his friends would
contain the names of the best-known men of the day, but, at the same
time, men who had but little in common: Carlyle, Sterling, Maurice,
Spedding, Thackeray, Tennyson, Landor, Hallam, Rogers, Macaulay, Sydney
Smith. ‘He became an intimate member of circles differing so widely from
each other as those of Lansdowne House, Holland House, Gore House, and
the Sterling Club’; and as a host he was notorious for mingling together
the most discordant social elements. Disraeli sketched him in _Tancred_
under a disguise so thin that nobody could fail to penetrate it:
‘Mr Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is
certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some
degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a
certain degree of prejudice. Mr Vavasour’s breakfasts were renowned.
Whatever your creed, class, or merit—one might almost add, your
character—you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you
were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced. He
prided himself on figuring as the social medium by which rival
reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the
compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust’ (vol. i. p. 337).
When some one asked if a celebrated murderer had been hanged, the reply
he got was: ‘I hope so, or Richard will have him at his breakfast-table
next Thursday;’ and Thirlwall, when his friend was on the brink of
marriage, thus alludes to past felicity:
‘It is very likely, nay certain, that you will still collect agreeable
people about your wife’s breakfast-table; but can I ever sit down there
without the certainty that I shall meet with none but respectable
persons? It may be an odd thing for a Bishop to lament, but I cannot
help it’ (vol. i. p. 448).
After all it seems probable that Milnes himself, and not the lion of the
hour, was the chief attraction at those parties. He delighted in the
best sort of conversation—that which he called ‘the rapid counterplay
and vivid exercise of combined intelligences,’ and he did his best to
revive the practice of that almost forgotten art—_l’art de causer_. As
Mr Reid says:
‘How brilliant and amusing he was over the dinner-table or the
breakfast-table was known to all his friends. Overflowing with
information, his mind was lightened by a bright wit, whilst his immense
stores of appropriate anecdotes enabled him to give point and colour to
every topic which was brought under discussion’ (vol. i. p. 189).
At the same time he did not fall into the fatal error of taking the talk
into his own hands, and delivering a monologue, as too many social
celebrities have done before and since. He had the happy art of making
his guests talk, while he listened, and threw in a remark from time to
time, to give new life when the conversation seemed to flag. Carlyle, in
a letter written to his wife during his first visit to Fryston, gives us
a lifelike portrait of Milnes when thus engaged:
‘Richard, I find, lays himself out while in this quarter to do
hospitalities, and of course to collect notabilities about him, and play
them off one against the other. I am his trump-card at present. The
Sessions are at Pontefract even now, and many lawyers there. These last
two nights he has brought a trio of barristers to dine, producing
champagne, &c.... Last night our three was admitted to be a kind of
failure, three greater blockheads ye wadna find in Christendee. Richard
had to exert himself; but he is really dexterous, the villain. He pricks
you with questions, with remarks, with all kinds of fly-tackle to make
you bite, does generally contrive to get you into some sort of speech.
And then his good humour is extreme; you look in his face and forgive
him all his tricks’ (vol. i. p. 256).
As a pendant to this we will quote Mr Forster’s description of Milnes
and Carlyle together:
‘Monckton Miles came yesterday and left this morning—a pleasant,
companionable little man—delighting in paradoxes, but good-humoured
ones; defending all manner of people and principles in order to provoke
Carlyle to abuse them, in which laudable enterprise he must have
succeeded to his heart’s content, and for a time we had a most amusing
evening, reminding me of a naughty boy rubbing a fierce cat’s tail
backwards, and getting in between furious growls and fiery sparks. He
managed to avoid the threatened scratches’ (vol. i. p. 387).
Milnes entered Parliament in 1837 as Conservative member for Pontefract.
His friends were rather surprised at his selection of a party, for even
then his views on most subjects were decidedly Liberal. Thirlwall, for
instance, wrote:
‘I can hardly bring myself now to consider you a Tory, or indeed as
belonging to a party at all; and although I am aware how difficult, and
even dangerous, it is for a public man to keep aloof from all parties,
still my first hope as well as expectation as to your political career
is that it may be distinguished by some degree of originality’ (vol. i.
p. 199).