would have expected or perhaps desired. From the outset he maintained an
independence of thought and action which did him the utmost credit as a
man of honour, but which ruined his chances of obtaining that success
which is measured by the attainment of official dignity. And yet, as Mr
Reid tells us, he was more ambitious of political than of literary
distinction. But the fates were against him. In the first place, his
oratorical style did not suit the House, though as an after-dinner
speaker he was conspicuously successful. He ‘had modelled himself on the
old style of political oratory, and gave his hearers an impression of
affectation.’ Then he would not vote straight with his party. He took a
line of his own about Canada and the Ballot; he voted on the opposite
side to Peel on the question of a large remission of capital
punishments; and he wrote _One Tract More_, ‘an eloquent and earnest
plea for toleration for the Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm,’ which shocked
the Protestants in general, and the electors of Pontefract in
particular. Perhaps he was too much in earnest; perhaps he was not a
sufficiently important person to be silenced by office; perhaps, as Mr
Reid says, ‘public opinion in England always insists upon drawing a
broad line of demarcation between the man of letters and the man of
affairs;’ but, whatever might be the reason, Sir Robert Peel passed him
over when forming his Administration in 1841—nay, rather, appears never
to have turned his thoughts in his direction. Milnes was grievously
disappointed, but with characteristic lightheartedness set at once to
work to make himself more thoroughly fit for the post he specially
coveted, the Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs. He went to Paris,
got intimate with Guizot, De Tocqueville, Montalembert—‘that English
aristocrat foisted into the middle of French democracy’—and other
leading statesmen. Through them, and by help of his natural gift of
knowing everybody he wished to know, he managed to include Louis
Philippe among those by whom he was accepted as a sort of unaccredited
English envoy. He kept Peel informed of the views of Guizot and the
King, and Peel replied with a message to the former in a letter which
shows that he was quite ready to make use of Milnes, though not to
reward him. On his return he gave Peel a general support on the Corn
Laws, while regretting that his ‘measures were not of a more liberal
character;’ he interested himself in the passing of the Copyright Bill,
a measure in respect of which he was accepted as the representative of
men of letters; and he travelled in the East, no doubt to study Oriental
politics on the spot. A letter he wrote to Peel from Smyrna is full of
shrewd observation and far-reaching insight into the Eastern Question;
but, on his return, he published a volume of poems called _Palm Leaves_.
Now Peel, like a certain Hanoverian monarch who hated ‘boetry and
bainters,’ hated literature; and, as Milnes’s father told him, ‘every
book he wrote was a nail in his political coffin.’ Again, Milnes was in
favour of the endowment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and had
written a pamphlet called _The Real Union of England and Ireland_, on
which, we may note, in passing, Mr Gladstone’s remark, that he had ‘some
opinions on Irish matters that are not fit for practice.’ With these
views he supported Peel’s grant to Maynooth, a step which brought him
into such disgrace at Pontefract that he thought seriously of giving up
parliamentary life altogether. In fact he applied for a diplomatic post,
but without success. Before long we find him again running counter to
his chief’s policy, supporting Lord Ashley against the Government, and
seconding a motion of Charles Buller’s against Lord Stanley. After this
it cannot excite surprise that Peel passed him over when he rearranged
his Administration in 1845. With his second disappointment Milnes’s
career as a professional politician came to an end. Ten years later
Palmerston offered him a lordship of the Treasury, but he declined it.
As he said himself in a letter written shortly afterwards:
‘_Via media_ never answers in politics, and somehow or other I never can
get out of it. My Laodicean spirit is the ruin of me. From having lived
with all sorts of people, and seen good in all, the broad black lines of
judgment that people usually draw seem to me false and foolish, and I
think my own finer ones just as distinct, though no one can see them but
myself’ (vol. i. p. 360).
Before long Milnes found a more congenial position on the opposite side
of the House. But it must not be supposed that he rushed into sudden and
rancorous opposition to his old leader. So long as Peel remained in
office, he allowed no personal considerations to interfere with his
support of him; and he steadily refused to join those who rebelled when
he announced his conversion to Free Trade. Meanwhile, his interest in
the burning question of the day being little more than formal, he turned
his attention to a social question in which he had long been interested,
and introduced a Bill for the establishment of reformatories for
juvenile offenders. Among the many combinations of opposite tastes and
tendencies with which Milnes was fond of startling the world, could one
more curious be imagined than this—the literary exquisite and the
criminal unwashed? But in fact this is only a single instance out of
many which could be produced to show that the cynical selfishness he
affected was only a mask which hid his real nature; perhaps assumed for
the sake of concealing from his left hand what his right hand was doing
so well. The proposal, we are told, ‘was scoffed at by many politicians
of eminence when it was first put forward.’ But Milnes was not to be
daunted by rebuffs, and ‘he persevered with his proposal, until he had
the great happiness of seeing reformatories established under the
sanction of the law, and of becoming himself the president of the first
and greatest of these noble institutions, that at Redhill.’ His very
genuine sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, especially when
young, is testified to by one of his intimate friends, Miss Nightingale:
‘His brilliancy and talents in tongue or pen—whether political, social,
or literary—were inspired chiefly by good-will towards man; but he had
the same voice and manners for the dirty brat as he had for a duchess,
the same desire to give pleasure and good. Once, at Redhill, where we
were with a party, and the chiefs were explaining to us the system in
the court-yard, a mean, stunted, villainous-looking little fellow crept
across the yard (quite out of order, and by himself), and stole a dirty
paw into Mr Milnes’s hand. Not a word passed; the boy stayed quite quiet
and quite contented if he could but touch his benefactor who had placed
him there. He was evidently not only his benefactor, but his friend’
(vol. ii. p. 7).
Milnes had been called a Liberal-Conservative during the first ten years
of his parliamentary life. He now became a Conservative-Liberal; but the
transposition of the adjective made little, if any, change in his
political conduct. He was as insubordinate in the latter position as he
had been in the former. He took Lord Palmerston as his leader and chosen
friend; but he did not always side with him. In the debates on the
Conspiracy Bill, after the attempt of Orsini to assassinate Napoleon
III., Milnes spoke and voted against his chief; and on the measure for
abolishing the East India Company he was equally indifferent to the
claims of party. As time went on, he drifted out of party politics
altogether; and both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords,
which he entered in 1863, it was to measures of a private character, or
to measures of social reform, that he gave his attention. He advocated
help to Lady Franklin in her expedition to clear up the mystery of her
husband’s fate; he was in favour of female suffrage; of the abolition of
public executions; and he led the agitation for legalising marriage with
a deceased wife’s sister. At the same time he cordially supported the
Liberal party on all great occasions. Speaking of the abortive Reform
Bill of 1866, Mr Reid remarks:
‘Houghton held strongly to the Liberal side throughout the movement, and
again afforded proof of the fact that his elevation to the House of
Lords had strengthened, rather than weakened, his faith in the people
and in popular institutions. Early in April he presided at one of the
great popular meetings in favour of Reform. The scene of the meeting was
the Cloth Hall at Leeds—a spot famous in the political history of the
West Riding—and Lord Houghton’s speech was as advanced in tone as the
most thoroughgoing Reformer could have wished it to be. He was, indeed,
one of the very few peers who took an open and pronounced part in the
agitation of the year’ (vol. ii. p. 151).
This is only one instance, out of many that could be adduced. It would
be interesting to know what he would have thought of some of the later
developments of his party. It is almost needless to say that he never
regarded Lord Beaconsfield as a serious politician. On the eve of his
return from Berlin in 1878, he writes: ‘I hope to be in my place on
Thursday, to see the reception of the Great Adventurer. Whether from
knowing him so well, or from the sarcastic temperament of old age, the
whole thing looks to me like a comedy, with as much relation to serious
politics as Punch to real life.’ At the same time he had not been a
thoroughgoing supporter of Mr Gladstone’s agitation against the Turks,
and he had warned that statesman so far back as 1871, that ‘a demon, not
of demagoguism, but of demophilism, is tempting you sorely.’
Advancing years and disappointed hopes caused no abatement in his
interest in foreign affairs. The events of 1848 had been specially
interesting to him; and at the close of that year he produced what Mr
Reid well describes as ‘a striking and instructive’ pamphlet, entitled
_A Letter to the Marquis of Lansdowne_. The author reviews the events of
the year, and supports the thesis that ‘the Liberals of the Continent
had not proved themselves unworthy of the sympathy of England.’ We have
no room for an analysis of this masterly work, but we cannot refrain
from quoting one remarkable passage in which he foreshadows French
intervention in Italy. After describing measures by which Austria
intended to make the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom a second Poland, he
proceeds:
‘And France, whatever be her adventures in government, will not easily
have so dulled her imagination or quelled her enthusiasm as to be
unmoved by appeals to the deeds of Marengo and Lodi, and to suffer an
expiring nation at her very door to cry in vain for help and protection,
not against the restraints of an orderly authority, but against fierce
invaders intent upon her absolute destruction’ (vol. i. p. 413).
This pamphlet made a great sensation. In England it was received, for
the most part, with dislike and apprehension. Carlyle was almost alone
in praising it. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘it is the greatest thing he has
yet done; earnest and grave, written in a large, tolerant, kind-hearted
spirit, and, as far as I can see, saying all that is to be said on
_that_ matter.’ But the strongest proof of the power of the pamphlet is
the fact that the Austrians stopped the writer on the Hungarian frontier
when travelling with his wife in 1851, as a person who could not breathe
that revolutionary atmosphere without danger to the empire. In his later
years foreign travel became almost a necessity to Lord Houghton; and as
he had then fewer ties to bind him to England, his absences were more
frequent and more prolonged. He travelled in France, no longer as an
envoy without credentials, but for his private information, or to be the
guest of Guizot and De Tocqueville; he became the friend of the
accomplished Queen of Holland; he represented the Geographical Society
at the opening of the Suez Canal; he made a triumphal progress through
the United States; and only three years before his death he went again
to Egypt and Greece.
Throughout his life Milnes approached public events with a singular
sobriety of judgment. He was never led away by popular clamour, but
formed his opinions, on principle, after mature deliberation. It is
almost needless to add that he generally found himself on the unpopular
side. When England went mad over the Crimean war, Milnes wrote calmly:
‘For my own part I like neither of the combatants, though I prefer a
feeble and superannuated despotism as less noxious to mankind than one
young and vigorous, and assisted by the appliances of modern
intelligence.’ During the American civil war, he ‘broke away from his
own class, and ranged himself on the side of the friends of the North,
with an earnestness not inferior to that of Mr Bright and Mr Forster.’
Mr Reid tell us that this conduct won for Milnes that popularity with
the masses, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire, which all his
previous efforts had failed to obtain, and that he found himself, to his
great surprise, one of the popular idols. In 1870, again, he was on the
unpopular side: ‘I am Prussian to the backbone,’ he wrote, ‘which is a
pure homage to principle, as they are the least agreeable people in the
world.’
We have been at pains to set forth Milnes’s political acts and
convictions in some detail, because he has been frequently represented
as a gay _farceur_, who took up politics as a pastime. It is not,
however, as a politician that he will be remembered, but as a man of
letters. In his younger days he achieved distinction as a writer of
verse, and Landor hailed him as ‘the greatest poet now living in
England.’ This judgment may nowadays provoke a smile; but, though it is
not to be expected that his poems will recover their former popularity,
they hardly deserve to have fallen into complete neglect. As Mr Reid
says:
‘A great singer he may not have been; a sweet singer with a charm of his
own he undoubtedly was; nor did his charm consist alone in the melody of
which he was a master. In many of his poems real poetic thought is
linked with musical words; whilst in everything that he wrote, whether
in verse or in prose, one may discern the brightest characteristics of
the man himself: the catholicity of his spirit; the tenderness of his
sympathy with weakness, suffering, mortal frailty in all its forms; the
ardour of his faith in something that should break down the artificial
barriers by which classes are divided, and bring into the lives of all a
measure of that light and happiness which he relished so highly for
himself’ (vol. ii. p. 438).
For his prose works, or at least for some of them, we predict a very
different fate. We do not like even to think of an age that will refuse
to admire the charming style, the real dramatic power, the exquisite
tact, and the fine taste which distinguish his _Life of Keats_, and his
_Monographs_, to which we have already alluded. Other essays, probably
of equal merit, lie scattered in Reviews and Magazines. We hope that
before long we may see the best of these collected together. Such a
series, which would cover a period of nearly sixty years, would form a
most important chapter in the history of English literature.
Besides his reputation as a writer, Milnes occupied an unique position
towards the world of letters, which it is not quite easy to define. It
is not enough to say that he was a Mæcenas, though he knew and
entertained the whole literary community both in London and at Fryston—a
house which, as Thackeray said, ‘combined all the graces of the château
and the tavern’; or that he was always ready to lend a helping hand to
those in distress, though he spent a fortune in generously and
delicately assisting others. His peculiar characteristics were a rare
gift in detecting merit, and an untiring energy in bringing it out, and
setting it in a position where it could bloom and flourish and be
recognized by other people. In effecting this he spared no pains, and
shrank from no annoyance. Often, indeed, he must have risked his own
popularity by his importunity for favours to be conferred on others. Mr
Reid describes at length the amusing scene between him and Sir Robert
Peel, when he solicited and obtained pensions for Tennyson and Sheridan
Knowles, of neither of whom the Minister had ever heard; and to Milnes
must also be allowed the credit of having been the first, or nearly the
first, to bring into prominent recognition the merits of Mr John
Forster. He possessed, too, in a very high degree, the gift of sympathy,
and, as a consequence, of influence. ‘Ever since I knew you,’ said his
friend Macarthy, ‘you have been the chief person in my life; a friend
and brother and confessor—the end and aim of all my actions and hopes’;
and Robert Browning, in a long and most interesting letter, written to
ask Milnes to use his interest to get him appointed secretary to the
minister whom England, as he then believed, ‘must send before the year
ends to this fine fellow, Pio Nono[87],’ admits that his own interest in
Italy was due in the first instance to Milnes’s influence. ‘One gets
excited,’ he says, ‘at least here on the spot, by this tiptoe strained
expectation of poor dear Italy, and yet, if I had not known you, I
believe I should have looked on with other bystanders.’ We have said
that he was charitable; but to say this is to give an imperfect idea of
the efforts he would make for literary men in difficulties. When Hood
was in distress he found that he ‘preferred to receive assistance in the
shape of gratuitous literary work for his magazine rather than in
money.’ Milnes not only contributed himself, but ‘canvassed right and
left among his friends for contributions.’ Nor was his help confined to
the person whose work he valued. ‘The interest and friendship which the
genius had aroused,’ says Mr Reid, ‘was extended to his or her friends
and connexions. Many a widow and many an orphan had occasion to be
thankful that the husband or father had during his lifetime excited the
admiration of Milnes. Years after the death of Charlotte Brontë we find
him trying to smooth the path of her father, and to secure preferment in
the Church for her husband.’ This is only one instance out of many that
might be adduced. Again, he seemed to regard his critical faculty as a
trust for the benefit of others, and was never more congenially employed
than in drawing attention to some young poet who had no influential
friends. In proof of this we will only refer our readers to the touching
story of poor David Gray, whom he nursed with almost feminine
tenderness, and whose poem, _The Luggie_, he edited; and to his early
recognition of the genius of Mr Swinburne, to whose merits he drew
attention by an article in the _Edinburgh Review_. In close connexion
with this kind help to men of whom he knew little or nothing may be
mentioned his interest in the Newspaper Press Fund. The formation of
such a fund was strenuously resisted, we are told, by the most
influential members of the Press; but Milnes, from the first, brought
the whole weight of his social influence to its support, and
contributed, more than any other man, to its permanent and successful
establishment.
Nor should his kindness to young men be forgotten. He may have sought
their society in the first instance from the pleasure he took in all
that was bright, and entertaining, and unaffected; but, as we have
already tried to point out, his motives were commonly underlaid by some
serious purpose which it was not always easy to discover. We do not
maintain that he was specially successful in drawing young men out, for
his own talk was often scrappy, anecdotical, and difficult to follow;
still less do we mean that he tried to influence them in any particular
direction by improving conversation, or the enunciation of any special
opinions in politics or literature. But he certainly made his juniors
feel sure of his sympathy and his good-will.
Of Milnes’s religious opinions it is difficult to give any positive
account. His family had been Unitarian; at college he became an
Evangelical; soon afterwards he fell under the influence of Irving, whom
he proclaimed to be ‘the apostle of the age.’ Then, during his residence
in Italy, as we have already mentioned, he chose Dr Wiseman for his
intimate friend, and the higher Roman Catholic clergy had hopes of his
conversion. ‘Mezzofanti,’ wrote one of his friends in 1832, ‘is full of
hopes that you will return to the bosom of her whom Carlyle calls “the
slain mother”.’ But, during this same period, while passing through what
he calls ‘the twilight of his mind,’ he was the friend of Sterling and
Maurice and Thirlwall, under whose influence he was hardly likely to
submit to an infallible Church. He himself said that he was prevented
from joining the Church of Rome by the uprising of a Catholic school in
the Church of England. To this movement, as we have seen, he was deeply
attached, and both spoke and wrote in its defence. In one of his
commonplace books he called himself a Puseyite sceptic; sometimes he
said he was a crypto-Catholic, and to the last he never entirely shook
off the impressions of his youth. But Mr Reid is probably right in
describing him as ‘a tolerant, liberal-minded man, apt to look at
religion from many different points of view.’ We are not aware that he
ever took part in any directly religious movement, or ever declared his
allegiance to the Church of England except as a political organization.
Partly from a love of paradox, partly from a habit of looking round a
question rather than directly at it, he would have had something to say
in defence of almost any system of religion, while his unfeigned charity
would induce him to adopt that which recognized most fully the claims of
suffering humanity.
Lord Houghton died at Vichy, August 11, 1885. He had been in failing
health for some time, but the end was sudden and unexpected. Only a few
hours before it came he had been entertaining a mixed company at the
_table d’hôte_ by the brilliancy and variety of his conversation. It
might almost be said that he died, as he had lived, in society.
We have tried to eliminate what we believe to have been the real Milnes
from a cloud of misrepresentations and erroneous judgments—for both of
which, it must be remembered, he was himself directly responsible. We
leave to our readers the task of passing sentence on a singularly
amiable, if eccentric, personality. Some opinions expressed by those who
understood him and valued him will appropriately close this article.
When he was young his friends recognized in him what Dr Johnson would
have called the potentiality of greatness, though they doubted whether
he would have sufficient steadiness of purpose to achieve it. ‘Your gay
and airy mind,’ wrote Tennyson in 1833, ‘must have caught as many
colours from the landscape you moved through as a flying soap-bubble—a
comparison truly somewhat irreverent, yet I meant it not as such.’ ‘I
think you are near something very glorious,’ said Stafford O’Brien, ‘but
you will never reach it.’ Mr Aubrey de Vere decided that ‘he had not
much solid ambition. The highlands of life were not what interested him
much; its mountains cast their shadows too far and drew down too many
clouds.’ But, if Milnes’s well-wishers were compelled to abandon their
hopes of any great distinction for their friend, they recognized, with
one accord, his charity and his sincerity. If they did not admire him,
they loved him. ‘You are on the whole a good man,’ said Carlyle, ‘though
with terrible perversities.’ Forster declared that he himself had ‘many
friends who would be kind to him in distress, but only one who would be
equally kind to him in disgrace.’ A distinguished German said of him,
‘Is it possible that an Englishman can be so loveable?’ and Mr Sumner
described him as ‘a member of Parliament, a poet and a man of fashion, a
Tory who does not forget the people, and a man of fashion with
sensibilities, love of virtue and merit among the simple, the poor, and
the lowly.’ Lastly, let us cite his own whimsical character of himself,
which, though expressed in the language of paradox, is probably, in the
main, nearer to the truth than one drawn by any critic could be:
‘He was a man of no common imaginative perceptions, who never gave his
full conviction to anything but the closest reasoning; of acute
sensibilities, who always distrusted the affections; of ideal
aspirations and sensual habits; of the most cheerful manners and of the
gloomiest philosophy. He hoped little and believed little, but he rarely
despaired, and never valued unbelief, except as leading to some larger
truth and purer conviction’ (vol. ii. p. 491).
EDWARD HENRY PALMER[88].