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PORTRAITS OF THE NINETIES
PORTRAITS OF THE SIXTIES
BY JUSTIN MCCARTHY.
With portrait Illustrations.
PORTRAITS OF THE SEVENTIES
BY THE RT. HON. G. W. E. RUSSELL.
With portrait Illustrations.
PORTRAITS OF THE EIGHTIES
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON.
With portrait Illustrations.
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., LONDON.
[Illustration: W. E. GLADSTONE. [_Frontispiece_
(_From a portrait by J. McLure Hamilton._)]
PORTRAITS OF
THE NINETIES
BY
E. T. RAYMOND
WITH 20 ILLUSTRATIONS
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
_First published_ _September 1921_
_Second Impression_ _October 1921_
_Third Impression_ _October 1921_
_Fourth Impression_ _January 1922_
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE NINETIES 9
II. THE EARL OF ROSEBERY 19
III. CECIL RHODES 30
IV. MR. GLADSTONE 41
V. GEORGE MEREDITH 50
VI. LORD SALISBURY 60
VII. LORD KITCHENER 69
VIII. THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 83
IX. ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE 93
X. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 102
XI. HERBERT SPENCER 111
XII. MR. CHAMBERLAIN AND MR. BALFOUR 122
XIII. OSCAR WILDE 136
XIV. SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 145
XV. BISHOP CREIGHTON 154
XVI. JOHN MORLEY 164
XVII. W. T. STEAD 174
XVIII. SIR HENRY FOWLER 183
XIX. AUBREY BEARDSLEY 192
XX. LORD COURTNEY OF PENWITH 200
XXI. THOMAS HARDY 211
XXII. EARL SPENCER 221
XXIII. SIR H. M. STANLEY 230
XXIV. JUSTIN McCARTHY 239
XXV. LORD LEIGHTON AND G. F. WATTS 248
XXVI. CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON—WILLIAM BOOTH 260
XXVII. SOME LAWYERS 271
XXVIII. OLD AND NEW JOURNALISTS 288
XXIX. SOME ACTORS 308
BIBLIOGRAPHY 315
INDEX 317
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
W. E. GLADSTONE _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
CECIL RHODES 30
GEORGE MEREDITH 50
LORD SALISBURY 60
LORD KITCHENER 70
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 102
HERBERT SPENCER 112
JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN 122
ARTHUR BALFOUR 128
OSCAR WILDE 136
JOHN MORLEY 164
W. T. STEAD 174
AUBREY BEARDSLEY 192
LORD COURTNEY OF PENWITH 200
THOMAS HARDY, O.M. 212
EARL SPENCER 222
JUSTIN McCARTHY 240
LORD LEIGHTON 248
G. F. WATTS IN HIS STUDIO 254
GENERAL BOOTH 264
PORTRAITS OF THE NINETIES
CHAPTER I
THE NINETIES
The late Mr. Justin McCarthy’s vivid _Portraits of the Sixties_, the late
Mr. George Russell’s admirable volume dealing with the men and women of
the Seventies, and Mr. Horace Hutchinson’s more recent _Portraits of the
Eighties_ form together an invaluable biographical guide to a period
second in interest to none in modern history. It is the business of a
less distinguished pen to attempt to give some account of leading figures
during the last years of the century and of the reign of Queen Victoria.
The task is one to be approached with equal interest and trepidation.
With interest, because what men thought and did in the Nineties—still
more what they neglected to do and forgot to think—is still powerful
to-day; what we are and suffer was in the main decided for us a quarter
of a century ago. With trepidation, because the time is distant
enough for the reader to demand something more than a mere essay in
instantaneous photography, with its mad foreshortenings and irrelevant
emphasis; while it is also near enough for errors to be exposed by
competent witnesses—people who were behind the scenes at the performance,
while the writer was only one of the gallery.
It requires no great courage to attempt an “appreciation” of anybody,
from Homer to Addison, who has long been dead. For if one knows very
little about such people, there is really very little to be known—little,
that is, to tell us the very men they were. The great figures of the
past are either phantoms or statues, things of mist or things of stone,
without form or with nothing but form. Of a phantom there can be any
view; of a statue there can be essentially but one; the only possible
diversity is attained by throwing coloured lights on it, as they do on
stage groups. Thus, when literary men say that the time has not yet
arrived for a “final estimate” of this person or that, they do not
mean that a true estimate may be formed hereafter. All they mean is
that any present estimate is liable to effective contradiction. When
effective contradiction becomes by the nature of things impossible, we
have not necessarily attained truth, but we have achieved what is called
“historical perspective.”
“Drastic measures,” said the schoolboy in _Vice Versa_, “is Latin for a
whopping.” “Historical perspective” means immunity from being “whopped”
for an unlucky guess. The learned professor to whom the mind of his own
butler is probably a dark mystery discourses confidently about the secret
motives of Tiglath Pilezer or Oliver Cromwell, not because he knows, but
because he knows nobody else knows. An anti-authoritarian like Mr. Wells
will traverse the said professor’s view (if he happens not to like it)
with equal decision and for the same reason. Everybody may declare that
the professor is right and Mr. Wells wrong. Nobody can prove it.
The case is different when a letter to _The Times_, stating an
indisputable but hitherto unpublished fact, may make nonsense of the most
ingenious deductions, or when (as in the case of Lord Beaconsfield) light
is suddenly thrown on a quite unsuspected corner of some great man’s
character. The writer is not foolish enough to pretend to “finality,” and
will not be greatly perturbed if he is accused of doing less or more than
justice to individuals. In some sense the ancients were right in holding
that the real purpose of biography was less truth than edification. For
the “verdict of history” is a futility when considered in relation to
the individual arraigned before its bar; when we can be sure of doing
perfect justice in the simplest police case we may begin to talk about
the infallibility of a tribunal of pedants. The chief usefulness of such
a verdict is that of a sign-post to the living; and for such purpose
the rough method of the ancients, who put a halo round one man’s head
and hung another in chains by the roadside, was perhaps more effective
than the modern way of submitting all to the same sort of post-mortem
examination. Carry analysis to the length of an autopsy, and hero and
scoundrel look very much alike.
The writer’s view, it may be repeated, is rather that of the gallery
than the green-room. It is least of all that of any individual player’s
tea-party. The gallery has its defects. Attention is diverted by the
crackers of nuts and suckers of oranges. The actors appear quaintly
foreshortened, and throw puzzling shadows. The finer by-play sometimes
passes unnoticed, or its meaning is not rightly apprehended. There is
a tendency, perhaps, to think the man who mouths his part the best
actor. But on the whole the gallery knows a good play when it sees it,
and is more than any other part of the house free from the more cranky
prepossessions of the moment. It has no pose. It has little faddism. It
has neither the servility nor the malice of the deadhead. It has paid
honest money, and wants honest money’s worth, is unaffectedly pleased
when it gets it, and frankly angry if it doesn’t. It may be too generous
when it claps, and a trifle unjust when it hisses. But it is honest in
both moods.
If the writer may sometimes avail himself of the privileges of the
gallery to deal frankly with the eminent, he has certainly no bias
against the Nineties. He recalls them as, on the whole, a golden age.
The sun shone brighter in those days. The east wind was less bitter.
The women were certainly prettier and (perhaps) more modest; the steaks
were juicier; the landladies were a kindlier race. There was a zest and
flavour in life lacking to-day. Youth was emancipated from the harsher
kind of parental control, and had not yet found a stern step-father in
the State. The world was all before it where to choose, and the future
was veiled in a rose-coloured mist. If some well-meaning elder suggested
that one might (by working really hard) end by being Attorney-General, or
even editor of _The Times_, one said the right thing aloud, but inwardly
murmured, “Ambition should be made of jollier stuff.” Those were, in
short, the days when for men now middle-aged everything was possible,
except failure and death: unthinkable things notoriously invented by old
fogies to depress the spirits of immortal youth.
One other thing was “unthinkable,” and that was war. A “sort of war”
was, of course, familiar to the early Nineties; the public then rather
enjoyed seeing the bombardment of Alexandria on the diorama (perhaps it
is necessary to explain that the diorama was “the pictures” of that less
advanced epoch). It relished small frontier campaigns. It was overjoyed
with things like the smashing of Lobengula and the Jameson Raid. The
Liberal _Speaker_—the _Nation_ of those days—even thought it necessary to
reprove the taste which delighted in pictures and descriptions of savage
warfare; it talked about a “recrudescence of barbarism.” But of war in
the real sense nobody dreamed.
Why should there be war? We had enough, and to spare, of the earth’s
surface: some even rather objected to the addition of the small black
baby of Uganda to our enormous family. We were willing to help Germany,
as one of the Teutonic family, to help herself to other people’s
belongings; as for France, the appetite of that “dying nation,” its
petulance over various more or less important matters—Egypt, Siam,
Newfoundland, and the like—was certainly annoying, but war with France,
as with anybody else, was—well, “unthinkable.” The sound of great guns in
the Eastern seas, proclaiming the advent of a Pagan Great Power, broke
faintly on English ears, but few heeded the portent. One rather wooden
and rigid race had smashed another race even more rigid and wooden,
and had done it in a style suggestive of Western efficiency. But that
was all. There might be some little stir in the Chancelleries. But no
unofficial English head worried itself about a “Far Eastern question,”
even after Japan had been bundled out of Port Arthur by a combination of
European Powers, until towards the very end of the century.
Then, indeed, the clash of war, East, West, and South—in China, in
the Philippines, in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Sudan, and in South
Africa—might well have suggested some fear of the general toppling over
which was to come. But each incident was treated as a thing by itself;
of the way the world was going, of the real forces at work, the Nineties
had little conception. Rome under the Antonines was not more sure of the
impossibility of any fundamental change.
It is not altogether fanciful to connect this insensibility, this
half-pathetic faith that whatever was very dull must necessarily be very
solid and permanent, with the long reigns of certain European monarchs
and the extended lives of many public men. Few remembered any head
of the English State but Queen Victoria, or any Austrian Kaiser but
Francis Joseph. William I was only lately dead; it was but yesterday
that the word of Bismarck stood against the world, as it had done for a
generation. Mr. Gladstone was still the first figure in British politics
till nearly the middle of the Nineties: Lord Salisbury’s record extended
back to the dim days of Palmerston; even the Pope seemed immortal. Huxley
and Tyndal were survivals of an earlier age; the old fairy tales of
science had grown common-place, and the newer wonders were still to come;
though there were stirrings in letters and art, on the whole it was still
the reign of the old men.
Yet this appearance of changelessness was largely deceptive. The Nineties
were essentially a time of transition. They resembled that point in the
life of a caterpillar when a change of skin is almost due. The thing is
at once lethargic and uneasy; its qualms and its inertia alike suggest
coming dissolution. But beneath its rusty coat the essential activities
are going on, and presently the old constrictive covering will split,
and a quite new-looking creature emerge. What may be called a sort of
fatigued shabbiness was observable in the upper strata of society during
the Nineties. The split in the caterpillar’s coat had begun, but had
not proceeded far; patches of dead skin, of skin not quite dead, and of
new skin thrusting its way through the ancient envelope gave a mottled
and unsatisfactory appearance. The old society was visibly finishing;
the new society had only arrived in spots; and each was not quite sure
of itself. The fount of honour, which now plays steadily on new wealth,
spirted fitfully after the manner of a “lady-teaser” at a fair. Sometimes
the stream hit a Cunliffe-Lister, sometimes a Thomas Lipton. The ancient
gentility of the squires still stuck stolidly to the land, but there was
a certain restlessness in the younger generation, and when an old man
died an old house often changed hands, and a mysterious somebody from
the city arrived who filled the place with troops of week-end friends and
gave the impression that he did not much care whether “the county” called
or not.
In politics landed Toryism was already giving way to the vigorous urban
and suburban varieties; its leaders were mostly stricken in years,
and its cadets seemed to lack either ability or ambition. The great
entertainers of the old type carried on the tradition with a massive
resolution, but, as it seemed, with little conviction; it was the
atmosphere of the epilogue, not even of the last act. For over all the
older magnificence hung the challenge of the new millionaires who had
captured Park Lane. The Embankment was beginning to be what it is now—a
_via dolorosa_, sacred to the splendid equipages of men equally great
in the City and the West. The old aristocracy seemed conscious that the
new pace would kill—the pace of the petrol age just then opening up.
They were right. The twentieth century had not much more than dawned
before the old caterpillar skin definitely gave way, and something quite
new appeared, vigorous and symmetrical, with a keen appetite and a sure
objective: the aristocracy of what may be called dynamic wealth, the
wealth that reproduces itself by a sort of geometrical progression.
Of this conquest of the old by the new which was proceeding in the
Nineties, the closest observer was the working-class politician. While
the rest were assuming the permanence of the old conditions, while
Liberalism boasted itself Gladstonian, and Conservatism was still
Disraelian, Labour sent Mr. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons. It had
guessed rightly the main thing that had happened, however mistaken it
might be on details. Up to the Nineties Labour was sicklied o’er with the
pale cast of the thought of John Stuart Mill. In the Nineties it turned
contemptuously away from every “’ism” that lay between Mr. Gladstone’s
position and Mr. Bradlaugh’s. It was now ready to use Liberalism, but for
Liberalism, in another sense, it had no use; it was, if such a word can
be used where there was no sort of regard, more friendly to the squire
than to the rich Radical, but only because in its view the squire did
not matter much, and the great Radical did. Since the Nineties Labour
has changed less than any party. Its older leaders can—and very often
do—make, with applause, the same speeches to-day that struck audiences
with a sense of novelty just after the setting up of that great landmark
in industrial history—the London dockers’ strike.
The middle classes went on as in the days of Noë. They ate, drank, and
sang “Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay.” For them there never was, and there probably
never will be, a period like the Nineties. It was in many ways not a
healthy period economically; the school of economic thought which was
even then in the making deplored its “deleterious cheapness.” Certainly
everything was cheap except Consols and Home rails, and human flesh and
blood were as cheap as anything. It was a dismal equation the hopelessly
(or even hopefully) poor had to work out in terms of pieces of silver and
hours of labour. And the hopeful were few; the poor man could, as a rule,
see nothing before him but bare subsistence. But those who had money,
even a very little, could buy much with it; and it was possible to live a
quite liberal life on less than the wages of a dustman to-day.
For the Londoner especially life went very well then. He suffered from
the still undiminished reign of fog and the tall hat. But otherwise his
lot was happy. Town was quieter, but just as amusing as it is now, less
pretentious, and far less wearing; it had lost both the dismalness and
the crude rowdiness of an earlier period, and had not yet developed the
raucous note of the modern city. One rumbled along comfortably on a
horse-omnibus, or jingled merrily in a hansom, and was moderately sure
of getting somewhere. Superficially everything was slower than now;
practically it was much the same. For if the Underground steam train
was a trifle more leisurely, there was never a breakdown; and if the
horse-omnibus was supposed to take ten minutes to Liverpool Street, it
got to Liverpool Street in ten minutes. “An hour from the city” meant
an hour; to-day it may mean anything from twenty minutes to a hundred
and fifty, according to what the directors think of a Labour leader’s
economics or the railway and omnibus men of a Minister’s policy.
Well-fed, addicted to rather more healthy ideas of recreation than
his predecessors, amazingly ignorant of the outside world, deplorably
educated, but not unintelligent, the average young man of the Nineties
was decidedly self-satisfied. He thought himself a credit to his country,
and thought his country the only country worth mentioning. Continentals
were people who provided us with music-hall entertainers, barbers,
bakers, cheap clerks, and picturesque guests to see the recurrent
Jubilee, when John Bull, like a hospitable host, bared his big right arm
and showed his muscle to the visitors—in the form of a naval display at
Spithead and a procession of white, black, and yellow troops through the
streets of London. The American hardly counted.
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay” was the personal note of the period. “Soldiers of
the Queen”—
“When we say that England’s _master_,
Remember who have made _her_ so”—
represented the national gesture of the time: a time of boundless
confidence sustained on a basis in one sense horribly insecure and
in another firm as adamant. For, while the shakiness of the material
foundation of England’s “mastery” was soon to be exposed, the man of
the Nineties was to be otherwise justified in his careless faith. In
“reeking tube and iron shard” we were found but second-rate; it was the
qualities the Nineties rather went out of their way to deride that pulled
us through the evil days that followed that singular time. The English
character might seem a little vulgarised just then, a little disfigured
by superficial cynicism, but it still had its fellow to seek. And it was
just the young rowdy of that day, and not the elder who rebuked him, who
saved the period in the good opinion of its successors. The older men of
the Nineties had more than a touch of Polonius; they were excellent in
counsel, but of “most weak hams.” But if it was the autumn of the old
excellences, it was the springtide of other things, and the Nineties will
always have a claim on the reverence of Englishmen as the breeding and
growing time of men as brave as any of our blood.