only two perfect things--Sir Robert Peel's voice and Lord Palmerston's
writing. The former we can know only by tradition; the latter survives,
for the instruction of mankind, in folios of voluminous despatches,
all written in a hand at once graceful in form and absolutely clear
to read. "The wayfaring men" of Diplomacy, though sometimes "fools,"
could not "err" in the interpretation of Palmerston's despatches. The
same excellence of caligraphy which Palmerston himself practised he
rightly required from his subordinates. If a badly written despatch
came into his hands, he would embellish it with scathing rebukes, and
return it, through the Office, to the offending writer. The recipient
of one of these admonitions thus recalls its terms, "Tell the gentleman
who copied this despatch to write a larger, rounder hand, to join the
letters in the words, and to use blacker ink."
If Lord Palmerston stood easily first among the penmen of his time,
the credit of writing the worst hand in England was divided among at
least three claimants. First there was Lord Houghton, whose strange,
tall, upright strokes, all exactly like each other except in so far
as they leaned in different directions, Lord Tennyson likened to
"walking-sticks gone mad." Then there was my dear friend Mr. James
Payn, who described his own hand only too faithfully when he wrote
about "the wandering of a centipede which had just escaped from the
inkpot and had scrawled and sprawled over the paper," and whose closest
friends always implored him to correspond by telegraph. And, finally,
there was the "bad eminence" of Dean Stanley, whose lifelong indulgence
in hieroglyphics inflicted a permanent loss on literature. The Dean,
as all readers of his biography will remember, had a marked turn for
light and graceful versification. The albums and letter-caskets of
his innumerable friends were full of these "occasional" verses, in
which domestic, political, and ecclesiastical events were prettily
perpetuated. After his death his sister, Mrs. Vaughan, tried to
collect these fugitive pieces in a Memorial Volume, but an unforeseen
difficulty occurred. In many cases the recipients of the poems were
dead and gone, and no living creature could decipher the Dean's
writing. So what might have been a pretty and instructive volume
perished untimely.
Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, the brilliant dame who raised the
Gordon Highlanders and who played on the Tory side the part which the
Duchess of Devonshire played among the Whigs, had, like our English
Subalterns, a very imperfect education; but with great adroitness she
covered her deficiences with a cloak of seeming humour. "Whenever," she
wrote to Sir Walter Scott, "I come to a word which I cannot spell, I
write it as near as I can, and put a note of exclamation after it; so
that, if it's wrong, my friend will think that I was making a joke."
A respected member of the present Cabinet who shares Duchess Jane's
orthographical weakness covers his retreat by drawing a long, involuted
line after the initial letter of each word. Let the reader write, say,
the word "aluminium" on this principle; and he will see how very easily
imperfect spelling in high places may be concealed.
With soldiers this chapter began, and with a soldier it shall
end--the most illustrious of them all, Arthur, Duke of Wellington.
Let it be recorded for the encouragement of our modern Subalterns
that the Duke, though he spelled much better than Captain Crawley,
wrote quite as badly as Sir George Tufto; but that circumstance did
not--as is sometimes the case--enable him to interpret by sympathy the
hieroglyphics of other people. Is there any one left, "In a Lancashire
Garden" or elsewhere, who recalls the honoured name of Jane Loudon,
authoress of "The Lady's Companion to her Flower Garden"? Mrs. Loudon
was an accomplished lady, who wrote not only on Floriculture, but on
Arboriculture and Landscape Gardening, and illustrated what she wrote.
In one of her works she desired to insert a sketch of the "Waterloo
Beeches" at Strathfieldsaye--a picturesque clump planted to commemorate
our deliverance from the Corsican Tyrant. Accordingly she wrote to the
Duke of Wellington, requesting leave to sketch the beeches, and signed
herself, in her usual form, "J. Loudon." The Duke, who, in spite of
extreme age and perceptions not quite so clear as they had once been,
insisted on conducting all his own correspondence, replied as follows:--
"F.M. the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to the Bishop of
London. The Bishop is quite at liberty to make a sketch of the breeches
which the Duke wore at Waterloo, if they can be found. But the Duke
is not aware that they differed in any way from the breeches which he
generally wears."
XXXIV
AUTOGRAPHS
From handwriting in general to autographs in particular the transition
is natural, almost inevitable. My recent reflections on the imperfect
penmanship of the British officer sent me to my collection of letters,
and the sight of these autographs--old friends long since hidden
away--set me on an interesting enquiry. Was there any affinity between
the writing and the character? Could one, in any case, have guessed who
the writer was, or what he did, merely by scrutinizing his manuscript?
I make no pretension to any skill in the art or science of Caligraphy;
and, regarding my letters merely as an amateur or non-expert, I must
confess that I arrive at a mixed and dubious result. Some of the
autographs are characteristic enough; some seem to imply qualities for
which the writer was not famed and to suppress others for which he was
notorious.
Let us look carefully at the first letter which I produce from my
hoard. The lines are level, and the words are clearly divided, although
here and there an abbreviation tells that the hand which wrote this
letter had many letters to write; the capitals, of which there are
plenty, are long and twirling, though the intermediate letters are
rather small, and the signature is followed by an emphatic dash which
seems to say more explicitly than words that the writer is one who
cannot be ignored. This is the autograph of Queen Victoria in those
distant days when she said, "They seem to think that I am a schoolgirl,
but I will teach them that I am Queen of England."
Surrounding and succeeding Queen Victoria I find a cluster of minor
royalties, but a study of their autographs does not enable me to
generalize about royal writing. Some are scrawling and some are
cramped; some are infantine and some foreign. Here is a level, firm,
and rapid hand, in which the exigencies of a copious correspondence
seem to have softened the stiffness of a military gait. The letter is
dated from "The Horse Guards," and the signature is
"Yours very truly,
GEORGE."
But here again we cannot generalize, for nothing can be more dissimilar
than the Duke's hurried, high-shouldered characters and the exquisite
piece of penmanship which lies alongside of them. This is written in
a leisurely and cultivated hand, with due spaces between words and
paragraphs, like the writing of a scholar and man of letters; it is
dated May 29, 1888, and bears the signature of
"Your affectionate Cousin,
ALBEMARLE,"
the last survivor but one of Waterloo.
But soldiers are not much in my way, and my military signatures are
few. My collection is rich in politicians. Here comes, first in date
though in nothing else, that Duke of Bedford who negotiated the
Treaty of Fontainebleau and got trounced by Junius for his pains. It
is written in 1767, just as the writer is "setting out from Woburn
Abbey to consult his Shropshire oculist" (why Shropshire?), and has
the small, cramped character which is common to so many conditions
of shortened sight. (I find exactly the same in a letter of Lord
Chancellor Hatherley, 1881.) Thirty-nine years pass, and William Pitt
writes his last letter from "Putney Hill, the 1st of January, 1806, 2
P.M.," the writing as clear, as steady, and as beautifully formed as if
the "Sun of Austerlitz" had never dawned. And now the Statesmen pass
me in rapid succession and in fine disregard of chronological order.
Lord Russell writes a graceful, fluent, rather feminine hand; Charles
Villiers's writing is of the same family; and the great Lord Derby's
a perfect specimen of the "Italian hand," delicate as if drawn with a
crow-quill, and slanted into alluring tails and loops. Lord Brougham's
was a vile scrawl, with half the letters tumbling backwards. John
Bright's is small, neat, and absolutely clear; nor is it fanciful to
surmise that Mr. Chamberlain copied Mr. Bright, and were they not both
short-sighted men? And Lord Goschen's writing, from the same cause, is
smaller still. The Duke of Argyll wrote a startling and imperious hand,
worthy of a Highland chief whose ancestors not so long ago exercised
the power of life and death; Lord Iddesleigh a neat and orderly hand,
becoming a Private Secretary or Permanent Official. Lord Granville's
and Mr. Forster's writings had this in common, that they looked
most surprisingly candid and straightforward. The present Duke of
Devonshire's writing suggests nothing but vanity, self-consciousness,
and ostentation. We all can judge, even without being caligraphists,
how far these suggestions conform to the facts. By far the most
pleasing autograph of all the Statesmen is Lord Beaconsfield's,
artistically formed and highly finished--in his own phrase, "that form
of scripture which attracts." With the utmost possible loyalty to a
lost leader, I would submit that Mr. Gladstone wrote an uncommonly bad
hand--not bad in point of appearance, for it was neat and comely even
when it was hurried; but bad morally--a kind of caligraphic imposture,
for it looks quite remarkably legible, and it is only when you come to
close quarters with it and try to decipher an important passage that
you find that all the letters are practically the same, and that the
interpretation of a word must depend on the context.
From my pile of Statesmen's autographs I extract yet another, and I
lay it side by side with the autographs of a great author and a great
ecclesiastic. All three are very small, exquisitely neat, very little
slanted, absolutely legible. Well as I knew the three writers, I doubt
if I could tell which wrote which letter. They were Cardinal Manning,
Mr. Froude, and Lord Rosebery. Will the experts in caligraphy tell
me if, in this case, similarity of writing bodied forth similarity
of gifts or qualities? Another very close similarity may be observed
between the writing of Lord Halsbury and that of Lord Brampton (better
known as Sir Henry Hawkins), which, but for the fact that Lord Brampton
uses the long "s" and Lord Halsbury does not, are pretty nearly
identical.
If there is one truth which can be deduced more confidently than
another from my collection of autographs, it is that there is no
such thing as "the literary hand." Every variety of writing which a
"Reader's" fevered brain could conceive is illustrated in my bundle
of literary autographs. _Seniores priores._ Samuel Rogers was born in
1763, and died in 1855. A note of his, written in 1849, and beginning,
"Pray, pray, come on Tuesday," is by far the most surprising piece of
caligraphy in my collection. It is so small that, except under the
eyes of early youth, it requires a magnifying-glass; yet the symmetry
of every letter is perfect, and, when sufficiently enlarged, it might
stand as a model of beautiful and readable writing. I take a bound of
sixty years, and find some of the same characteristics reproduced by
my friend Mr. Quiller-Couch; but between the "Pleasures of Memory" and
"Green Bays" there rolls a sea of literature, and it has been navigated
by some strange crafts in the way of handwriting. I have spoken on
another occasion of Dean Stanley, Lord Houghton, and James Payn;
specimens of their enormities surround me as I write, and I can adduce,
I think, an equally heinous instance. Here is Sydney Smith, writing in
1837 to "Dear John," the hero of the Reform Act, "No body wishes better
for you and yours than the inhabitants of Combe Florey." Perhaps so;
but they conveyed their benedictions through a very irritating medium,
for Sydney Smith's writing is of the immoral type, pleasing to the
eye and superficially legible, but, when once you have lost the clue,
a labyrinth. Perhaps it is due to this circumstance that his books
abound, beyond all others, in uncorrected misprints.
But there are other faults in writing besides ugliness and
illegibility. A great man ought not to write a poor hand. Yet nothing
can be poorer than Ruskin's--mean, ugly, insignificant--only redeemed
by perfect legibility. Goldwin Smith's, though clear and shapely, is
characterless and disappointing. Some great scholars, again, write
disappointing hands. Jowett's is a spiteful-looking angular, little
scratch, perfectly easy to read; Westcott's comely but not clear;
Lightfoot's an open, scrambling scrawl, something like the late Lord
Derby's. These great men cannot excuse their deficiencies in penmanship
by pleading that they have had to write a great deal in their lives.
Others before them have had to do that, and have emerged from the trial
without a stain on their caligraphy. For example--"Albany, December
3, 1854," is the heading of an ideally beautiful sheet, every letter
perfectly formed, all spaces duly observed, and the whole evidently
maintaining its beauty in spite of breakneck speed. The signature is
"Ever yours truly,
T. B. MACAULAY."
Here is a letter addressed to me only last year by a man who was
born in 1816. In my whole collection there is no clearer or prettier
writing. As a devotee of fine penmanship, I make my salutations to Sir
Theodore Martin.
XXXV
MORE AUTOGRAPHS
My suggestive friend has suddenly been multiplied a hundredfold.
Handwriting is a subject which apparently makes a wide appeal.
Each post brings me corrections or corroborations of what I wrote
last Saturday. Fresh instances of enormity in the way of illegible
writing are adduced from all quarters; nor are there wanting acrid
critics who suggest that reform should begin at home, and that "the
Author of Collections and Recollections" would do well to consult
a writing-master, or to have his copy typed before it goes to the
printers. Waiving these personalities, I turn again to my letter-case,
and here let me say in passing that I committed a fearful indiscretion
when I spoke of my "Collection" of autographs. That fatal word brought
down an avalanche of "Collectors," who, hailing me as a man and a
brother, propose all sorts of convenient exchanges. A gentleman who
cherishes a postcard from Mr. Rudyard Kipling would exchange it for an
unpublished letter of Shelley; and a maiden-lady at Weston-super-Mare,
whose great-aunt corresponded with Eliza Cook, will refuse no
reasonable offer.
But all these handsome propositions must be brushed aside, for I have
no collection of autographs, if "collection" implies any art or system
in the way in which they have been brought together, or any store of
saleable duplicates. Mine are simply letters addressed to myself or
to my kinsfolk, plus just a very few which have come into my hands in
connexion with public business; but, such as they are, they are full of
memories and morals.
Why did very old people write so well? I have already described the
writing of Samuel Rogers, of the Waterloo Lord Albemarle, and of Sir
Theodore Martin. Pretty well for octogenarian penmanship; but I can
enlarge the gallery. A bundle of octogenarian letters lies before me
as I write. Oliver Wendell Holmes sends a tribute to Matthew Arnold.
Charles Villiers accepts an invitation to dinner. Lord Norton invites
me to stay at Hams. Archdeacon Denison complains of "his first attack
of gout at eighty-five." Mr. Leveson-Gower at eighty-six thanks
me for a review of his first book. I protest that there is not an
ungraceful line--scarcely a misshaped letter--in any of these five
manuscripts. Here is a small, elegant, and "taily" hand, rather like an
old-fashioned lady's. The signature is
"Yours sincerely,
EVERSLEY,"
better known as Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, the most authoritative Speaker
the House of Commons ever had. Note that this was written in his
eighty-eighth year, and he lived to buy a new pair of guns after he was
ninety. Here is a strong, clear, well-defined writing, setting forth
with precision and emphasis the reasons why the last Duke of Cleveland,
then in his eighty-fifth year, will not give more than £5 for an
object which he has been asked to help. The writing of the beloved
and honoured Duke of Rutland, always graceful and regular, becomes
markedly smaller, though not the least less legible, till he dies at
eighty-seven. There is no more vigorous, even dashing, signature in
my store than "G. J. Holyoake," written in July 1905. Close to the
imperial purple of the Agitator's ink nestles, in piquant contrast,
a small half-sheet of rose-pink paper bearing a Duchess's coronet
and cypher. The writing is distinct and ornamental; the letter was
written in 1880, and the writer was born in 1792. But the mere fact
of attaining to eighty or ninety years will not absolutely guarantee,
though it seems to promote, legibility of writing. My venerable
friend Dean Randall, who was born in 1824, ends a letter, which
certainly needs some such apology, with a disarming allusion to the
"dreadful scrawl" of his "ancient MS."; and four sides of tantalizing
hieroglyphics, drawn apparently with a blunt stick, are shown by
external evidence to be a letter from Canon Carter of Clewer when he
had touched his ninetieth birthday.
On similarity, approaching to identity, between the writings of very
dissimilar persons I have already remarked, and a further illustration
comes to light as I turn over my papers. Here are two letters in the
graceful and legible script of the early nineteenth century, with long
S's, and capitals for all the substantives. Both are evidently the
handiwork of cultivated gentlemen; and both the writers, as a matter
of fact, were clergymen. But there the resemblance stops. The one was
"Jack" Russell, the well-known Sporting Parson of Exmoor; the other
was Andrew Jukes, the deepest and most influential Mystic whom the
latter-day Church has seen.
When I praise gracefulness in writing I mean natural and effortless
grace, such as was displayed in the writing of the late Duke of
Westminster. But, if we admire writing artificially fashioned and
coerced into gracefulness like a clipped yew, it would be difficult
to excel the penmanship of the late George Augustus Sala, who was an
engraver before he was an author; or that of Sir A. Conan Doyle, who
handles a pen as dexterously as in his surgical days he wielded the
lancet. I praised just now the late Duke of Westminster's writing,
and of him one might say what Scott said, in a different sense, of
Byron--that he "managed his pen with the careless and negligent ease of
a man of quality"; but there is another kind of grace than that--the
grace which is partly the result of mental clearness and partly of a
cultured eye. Here are two specimens of such writing, the letters so
alluringly fashioned that they look, as some one said, like something
good to eat; and spaced with a care which at once makes reading easy,
and testifies to clear thinking in the writer. Both are the writings of
Scholars, and both of men who wrote a vast deal in their lives--Bishop
Creighton and Dean Vaughan. It must have been a joy to read their
Proofs. The late Dean Farrar was the only Public-School Master I ever
knew who took pains with his pupils' writing and encouraged them to add
grace to legibility. His own writing, small, upright, and characterful,
was very pretty when he took time and pains; but the specimen which
lies before me shows sad signs of the havoc wrought by incessant
writing against time.
Grace and legibility are the two chief glories of penmanship, but other
attributes are not without their effect. A dashing scrawl, if only
it is easy to read, suggests a soaring superiority to conventional
restraints, and rather bespeaks a hero. Here are two scrawls, and each
is the work of a remarkable person. One is signed "Yours truly, Jos.
Cowen," and I dare say that some of my readers would see in it the
index to a nature at once impetuous and imperious. But Mr. Cowen's
scrawl was crowquill-work and copperplate compared with its next-door
neighbour. "Accept the enclosed, dear Mr. Russell," covers the whole
of one side of a sheet of letter-paper; the ink is blue; the paper
is ribbed; the signature, all wreathed in gigantic flourishes and
curling tails, is "Laura Thistlethwaite," and the enclosed is one of
the Evangelistic Addresses of that gifted preacher who once was Laura
Bell. Odd incongruities keep turning up. As I pass from the Evangelical
lady-orator, I come to Father Ignatius, an Evangelical orator with a
difference, but with a like tendency to scrawl. Lord Leighton's writing
is also a scrawl, and, it must be confessed, an egotistical scrawl, and
a very bad scrawl to read. An illegible scrawl, too, is the writing
of Richard Holt Hutton, but his is not a vainglorious or commanding
scrawl, but rather humble and untidy. "Henry Irving" is a signature
quite culpably illegible, but "Squire Bancroft" is just irregular
enough to be interesting though not unreadable.
_Per contra_, I turn to one of the most legible signatures in my
possession. The writing is ugly and the letters are ill-formed, looking
rather like the work of a hand which has only lately learned to write
and finds the act a difficulty. But it is as clear as print, and it
shows no adventitious ornamentation or self-assertive twirls. The
signature is
"Yours most sincerely,
RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL."
In this case, if in no other, the oracles of Caligraphy are set at
naught. Here is a fine, twisty, twirling hand, all tails and loops,
but not at all unsightly. The signature reads like "Lincoln," and only
a careful study would detect that the "L" of "Lincoln" is preceded
by a circular flourish which looks like part of the L but is really
a capital C. It is the signature of that great scholar, Christopher
Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln; and I remember that, in days of
ecclesiastical strife, it was once imputed to that apostolic man for
vanity that he signed his name "Lincoln" like a Temporal Peer. From
that day he defined the "C" more carefully.
To the last letter which I bring to light to-day a different kind of
interest attaches. It is dated
"DINGLE BANK, LIVERPOOL,
_April 13, 1888_."
The writing is small and clear, with the upstrokes and downstrokes
rather long in comparison with the level letters; but some small blurs
and blots show that the letter was written in unusual haste. It ends
with these words: "Smalley has written a letter full of shriekings and
cursings about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion
of it from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again.
"Ever yours,
M. A."
This was the last letter which Matthew Arnold ever wrote, and it closed
a friendship which had been one of the joys and glories of my life.
XXXVI
CHRISTMAS