the one ark of salvation; and his was the faith which would compass sea
and land, sacrifice all that it possessed, and give its body to be
burned, if it might by any means bring one more soul to safety. If he
could win a single human being to see the truth and act on it, he was
supremely happy. To make the Church of Rome attractive, to enlarge her
borders, to win recruits for her, was therefore his constant effort. He
had an ulterior eye to it in all his public works--his zealous
teetotalism, his advocacy of the claims of labour, his sympathy with the
demand for Home Rule; and the same principle which animated him in these
large schemes of philanthropy and public policy made itself felt in the
minutest details of daily life and personal dealing. Where he saw the
possibility of making a convert, or even of dissipating prejudice and
inclining a single Protestant more favourably towards Rome, he left no
stone unturned to secure this all-important end. Hence it came that he
was constantly, and not wholly without reason, depicted as a man whom in
religious matters it was impossible to trust; with whom the end
justified the means; and whose every act and word, where the interests
of his Church were involved, must be watched with the most jealous
suspicion.
All this was grossly overstated. Whatever else Cardinal Manning was, he
was an English gentleman of the old school, with a nice sense of honour
and propriety. But still, under a mass of calumny and exaggeration,
there lay this substratum of truth--that he who wills the end wills the
means; and that where the interests of a sacred cause are at stake, an
enthusiastic adherent will sometimes use methods to which, in
enterprises of less pith and moment, recourse could not properly be had.
Manning had what has been called "the ambition of distinctiveness." He
felt that he had a special mission which no other man could so
adequately fulfil, and this was to establish and popularize in England
his own robust faith in the cause of the Papacy as identical with the
cause of God. There never lived a stronger Papalist. He was more
Ultramontane than the Ultramontanes. Everything Roman was to him divine.
Italian architecture, Italian vestments, the Italian mode of pronouncing
ecclesiastical Latin were dear to him, because they visibly and audibly
implied the all-pervading presence and power of Rome. Rightly or
wrongly, he conceived that English Romanism, as it was when he joined
the Roman Church, was practically Gallicanism; that it minimized the
Papal supremacy, was disloyal to the Temporal Power, and was prone to
accommodate itself to its Protestant and secular environment. Against
this time-serving spirit he set his face like a flint. He believed that
he had been divinely appointed to Papalize England. The cause of the
Pope was the cause of God; Manning was the person who could best serve
the Pope's cause, and therefore all forces which opposed him were in
effect opposing the Divine Will. This seems to have been his simple and
sufficient creed, and certainly it had the merit of supplying a clear
rule of action. It made itself felt in his hostility to the Religious
Orders, and especially the Society of Jesus. Religious Orders are
extra-episcopal. The Jesuits are scarcely subject to the Pope himself.
Certainly neither the Orders nor the Society would, or could, be subject
to Manning. A power independent of, or hostile to, his authority was
inimical to religion, and must, as a religious duty, be checked, and, if
possible, destroyed. Exactly the same principle animated his dealings
with Cardinal Newman. Rightly or wrongly, Manning thought Newman a
half-hearted Papalist. He dreaded alike his way of putting things and
his practical policy. Newman's favourite scheme of establishing a Roman
Catholic college at Oxford, Manning regarded as fraught with peril to
the faith of the rising generation. The scheme must therefore be crushed
and its author snubbed.
I must in candour add that these differences of opinion between the two
Cardinals were mixed with and embittered by a sense of personal dislike.
When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very
unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof. I ventured to
ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches. He replied that he
had, and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very
unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety,
after a moment's pause he added, "But if you ask me if they are like
poor Newman, I am bound to say--_a photograph_."
It was, I suppose, matter of common knowledge that Manning's early and
conspicuous ascendency in the counsels of the Papacy rested mainly on
the intimacy of his personal relations with Pius IX. But it was news to
most of us that (if his biographer is right) he wished to succeed
Antonelli as Secretary of State in 1876, and to transfer the scene of
his activities from Westminster to Rome, and that he attributed the
Pope's disregard of his wishes to mental decrepitude. The point, if
true, is an important one, for his accession to the Secretaryship of
State, and permanent residence in Rome, could not have failed to affect
the development of events when, two years later, the Papal throne became
vacant by the death of Pius IX. But _Deo aliter visum_. It was ordained
that he should pass the evening of his days in England, and that he
should outlive his intimacy at the Vatican and his influence on the
general policy of the Church of Rome. With the accession of Leo XIII. a
new order began, and Newman's elevation to the sacred purple seemed to
affix the sanction of Infallibility to views and methods against which
Manning had waged a Thirty Years' War. Henceforward he felt himself a
stranger at the Vatican, and powerless beyond the limits of his own
jurisdiction.
Perhaps this restriction of exterior activities in the ecclesiastical
sphere drove the venerable Cardinal to find a vent for his untiring
energies in those various efforts of social reform in which, during the
last ten years of his life, he played so conspicuous a part. If this be
so, though Rome may have lost, England was unquestionably a gainer. It
was during those ten years that I was honoured by his friendship. The
storms, the struggles, the ambitions, the intrigues which had filled so
large a part of his middle life lay far behind. He was revered, useful,
and, I think, contented in his present life, and looked forward with
serene confidence to the final, and not distant, issue. Thrice happy is
the man who, in spite of increasing infirmity and the loss of much that
once made life enjoyable, thus
"Finds comfort in himself and in his cause,
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause."
FOOTNOTES:
[3] 1903
V.
LORD HOUGHTON.
It is narrated of an ancient Fellow of All Souls' that, lamenting the
changes which had transformed his College from the nest of aristocratic
idlers into a society of accomplished scholars, he exclaimed: "Hang it
all, sir, we were _sui generis_." What the unreformed Fellows of All
Souls' were among the common run of Oxford dons, that, it may truly (and
with better syntax) be said, the late Lord Houghton was among his
fellow-citizens. Of all the men I have ever known he was, I think, the
most completely _sui generis_. His temperament and turn of mind were, as
far as I know, quite unlike anything that obtained among his
predecessors and contemporaries; nor do I see them reproduced among the
men who have come after him. His peculiarities were not external. His
appearance accorded with his position. He looked very much what one
would have expected in a country gentleman of large means and prosperous
circumstances. His early portraits show that he was very like all the
other young gentlemen of fashion whom D'Orsay drew, with their long
hair, high collars, and stupendous neckcloths. The admirably faithful
work of Mr. Lehmann will enable all posterity to know exactly how he
looked in his later years with his loose-fitting clothes, comfortable
figure, and air of genial gravity. Externally all was normal. His
peculiarities were those of mental habit, temperament, and taste. As far
as I know, he had not a drop of foreign blood in his veins, yet his
nature was essentially un-English.
A country gentleman who frankly preferred living in London, and a
Yorkshireman who detested sport, made a sufficiently strange phenomenon;
but in Lord Houghton the astonished world beheld as well a politician
who wrote poetry, a railway-director who lived in literature, a
_libre-penseur_ who championed the Tractarians, a sentimentalist who
talked like a cynic, and a philosopher who had elevated conviviality to
the dignity of an exact science. Here, indeed, was a "living
oxymoron"--a combination of inconsistent and incongruous qualities which
to the typical John Bull--Lord Palmerston's "Fat man with a white hat in
the twopenny omnibus"--was a sealed and hopeless mystery.
Something of this unlikeness to his fellow-Englishmen was due, no doubt,
to the fact that Lord Houghton, the only son of a gifted, eccentric, and
indulgent father, was brought up at home. The glorification of the
Public School has been ridiculously overdone. But it argues no blind
faith in that strange system of unnatural restraints and scarcely more
reasonable indulgences to share Gibbon's opinion that the training of a
Public School is the best adapted to the common run of Englishmen. "It
made us what we were, sir," said Major Bagstock to Mr. Dombey; "we were
iron, sir, and it forged us." The average English boy being what he is
by nature--"a soaring human boy," as Mr. Chadband called him--a Public
School simply makes him more so. It confirms alike his characteristic
faults and his peculiar virtues, and turns him out after five or six
years that altogether lovely and gracious product--the Average
Englishman. This may be readily conceded; but, after all, the
pleasantness of the world as a place of residence, and the growing good
of the human race, do not depend exclusively on the Average Englishman;
and something may be said for the system of training which has
produced, not only all famous foreigners (for they, of course, are a
negligible quantity), but such exceptional Englishmen as William Pitt
and Thomas Macaulay, and John Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, and Richard
Monckton Milnes.
From an opulent and cultivated home young Milnes passed to the most
famous college in the world, and found himself under the tuition of
Whewell and Thirlwall, and in the companionship of Alfred Tennyson and
Julius Hare, Charles Buller and John Sterling--a high-hearted
brotherhood who made their deep mark on the spiritual and intellectual
life of their own generation and of that which succeeded it.
After Cambridge came foreign travel, on a scale and plan quite outside
the beaten track of the conventional "grand tour" as our fathers knew
it. From the Continent Richard Milnes brought back a gaiety of spirit, a
frankness of bearing, a lightness of touch which were quite un-English,
and "a taste for French novels, French cookery, and French wines" with
which Miss Crawley would have sympathized. In 1837 he entered Parliament
as a "Liberal Conservative" for the Borough of Pontefract, over which
his father exercised considerable influence, and he immediately became a
conspicuous figure in the social life of London. A few years later his
position and character were drawn by the hand of a master in a passage
which will well bear yet one more reproduction:--
"Mr. Vavasour was a social favourite; a poet, and a real poet, and a
troubadour, as well as a Member of Parliament; travelled,
sweet-tempered, and good-hearted; amusing and clever. With catholic
sympathies and an eclectic turn of mind, 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
country--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. A real philosopher, alike from his genial
disposition and from the influence of his rich and various information,
Vavasour moved amid the strife, sympathizing with every one; and
perhaps, after all, the philanthropy which was his boast was not
untinged by a dash of humour, of which rare and charming quality he
possessed no inconsiderable portion. Vavasour liked to know everybody
who was known, and to see everything which ought to be seen. His life
was a gyration of energetic curiosity; an insatiable whirl of social
celebrity. There was not a congregation of sages and philosophers in any
part of Europe which he did not attend as a brother. He was present at
the camp of Kalisch in his yeomanry uniform, and assisted at the
festivals of Barcelona in an Andalusian jacket. He was everywhere and at
everything: he had gone down in a diving-bell and gone up in a balloon.
As for his acquaintances, he was welcomed in every land; his universal
sympathies seemed omnipotent. Emperor and King, Jacobin and Carbonaro,
alike cherished him. He was the steward of Polish balls, and the
vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave
dinners to Louis Blanc."
Lord Beaconsfield's penetration in reading character and skill in
delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than
in the foregoing passage. Divested of its intentional and humorous
exaggerations, it is not a caricature, but a portrait. It exhibits with
singular fidelity the qualities which made Lord Houghton, to the end of
his long life, at once unique and lovable. We recognize the overflowing
sympathy, the keen interest in life, the vivid faculty of enjoyment, the
absolute freedom from national prejudice, the love of seeing and of
being seen.
During the Chartist riots of 1848 Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother:
"Tell Miss Martineau it is said here that Monckton Milnes refused to be
sworn in a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post
of President of the Republic at a moment's notice." And those who knew
Lord Houghton best suspect that he himself originated the joke at his
own expense. The assured ease of young Milnes's social manner, even
among complete strangers, so unlike the morbid self-repression and proud
humility of the typical Englishman, won for him the nickname of "The
Cool of the Evening." His wholly un-English tolerance and constant
effort to put himself in the place of others whom the world condemned,
procured for him from Carlyle (who genuinely loved him) the title of
"President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company." Bishop
Wilberforce wrote, describing a dinner-party in 1847: "Carlyle was very
great. Monckton Milnes drew him out. Milnes began the young man's cant
of the present day--the barbarity and wickedness of capital punishment;
that, after all, we could not be sure others were wicked, etc. Carlyle
broke out on him with, 'None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation
Companies for me. We _do_ know what is wickedness, _I_ know wicked men,
men whom I _would not live with_--men whom under some conceivable
circumstances I would kill or they should kill me. No, Milnes, there's
no truth or greatness in all that. It's just poor, miserable
littleness.'"
Lord Houghton's faculty of enjoyment was peculiarly keen. He warmed not
only both hands but indeed all his nature before the fire of life. "All
impulses of soul and sense" affected him with agreeable emotions; no
pleasure of body or spirit came amiss to him. And in nothing was he more
characteristically un-English than in the frank manifestation of his
enjoyment, bubbling over with an infectious jollity, and never, even
when touched by years and illness, taking his pleasures after that
melancholy manner of our nation to which it is a point of literary
honour not more directly to allude. Equally un-English was his frank
openness of speech and bearing. His address was pre-eminently what
old-fashioned people called "forthcoming." It was strikingly--even
amusingly--free from that frigid dignity and arrogant reserve for which
as a nation we are so justly famed. I never saw him kiss a guest on both
cheeks, but if I had I should not have felt the least surprised.
What would have surprised me would have been if the guest (whatever his
difference of age or station) had not felt immediately and completely at
home, or if Lord Houghton had not seemed and spoken as if they had known
one another from the days of short frocks and skipping-ropes. There
never lived so perfect a host. His sympathy was genius, and his
hospitality a fine art. He was peculiarly sensitive to the claims of
"Auld Lang Syne," and when a young man came up from Oxford or Cambridge
to begin life in London, he was certain to find that Lord Houghton had
travelled on the Continent with his father, or had danced with his
mother, or had made love to his aunt, and was eagerly on the look-out
for an opportunity of showing gracious and valuable kindness to the son
of his ancient friends.
When I first lived in London Lord Houghton was occupying a house in
Arlington Street made famous by the fact that Hogarth drew its interior
and decorations in his pictures of "Marriage a la Mode." And nowhere did
the social neophyte receive a warmer welcome, or find himself amid a
more eclectic and representative society. Queens of fashion,
professional beauties, authors and authoresses, ambassadors,
philosophers, discoverers, actors--every one who was famous or even
notorious; who had been anywhere or had done anything, from a
successful speech in Parliament to a hazardous leap at the
Aquarium--jostled one another on the wide staircase and in the gravely
ornate drawing-rooms. And amid the motley crowd the genial host was
omnipresent, with a warm greeting and a twinkling smile for each
successive guest--a good story, a happy quotation, the last morsel of
piquant gossip, the newest theory of ethics or of politics.
Lord Houghton's humour had a quality which was quite its own. Nothing
was sacred to it--neither age, nor sex, nor subject was spared; but it
was essentially good-natured. It was the property of a famous spear to
heal the wounds which itself had made; the shafts of Lord Houghton's fun
needed no healing virtue, for they made no wound. When that saintly
friend of temperance and all good causes, Mr. Cowper-Temple, was raised
to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, Lord Houghton went about saying,
"You know that the precedent for Billy Cowper's title is in _Don
Juan?_--
'And Lord Mount Coffee-house, the Irish peer,
Who killed himself for love, with drink, last year.'"
When a very impecunious youth, who could barely afford to pay for his
cab fares, lost a pound to him at whist, Lord Houghton said, as he
pocketed the coin, "Ah, my dear boy, the _great_ Lord Hertford, whom
foolish people called the _wicked_ Lord Hertford--Thackeray's Steyne and
Dizzy's Monmouth--used to say, 'There is no pleasure in winning money
from a man who does not feel it.' How true that was!--" And when he saw
a young friend at a club supping on _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne,
he said encouragingly, "That's quite right. All the pleasant things in
life are unwholesome, or expensive, or wrong." And amid these rather
grim morsels of experimental philosophy he would interject certain
_obiter dicta_ which came straight from the unspoiled goodness of a
really kind heart. "All men are improved by prosperity," he used to
say. Envy, hatred, and malice had no place in his nature. It was a
positive enjoyment to him to see other people happy, and a friend's
success was as gratifying as his own. His life, though in most respects
singularly happy, had not been without its disappointments. At one time
he had nursed political ambitions, and his peculiar knowledge of foreign
affairs had seemed to indicate a special line of activity and success.
But things went differently. He always professed to regard his peerage
as "a Second Class in the School of Life," and himself as a political
failure. Yet no tinge of sourness, or jealousy, or cynical disbelief in
his more successful contemporaries ever marred the geniality of his
political conversation.
As years advanced he became not (as the manner of most men is) less
Liberal, but more so; keener in sympathy with all popular causes;
livelier in his indignation against monopoly and injustice. Thirty years
ago, in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1866, his character and
position were happily hit off by Sir George Trevelyan in a description
of a walk down Piccadilly:--
"There on warm midsummer Sundays Fryston's Bard is wont to wend,
Whom the Ridings trust and honour, Freedom's staunch and jovial friend:
Loved where shrewd hard-handed craftsmen cluster round the northern
kilns--
He whom men style Baron Houghton, but the Gods call Dicky Milnes."
And eighteen years later there was a whimsical pathos in the phrase in
which he announced his fatal illness to a friend: "Yes, I am going to
join the Majority--and you know I have always preferred Minorities."
It would be foreign to my purpose to criticize Lord Houghton as a poet.
My object in these chapters is merely to record the characteristic
traits of eminent men who have honoured me with their friendship, and
among those there is none for whose memory I cherish a warmer sentiment
of affectionate gratitude than for him whose likeness I have now tried
to sketch. His was the most precious of combinations--a genius and a
heart. An estimate of his literary gifts and performances lies
altogether outside my scope, but the political circumstances of the
present hour[4] impel me to conclude this paper with a quotation which,
even if it stood alone, would, I think, justify Lord Beaconsfield's
judgment quoted above--that "he was a poet, and a true poet." Here is
the lyrical cry which, writing in 1843, he puts into the mouth of
Greece:--
"And if to his old Asian seat,
From this usurped, unnatural throne,
The Turk is driven, 'tis surely meet
That we again should hold our own;
Be but Byzantium's native sign
Of Cross on Crescent[5] once unfurled,
And Greece shall guard by right divine
The portals of the Easter world."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] March 1897.
[5] The Turks adopted the sign of the Crescent from Byzantium after the
Conquest: the Cross above the Crescent is found on many ruins of the
Grecian city--among others, on the Genoese castle on the Bosphorus.
VI.
RELIGION AND MORALITY.
In these chapters I have been trying to recall some notable people
through whom I have been brought into contact with the social life of
the past. I now propose to give the impressions which they conveyed to
me of the moral, material, and political condition of England just at
the moment when the old order was yielding place to new, and modern
Society was emerging from the birth-throes of the French Revolution. All
testimony seems to me to point to the fact that towards the close of the
eighteenth century Religion was almost extinct in the highest and lowest
classes of English society. The poor were sunk in ignorance and
barbarism, and the aristocracy was honeycombed by profligacy. Morality,
discarded alike by high and low, took refuge in the great Middle Class,
then, as now, deeply influenced by Evangelical Dissent. A dissolute
Heir-Apparent presided over a social system in which not merely religion
but decency was habitually disregarded. At his wedding he was so drunk
that his attendant dukes "could scarcely support him from falling."[6]
The Princes of the Blood were notorious for a freedom of life and
manners which would be ludicrous if it were not shocking. Here I may
cite an unpublished diary[7] of Lord Robert Seymour (son of the first
Marquis of Hertford), who was born in 1748 and died in 1831. He was a
man of fashion and a Member of Parliament; and these are some of the
incidents which he notes in 1788:--
"The Prince of Wales declares there is not an honest Woman in London,
excepting Ly. Parker and Ly. Westmoreland, and those are so stupid he
can make nothing of them; they are scarcely fit to blow their own
Noses."
"At Mrs. Vaneck's assembly last week, the Prince of Wales, very much to
the honour of his polite and elegant Behaviour, measured the breadth of
Mrs. V. behind with his Handkerchief, and shew'd the measurement to most
of the Company."
"Another Trait of the P. of Wales's Respectful Conduct is that at an
assembly he beckoned to the poor old Dutchess of Bedford across a large
Room, and, when she had taken the trouble of crossing the Room, he very
abruptly told her he had nothing to say to her."