our country cousins are aware that the Member for Northampton is less
an ornament of general society than the oracle of an initiated circle.
The smoking-room of the House of Commons is his shrine, and there,
poised in an American rocking-chair and delicately toying with a
cigarette, he unlocks the varied treasures of his well-stored memory,
and throws over the changing scenes of life the mild light of his genial
philosophy. It is a chequered experience that has made him what he is.
He has known men and cities; has probed in turn the mysteries of the
caucus, the green-room, and the Stock Exchange; has been a diplomatist,
a financier, a journalist, and a politician. Under these circumstances,
it is perhaps not surprising that his faith--no doubt originally
robust--in the purity of human nature and the uprightness of human
motive should have undergone some process of degeneration. Still it may
be questioned whether, after all that he has seen and done, he is the
absolute and all-round cynic that he would seem to be. The palpable
endeavour to make out the worst of every one--including himself--gives a
certain flavour of unreality to his conversation; but, in spite of this
peculiarity, he is an engaging talker. His language is racy and
incisive, and he talks as neatly as he writes. His voice is pleasant,
and his utterance deliberate and effective. He has a keen eye for
absurdities and incongruities, a shrewd insight into affectation and
bombast, and an admirable impatience of all the moral and intellectual
qualities which constitute the Bore. He is by no means inclined to bow
his knee too slavishly to an exalted reputation, and analyzes with
agreeable frankness the personal and political qualities of great and
good men, even if they sit on the front Opposition bench. As a
contributor to enjoyment, as a promoter of fun, as an unmasker of
political and social humbug, he is unsurpassed. His performances in
debate are no concern of mine, for I am speaking of conversation only;
but most Members of Parliament will agree that he is the best companion
that can be found for the last weary half-hour before the division-bell
rings, when some eminent nonentity is declaiming his foregone
conclusions to an audience whose whole mind is fixed on the chance of
finding a disengaged cab in Palace Yard.
Like Mr. Labouchere, Lord Acton has touched life at many points--but not
the same. He is a theologian, a professor, a man of letters, a member of
society; and his conversation derives a distinct tinge from each of
these environments. When, at intervals all too long, he quits his
retirement at Cannes or Cambridge, and flits mysteriously across the
social scene, his appearance is hailed with devout rejoicing by every
one who appreciates manifold learning, a courtly manner, and a
delicately sarcastic vein of humour. The distinguishing feature of Lord
Acton's conversation is an air of sphinx-like mystery, which suggests
that he knows a great deal more than he is willing to impart. Partly by
what he says, and even more by what he leaves unsaid, his hearers are
made to feel that, if he has not acted conspicuous parts, he has been
behind the scenes of many and very different theatres.
He has had relations, neither few nor unimportant, with the Pope and the
Old Catholics, with Oxford and Lambeth, with the cultivated Whiggery of
the great English families, with the philosophic radicalism of Germany,
and with those Nationalist complications which, in these later days,
have drawn official Liberalism into their folds. He has long lived on
terms of the closest intimacy with Mr. Gladstone, and may perhaps be
bracketed with Canon MacColl and Sir Algernon West as the most absolute
and profound Gladstonian outside the family circle of Hawarden. But he
is thoroughly eclectic in his friendships, and when he is in London he
flits from Lady Hayter's tea-table to Mr. Goschen's bureau, analyzes at
the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks's, and by
dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain
intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and
the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the
Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the
side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.
The ranks of our good talkers--none too numerous a body at the best, and
sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter--have
been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell.
For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during
the last nine--in short, since he entered Parliament--that the admirable
qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before
that time his delightful _Obiter Dicta_ had secured for him a wide
circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his
first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest.
What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as
pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the
questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or
even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his
conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its
agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of
chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect.
To "birrell" is now a verb as firmly established as to "boycott," and it
signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive,
perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when
the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it
was seen that his predominant quality was strength.
An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him "The
Harmonious Blacksmith," and the collocation of words happily hits off
the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his
positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his
thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses. In his
sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual
affectation, and moral baseness, he is the Blacksmith all over. In his
geniality, his sociability, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness
to amuse or be amused, the epithet "harmonious" is abundantly justified.
He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the eighteenth
century, in which his studies have chiefly lain. He says what he means,
and calls a spade a spade, and glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He
is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps
the most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people are too
"cultured" to read books, though willing enough to chatter about them.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] May 7, 1897.
XVII.
CLERGYMEN.
_ Clerus Anglicanus stupor mundi_. I believe that this complimentary
proverb originally referred to the learning of the English clergy, but
it would apply with equal truth to their social agreeableness. When I
was writing about the Art of Conversation and the men who excelled in
it, I was surprised to find how many of the best sayings that recurred
spontaneously to my memory had a clerical origin; and it struck me that
a not uninteresting chapter might be written about the social
agreeableness of clergymen. A mere layman may well feel a natural and
becoming diffidence in venturing to handle so high a theme.
In a former chapter I said something of the secular magnificence which
surrounded great prelates in the good old days, when the Archbishop of
Canterbury could only be approached on gilt-edged paper, and even the
Bishop of impecunious Oxford never appeared in his Cathedral city
without four horses and two powdered footmen. In a certain sense, no
doubt, these splendid products of established religion conduced to
social agreeableness. Like the excellent prelate described in
_Friendship's Garland_, they "had thoroughly learnt the divine lesson
that charity begins at home." They maintained an abundant hospitality;
they celebrated domestic events by balls at the episcopal palace; they
did not disdain (as we gather from the Life of the Hon. and Rev. George
Spencer) the relaxation of a rubber of whist, even on the night before
an Ordination, with a candidate for a partner. They dined out, like that
well-drawn bishop in _Little Dorrit_, who "was crisp, fresh, cheerful,
affable, bland, but so surprisingly innocent;" or like the prelate on
whom Thackeray moralized: "My Lord, I was pleased to see good thing
after good thing disappear before you; and think that no man ever better
became that rounded episcopal apron. How amiable he was! how kind! He
put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the
Establishment."
But the agreeableness which I had in my mind when I took upon myself to
discourse of agreeable clergymen was not an official but a personal
agreeableness. We have been told on high authority that the Merriment of
Parsons is mighty offensive; but the truth of this dictum depends
entirely on the topic of the merriment. A clergyman who made light of
the religion which he professes to teach, or even joked about the
incidents and accompaniments of his sacred calling, would by common
consent be intolerable. Decency exacts from priests at least a semblance
of piety; but I entirely deny that there is anything offensive in the
"merriment of parsons" when it plays round subjects outside the scope of
their professional duties.
Of Sydney Smith Lord Houghton recorded that "he never, except once, knew
him to make a jest on any religious subject, and then he immediately
withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them;" and I
regard the admirable Sydney as not only the supreme head of all
ecclesiastical jesters, but as, on the whole, the greatest humorist
whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form.
Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment--rich,
natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was--subserve the serious purposes
of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each
sarcasm was a moral lesson.
_Peter Plymley's Letters_, and those addressed to Archdeacon Singleton,
the Essays on _America_ and _Persecuting Bishops_, will probably be read
as long as the _Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay's review of Montgomery's
Poems; while of detached and isolated jokes--pure freaks of fun clad in
literary garb--an incredible number of those which are current in daily
converse deduce their birth from this incomparable Canon.
When one is talking of facetious clergymen, it is inevitable to think of
Bishop Wilberforce; but his humour was of an entirely different quality
from that of Sydney Smith. To begin with, it is unquotable. It must, I
think, have struck every reader of the Bishop's Life, whether in the
three huge volumes of the authorized Biography or in the briefer but
more characteristic monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the
biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar
flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to
the reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and
good stories collected from other people are all that the books
disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent
testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only
one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his time.
We know from one of his own letters that he peculiarly disliked the
description which Lord Beaconsfield gave of him in _Lothair_, and on the
principle of _Ce n'est que la vérité qui blesse_, it may be worth while
to recall it: "The Bishop was particularly playful on the morrow at
breakfast. Though his face beamed with Christian kindness, there was a
twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane
self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic
raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from
the daughters of the house, who laughed occasionally even before his
angelic jokes were well launched."
Mr. Bright once said, with characteristic downrightness, "If I was paid
what a bishop is paid for doing what a bishop does, I should find
abundant cause for merriment in the credulity of my countrymen;" and,
waiving the theological animus which the saying implies, it is not
uncharitable to surmise that a general sense of prosperity and a strong
faculty of enjoying life in all its aspects and phases had much to do
with Bishop Wilberforce's exuberant and infectious jollity. "A truly
emotional spirit," wrote Matthew Arnold, after meeting him in a country
house, "he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and
men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest
for the other."
A scarcely less prominent figure in society than Bishop Wilberforce, and
to many people a much more attractive one, was Dean Stanley. A clergyman
to whom the Queen signed herself "Ever yours affectionately" must
certainly be regarded as the social head of his profession, and every
circumstance of Stanley's nature and antecedents exactly fitted him for
the part. He was in truth a spoiled child of fortune, in a sense more
refined and spiritual than the phrase generally conveys. He was born of
famous ancestry, in a bright and unworldly home; early filled with the
moral and intellectual enthusiasms of Rugby in its best days; steeped in
the characteristic culture of Oxford, and advanced by easy stages of
well-deserved promotion to the most delightful of all offices in the
Church of England. His inward nature accorded well with this happy
environment. It was in a singular degree pure, simple, refined,
ingenuous. All the grosser and harsher elements of human character
seemed to have been omitted from his composition. He was naturally good,
naturally graceful, naturally amiable. A sense of humour was, I think,
almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed. Lord
Beaconsfield spoke of his "picturesque sensibility," and the phrase was
happily chosen. He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful
in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of
graphic description; and all glorified by something of the poet's
imagination. His conversation was incessant, teeming with information,
and illustrated by familiar acquaintance with all the best that has been
thought and said in the world.
Never was a brighter intellect or a more gallant heart housed in a more
fragile form. His figure, features, bearing, and accent were the very
type of refinement; and as the spare figure, so short yet so full of
dignity, marked out by the decanal dress and the red ribbon of the Order
of the Bath, threaded its way through the crowded saloons of London
society, one felt that the Church, as a civilizing institution, could
not be more appropriately represented.
A lady of Presbyterian antecedents who had conformed to Anglicanism once
said to the present writer, "I dislike the _Episcopal_ Church as much as
ever, but I love the _Decanal_ Church." Her warmest admiration was
reserved for that particular Dean, supreme alike in station and in
charm, whom I have just now been describing; but there were, at the time
of speaking, several other members of the same order who were
conspicuous ornaments of the society in which they moved. There was Dr.
Elliot, Dean of Bristol, a yearly visitor to London; dignified, clever,
agreeable, highly connected; an administrator, a politician, an
admirable talker; and so little trammelled by any ecclesiastical
prejudices or habitudes that he might have been the original of Dr.
Stanhope in _Barchester Towers_. There was Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ
Church, whose periodical appearances at Court and in society displayed
to the admiring gaze of the world the very handsomest and stateliest
specimen of the old English gentleman that our time has produced. There
was Dr. Church, Dean of St. Paul's, by many competent judges pronounced
to be our most accomplished man of letters, yet so modest and so
retiring that the world was never suffered to come in contact with him
except through his books. And there was Dr. Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff,
who concealed under the blandest of manners a remorseless sarcasm and a
mordant wit, and who, returning from the comparative publicity of the
Athenaeum to the domestic shades of the Temple, would often leave behind
him some pungent sentence which travelled from mouth to mouth, and
spared neither age nor sex nor friendship nor affinity.
The very highest dignitaries of the Church in London have never, in my
experience, contributed very largely to its social life. The
garden-parties of Fulham and Lambeth are indeed recognized incidents of
the London season; but they present to the critical eye less the aspect
of a social gathering than that of a Church Congress combined with a
Mothers' Meeting. The overwhelming disparity between the
position of host and guests is painfully apparent, and that
"drop-down-dead-ativeness" of manner which Sydney Smith quizzed still
characterizes the demeanour of the unbeneficed clergy. Archbishop Tait,
whose natural stateliness of aspect and manner was one of the most
conspicuous qualifications for his great office, was a dignified and
hospitable host; and Archbishop Thomson, reinforced by a beautiful and
charming wife, was sometimes spoken of as the Archbishop of Society.
Archbishop Benson looked the part to perfection, but did not take much
share in general conversation, though I remember one terse saying of his
in which the _odium theologicum_ supplied the place of wit. A portrait
of Cardinal Manning was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and I remarked
to the Archbishop on the extraordinary picturesqueness of the Cardinal's
appearance "The dress is very effective," replied the Archbishop dryly,
"but I don't think there is much besides." "Oh, surely it is a fine
head?" "No, not a fine head; only _no face_."
Passing down through the ranks of the hierarchy, I shall presently have
something to say about two or three metropolitan Canons who are notable
figures in society; but before I come to them I must offer a word of
affectionate tribute to the memory of Dr. Liddon. Probably there never
was a man whose social habit and manner were less like what a mere
outsider would have inferred from his physical aspect and public
demeanour. Nature had given him the outward semblance of a foreigner and
an ascetic; a life-long study of ecclesiastical rhetoric had stamped him
with a mannerism which belongs peculiarly to the pulpit. But the true
inwardness of the man was that of the typical John Bull--hearty,
natural, full of humour, utterly free from self-consciousness. He had a
healthy appetite, and was not ashamed to gratify it; liked a good glass
of wine; was peculiarly fond of sociable company, whether as host or
guest; and told an amusing story with incomparable zest and point. His
verbal felicity was a marked feature of his conversation. His
description of Archbishop Benson (revived, with strange taste, by the
_Saturday Review_ on the occasion of the Archbishop's death) was a
masterpiece of sarcastic character-drawing. The judicious Bishop
Davidson and the accomplished Canon Mason were the subjects of similar
pleasantries; and there was substantial truth as well as genuine fun in
his letter to a friend written one dark Christmas from Amen Court:
"London is just now buried under a dense fog. This is commonly
attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-window at
Westminster."
XVIII.
CLERGYMEN--_continued_.
Of the "Merriment of Parsons" one of the most conspicuous instances was
to be found in the Rev. W.H. Brookfield, the "little Frank Whitestock"
of Thackeray's _Curate's Walk_, and the subject of Lord Tennyson's
characteristic elegy:--
"Brooks, for they called you so that knew you best--
Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes,
How oft we two have heard St. Mary's chimes!
How oft the Cantab supper host, and guest,
Would echo helpless laughter to your jest!
* * * * *
You man of humorous-melancholy mark
Dead of some inward agony--is it so?
Our kindlier, trustier Jaques, past away!
I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark:
[Greek: Skias onar]--dream of a shadow, go,--
God bless you. I shall join you in a day."
This tribute is as true in substance as it is striking in phrase. I have
noticed the same peculiarity about Mr. Brookfield's humour as about
Jenny Lind's singing. Those who had once heard it were always eager to
talk about it. Ask some elderly man about the early triumphs of the
Swedish Nightingale, and notice how he kindles. "Ah! Jenny Lind! Yes;
there was never anything like that!" And he begins about the _Figlia_,
and how she came along the bridge in the _Sonnambula_; and you feel the
tenderness in his tone, as of a positive love for her whose voice seems
still ringing through him as he talks. I have noticed exactly the same
phenomenon when people who knew Mr. Brookfield hear his name mentioned
in casual conversation. "Ah! Brookfield! Yes; there never was any one
quite like him!" And off they go, with visible pleasure and genuine
emotion, to describe the inimitable charm, the touch of genius which
brought humorous delight out of the commonest incidents, the tinge of
brooding melancholy which threw the flashing fun into such high relief.
Not soon will fade from the memory of any who ever heard it the history
of the examination at the ladies' school, where Brookfield, who had
thought that he was only expected to examine in languages and
literature, found himself required to set a paper in physical science.
"What was I to do? I know nothing about hydrogen or oxygen or any other
'gen.' So I set them a paper in common sense, or what I called 'Applied
Science.' One of my questions was, 'What would you do to cure a cold in
the head?' One young lady answered, 'I should put _my_ feet in hot
mustard and water till _you_ were in a profuse perspiration.' Another
said, 'I should put him to bed, give him a soothing drink, and sit by
him till he was better.' But, on reconsideration, she ran her pen
through all the 'him's' and 'he's,' and substituted 'her' and 'she.'"
Mr. Brookfield was during the greater part of his life a hard-working
servant of the public, and his friends could only obtain his delightful
company in the rare and scanty intervals of school-inspecting--a
profession of which not even the leisure is leisurely. The type of the
French abbé, whose sacerdotal avocations lay completely in the
background and who could give the best hours of the day and night to the
pleasures or duties of society, was best represented in our day by the
Rev. William Harness and the Rev. Henry White. Mr. Harness was a
diner-out of the first water; an author and a critic; perhaps the best
Shakespearean scholar of his time; and a recognized and even dreaded
authority on all matters connected with the art and literature of the
drama. Mr. White, burdened only with the sinecure chaplaincies of the
Savoy and the House of Commons, took the Theatre as his parish, mediated
with the happiest tact between the Church and the Stage, and pronounced
a genial benediction over the famous suppers in Stratton Street at which
an enthusiastic patroness used to entertain Sir Henry Irving when the
public labours of the Lyceum were ended for the night.