dinner more sociably or tells a story more aptly; no one enjoys good
society more keenly or is more appreciated in it; but he does not make
society a profession. He is conscientiously devoted to the duties of his
canonry; he is an accomplished theologian; and he is perhaps the most
expert and vigorous pamphleteer in England. The Franco-German War, the
Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule,
and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen
pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the
dimensions of solid treatises. Canon MacColl is genuinely and _ex animo_
an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well. His inflexible
integrity and fine sense of honour have enabled him to play, with credit
to himself and advantage to the public, the rather risky part of the
Priest in Politics. He has been trusted alike by Lord Salisbury and by
Mr. Gladstone; has conducted negotiations of great pith and moment; and
has been behind the scenes of some historic performances. Yet he has
never made an enemy, nor betrayed a secret, nor lowered the honour of
his sacred calling.
Miss Mabel Collins, in her vivid story of _The Star Sapphire_, has drawn
under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with
his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness
of London at the present moment. Is social agreeableness a hereditary
gift? Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity,
one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could
supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education
can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted. It is
recorded, I think, of Madame de Stael, that, after her first
conversation with William Wilberforce, she said: "I have always heard
that Mr. Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but I did
not know that he was also the wittiest." The agreeableness of the great
philanthropist's son--Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and of
Winchester--I discussed in my last chapter. We may put aside the fulsome
dithyrambics of grateful archdeacons and promoted chaplains, and be
content to rest the Bishop's reputation for agreeableness on testimony
so little interested as that of Matthew Arnold and Archbishop Tait. The
Archbishop wrote, after the Bishop's death, of his "social and
irresistibly fascinating side, as displayed in his dealings with
society;" and in 1864 Mr. Arnold, after listening with only very
moderate admiration to one of the Bishop's celebrated sermons, wrote:
"Where he was excellent was in his speeches at luncheon afterwards--gay,
easy, cordial, and wonderfully happy."
I think that one gathers from all dispassionate observers of the Bishop
that what struck them most in him was the blending of boisterous fun and
animal spirits with a deep and abiding sense of the seriousness of
religion. In the philanthropist-father the religious seriousness rather
preponderated over the fun; in the bishop-son (by a curious inversion of
parts) the fun sometimes concealed the religiousness. To those who
speculate in matters of race and pedigree it is interesting to watch the
two elements contending in the character of Canon Basil Wilberforce, the
Bishop's youngest and best-beloved son. When you see his graceful
figure and clean-shaven ecclesiastical face in the pulpit of his
strangely old-fashioned church, or catch the vibrating notes of his
beautifully modulated voice in
"The hush of our dread high altar,
Where The Abbey makes us _We_,"
you feel yourself in the presence of a born ecclesiastic, called from
his cradle by an irresistible vocation to a separate and sanctified
career. When you see him on the platform of some great public meeting,
pouring forth argument, appeal, sarcasm, anecdote, fun, and pathos in a
never-ceasing flood of vivid English, you feel that you are under the
spell of a born orator. And yet again, when you see the priest of
Sunday, the orator of Monday, presiding on Tuesday with easy yet
finished courtesy at the hospitable table of the most beautiful
dining-room in London, or welcomed with equal warmth for his racy humour
and his unfailing sympathy in the homes of his countless friends, you
feel that here is a man naturally framed for society, in whom his father
and grandfather live again. Truly a combination of hereditary gifts is
displayed in Canon Wilberforce; and the social agreeableness of London
received a notable addition when Mr. Gladstone transferred him from
Southampton to Dean's Yard.
Of agreeable Canons there is no end, and the Chapter of Westminster is
peculiarly rich in them. Mr. Gore's ascetic saintliness of life conceals
from the general world, but not from the privileged circle of his
intimate friends, the high breeding of a great Whig family and the
philosophy of Balliol. Archdeacon Furse has the refined scholarship and
delicate literary sense which characterized Eton in its days of glory.
Dr. Duckworth's handsome presence has long been welcomed in the very
highest of all social circles. Mr. Eyton's massive bulk and warm heart,
and rugged humour and sturdy common sense, produce the effect of a
clerical Dr. Johnson. But perhaps we must turn our back on the Abbey
and pursue our walk along the Thames Embankment as far as St. Paul's if
we want to discover the very finest flower of canonical culture and
charm, for it blushes unseen in the shady recesses of Amen Court. Henry
Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul's, is beyond all question one of the
most agreeable men of his time. In fun and geniality and warm-hearted
hospitality he is a worthy successor of Sydney Smith, whose official
house he inhabits; and to those elements of agreeableness he adds
certain others which his admirable predecessor could scarcely have
claimed. He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its
versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave to
gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and nature,
literature and life. His temperament is essentially musical, and,
indeed, it was from him that I borrowed, in a former paragraph, my
description of Jenny Lind and her effect on her hearers. No man in
London, I should think, has so many and such devoted friends in every
class and stratum; and those friends acknowledge in him not only the
most vivacious and exhilarating of social companions, but one of the
moral forces which have done most to quicken their consciences and lift
their lives.
Before I have done with the agreeableness of clergymen I must say a word
about two academical personages, of whom it was not always easy to
remember that they were clergymen, and whose agreeableness struck one in
different lights, according as one happened to be the victim or the
witness of their jocosity. If any one wishes to know what the late
Master of Balliol was really like in his social aspect, I should refer
him, not to the two volumes of his Biography, nor even to the amusing
chit-chat of Mr. Lionel Tollemache's Recollections, but to the cleverest
work of a very clever Balliol man--Mr. W.H. Mallock's _New Republic_.
The description of Mr. Jowett's appearance, conversation, and social
bearing is photographic, and the sermon which Mr. Mallock puts into his
mouth is not a parody, but an absolutely faultless reproduction both of
substance and of style. That it excessively irritated the subject of the
sketch is the best proof of its accuracy. For my own part, I must freely
admit that I do not write as an admirer of Mr. Jowett; but one saying of
his, which I had the advantage of hearing, does much to atone, in my
judgment, for the snappish impertinences on which his reputation for wit
has been generally based. The scene was the Master's own dining-room,
and the moment that the ladies had left the room one of the guests began
a most outrageous conversation. Every one sat flabbergasted. The Master
winced with annoyance; and then, bending down the table towards the
offender, said in his shrillest tone--"Shall we continue this
conversation in the drawing-room?" and rose from his chair. It was
really a stroke of genius thus both to terminate and to rebuke the
impropriety without violating the decorum due from host to guest.
Of the late Master of Trinity--Dr. Thompson--it was said: "He casteth
forth his ice like morsels. Who is able to abide his frost?" The stories
of his mordant wit are endless, but an Oxford man can scarcely hope to
narrate them with proper accuracy. He was nothing if not critical. At
Seeley's Inaugural Lecture as Professor of History his only remark
was--"Well, well. I did not think we could so soon have had occasion to
regret poor Kingsley." To a gushing admirer who said that a popular
preacher had so much taste--"Oh yes; so very much, and all so very bad."
Of a certain Dr. Woods, who wrote elementary mathematical books for
schoolboys, and whose statue occupies the most conspicuous position in
the ante-chapel of St. John's College--"The Johnian Newton." His hit at
the present Chief Secretary for Ireland,[22] when he was a junior Fellow
of Trinity, is classical--"We are none of us infallible--not even the
youngest of us." But it requires an eye-witness of the scene to do
justice to the exordium of the Master's sermon on the Parable of the
Talents, addressed in Trinity Chapel to what considers itself, and not
without justice, the cleverest congregation in the world. "It would be
obviously superfluous in a congregation such as that which I now address
to expatiate on the responsibilities of those who have five, or even
two, talents. I shall therefore confine my observations to the more
ordinary case of those of us who have _one talent_."
FOOTNOTES:
[22] The Right Hon. G.W. Balfour.
XIX.
REPARTEE.
Lord Beaconsfield, describing Monsignore Berwick in _Lothair_, says that
he "could always, when necessary, sparkle with anecdote or blaze with
repartee." The former performance is considerably easier than the
latter. Indeed, when a man has a varied experience, a retentive memory,
and a sufficient copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling
may attain the character of a disease. The "sparkle" evaporates while
the "anecdote" is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called "Anecdotage"
is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no means
inclined to admit the general inferiority of contemporary conversation
to that of the last generation, I am disposed to think that in the art
of repartee our predecessors excelled us.
If this is true, it may be partly due to the greater freedom of an age
when well-bred men and refined women spoke their minds with an
uncompromising plainness which would now be voted intolerable. I have
said that the old Royal Dukes were distinguished by the racy vigour of
their conversation; and the Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King Ernest
of Hanover, was held to excel all his brothers in this respect. I was
told by the late Sir Charles Wyke that he was once walking with the Duke
of Cumberland along Piccadilly when the Duke of Gloucester (first cousin
to Cumberland, and familiarly known as "Silly Billy") came out of
Gloucester House. "Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Gloucester, stop a
minute. I want to speak to you," roared the Duke of Cumberland. Poor
Silly Billy, whom nobody ever noticed, was delighted to find himself
thus accosted, and ambled up smiling. "Who's your tailor?" shouted
Cumberland. "Stultz," replied Gloucester. "Thank you. I only wanted to
know, because, whoever he is, he ought to be avoided like a pestilence."
Exit Silly Billy.
Of this inoffensive but not brilliant prince (who, by the way, was
Chancellor of the University of Cambridge) it is related that once at a
levée he noticed a naval friend with a much-tanned face. "How do,
Admiral? Glad to see you again. It's a long time since you have been at
a levée." "Yes, sir. Since I last saw your Royal Highness I have been
nearly to the North Pole." "By G---, you look more as if you had been to
the South Pole." It is but bare justice to this depreciated memory to
observe that the Duke of Gloucester scored a point against his kingly
cousin when, on hearing that William IV. had consented to the Reform
Bill, he ejaculated, "Who's Silly Billy now?" But this is a digression.
Early in the nineteenth century a famous lady, whose name, for obvious
reasons, I forbear to indicate even by an initial, had inherited great
wealth under a will which, to put it mildly, occasioned much surprise.
She shared an opera-box with a certain Lady D---, who loved the flowing
wine-cup not wisely, but too well. One night Lady D--- was visibly
intoxicated at the opera, and her friend told her that the partnership
in the box must cease, as she could not appear again in company so
disgraceful. "As you please," said Lady D---. "I may have had a glass of
wine too much; but at any rate I never forged my father's signature, and
then murdered the butler to prevent his telling."
Beau Brummell, the Prince of Dandies and the most insolent of men, was
once asked by a lady if be would "take a cup of tea." "Thank you,
ma'am," he replied, "I never _take_ anything but physic." "I beg your
pardon," replied the hostess, "you also take liberties."
The Duchess of Somerset, born Sheridan, and famous as the Queen of
Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, was pre-eminent in this
agreeable art of swift response. One day she called at a shop for some
article which she had purchased the day before, and which had not been
sent home. The order could not be traced. The proprietor of the
establishment inquired, with great concern, "May I ask who took your
Grace's order? Was it a young gentleman with fair hair?" "No; it was an
elderly nobleman with a bald head."
The celebrated Lady Clanricarde, daughter of George Canning, was talking
during the Franco-German War of 1870 to the French Ambassador, who
complained bitterly that England had not intervened on behalf of France.
"But, after all," he said, "it was only what we might have expected. We
always believed that you were a nation of shopkeepers, and now we know
you are." "And we," replied Lady Clanricarde, "always believed that you
were a nation of soldiers, and now we know you are not"--a repartee
worthy to rank with Queen Mary's reply to Lady Lochleven about the
sacramental character of marriage, in the third volume of _The Abbot_.
A young lady, who had just been appointed a Maid of Honour, was telling
some friends with whom she was dining that one of the conditions of the
office was that she should not keep a diary of what went on at Court. A
cynical man of the world who was present said, "What a tiresome rule! I
think I should keep my diary all the same." "Then," replied the young
lady, "I am afraid you would not be a maid of _Honour_."
In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting
figure was Henry Luttrell. It was known that he must be getting on in
life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one
knew. At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no
considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank--"Now, Luttrell, we're
all dying to know how old you are. Just tell me." Eyeing his questioner
gravely, Luttrell made answer, "It is an odd question; but as you, Lady
Holland, ask it, I don't mind telling you. If I live till next year, I
shall be--devilish old."
For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen,
for Lord Holland's genial humour, and for Lady Holland's indiscriminate
insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay's Life and Charles Greville's
Journals, and the enormous mass of contemporary memoirs. Most of these
verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some
social or literary topic; but now and then, when political passion was
really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.
Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice. Sir James Mackintosh,
who, as the writer of the _Vindiciae Gallicae_, had been the foremost
apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of
Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution
and its authors, their works and ways. Having thus become a vehement
champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O'Coighley, the
priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and
France, was the basest of mankind. "No, Mackintosh," replied that sound
though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; "he might have been much worse. He
was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman. He was a priest; he
might have been a lawyer. He was a rebel; he might have been a
renegade."
These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age.
Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them. When the
Greville Memoirs--that mine of social information in which I have so
often quarried--came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was,
if he had read them. He replied, "No. I do not feel attracted to them. I
remember the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I
have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known
Bulwer Lytton." This three-edged compliment has seldom been excelled. In
a lighter style, and more accordant with feminine grace, was Lady
Morley's comment on the decaying charms of her famous rival, Lady
Jersey--the Zenobia of _Endymion_--of whom some gushing admirer had said
that she looked so splendid going to court in her mourning array of
black and diamonds--"it was like night." "Yes, my dear; _minuit passé_."
A masculine analogue to this amiable compliment may be cited from the
table-talk of Lord Granville--certainly not an unkindly man--to whom the
late Mr. Delane had been complaining of the difficulty of finding a
suitable wedding-present for a young lady of the house of Rothschild.
"It would be absurd to give a Rothschild a costly gift. I should like to
find something not intrinsically valuable, but interesting because it is
rare." "Nothing easier, my dear fellow; send her a lock of your hair."
When a remote cousin of Lord Henniker was elected to the Head Mastership
of Rossall, a disappointed competitor said that it was a case of [Greek:
eneka tou kuriou]; but a Greek joke is scarcely fair play.
When the _New Review_ was started, its accomplished Editor designed it
to be an inexpensive copy of the _Nineteenth Century_. It was to cost
only sixpence, and was to be written by bearers of famous names--those
of the British aristocracy for choice. He was complaining in society of
the difficulty of finding a suitable title, when a vivacious lady said,
"We have got _Cornhill_, and _Ludgate_, and _Strand_--why not call yours
_Cheapside_?"
Oxford has always been a nursing-mother of polished satirists. Of a
small sprig of aristocracy, who was an undergraduate in my time, it was
said by a friend that he was like Euclid's definition of a point: he had
no parts and no magnitude, but had position. In previous chapters I have
quoted the late Master of Balliol and Lord Sherbrooke. Professor Thorold
Rogers excelled in a Shandean vein. Lord Bowen is immortalized by his
emendation to the Judge's address to the Queen, which had contained the
Heep-like sentence--"Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness for the
great office to which we have been called." "Wouldn't it be better to
say, 'Conscious as we are of one another's unworthiness'?" Henry Smith,
Professor of Geometry, the wittiest, most learned, and most genial of
Irishmen, said of a well-known man of science--"His only fault is that
he sometimes forgets that he is the Editor, not the Author, of Nature."
A great lawyer who is now a great judge, and has, with good reason, the
very highest opinion of himself, stood as a Liberal at the General
Election of 1880. His Tory opponents set on foot a rumour that he was an
Atheist, and when Henry Smith heard it he said, "Now, that's really too
bad, for ---- is a man who reluctantly acknowledges the existence of a
_Superior Being_."
At dinner at Balliol the Master's guests were discussing the careers of
two Balliol men, the one of whom had just been made a judge and the
other a bishop. "Oh," said Henry Smith, "I think the bishop is the
greater man. A judge, at the most, can only say, 'You be hanged,' but a
bishop can say, 'You be d---d.'" "Yes," twittered the Master; "but if
the judge says, 'You be hanged,' you _are_ hanged."
Henry Smith, though a delightful companion, was a very unsatisfactory
politician--nominally, indeed, a Liberal, but full of qualifications and
exceptions. When Mr. Gathorne Hardy was raised to the peerage at the
crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and thereby vacated his seat
for the University of Oxford, Henry Smith came forward as a candidate in
the Liberal interest; but his language about the great controversy of
the moment was so lukewarm that Professor Freeman said that, instead of
sitting for Oxford in the House of Commons, he ought to represent
Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia Minor.
Of Dr. Haig-Brown it is reported that, when Head Master of Charterhouse,
he was toasted by the Mayor of Godalming as a man who knew how to
combine the _fortiter in re_ with the _suav[=i]ter in modo_. In replying
to the toast he said, "I am really overwhelmed not only by the quality,
but by the _quantity_ of his Worship's eulogium."
It has been a matter of frequent remark that, considering what an
immense proportion of parliamentary time has been engrossed during the
last seventeen years by Irish speeches, we have heard so little Irish
humour, whether conscious or unconscious--whether jokes or "bulls." An
admirably vigorous simile was used by the late Mr. O'Sullivan, when he
complained that the whisky supplied at the bar was like "a torchlight
procession marching down your throat;" but of Irish bulls in Parliament
I have only heard one--proceeding, if my memory serves me, from Mr. T.
Healy: "As long as the voice of Irish suffering is dumb, the ear of
English compassion is deaf to it." One I read in the columns of the
_Irish Times_: "The key of the Irish difficulty is to be found in the
_empty_ pocket of the landlord." An excellent confusion of metaphors was
uttered by one of the members for the Principality in the debate on the
Welsh Church Bill, in indignant protest against the allegation that the
majority of Welshmen now belonged to the Established Church. He said,
"It is a lie, sir; and it is high time that we nailed this lie to the
mast." But a confusion of metaphors is not a bull.
Among tellers of Irish stories, Lord Morris is supreme; one of his best
depicts two Irish officials of the good old times discussing, in all the
confidence of their after-dinner claret, the principles on which they
bestowed their patronage Said the first, "Well, I don't mind admitting
that, _caeteris paribus_, I prefer my own relations." "My dear boy,"
replied his boon companion, "_caeteris paribus_ be d----d." The
cleverest thing that I have lately heard was from a young lady, who is
an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the
personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who
abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman.
Their irreverent compatriot has nicknamed them
"The storied Erne and animated bust."
Frances Countess Waldegrave, who had previously been married three
times, took as her fourth husband an Irishman, Mr. Chichester Fortescue,
who was shortly afterwards made Chief Secretary. The first night that
Lady Waldegrave and Mr. Fortescue appeared at the theatre in Dublin, a
wag in the gallery called out, "Which of the four do you like best, my
lady?" Instantaneously from the Chief Secretary's box came the adroit
reply: "Why, the Irishman, of course '"
The late Lord Coleridge was once speaking in the House of Commons in
support of Women's Rights. One of his main arguments as that there was
no essential difference between the masculine and the feminine
intellect. For example, he said, some of the most valuable qualities of
what is called the judicial genius--sensibility, quickness,
delicacy--are peculiarly feminine. In reply, Serjeant Dowse said: "The
argument of the hon. and learned Member, compendiously stated, amounts
to this--because some judges are old women, therefore all old women are
fit to be judges."
To my friend Mr. Julian Sturgis, himself one of the happiest of
phrase-makers, I am indebted for the following gems from America.