[_Menton, January, 1874._]
... Last night I had a quarrel with the American on politics. It is odd
how it irritates you to hear certain political statements made. He was
excited, and he began suddenly to abuse our conduct to America. I, of
course, admitted right and left that we had behaved disgracefully (as we
had); until somehow I got tired of turning alternate cheeks and getting
duly buffeted; and when he said that the Alabama money had not wiped out
the injury, I suggested, in language (I remember) of admirable
directness and force, that it was a pity they had taken the money in
that case. He lost his temper at once, and cried out that his dearest
wish was a war with England; whereupon I also lost my temper, and,
thundering at the pitch of my voice, I left him and went away by myself
to another part of the garden. A very tender reconciliation took place,
and I think there will come no more harm out of it. We are both of us
nervous people, and he had had a very long walk and a good deal of beer
at dinner: that explains the scene a little. But I regret having
employed so much of the voice with which I have been endowed, as I fear
every person in the hotel was taken into confidence as to my
sentiments, just at the very juncture when neither the sentiments nor
(perhaps) the language had been sufficiently considered.
_Friday._--You have not yet heard of my book?--_Four Great
Scotsmen_--John Knox, David Hume, Robert Burns, Walter Scott. These,
their lives, their work, the social media in which they lived and
worked, with, if I can so make it, the strong current of the race making
itself felt underneath and throughout--this is my idea. You must tell me
what you think of it. The Knox will really be new matter, as his life
hitherto has been disgracefully written, and the events are romantic and
rapid; the character very strong, salient, and worthy; much interest as
to the future of Scotland, and as to that part of him which was truly
modern under his Hebrew disguise. Hume, of course, the urbane, cheerful,
gentlemanly, letter-writing eighteenth century, full of attraction, and
much that I don't yet know as to his work. Burns, the sentimental side
that there is in most Scotsmen, his poor troubled existence, how far his
poems were his personally, and how far national, the question of the
framework of society in Scotland, and its fatal effect upon the finest
natures. Scott again, the ever delightful man, sane, courageous,
admirable; the birth of Romance, in a dawn that was a sunset; snobbery,
conservatism, the wrong thread in History, and notably in that of his
own land. _Voila, madame, le menu. Comment le trouvez-vous? Il y a de la
bonne viande, si on parvient a la cuire convenablement._