much people-seeing. People laugh at me for liking it all so much, and
still more for expressing my liking for it; but I believe I shall never
turn out to be ‘one of those whom Dante found in hell-border because
they had been sad under the blessed sun.’[548] How many people in ‘the
world,’ so called, are perfectly charming! Surely if there are many like
the Woods, Jerseys, William Lowthers, Pennants, Ilchesters, and oh! how
many others, good must far predominate over evil in society.
“You know how I have always said I hated leaving London for Sundays, but
I did leave it for three of them. The first was spent at Reigate
Manor--Lady Henry Somerset’s charming old house, with an oak panelled
hall and staircase, such as one is surprised to find near London. Lady
Henry is a delightful hostess, and though so enthusiastically interested
in all her good works, keeps them quite in the background. I was so glad
to find George Curzon at Reigate, as pleasant as ever, and his American
wife; and he has so much to say on all subjects that one does not wonder
he has been spoken of as the man who ‘had seen everything, known
everything, read all books, and written most of them.’ But yet the
‘feature’ of the party was Lord Carlisle’s son, Hubert Howard, who
jumped upon the donkeys browsing in the park, and was kicked off by
them; then upon a stray long-haired pony, and was kicked off by it; and
who finally would go out to sea on the lake in a barrel in his Sunday
clothes, and of course the barrel upset in the midst, and the nails with
which it was studded left him with very few clothes at all.[549]
“Then I was two days at Hatfield--days of brilliant sunshine, glowing
gardens, scent of lime-flowers, great kindness from host and hostess,
and much pleasant companionship. The rooms have names of trees: I was in
the hornbeam room, whence S. Alban’s Abbey was visible. I drew hard on
Sunday amid the brilliant flowers of the garden: oh! how wicked it would
have been thought when I was younger; but now no one thought it so. Most
of the guests did nothing but talk and enjoy the summer beauty. Madame
Ignatieff, coming to Hatfield, said, ‘Ah, I see what your life in great
country-houses is--eat and doddle (dawdle), doddle and eat.’ Dear Sir
Augustus Paget, of many pleasant Roman memories, sat out by me part of
the time, and on the Monday morning kept me after breakfast talking of
how very happy he was, how many enjoyments in his life. I could not help
feeling afterwards what characteristic ‘last words’ those were. I went
into the drawing-room to take leave of Lady Salisbury, and in an instant
Lady Cranborne ran in saying that Sir Augustus had fallen in the hall.
He scarcely spoke again, and on Saturday his bright spirit had
departed. I was _very_ sorry. I had known him so long, and--I am again
quoting George Eliot, whom I have just been reading--‘how unspeakably
the lengthening of memories in common endears one’s old friends.’
“Lady Salisbury is delightful, not only to listen to but to watch. She
is so young in her spirit. ‘On a l’age de son cœur.’ All she does, as
all she says, is so clever, and her relation to her many
daughters-in-law, to the great variety of her visitors, to her vast
household, is so unfailingly sagacious. Even ‘to know her is a liberal
education,’ as Steele said of a lady he admired. She is a great contrast
to Lord Salisbury: as I watched him solemnly and slowly walking up and
down the rooms with his hand on the head of his great dog Pharaoh, I was
always reminded of Henry Vaughan’s lines--
‘The darksome statesman, hung with weight and woe,
Like to thick midnight fog, mov’d there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go.’
“The next Sunday I was at Osterley, in intensely hot weather. Sir E.
Burne Jones was there (as well as at Hatfield), the painter of morbid
and unlovely women, who has given an apotheosis to ennui--the Botticelli
of the nineteenth century. He is very agreeable naturally, and made
infinitely more so by his seductively captivating voice. He spoke much
of Mr. Pepys’ ‘Diaries,’ and what a pity it was he became blind, ‘we
might have had so many more volumes.’ He described going to dine with
the Blumenthals, where the footman at the door presented him with a gilt
apple, and informed him that he was Paris, and would go down to dinner
with whichever of the Graces he presented it to. ‘I knew I must make two
deadly enemies,’ said Sir Edward, ‘so I shut my eyes and stretched out
the apple into space; _some one_ took it.’ He said peacocks made their
shrill cry because they were afraid a thief might come and steal their
beauty away, and then he talked of the Talmud--‘that great repository of
interesting stories.’ The Grand-Vizier, he said, was terribly afraid
Solomon would marry the Queen of Sheba, so he told the king her legs
were hairy. Then, in his wisdom, Solomon surrounded his throne with
running water, and covered it with glass. And when the queen came to him
and saw the water, she lifted up her trailing robe, and he beheld her
legs reflected in the glass, and they were not hairy, and he said, ‘The
Grand-Vizier is a liar,’ and he put him to death. The beloved Halifaxes
were at Osterley, quite delightful always--
‘Bright sparklings of all human excellence,
To which the silver wands of saints in heaven
Might point in rapturous joy.’[550]
“After leaving London finally I went to Oxton Hall in Nottinghamshire
for my dear Hugh Bryan’s wedding with Miss Violet Sherbrooke--such a
pretty wedding--and thence to Wollaton Hall, Lord Middleton’s glorious
old house near Nottingham. On the way I stayed to draw Nottingham
Castle, which I had drawn as a boy, but they have quite spoilt it by
tearing up its fine old plateau of grey flagstones, and putting down
asphalt, only, of course, in the drawing I left that out. Wollaton is a
beautiful old grey stone building full of varied ornaments--niches,
pinnacles, and busts, with a central tower and huge central hall. It was
built by John of Padua with stone from Ancaster, all brought on donkeys,
and for which nothing was paid, coal being taken and given in exchange
for it from a pit already open in Elizabeth’s time. In the church, to
which we went on Sunday morning, is the tomb of John of Padua’s clerk of
the works, also the monument of Lady Anne Willoughby, _née_ Grey, aunt
of Lady Jane, and a beautiful tomb of a Willoughby who was Knight of the
Holy Sepulchre, with little effigies of his four wives, one of whom was
mother of the Arctic voyager. The afternoon was wet, and amongst other
relics we saw the clothes of this Willoughby hero, left behind when he
went to the North Pole, and preserved with many other old dresses in a
vast deserted upper chamber called ‘Bedlam,’ probably because the
‘gentlemen’s gentlemen’ slept there in old times, as in a dormitory.
There is much else to see in the house, which was strongly fortified
against the Nottingham rioters, and a number of handcuffs are hanging up
which were prepared for them. The first evening I was alone with my
delightfully genial host and hostess, but on Saturday many guests came,
including the exceedingly pleasant young Lord Deramore.
“The late Lord Middleton lived in this palace in most primitive fashion.
He used to have dinner-parties, but the dinner consisted in a haunch of
venison at one end and a haunch of venison at the other, and
currant-jelly in the middle, and then two apple-pies to match.
[Illustration: THE TERRACE DOOR, HOLMHURST.]
“Here is a delightful story of the present Bishop of London for you,
which is _molto ben trovato_, at any rate. One day, he took a cab home
to Fulham from the City, and wishing to be liberal, gave the man
sixpence beyond the full fare. The man looked at it. ‘What, aren’t you
satisfied?’ said the Bishop. ‘Oh yes, I’m _satisfied_,’ said the man;
‘but if I might, I should like to ask you a question.’ ‘Oh certainly,’
said the Bishop, ‘ask whatever you like.’ ‘Well, then, if St. Paul had
come back to earth and was Bishop, do you suppose he’d be living in this
here palace?’ ‘Certainly not,’ replied the Bishop promptly, ‘for he’d be
living at Lambeth, and it would be a shilling fare.’
“And now, after all these luxurious fine houses, I am in what, to me, is
the tenfold luxury of Holmhurst.
‘My green and silent spot amid the hills,
Oh, ’tis a quiet spirit-healing nook.’[551]
I should not like to live in a bare or commonplace house, but then I
don’t; and oh! the luxury of absolute independence. I should rather
_like_ a carriage and horse perhaps, but I don’t in the least _want_
them. Certainly, in words I have been reading of Bishop Fraser, ‘living
in comfort is a phrase entirely depending for its meaning on the ideas
of him who uses it.’”
* * * * *
_To_ FRANCIS COOKSON.
“_Sept. 7._--Is it a sign of old age coming on, I wonder, when one has
the distaste for leaving home by which I am now possessed? I simply hate
it. When one has all one wants and exactly what one likes, why should
one set off on a round of visits, in which one may, and probably will,
have many pleasant hours, but as certainly many bare and dull ones,
often in dreary rooms, sometimes with wooden-headed people, and without
the possibility of the familiar associations which habit makes such a
pleasure? Then, in most country-houses, ‘l’anglais s’amuse moult
tristement,’ as Froissart says. I cannot say how delightful I always
find my home life--the ever-fresh morning glories of the familiar view
of brilliant flowers, green lawns, and oak woods; and then the sea,
which to me is so much more beautiful in its morning whiteness with
faint grey cloud-shadows, or smiling under the tremulous sun-rays,[552]
than in the evening light, which brings a lovely but monotonous blueness
with it: the joyous companionship of my little black spitz Nero
(‘Black,’ not the wicked emperor): the regularity of my proof-sheet
work, and other work, till luncheon-dinner, after which there are
generally visitors to be attended to; and then quiet work again, or
meditation on the long-ago and the future, when
‘Silent musings urge the mind to seek
Something too high for syllables to speak.’[553]
Then there is always my library, in which 6000 agreeable friends are
always ready to converse with me at any moment, and ‘vingt-sept années
d’ennui et de solitude lui firent lire bien des livres,’ as Catherine
II. said in her epitaph on herself, might certainly be applied to me.
Only I can imagine, if eyes and limbs failed, the winter evenings
becoming long and monotonous. ‘Meglio solo che male accompagnato’ is a
good Italian proverb, only it would be pleasant to be ‘ben
accompagnato.’ I am beginning to feel with Madame de Staël--‘J’aime la
solitude, mais il me faut à qui dire; j’aime la solitude.’
“The neighbours are very kindly beginning to consider me ‘the hermit of
Holmhurst,’ and come to visit me in my cell, especially on Tuesdays,
without expecting me to go to them. I would not have a bicycle on any
account, for then I might be obliged to go, and I am too poor to have a
carriage. So, in six weeks, I have only twice been outside the
gates--for one day to London for George Jolliffe’s wedding, and for two
nights to Battle, whence, to my great joy, the Duchess asked me to
‘mother’ her guests--charming Lady Edward Cavendish, the Vincent
Corbets, and Mr. Armstrong, the Oxford history professor--to
Hurstmonceaux. How beautiful, how interesting it all looked. No other
place ever seems to me half so romantic; but though ‘at each step one
treads on a memory,’ as Cicero says, I can go there now without a pang;
my affections are too full of Holmhurst to have any room for it, and the
old family are almost forgotten there already, ‘so much has happened
since they left.’ ‘Lord! to see how the world makes nothing of a man, an
houre after he is dead,’ writes Pepys in his Diary.
[Illustration: THE NAYLOR LANDING, HOLMHURST.]
“I wonder if you ever saw Coventry Patmore here, who died lately. He
often came to Holmhurst during the latter part of his residence at
Hastings, where he wrote ‘The Angel in the House’ in memory of his first
wife, and in memory of his second spent most of the large fortune she
had brought him, £60,000, in building a beautiful church, S. Mary Star
of the Sea; and whilst building it, though always a devout Catholic,
imbibed, from being brought into close contact with them, a hatred of
priests which never left him. The existence of ‘In Memoriam’ may be said
to be due to Patmore. When young, he and Tennyson lodged together at
some house in London, where they had a violent quarrel with their
landlady, and left suddenly in a huff. Once well away, they recollected
that the MS. of ‘In Memoriam’ was left in the cupboard of their room
with the unfinished ham and the half-empty jam-pot. The timid Alfred
would not face the wrath of the landlady, but Patmore went back to get
it. He found the woman cleaning her doorstep and told her that he was
come to get something he had left behind. ‘No,’ she said, ‘there was
nothing, and she had seen quite enough of him, he should not go
upstairs.’ But the slim Patmore took her by surprise, slipped past her,
rushed up to the room, and from the jam cupboard extracted the MS., and
made off with it in spite of her imprecations.
“Tennyson recognised what Patmore had done at the time, and said he
should give him the MS. But he never did; he gave it to Sir J. Simeon,
who left it to his second wife. When Tennyson’s MSS. rose so much in
value, his family asked for it back, and Lady Simeon has promised that
it shall go back at her death. In another generation, if Tennyson’s fame
lasts so long, it will probably be sold for a large sum.
“Apropos of poets, pleasant old Miss Courtenay was talking to me the
other day of how Browning was beyond all things a man of the world
rather than a poet. When she saw Mrs. Browning at Naples long ago, and
expressed some surprise at his being so much with Lockhart, who was then
in his last serious illness, Mrs. Browning said, ‘Yes, and isn’t it
delightful that Mr. Lockhart likes him so much; he told me the other
day, “I like Robert so much because he is not a damned _literary_
person!’”
“The clergyman in the little iron tabernacle of a church at our gate
seemed to some to preach at me last night for not having been at the
morning service, at which there was the Sacrament. He was quite right. I
really might have gone, for I had no ‘boys’ here, and I was not merely
kept away by my detestation of sermons, so seldom, what Spurgeon said
they should be, ‘the man in flower;’ but I never thought of it, and was
very busy at home about a thousand things. But though I revere the
Sacrament as a holy commemorative ordinance, I cannot feel as if it did
one the slightest good, except as concentrating one’s thoughts for a
few minutes on sacred memories. James Adderley, the monk-preacher, says
there are many who regard the Sacrament like a ‘mourning ring;’ and that
is exactly how I look upon it. I cannot understand how people can
consider such a mere commemorative service ‘a thing to live by,’ as they
call it; and all the transubstantiation idea is to me too truly
horrible. If I were dying--dying, I mean, in the trembling hope of a
near blessed reality--the reception of this mere type would be no
comfort to me. Then, also, as I am on the confession tack, I do not
believe for one instant in ‘original sin;’ rather, as Solomon--who had
much personal knowledge of the subject--says, that ‘God hath made man
upright, but he hath sought out many inventions.’[554] ... And yet,
truly, in my own way, I always feel that--
‘Malgré nous, vers le ciel il faut tourner les yeux.’”[555]
* * * * *
JOURNAL _and_ LETTERS.
“_Chesters, Northumberland, Oct. 6._--All my dread of visits passed away
when they began. Capital indeed is Milton’s advice--
‘Be not over-exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils.’
And then I know one ought to go into the world ‘as a fireman on duty,’
which Cardinal Manning said was his only way of visiting it for thirty
years. One thing a man who pays a good many visits should always be
certain of--_never_ to outstay his welcome. It would be dreadful to see
one’s hostess begin to have the fidgets. It is safest--at latest--to go
by the eleven o’clock train, but a good and pleasant plan is to take
leave overnight, and _be_ gone the next morning. I was full of enjoyment
at Penrhyn Castle--the genial and charming family, the great variety of
the guests, and the excursions, in spite of furious storms, into the
Welsh hills. Then I was with a most kind bachelor host, Fred Swete, at
Oswestry, and spent the day at Brogyntyn with Lord Harlech, a perfect
example of old-fashioned courtesy and kindness. In his grounds is a long
terrace with a glorious view over the plains and hills of Shropshire,
including the beloved Hawkestone range of my childhood. The next day, at
the Brownlow-Towers’ pleasant house at Ellesmere, a little girl of eight
was most amusingly _fin de siècle_. ‘Now, darling, you must go up to the
schoolroom and stay there,’ said her mother after luncheon. ‘No,
darling, no,’ answered the child. ‘I must not, darling,’ with an exact
imitation of its mother’s manner, ‘for I’ve been listening, and it’s
going to be interesting.’
“We made delightful excursions from Lutwyche to draw at Bridgenorth and
an old moated grange called Elswick, meeting Lady Boyne and her party,
who came from Burwarton as to a half-way house.
“Then I was at Ridley Hall, full of--oh! how many memories of my
long-ago. But it was the greatest pleasure to see Frank and Lady Anne
Lyon there, and how much they appreciated and cared for the place. Lord
and Lady Wantage were at Ridley, and I went with them to Hexham Abbey,
once a most grand church, but utterly ruined by an ignorant
restoration. And now, wandering still on the footprints of past days, I
am at Chesters with the widow and children of my dear old friend George
Clayton, he as well as all the earlier generation of his family having
passed away, and Miss Annie Ogle, whom I knew so well in those far-away
days, here as a delightful _old_ lady, with snow-white hair, but the
same winning character and ways as in her youth. A museum has been built
now for the immense collection of Roman altars and fragments, &c., from
the ‘stations’ of the Roman wall, one of the best of which (Cilurnum) is
just in front of the house; while below ‘the riotous rapids of the
Tyne,’ as Swinburne calls them, with their rocky shores and bosky banks,
are the boundary of the park.”
* * * * *
“_Redholm, North Berwick, Oct. 17._--I am staying here with Robert Shaw
Stewart, a friend of old Roman days, and his kind wife, who was a
daughter of Charles Warner, the well-known statesman-philanthropist of
Trinidad,--‘fort comme le diamant, plus tendre qu’une mère’--of whom
Froude has given so charming a description. The Dalzells and all my
other dear friends of past days here have gone over the border-land,
but, in this hospitable house, I have seen quite a diorama of people. A
topic has been the three modern Scotch novelists, Crockett,[556]
Barrie,[557] and Ian Maclaren (Watson): Crockett such a delightful
fellow, so full of sunshine, of real happy enjoyment of people and
things: Barrie, a weaver’s boy as to his origin, but simple and
straightforward to a degree, though his books have made him rich: Watson
just a little spoilt since the great success of his annals of
Drumtochty, which, under another name (Logiealmond, near Glenalmond) was
the place where he was minister. The Free Kirk minister in this place,
Dr. Davidson, told me how when they all were at college together, Barrie
and Crockett used to tell stories in class. They sate up in a corner,
with a little coterie round them, and held their audience enthralled. No
one listened to the lecturer, and some of the students outside the
charmed circle used to say, ‘Had not you better send down to the
professor and tell him not to make so much noise?’ The lower orders in
Scotland seem to read the modern national novelists just as much as the
upper, and they read other deeper books too, and think calmly in a way
very unlike Englishmen. ‘The Shorter Catechism,’ which they all
understand, is a proof of this. When it was published, indeed, there was
a far more serious catechism for adults: this one was only intended for
‘those of tender years,’ yet there is much requiring deepest thought in
it, though the peasant classes always master it.”
* * * * *
“_Airlie Castle, Oct. 18._--Monday was fearfully cold, and it was a
pleasure to see the beautiful face of Lady Airlie--more picturesque and
distinguished in late middle life than any one else--looking out of a
close carriage come to meet me. Her most poetical home is just suited to
her--the tiniest castle in the world, with its one noble gate-tower
giving access to a little green plateau beneath which the Melgum and
the Isla rush through deep wooded gorges to their meeting-place. And
into these gorges the castle windows look deep down. Then, to those who
know Lady Airlie, I need not say how beautiful the little rooms are, how
splendid the few flowers, how much of story clusters round the furniture
and pictures--‘only a few; I do not like a room or a wall to be crowded,
even with the best things,’ says their mistress.
“In the serene beauty of her age, she herself lends a lustre to her
surroundings; quietly, contentedly severing most links with the great
world in which she has so long been a star, ‘elle dépose fleur à fleur
la couronne de la vie.’[558]
“Lady Maude White is here, returning to an intellectual world with which
she has never broken a single link, after many years of privation,
solitude, and duty nobly borne, first with her brother, and then with
her husband, at a horse-ranch in America.
“The castle of Airlie has never recovered its burning by Argyll and the
Covenanters, when
‘It fell on a day, a bonnie summer day,
When the corn was brearin’ fairly,
That there fell out a great dispute
Between Argyll and Airlie.’
The family were always for the King and the Church, indeed too much so,
for Maryott Ogilvy was the mistress of Cardinal Beaton, for whom he
built several castles, and who was enormously endowed by him. Of their
six children, the eldest girl had the richest dower in Scotland, and
married the Lord Crawford of that day. It was David, Lord Ogilvy, who
was out in the ‘45, who rebuilt a bit of the old castle, just enough to
live in by himself after he came home, and added a few rooms for his
wife when he married a second time. Behind the castle is a delightful
old garden, to which Lady Airlie has added hedges and peacocks in
clipped yew, with divers other ‘incidents;’ and all along the ledges of
the gorges run wonderful little pathlets--beautiful exceedingly in the
crimson and gold of their autumnal glory. But they will be gone
directly; for, as Edward Fitzgerald says, ‘The trees in the Highlands
give themselves no dying airs, but turn orange in a day, and are swept
off in a whirlwind, and winter is come.’
“We drove to Cortachy through woods laid prostrate by the great storm of
1893, which has left the trees piled on one another, like the dead of a
vanquished army on a battlefield. Lady Airlie made the whole of the
weird desolate country live through her interpretation of it:--