to an excellent library; and, even before I could read comfortably by
myself, my interest in books was stimulated by listening to my elders as
they read aloud. The magic of words and cadence--the purely sensuous
pleasure of melodious sound--stirred me from the time when I was quite a
child. Poetry, of course, came first; but prose was not much later. I
had by nature a good memory, and it retained, by no effort on my part,
my favourite bits of Macaulay and Scott. _The Battle of Lake Regillus_
and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, the impeachment of Warren Hastings
and the death of Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, are samples of the literature
with which my mind was stored. Every boy, I suppose, attempts to imitate
what he admires, and I was eternally scribbling. When I was eleven, I
began a novel, of which the heroine was a modern Die Vernon. At twelve,
I took to versification, for which the swinging couplets of _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ supplied the model. Fragments of prose and
verse came thick and fast. When I was thirteen, I made my first
appearance in print; with a set of verses on a Volunteer Encampment,
which really were not at all bad; and at fourteen I published
(anonymously) a religious tract, which had some success in Evangelical
circles.
The effect of Harrow was both to stimulate and to discipline my taste
for literature. It was my good fortune to be taught my Sophocles and
Euripides, Tacitus and Virgil, by scholars who had the literary sense,
and could enrich school-lessons with all the resources of a generous
culture. My sixteenth and seventeenth years brought me a real and
conscious growth in the things of the mind, and with that period of my
life I must always gratefully associate the names of Frederic Farrar,
Edward Bowen, and Arthur Watson.[49]
Meanwhile I was not only learning, but also practising. My teachers with
one accord incited me to write. Essay-writing formed a regular part of
our work in school and pupil-room, and I composed a great deal for my
own amusement. I wrote both prose and verse, and verse in a great many
metres; but it was soon borne in upon me--conclusively after I had been
beaten for the Prize Poem[50]--that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In
prose, I was more successful. My work for _The Harrovian_ gave me
constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English
Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and
rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for
the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and
Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme
has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture.
The "Young Lion" of the _Daily Telegraph_ thus "roared" over my
performance--
"The English Essay now takes a higher place on Speech Day than it did in
the old season; and the essay which was crowned yesterday was notable
alike for the theme, the opinions, and the literary promise of the
writer. The young author bore the historical name of Russell, and he was
really reviewing the forerunners and the fellow-workers of his own
ancestors, in describing the rhetorical powers of the elder and the
younger Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Canning and Grey.... The well-known
Constitutional note of Lord Russell was heard in every page, and the
sonorous English was such as the Earl himself might have written fifty
years ago, if the undergraduates of that day had been able to copy a
Macaulay. The essayist has read the prose of that dangerous model until
he has imitated the well-known and now hackneyed devices of the great
rhetorician with a closeness which perilously brought to mind the show
passages of the 'Essays' and the 'History.' Mr. Russell has caught the
trick of cutting up his paragraphs into rolling periods, and short,
sharp, and disjointed sentences; but he will go to more subtle and more
simple masters of style than Macaulay, when he shall have passed the
rhetorical stage of youth."
This prophecy was soon fulfilled, and indeed the process of fulfilment
had already begun. In the Sixth Form, we naturally were influenced by
Dr. Butler, who, though he certainly did not despise fine rhetoric,
wrote a beautifully simple style, and constantly instructed us in the
difference between eloquence and journalese. "Let us leave _commence_
and _partake_ to the newspapers," was an admonition often on his lips.
Our Composition Masters were Edward Young, an exquisite scholar of the
Eton type, and the accomplished Henry Nettleship, who detested
flamboyancy, and taught us to admire Newman's incomparable easiness and
grace. And there was Matthew Arnold living on the Hill, generously
encouraging every bud of literary promise, and always warning us against
our tendency to "Middle-class Macaulayese."
At Oxford, the chastening process went on apace. Newman became my
master, as far as language was concerned; and I learned to bracket him
with Arnold and Church as possessing "The Oriel style." Thackeray's
Latinized constructions began to fascinate me; and, though I still loved
gorgeous diction, I sought it from Ruskin instead of Macaulay.
All this time I was writing--in a very humble and obscure way,
certainly, but still writing. I wrote in local newspapers and Parish
Magazines. I published anonymous comments on current topics. I
contributed secretly to ephemeral journals. I gave lectures and printed
them as pamphlets. It was all very good exercise; but the odd part of it
seems to me, in looking back, that I never expected pay, but rather
spent my own money in printing what I wrote. That last infirmity of
literary minds I laid aside soon after I left Oxford. I rather think
that the first money which I made with my pen was payment for a
character-study of my uncle, Lord Russell, which I wrote for _The
World_; thereby eliciting from Matthew Arnold the urbane remark, "Ah, my
dear George, I hear you have become one of Yates's hired stabbers."
After I entered Parliament, opportunities of writing, and of writing for
profit, became more frequent. I contributed to the _Quarterly_, the _New
Quarterly_, the _Nineteenth Century_, the _Fortnightly_, the
_Contemporary_, the _Spectator_, and the _Pall Mall_. Yet another
magazine recurs pleasantly to my mind, because of the warning which was
inscribed on one's proof-sheet--"The cost of _corrigenda_ will be
deducted from _honoraria_." What fine language! and what a base economy!
It did not take me long to find that the society in which I habitually
lived, and which I have described in a former chapter, was profoundly
ignorant. A most amusing law-suit between a Duchess and her maid took
place about the time of which I am writing, and the Duchess's
incriminated letter, beginning in the third person, wandering off into
the first, and returning with an effort to the third, was indeed an
object-lesson in English composition. A young sprig of fashion once said
to me, in the tone of a man who utters an accepted truth, "It is so
much more interesting to talk about people than things"--even though
those "things" were the literary triumphs of humour or tragedy. In one
great house, Books were a prohibited subject, and the word "Books" was
construed with such liberal latitude that it seemed to include
everything except Bradshaw. Even where people did not thus truculently
declare war against literature, they gave it an uncommonly wide berth,
and shrank with ill-concealed aversion from such names as Meredith and
Browning. "Meredith," said Oscar Wilde, "is a prose-Browning--and so is
Browning." And both those forms of prose were equally eschewed by
society.
Of course, when one is surveying a whole class, one sees some
conspicuous exceptions to the prevailing colour; and here and there one
had the pleasure of meeting in society persons admirably accomplished. I
have already mentioned Lord Houghton, poet, essayist, pamphleteer,
book-lover, and book-collector, who was equally at home in the world of
society and the world of literature. Nothing that was good in books,
whether ancient or modern, escaped his curious scrutiny, and at his
hospitable table, which might truly be called a "Festive Board,"
authors great and small rubbed shoulders with dandies and diplomats and
statesmen. On the 16th of June, 1863, Matthew Arnold wrote--"On Sunday I
dined with Monckton Milnes,[51] and met all the advanced Liberals in
religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume.... The
philosophers were fearful! George Lewes, Herbert Spencer, a sort of
pseudo-Shelley called Swinburne, and so on. Froude, however, was there,
and Browning, and Ruskin."
The mention of Matthew Arnold reminds me that, though I had admired and
liked him in a reverent sort of way, when I was a Harrow boy and he was
a man, I found him even more fascinating when I met him on the more even
terms of social life in London. He was indeed the most delightful of
companions; a man of the world entirely free from worldliness, and a man
of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry. He walked through the
world enjoying it and loving it; and yet all the time one felt that his
"eyes were on the higher loadstars" of the intellect and the spirit. In
those days I used to say that, if one could fashion oneself, I should
wish to be like Matthew Arnold; and the lapse of years has not altered
my desire.
Of Robert Browning, as he appeared in society, I have already spoken;
but here let me add an instance which well illustrates his tact and
readiness. He once did me the honour of dining with me, and I had
collected a group of eager disciples to meet him. As soon as dinner was
over, one of these enthusiasts led the great man into a corner, and
began cross-examining him about the identity of _The Lost Leader_ and
the meaning of _Sordello_. For a space Browning bore the catechism with
admirable patience; and then, laying his hand on the questioner's
shoulder, he exclaimed, "But, my dear fellow, this is too bad. _I_ am
monopolizing _you_," and skipped out of the corner.
Lord Tennyson was scarcely ever to be encountered in society; but I was
presented to him at a garden-party by Mr. James Knowles, of the
_Nineteenth Century_. He was, is, and always will be, one of the chief
divinities of my poetical heaven; but he was more worshipful at a
distance than at close quarters, and I was determined not to dispel
illusion by a too near approach to the shrine. J. A. Froude was a man of
letters whom from time to time one encountered in society. No one could
doubt his cleverness; but it was a cleverness which rather repelled than
attracted. With his thin lips, his cold smile, and his remorseless,
deliberate, way of speaking, he always seemed to be secretly gloating
over the hideous scene in the hall of Fotheringay, or the last agonies
of a disembowelled Papist. Lord Acton was, or seemed to be, a man of the
world first and foremost; a politician and a lover of society; a gossip,
and, as his "Letters" show, not always a friendly gossip.[52] His
demeanour was profoundly sphinx-like, and he seemed to enjoy the sense
that his hearers were anxious to learn what he was able but unwilling to
impart. His knowledge and accomplishments it would, at this time of day,
be ridiculous to question; and on the main concerns of human
life--Religion and Freedom--I was entirely at one with him. All the more
do I regret that in society he so effectually concealed his higher
enthusiasms, and that, having lived on the vague fame of his "History of
Liberty," he died leaving it unwritten.
I am writing of the years when I first knew London socially, and I may
extend them from 1876 to 1886. All through those years, as through many
before and since, the best representative of culture in society was Mr.,
now Sir, George Trevelyan--a poet, a scholar to his finger-tips, an
enthusiast for all that is best in literature, ancient or modern, and
author of one of the six great Biographies in the English language.
There is no need to recapitulate Sir George's services to the State, or
to criticize his performances in literature. It is enough to record my
lively and lasting gratitude for the unbroken kindness which began when
I was a boy at Harrow, and continues to the present hour.
I have spoken, so far, of literary men who played a more or less
conspicuous part in society; but, as this chapter is dedicated to
Literature, I ought to say a word about one or two men of Letters who
always avoided society, but who, when one sought them out in their own
surroundings, were delightful company. Foremost among these I should
place James Payn.
Payn was a man who lived in, for, and by Literature. He detested
exercise. He never travelled. He scarcely ever left London. He took no
holidays. If he was forced into the country for a day or two, he used
the exile as material for a story or an essay. His life was one
incessant round of literary activity. He had published his first book
while he was an Undergraduate at Trinity, and from first to last he
wrote more than a hundred volumes. _By Proxy_ has been justly admired
for the wonderful accuracy of its local colour, and for a masterly
knowledge of Chinese character; but the writer drew exclusively from
encyclopædias and books of travel. In my judgment, he was at his best in
the Short Story. He practised that difficult art long before it became
popular, and a book called originally _People, Places, and Things_, but
now _Humorous Stories_, is a masterpiece of fun, invention, and
observation. In 1874, he became "Reader" to Messrs. Smith and Elder, and
in that capacity had the happiness of discovering _Vice Versa_, and the
less felicitous experience of rejecting _John Inglesant_ as unreadable.
It was at this period of his life that I first encountered Payn, and I
fell at once under his charm. His was not a faultless character, for he
was irritable, petulant, and prejudiced. He took the strongest dislikes,
sometimes on very slight grounds; was unrestrained in expressing them,
and was apt to treat opinions which he did not share very cavalierly.
But none of these faults could obscure his charm. He was the most
tender-hearted of human beings, and the sight, even the thought, of
cruelty set his blood on fire. But, though he was intensely humane, he
was absolutely free from mawkishness; and a wife-beater, or a
child-torturer, or a cattle-maimer would have had short shrift at his
hands. He was genuinely sympathetic, especially towards the hopes and
struggles of the young and the unbefriended. Many an author, once
struggling but now triumphant, could attest this trait. But his chief
charm was his humour. It was absolutely natural; bubbled like a
fountain, and danced like light. Nothing escaped it, and solemnity only
stimulated it to further activities. He had the power, which Sydney
Smith described, of "abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the
most successful ridicule;" and, when he was offended, the ridicule had a
remarkably sharp point. It was of course, impossible that all the humour
of a man who joked incessantly could be equally good. Sometimes it was
rather boyish, playing on proper names or personal peculiarities; and
sometimes it descended to puns. But, for sheer rapidity, I have never
known Payn's equal. When a casual word annoyed him, his repartee
flashed out like lightning. I could give plenty of instances, but to
make them intelligible I should have to give a considerable amount of
introduction, and that would entirely spoil the sense of flashing
rapidity. There was no appreciable interval of time between the
provoking word and the repartee which it provoked.
Another great element of charm in Payn was his warm love of Life,
"And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world."
While he hated the black and savage and sordid side of existence with a
passionate hatred, he enjoyed all its better--which he believed to be
its larger--part with an infectious relish. Never have I known a more
blithe and friendly spirit; never a nature to which Literature and
Society--books and men--yielded a more constant and exhilarating joy. He
had unstinted admiration for the performances of others, and was wholly
free from jealousy. His temperament indeed was not equable. He had ups
and downs, bright moods and dark, seasons of exaltation and seasons of
depression. The one succeeded the other with startling rapidity, but the
bright moods triumphed, and it was impossible to keep him permanently
depressed. His health had always been delicate, but illness neither
crushed his spirit nor paralysed his pen. Once he broke a blood-vessel
in the street, and was conveyed home in an ambulance. During the
transit, though he was in some danger of bleeding to death, he began to
compose a narrative of his adventure, and next week it appeared in the
_Illustrated London News_.
During the last two years of his life he was painfully crippled by
arthritic rheumatism, and could no longer visit the Reform Club, where
for many years he had every day eaten his luncheon and played his
rubber. Determining that he should not completely lose his favourite, or
I should rather say his only, amusement, some members of the Club banded
themselves together to supply him with a rubber in his own house twice a
week; and this practice was maintained to his death. It was a striking
testimony to the affection which he inspired. In those years I was a
pretty frequent visitor, and, on my way to the house, I used to bethink
me of stories which might amuse him, and I used even to note them down
between one visit and another, as a provision for next time. One day
Payn said, "A collection of your stories would make a book, and I think
Smith and Elder would publish it." I thought my anecdotage scarcely
worthy of so much honour; but I promised to make a weekly experiment in
the _Manchester Guardian_. My _Collections and Recollections_ ran
through the year 1897, and appeared in book-form at Easter, 1898. But
Payn died on the 25th of the previous March; and the book, which I had
hoped to put in his hand, I could only inscribe to his delightful
memory.
Another remarkable man of letters, wholly remote from the world, was
Richard Holt Hutton, for thirty-six years (1861-1897) the honoured
Editor of _The Spectator_. Hutton was a "stickit minister" of the
Unitarian persuasion, who had been led, mainly by the teaching of F. D.
Maurice, to the acceptance of orthodox Christianity; and who devoted all
the rest of his life to the inculcation of what he conceived to be moral
and religious truth, through the medium of a weekly review. He lived, a
kind of married hermit, on the edge of Windsor Forest, and could hardly
be separated, even for a week's holiday, from his beloved _Spectator_.
His output of work was enormous and incessant, and was throughout
critical and didactic. The style was pre-eminently characteristic of
the man--tangled, untidy, ungraceful, disfigured by "trailing relatives"
and accumulated epithets; and yet all the time conveying the sense of
some real and even profound thought that strove to express itself
intelligibly. As the style, so the substance. "_The Spectator_," wrote
Matthew Arnold in 1865, "is all very well, but the article has Hutton's
fault of seeing so very far into a mill-stone." And, two years later,
"_The Spectator_ has an article in which Hutton shows his strange
aptitude for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick." Both were
sound criticisms. When Hutton addressed himself to a deep topic of
abstract speculation, he "saw so very far into it" that even his most
earnest admirers could not follow the visual act. When he handled the
more commonplace subjects of thought or action with which ordinary men
concern themselves, he seemed to miss the most obvious and palpable
points. He was a philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the
abstract and the mystical--a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He
saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to
ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on
such a theme as Personal Identity or the Idea of God, he "found no end,
in wandering mazes lost."
But the very quality of aloofness from other men and their ways of
thinking, which made it impossible for him to be the exponent of a
system or the founder of a school, made him a peculiarly interesting
friend. In homely phrase, you never knew where to have him; he was
always breaking out in a fresh place. Whatever subject he handled, from
impaled Bulgarians to the credibility of miracles, was certain to be
presented in a new and unlooked-for aspect. He was as full of splendid
gleams as a landscape by Turner, and as free from all formal rules of
art and method. He was an independent thinker, if ever there was one,
and as honest as he was independent. In his belief, truth was the most
precious of treasures, to be sought at all hazards, and, when acquired,
to be safeguarded at all costs. His zeal for truth was closely allied
with his sense of justice. His mind came as near absolute fairness as is
possible for a man who takes any part in live controversies. He never
used an unfair argument to establish his point, nor pressed a fair
argument unduly. He was scrupulously careful in stating his adversary's
case, and did all in his power to secure a judicial and patient hearing
even for the causes with which he had least sympathy. His own
convictions, which he had reached through stern and self-sacrificing
struggles, were absolutely solid. By the incessant writing of some forty
years, he enforced the fundamental truth of human redemption through God
made Man on the attention of people to whom professional preachers speak
in vain, and he steadily impressed on his fellow-Christians those
ethical duties of justice and mercy which should be, but sometimes are
not, the characteristic fruits of their creed. It was a high function,
excellently fulfilled.
The transition is abrupt, but no catalogue of the literary men with whom
I was brought in contact could be complete without a mention of Mr.
George Augustus Sala. He was the very embodiment of Bohemia; and, alike
in his views and in his style, the fine flower of such journalism as is
associated with the name of the _Daily Telegraph_. His portrait,
sketched with rare felicity, may be found in Letter XII. of that
incomparable book, _Friendship's Garland_. "Adolescens Leo" thus
describes him--"Sala, like us his disciples, has studied in the book of
the world even more than in the world of books. But his career and
genius have given him somehow the secret of a literary mixture novel and
fascinating in the last degree: he blends the airy epicureanism of the
_salons_ of Augustus with the full-bodied gaiety of our English
cider-cellar. With our people and country, _mon cher_, this mixture is
now the very thing to go down; there arises every day a larger public
for it; and we, Sala's disciples, may be trusted not willingly to let it
die."
That was written in 1871; and, when sixteen years had elapsed, I thought
it would be safe, and I knew it would be amusing, to bring Sala and
Matthew Arnold face to face at dinner. For the credit of human nature
let it be recorded that the experiment was entirely successful; for, as
Lord Beaconsfield said, "Turtle makes all men equal," and vindictiveness
is exorcised by champagne.
The Journalist of Society in those days was Mr. T. H. S. Escott, who was
also Editor of the _Fortnightly_ and leader-writer of the _Standard_. I
should be inclined to think that no writer in London worked so hard; and
he paid the penalty in shattered health. It is a pleasure to me, who in
those days owed much to his kindness, to witness the renewal of his
early activities, and to welcome volume after volume from his prolific
pen. Mr. Kegan Paul, essayist, critic, editor, and ex-clergyman, was
always an interesting figure; and his successive transitions from
Tractarianism to Latitudinarianism, and from Agnosticism to
Ultramontanism, gave a peculiar piquancy to his utterances on religion.
He deserves remembrance on two quite different scores--one, that he was
the first publisher to study prettiness in the production of even cheap
books; and the other, that he was an early and enthusiastic worker in
the cause of National Temperance. It was my privilege to be often with
him in the suffering and blindness of his last years, and I have never
seen a trying discipline more bravely borne.