reaches Tegernsee. There is not any doubt the motion[30] is right; but
I can imagine a much {24} stronger statement of objections than the
righteous indignation of the Tories produced.
Let us hope that John Morley was not discouraged by _encountering Sweet
Caesar's ghost on Tuesday_. The _Pall Mall_ is getting a little
personal, and too highly coloured in reports of fact. Do you know my
intimate friend Lathbury, political editor of the _Economist_? A
Weekly is easier to conduct than a Daily; but his articles seem to me
excellent in tone, judgment, and impartiality. He wrote much formerly
in the _Daily News_ and the _Pall Mall_, and I was negotiating with
Delane to put him on the _Times_ when Bagehot's death gave him the
other opening. His wife was Bonamy Price's daughter. You never saw a
man more frank, cheery, and well-conditioned.
I suppose Hayward has brought ----. Let him bring Chenery, that he may
be useful as well as ornamental. It is not a matter of indifference
that, when other journalists come, he should be left to stay away.
Only don't let his sins be cast in his teeth.
I am afraid you will not take to Morier; but he is the greatest force
in our diplomatic service, in spite of his discomfiture at Lisbon. He
would be the very man to meet Challemel Lacour, who will be an offence
to so many.
Liddon repeated at Munich the story of Carnarvon. He also gave the
excuse which I suggested--that Chamberlain, Fawcett, Dilke alarmed him.
But it is not a pretty story as he tells it, considering the way
Carnarvon turned against the new Ministry.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Tegernsee July 10, 1880_]
I am heartily glad to hear what you say of Mr. Gladstone's health and
strength and spirits, and of the {25} nook behind Hampstead,[31] so
much better than the dull air of the Thames Valley. There must be so
much to harass him besides what appears, and what he can wind up and
swamp in dazzling speech. Rosebery's anxiety is shared by many
thorough Liberals, and it is not, perhaps, unfortunate that the perils
of the position have made themselves felt at once, that the full
warning comes in time, and the remedy can be taken early.
I wonder whether, for a reason you know as well as I do, a thing we all
perceive remains a mystery to the person most concerned to know it.
The Liberal party is held together, not by forces within, but by a
force above it. It consists, like the being that declined a chair, of
two wings and a head. Without Mr. Gladstone's ascendency and the
lustre of his fame, Harcourt, Argyll, and Bright would soon offend
every group into insubordination and incohesion. The jealousy between
the old Liberals, who are losing ground, and the usurping Radicals, and
all other familiar elements of discontent, cannot be restrained by
Parliamentary management alone. There remains a great sphere for
direct personal influence. The men Mr. Gladstone used to look up to,
Peel and Aberdeen, had not much of this, and I fancy he takes from them
the belief that it is unnecessary or undignified. He has been so long
without holding the threads of party: it is so natural, in one who
writes and speaks so much, to suspect those who misunderstand him doing
it voluntarily: it is so natural to him to underrate the effect of
personal contact, that he may think that the sole legitimate method of
mastering men is Parliamentary speaking, or writings addressed to
mankind. But it is worth anything that people should know and see more
of him, in society if possible. {26} First, because people are
flattered. Next, because they are awed. Last, because they are
conciliated, and so disciplined. And this applies to three sorts
especially--members, diplomatists, and journalists. I am sure all that
public policy can do to strengthen the Government will be done. But I
note an unhappy impatience of those inferior arts my earthy spirit
relies on.
I see how willing the _Times_ is to be taken in hand, in spite of
Walter. Sir Henry Maine, like Stephen, used to write in the _Pall
Mall_. I don't know whether he has joined Morley. Maine's nature is
to exercise power, and to find good reasons for adopted policy.
Augustus or Napoleon would have made him Prime Minister. He has no
strong sympathies, and is not at heart a Liberal, for he believes that
Manchesterism will lose India. He considers also that the party,
especially Lowe, has treated him less well than Salisbury. He is
intensely nervous and sensitive. After that, I may say that I esteem
him, with Mr. Gladstone, Newman, and Paget, the finest intellect in
England. For some reason he is one of the men whom Lord Granville's
arts do not reach. I wish you would see him....
It would be very kind of you indeed to ask the Lathburys some Tuesday
or Tuesdays. I say that because he is so much my friend, but he is
also an eminently useful and trustworthy man. His wife wrote much in
the _Saturday_--I don't remember the article you speak of. When I am a
little in doubt about anything I consult Lathbury, who steadies and
encourages me. When I feel very sure of some conclusion I go to Maine,
who always knocks it to pieces. He is much the more instructive of the
two. The other is more pleasant.
With Maine, above him indeed at the India Office, {27} is Sir Louis
Mallet, a thoughtful economist, a sincere, almost passionate Liberal,
but under Cobden's influence, one of those sincere Liberals least
attracted by your father. He is very sound beyond the Indus, and I
wish you sometimes saw him; but I ought not, perhaps, to say it, for I
half suspect the Prime Minister has some ancient reason for objecting
to him.
The breakfast with the archbishop,[32] the philosopher,[33] the
Frenchman,[34] and even with G---- does not suggest hilarity. What you
will do for sketches of character after the Reays leave England, I
cannot imagine.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Marienbad August 8, 1880_]
I don't know how to thank you for thinking of me at such a moment.[35]
It was hard to bear being away just then, and you must have gone
through a dreadful time. Even with the scraps of information that
reach one here, I have been able to realise much of it. Almost the
first consoling thing was the report of your escapade with Wolverton.
Every line of your letter is a monument of your goodness, even your
disinclination to go into details. But I am afraid you must have been
terribly knocked up--so soon, too, after your own illness, of which I
will not speak now, but which, indeed, I was very sorry to hear of.
And I do trust that Mrs. Gladstone was enabled to go through it all
without excessive alarm or fatigue. She will not need words to be
assured of all my sympathy. I am persuaded that your greatest
pleasure, just now, comes from the expressive conduct of adversaries,
not from the vain words of friends.
{28}
Our defeat in the Lords[36] opens a wide vista of difficulty and
trouble--partly because it injures the Government, but not much, and
will probably increase the ascendency of the P.M.; particularly because
of the H. of Lords itself. Nobody will ever believe that such a
majority was due to honest and disinterested motives. People will say,
and will say truly, that an assembly which is moved by selfish and
sordid motives, when there is a question of preventing ruin and
starvation, is not only an injury to the poor, but a disgrace to the
community, and there is no way out of it. Small majorities may give
way or abstain; but after so determined a demonstration, repentance
will be suicidal. And the one instance in modern times where the Lords
have proved stronger than the Commons, because postponement here was
prohibition, is a question of helping the poor who suffer, at a slight
sacrifice and slighter danger to people immensely rich.
We are only beginning with questions of this kind. Did you hear the
speech at the end of May in which Mr. Gladstone spoke of that class
which is so numerous that it is virtually the entire nation? Graver
words were never spoken in Parliament, for the entire land is virtually
in the hands of another class. The considerations which this contrast,
this contradiction suggests, have a mighty future before them, a future
damaging to my boy's prospect of ever sitting on a red leather bench.
I am sorry we were not 52.[37] It would have been impressive, like the
Doctrinaires of whom it was said: "Ils sont quatre; mais quand ils
veulent imposer par {29} le nombre, ils pretendent etre cinq." Indeed,
for all the reasons which Argyll repudiates, justifying my prophecy
about him in the spirit, if not to the letter, there has been no
measure for which I should be so anxious to vote. I wrote to Lord
G.[38] to send me timely warning, as there was no trouble I would not
take.
Having been to a doctor, without any idea that I was seriously out of
order, I was sent here suddenly, and am forbidden, for reasons I must
acknowledge, to move for some weeks to come. It could not have
happened at a worse moment for me.
I was sorry for Frere, and should probably have allowed his daughter to
come round me....
It is too kind of you to remember, after all that has passed over you
and the nation, details of former letters. Unless there has been a
change lately, there are two editors of the _Economist_, one for money
matters and the other for politics. Maine will be proud and happy, and
ought to be much obliged to me for supplying a topic for so pleasant a
conversation. I wonder whether he showed you the luminous side of his
mind, whether you saw why he always disagrees with me, and why some
people are more afraid than fond of him. Whatever passes at the end of
the Session, I do hope that a season of rest is included in our friend
Dr. A. Clark's prescriptions. It might give me some remote chance of
seeing you again.
That Dutch Interior is charming, and I hope you enjoyed the circle of
widowers as much as I did your graphic account of them. It is
delightful to think of the repose after the storm has been weathered so
{30} well. Argyll practising his next speech in the solitude of night,
----'s diplomatic deafness and yet more artful slumber, his brother
with a hook placidly fixed in Bright's aggressive nose, the refined
American[39] offended by the rigidity of the Democrat, the group of
listening Senators, the harmless youth, the envious beauty--and then
the great historic background and the one overshadowing figure--there
is not a page in Mme. de Remusat approaching it. Do you write like
this to other people? Do you write at least six pages of diary every
night? Please do; and let me read it now and then. And remember that
one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin. If you are really
going to be left at Hawarden, you ought to shut your door, shut your
eyes, recall all that you have seen and heard during the last six
months, and write it carefully down. You have such an opportunity and
such a power. I am not like the Roman:[40] I envy almost as much as I
admire.
You make me happy by allowing me to conclude that I gave no offence by
what I wrote of our exalted House. I don't mean that your uneasiness
was quite unreasonable. When a Bill[41] gets knocked about in
Committee, even when an artful Minister means it to be knocked about,
it can never go up to the Lords harmonious, consistent, and the genuine
expression of a policy. There are not two sides to every question, but
there is always an opening, in such cases, for sincere criticism. The
way out of that is to pass the second reading, and to correct in
Committee what was done wrong in Committee. What I mean in this case
is that the Bill involved a principle of infinite force and {31} value,
which the Ministry probably veiled to their own eyes, and which the
Lords were right to resist as a private association, which they are
not; wrong to resist as a disinterested national institution, which is
their claim to exist.
It is impossible to exaggerate the depth of aversion the Bill has
evoked. You must have heard enough of it. One man has spent two days
here for the purpose of telling me how wrong it was. Another writes to
me that he has paired for the session, feeling that Government will be
obliged to those who help them when they are hopelessly wrong, although
the help consists in pairing and going to Vichy. These are idle men,
representative of thousands.
It reminds me of the great landowner, Bedford, who reminds me of
Arthur,[42] who reminds me of Maine. I suppose it was a refuge in
Piccadilly that revealed the secret to me. Arthur's one fault is a
delight in secrets. Although Maine is unfitted to be P.M. (under any
but a despotic monarch), nobody has so large a conception of all
questions relating to the tenure of land. I dare say he has been asked
to say what he knows about Ireland. What pure reason and boundless
knowledge can do, without sympathy or throb, Maine can do better than
any man in England.
I am sorry to think of Lowell's sun sinking behind your horizon. At
first sight one always fancies that those who question the certainty of
history sap the certainty of religion, or are the victims of those who
do, and I fancy I should have had a word (with corners) to throw at
him. The Remusat volumes are one of my landmarks in judging Napoleon.
It is, of all accounts by competent people, the most injurious to his
memory, as {32} Segur's are the most favourable. Until I read them, I
thought the fixed intention to put Enghien to death, the charge of
murder, not proven. If the authority of these recollections breaks
down, I must invent for myself a new Napoleon. After allowing for the
fact that they were written, or re-written, years later, like the Diary
of John Adams, the Memoirs of S. Simon, the History of Burnet, of
Clarendon, the Annals of Tacitus, the Nine Muses of Herodotus, the
Eight Books of Thucydides, which are the most conspicuous sources of
all history, and for the suspicion that there was a great secret she
not only could not tell, but wrote in order to obliterate, and after
giving whatever weight it deserves to the little joke that calls it:
"Souvenir d'une femme de chambre renvoyee," I am so persuaded that the
book is authentic and true, that I should have liked to hear the
argument. But this is true, history does not stand or fall with
historians. From the thirteenth century we rely much more on letters
than on histories written for the public. I need not add that the
history of our Lord which we find in the Epistles is one most valuable
testimony in favour of the Gospels. So that even if Lowell can damage
the reports in this book, we can restore the certainty of history by
the aid of letters, of documents and of those facts in which
independent witnesses agree.
Is it not heroic of your sister renouncing a life like your own for the
toil of Newnham? I wish her success and happiness in her pilgrimage
most sincerely. By-the-bye your other sister is the real pilgrim, and
I wish I had known in time to warn my belongings of her movements.
My time here is up, and I go home to-morrow. As a proper P.M.'s
daughter you ought to say you hope {33} I was really ill, to justify
fifty-one.... It is absurd to come all the way to England and not to
see you; so I shall come only if I am ideally wanted. I write at once
to discover whether and when. Your telegram is a great disappointment.
I wonder where they will go. Cannes is the place I recommend, but not
till October. If I am not summoned home from Tegernsee for Hares or
Burials,[43] I look forward to Ammergau, and wish you were coming.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Tegernsee Sept. 21, 1880_]
I ought to write no more. I ought to hide my useless hand altogether.
There was a week during which I looked forward to a summons home, a
summons that never came; and after having persistently applied for it,
I thought that it was better not to make the offer of my vote more
urgent than the demand for it. I know how much I have missed and lost.
Circumstances over which I have no control would probably have arrested
my maritime enterprise at Gravesend.[44] But how pleasant Holmbury
would have been! And then there was, and is, so much to talk to you
about, so much that evaporates in writing and will not keep, so much
that will. As there can hardly be an autumn session after prorogation
in September, I must wait for the end of January. Meanwhile I hope you
will cultivate the notion of Tegernsee. Such a break with the great
world would do Mr. Gladstone good, and I fancy we could make you like
the place once more. Let me have that hope before me.
* * * * *
{34}
My children went to Ammergau and came back not deeply moved, but
strongly impressed. I let them go without me from a sort of dread many
people must have felt, not because of the chief actor, for a pious,
simple-minded peasant's conception of the two natures is probably not
more inadequate than my own, but what we do gradually realise in
meditating the Passion is the character and experience of the
disciples, the effect of that companionship, the utter human weakness
that survived in the midst of the intense feelings it must have
awakened in them. Those are contrasts that can be expressed, and are
apparently too subtle for the performers at Ammergau. I am told that,
on the whole, the audience remained cold.
The answer to my telegram was signed in a way that led me to doubt
whether it came from you. I trust it was sent by your brother, and
that Mr. Gladstone was not molested by my inquiries on the top of so
many more. It is beginning at the wrong end to read David Copperfield
first, but he is worth anything to busy men, because his fun is so
hearty and so easy, and he rouses the emotions by such direct and
simple methods. I am ashamed to think how much more often I return to
Dickens than to George Eliot.
Do some of the brothers or secretaries make a point of reading the
_Temps_? Of all that is written against the Ministry and its general
policy, the _Temps_ articles seem to me the most serious and
suggestive, and at Marienbad I went through a course of Austrian
newspapers, which are very hostile, and better written than our Tory
organs, but not near so good as the _Temps_. I am afraid it is my
friend Scherer. Not being a Frenchman, his patriotism is peculiarly
lively. Don't call Chenery my friend. I have never seen him, and {35}
only know that he is making a mess of the _Times_. But my reasons were
those you know well, and they will hold good next year.
You are quite right in all your corrections. ---- ---- is a very good
fellow. His only artifice is his discretion. His mind is accustomed
to travel along roads straight, and wide, and beaten, so that it
accumulates conventional truths and borrowed convictions, but he is as
well meaning and as sincere as a man can well be who is not on the
watch to root up prejudices. His son is threatened with Toryism as
with the gout. I don't know which is worse.... I talk nonsense at
times, because sense is monotonous. It won't do to shrink from hard
speeches and judgments when they are necessary. But it is horrible to
make them when one is not compelled. Do believe me when I say that is
what makes you delightful, and a certain generous, unselfish,
courageous credulity is part of it. Commynes says: "It is no shame to
be suspicious, but only to be deceived." That is a contemporary of
Machiavelli. Two centuries later you will find in Telemaque these
words: "Celui qui craint avec exces d'etre trompe merite de l'etre, et
l'est presque toujours grossierement." That is the progress of 200
years. Don't you think you see the distance between Bismarck and your
father?
You have had an excellent idea about those letters. If you go on and
arrange them, it will be very precious to him some idle day, if that
should ever come, and to you all. The inner reality of history is so
unlike the back of the cards, and it takes so long to get at it, which
does not prevent us from disbelieving what is current as history, but
makes us wish to sift it, and dig through mud to solid foundations. I
conclude that all {36} political correspondence has been set in order
regularly, otherwise that ought to be thought of too.
* * * * *
The bit of scandal suspected in the unwritten part of the Remusat
Memoirs, was supposed to have belonged to the time of the camp at
Boulogne, of which she gives very full accounts. But it is not
necessary to believe all those things. There would be no pure
reputations. I suspend my belief even about Fersen.... They cannot
publish Talleyrand's Memoirs because he tells so many tales of that
kind, and people still living would be surprised to find out who they
are.
I was flattered to know that I had supplied topics of conversation and
even of dispute at Holmbury. I should like always to be accused by
Lord Granville, defended by your father, and sentenced by you. But
don't always associate me with bottles of physic, even in dreams.
From something you wrote I gather that Mr. Gladstone did not altogether
disagree with Forster's sentiments; I am sure I did not; yet it seemed
to me very hazardous to make such a speech in Mr. Gladstone's absence,
suggesting wide differences in the Ministry, rousing expectations which
will go on growing through the autumn, making the Lords more angry than
repentant, using terms so vague that they can be almost honestly
misrepresented, and a great deal more. Home Rule will make great
capital out of the events that happened after your father fell ill.
J. McCarthy's two last volumes[45] are not equal to the first, but you
will be interested in reading them. But here is post-time, and I
cannot say one-half.
{37}
[Sidenote: _Tegernsee Sept. 27, 1880_]
It is not easy to add to the panegyric pronounced on St. Hilaire by a
too zealous friend in Friday's _Pall Mall_. That gratifying
description is not quite satisfactory. The writer affirms that St.
Hilaire is an Orientalist of the first rank, and a Greek scholar
unsurpassed in France. He knows Greek thoroughly for working purposes,
but not exquisitely as a scholar; and he has done little, on the whole,
for his idol Aristotle in the way of consulting the manuscripts and
improving the unsettled text. And although he has studied Eastern
religions deeply, I do not believe that he is a master of Eastern
languages. Nor does he live on a third floor in that good street the
Rue d'Astorg. He does not live there at all, but three miles away, in
a charming little bachelor's house at Passy. His rooms, formerly in
the Rue d'Astorg, were "au fond de la cour au premier," and his
maid-servant is not (and was not) elderly, but young, though
ill-favoured. And it is not fair to say, with obvious purpose, that he
never deserts the Thiers dinner-table except for the Germans. I made
his acquaintance at a dinner at Lord Lyons's.
From all which I conclude that the letter is a vehement endeavour to
recommend the new Minister abroad. Last summer St. Hilaire gave me the
three big volumes of his Aristotelian Metaphysics, and, when I
remonstrated, said, "Vous me le rendrez un jour, d'une autre facon."
That is what I am doing at this moment, when I tell you how very highly
I rate the man.