April 15 1888.
Written in 1897.
XIV.
CONVERSATION—continued.
Brave men have lived since as well as before Agamemnon, and those who know the present society of London may not unreasonably ask whether, even granting the heavy losses which I enumerated in my last chapter, the Art of Conversation is really extinct. Are the talkers of to-day in truth so immeasurably inferior to the great men who preceded them? Before we can answer these questions, even tentatively, we must try to define our idea of good conversation, and this can best be done by rigidly ruling out what is bad. To begin with, all affectation, unreality, and straining aftereffect are intolerable; scarcely less so are rhetoric, declamation, and whatever tends towards speech-making. Mimicry is a very dangerous trick, rare in perfection, and contemptible when imperfect. An apt story well told is delicious, but there was sound philosophy in Mr. Pinto's view that "when a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world." One touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin, and a spice of malice tickles the intellectual palate; but a conversation which is mainly malicious is entirely dull. Constant joking is a weariness to the flesh; but, on the other hand, a sustained seriousness of discourse is fatally apt to recall the conversation between the Hon. Elijah Pogram and the Three Literary Ladies—"How Pogram got out of his depth instantly, and how the Three L.L.'s were never in theirs, is a piece of history not worth recording. Suffice it that, being all four out of their depths and all unable to swim, they splashed up words in all directions, and floundered about famously. On the whole, it was considered to have been the severest mental exercise ever heard in the National Hotel, and the whole company observed that their heads ached with the effort—as well they might."
A talker who monopolizes the conversation is by common consent insufferable, and a man who regulates his choice of topics by reference to what interests not his hearers but himself has yet to learn the alphabet of the art. Conversation is like lawn-tennis, and requires alacrity in return at least as much as vigour in service. A happy phrase, an unexpected collocation of words, a habitual precision in the choice of terms, are rare and shining ornaments of conversation, but they do not for an instant supply the place of lively and interesting matter, and an excessive care for them is apt to tell unfavourably on the substance of discourse.
"I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. There were at least five words in every sentence that must have been very much astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no others apparently could so well have expressed his idea. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post—every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flung out into every burst." This is a contemporary description of Lord Beaconsfield's conversation in those distant days when, as a young man about town, he was talking and dressing his way into social fame. Though written in admiration, it seems to me to describe the most intolerable performance that could ever have afflicted society. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post. Could the wit of man devise a more appalling image?
Mr. Matthew Arnold once said to me: "People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style." This dictum applies, I think, at least as well to conversation as to literature. The one thing needful is to have something to say. The way of saying it may best be left to take care of itself. A young man about town once remarked to me, in the tone of one who utters an accepted truism: "It is so much more interesting to talk about people than things." The sentiment was highly characteristic of the mental calibre and associations of the speaker; and certainly the habitual talk—for it is not conversation—of that section of society which calls itself "smart" seems to touch the lowest depth of spiteful and sordid dullness. But still, when the mischiefs of habitual personality have been admitted to the uttermost, there remains something to be said on the other side. We are not inhabitants of Jupiter or Saturn, but human beings to whom nothing that is human is wholly alien. And if in the pursuit of high abstractions and improving themes we imitate too closely Wordsworth's avoidance of Personal Talk, our dinner-table will run much risk of becoming as dull as that poet's own fireside.
Granting, then, that to have something to say which is worth hearing is the substance of good conversation, we must reckon among its accidents and ornaments a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; a habitual deference to the tastes and even the prejudices of other people; a hearty desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a constant recollection that even the most patient hearers may sometimes wish to be speakers. Above all else, the agreeable talker cultivates gentleness and delicacy of speech, avoids aggressive and overwhelming displays, and remembers the tortured cry of the neurotic bard:—
"Vociferated logic kills me quite;
A noisy man is always in the right—
I twirl my thumbs, fall back into my chair,
Fix on the wainscot a distressful stare;
And when I hope his blunders all are out,
Reply discreetly, 'To be sure—no doubt!'"
If these, or something like these, are the attributes of good conversation, in whom do we find them best exemplified? Who best understands the Art of Conversation? Who, in a word, are our best talkers? I hope that I shall not be considered ungallant if I say nothing about the part borne in conversation by ladies. Really it is a sacred awe that makes me mute. London is happy in possessing not a few hostesses, excellently accomplished, and not more accomplished than gracious, of whom it is no flattery to say that to know them is a liberal education. But, as Lord Beaconsfield observes in a more than usually grotesque passage of Lothair, "We must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea." We will not "peep and botanize" on sacred soil, nor submit our most refined delights to the impertinences of critical analysis.
In considering the Art of Conversation I obey a natural instinct when I think first of Mr. Charles Villiers, M.P. His venerable age alone would entitle him to this pre-eminence, for he was born in 1802, and was for seventy years one of the best talkers in London. Born of a family which combined high rank with intellectual distinction, his parentage was a passport to all that was best in social and political life. It argues no political bias to maintain that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century Toryism afforded its neophytes no educational opportunities equal to those which a young Whig enjoyed at Bowood and Panshanger and Holland House. There the best traditions of the previous century were constantly reinforced by accessions of fresh intellect. The charmed circle was indeed essentially, but it was not exclusively, aristocratic; genius held the key, and there was a carrière ouverte aux talents.
Thus it came to pass that the society of Lord Lansdowne and Lord Holland and Lord Melbourne was also the society of Brougham and Mackintosh, and Macaulay and Sydney Smith. It presented every variety of accomplishment and experience and social charm, and offered to a man beginning life the best conceivable education in the art of making oneself agreeable. For that art Mr. Villiers had a natural genius, and his lifelong association with the Whigs superadded a technical training in it. But this, though much, was by no means all. I hold it to be an axiom that a man who is only a member of society can never be so agreeable as one who is something else as well. And Mr. Villiers, though "a man about town," a story-teller, and a diner-out of high renown, has had seventy years' experience of practical business and Parliamentary life. Thus the resources of his knowledge have been perpetually enlarged, and, learning much, he has forgotten nothing. The stores of his memory are full of treasures new and old. He has taken part in the making of history, and can estimate the great men of the present day by a comparison with the political immortals.
That this comparison is not always favourable to some exalted reputations of the present hour is indeed sufficiently notorious to all who have the pleasure of Mr. Villiers's acquaintance; and nowhere is his mastery of the art of conversation more conspicuous than in his knack of implying dislike and insinuating contempt without crude abuse or noisy denunciation. He has a delicate sense of fun, a keen eye for incongruities and absurdities, and that genuine cynicism which springs, not from the poor desire to be thought worldly-wise, but from a lifelong acquaintance with the foibles of political men. To these gifts must be added a voice which age has not robbed of its sympathetic qualities, a style of diction and a habit of pronunciation which belong to the eighteenth century, and that formal yet facile courtesy which no one less than eighty years old seems capable of even imitating.
I have instanced Mr. Villiers as an eminent talker. I now turn to an eminent man who talks—Mr. Gladstone.[17] An absurd story has long been current among credulous people with rampant prejudices that Mr. Gladstone was habitually uncivil to the Queen. Now, it happens that Mr. Gladstone is the most courteous of mankind. His courtesy is one of his most engaging gifts, and accounts in no small degree for his power of attracting the regard of young men and undistinguished people generally. To all such he is polite to the point of deference, yet never condescending. His manners to all alike—young and old, rich and poor—are the ceremonious manners of the old school, and his demeanour towards ladies is a model of chivalrous propriety. It would therefore have been to the last degree improbable that he should make a departure from his usual habits in the case of a lady who was also his Sovereign. And, as a matter of fact, the story is so ridiculously wide of the mark that it deserves mention only because, in itself false, it is founded on a truth. "I," said the Duke of Wellington on a memorable occasion, "have no small talk, and Peel has no manners." Mr. Gladstone has manners but no small talk. He is so consumed by zeal for great subjects that he leaves out of account the possibility that they may not interest other people. He pays to every one, and not least to ladies, the compliment of assuming that they are on his own intellectual level, engrossed in the subjects which engross him, and furnished with at least as much information as will enable them to follow and to understand him. Hence the genesis of that absurd story about his demeanour to the Queen.
"He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting," is a complaint which is said to have proceeded from illustrious lips. That most successful of all courtiers, the astute Lord Beaconsfield, used to engage her Majesty in conversation about water-colour drawing and the third-cousinships of German princes. Mr. Gladstone harangues her about the polity of the Hittites, or the harmony between the Athanasian Creed and Homer. The Queen, perplexed and uncomfortable, tries to make a digression—addresses a remark to a daughter or proffers biscuit to a begging terrier. Mr. Gladstone restrains himself with an effort till the Princess has answered or the dog has sat down, and then promptly resumes: "I was about to say—" Meanwhile the flood has gathered force by delay, and when it bursts forth again it carries all before it.
No image except that of a flood can convey the notion
of Mr. Gladstone's table-talk on a subject which interests
him keenly—its rapidity, its volume, its splash and dash, its
frequent beauty, its striking effects, the amount of varied
matter which it brings with it, the hopelessness of trying to
withstand it, the unexpectedness of its onrush, the subdued
but fertilized condition of the subjected area over which it
has passed. The bare mention of a topic which interests
Mr. Gladstone opens the floodgates and submerges a province.
But the torrent does not wait for the invitation.
If not invited it comes of its own accord; headlong, overwhelming,
sweeping all before it, and gathering fresh force
from every obstacle which it encounters on its course.
Such is Mr. Gladstone's table-talk. For conversation, strictly
so called, he has no turn. He asks questions when he
wants information, and answers them copiously when asked
by others. But of give-and-take, of meeting you
half-way,
of paying you back in your own conversational coin, he has
little notion. He discourses, he lectures, he harangues.
But if a subject is started which does not interest him it
falls flat. He makes no attempt to return the ball. Although,
when he is amused, his amusement is intense and
long sustained, his sense of humour is highly capricious.
It is impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess
beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he
has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in
grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was
a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can
be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has
fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote
which depends for its point upon some trait of baseness,
cynicism, or sharp practice. He finds his tale received in
dead silence, looks up wonderingly for an explanation, and
finds that what was intended to amuse has only disgusted.
Mr. Browning once told Mr. Gladstone a highly characteristic
story of Disraelitish duplicity, and for all reply heard a
voice choked with indignation:—"Do you call that amusing,
Browning? I call it devilish."[18]
NOTES:
This was written before the 19th of May, 1898, on which day "the world lost its greatest citizen;" but it has not been thought necessary, here or elsewhere, to change the present into the past tense.
I give this story as I received it from Mr. Browning.
XV.
CONVERSATION—continued.
More than thirty years have passed since the festive evening described by Sir George Trevelyan in The Ladies in Parliament:—
"When, over the port of the innermost bin,
The circle of diners was laughing with Phinn;
When Brookfield had hit on his happiest vein.
And Harcourt was capping the jokes of Delane."
The sole survivor of that brilliant group now[19] leads the Opposition; but at the time when the lines were written he had not yet entered the House of Commons. As a youth of twenty-five he had astonished the political world by his anonymous letters on The Morality of Public Men, in which he denounced, in the style of Junius, the Protectionist revival of 1852. He had fought a plucky but unsuccessful fight at Kirkcaldy; was making his five thousand a year at the Parliamentary Bar; had taught the world international law over the signature of "Historicus," and was already, what he is still, one of the most conspicuous and interesting figures in the society of London. Of Sir William Harcourt's political alliances this is not the place nor am I the person to treat:
"Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of Man."
My theme is not Sir William Harcourt the politician, but Sir William Harcourt the man, the member of society—above all, the talker. And, although I have thus deliberately put politics on one side, it is strictly relevant to my purpose to observe that Sir William is essentially and typically a Whig. For Whiggery, rightly understood, is not a political creed but a social caste. The Whig, like the poet, is born, not made. It is as difficult to become a Whig as to become a Jew. Macaulay was probably the only man who, being born outside the privileged enclosure, ever penetrated to its heart and assimilated its spirit. The Whigs, indeed, as a body have held certain opinions and pursued certain tactics which have been analyzed in chapters XIX. and XXI. of the unexpurgated Book of Snobs. But those opinions and those tactics have been mere accidents, though perhaps inseparable accidents, of Whiggery. Its substance has been relationship.
When Lord John Russell formed his first Administration his opponents alleged that it was mainly composed of his cousins, and one of his younger brothers was charged with the impossible task of rebutting the accusation in a public speech. Mr. Beresford-Hope, in one of his novels, made excellent fun of what he called "the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood." He showed—what, indeed, the Whigs themselves knew uncommonly well—that from a certain Earl Gower, who flourished in the eighteenth century, and was great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, are descended all the Levesons,[20] Gowers, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Russells, and Harcourts, who walk on the face of the earth. Truly a noble and a highly favoured progeny. "They are our superiors," said Thackeray; "and that's the fact. I am not a Whig myself (perhaps it is as unnecessary to say so as to say I'm not King Pippin in a golden coach, or King Hudson, or Miss Burdett-Coutts). I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"
From this illustrious stock Sir William Harcourt is descended through his grandmother, Lady Anne Harcourt —born Leveson-Gower, and wife of the last Prince-Archbishop of York (whom, by the way, Sir William strikingly resembles both in figure and in feature). When one meets Sir William Harcourt for the first time in society, perhaps one is first struck by the fact that he is in aspect and bearing a great gentleman of the old school, and then that he is an admirable talker. He is a true Whig in culture as well as in blood. Though his conversation is never pedantic, it rests on a wide and strong basis of generous learning. Even those who most cordially admire his political ability do not always remember that he is an excellent scholar, and graduated as eighth in the First Class of the Classical Tripos in the year when Bishop Lightfoot was Senior Classic. He has the Corpus Poetarum and Shakespeare and Pope at his finger-ends, and his intimate acquaintance with the political history of England elicited a characteristic compliment from Lord Beaconsfield. It is his favourite boast that in all his tastes, sentiments, and mental habits he belongs to the eighteenth century, which he glorifies as the golden age of reason, patriotism, and liberal learning. This self-estimate strikes me as perfectly sound, and it requires a very slight effort of the imagination to conceive this well-born young Templar wielding his doughty pen in the Bangorian Controversy, or declaiming on the hustings for Wilkes and Liberty; bandying witticisms with Sheridan, and capping Latin verses with Charles Fox; or helping to rule England as a member of that "Venetian Oligarchy" on which Lord Beaconsfield lavished all the vials of his sarcasm. In truth, it is not fanciful to say that whatever was best in the eighteenth century—its robust common sense, its racy humour, its thorough and unaffected learning, its ceremonious courtesy for great occasions, its jolly self-abandonment in social intercourse—is exhibited in the demeanour and conversation of Sir William Harcourt. He is an admirable host, and, to borrow a phrase from Sydney Smith, "receives his friends with that honest joy which warms more than dinner or wine." As a guest, he is a splendid acquisition, always ready to amuse and to be amused, delighting in the rapid cut-and-thrust of personal banter, and bringing out of his treasure things new and old for the amusement and the benefit of a later and less instructed generation.
Extracts from the private conversation of living people, as a rule, I forbear; but some of Sir William's quotations are so extraordinarily apt that they deserve a permanent place in the annals of table-talk. That fine old country gentleman, the late Lord Knightley (who was the living double of Dickens's Sir Leicester Dedlock), had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree. The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, "This reminds me of Addison's evening hymn—
'And Knightley to the listening earth
Repeats the story of his birth.'"
Surely the force of apt citation can no further go. When Lord Tennyson chanced to say in Sir William Harcourt's hearing that his pipe after breakfast was the most enjoyable of the day, Sir William softly murmured the Tennysonian line—
"The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds."
Some historians say that he substituted "bards" for "birds," and the reception accorded by the poet to the parody was not as cordial as its excellence deserved.
Another capital talker is Sir George Trevelyan. He has been, from the necessities of his position, a man of the world and a politician, and he is as ready as Mr. Bertie-Tremaine's guests in Endymion to talk of "that heinous subject on which enormous fibs are ever told—the Registration." But, after all, the man of the world and the politician are only respectable parts which he had been bound to assume, and he has played them—with assiduity and success: but the true man in Sir George Trevelyan is the man of letters. Whenever he touches a historical or literary theme his whole being seems to undergo a transformation. The real nature flashes out through his twinkling eyes. While he muses the fire burns, and, like the Psalmist, he speaks with his tongue. Dates and details, facts and traditions, cantos and poetry, reams of prose, English and Latin and Greek and French, come tumbling out in headlong but not disorderly array. He jumps at an opening, seizes an illusion, replies with lightning quickness to a conversational challenge, and is ready at a moment's notice to decide any literary or historical controversy in a measured tone of deliberate emphasis which is not wholly free from exaggeration. Like his uncle Lord Macaulay, Sir George Trevelyan has "his own heightened and telling way of putting things," and those who know him well make allowance for this habit. For the rest, he is delightful company, light-hearted as a boy, full of autobiographical chit-chat about Harrow and Trinity, and India and Holly Lodge, eagerly interested in his friends' concerns, brimming over with enthusiasm, never bored, never flat, never stale. A well-concerted party is a kind of unconscious conspiracy to promote cheerfulness and enjoyment, and in such an undertaking there can be no more serviceable ally than Sir George Trevelyan.
Mr. John Morley's agreeableness in conversation is of a different kind. His leading characteristic is a dignified austerity of demeanour which repels familiarity and tends to keep conversation on a high level; but each time one meets him there is less formality and less restraint, and the grave courtesy which never fails is soon touched with friendliness and frank good-humour in a singularly attractive fashion. He talks, not much, but remarkably well. His sentences are deliberate, clear-cut, often eloquent. He excels in phrase-making. His quotations are apt and novel. His fine taste and varied reading enable him to hold his own in many fields where the merely professional politician is apt to be terribly astray. His kindness to social and literary beginners is one of his most engaging traits. He invariably finds something pleasant to say about the most immature and unpromising efforts, and he has the knack of so handling his own early experience as to make it an encouragement and a stimulus, and not (as the manner of some is) a burden and a bogey. Mr. Morley never obtrudes his own opinions, never introduces debatable matter, never dogmatizes. But he is always ready to pick up the gauntlet, especially if a Tory flings it down; is merciless towards ill-formed assertion, and is the alert and unsparing enemy of what Mr. Ruskin calls "the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial."
Lord Salisbury goes so little into general society that his qualities as a talker are not familiarly known. He is painfully shy, and at a club or in a large party undergoes the torments of the lost. Yet no one can listen, even casually, to his conversation without appreciating the fine manner, full both of dignity and of courtesy; the utter freedom from pomposity, formality, and self-assertion, and the agreeable dash of genuine cynicism, which modifies, though it does not mask, the flavour of his fun. After a visit to Hatfield in 1868, Bishop Wilberforce wrote in his diary: "Gladstone how struck with Salisbury: 'Never saw a more perfect host.'" And again—"He remarked to me on the great power of charming and pleasant hosting possessed by Salisbury." And it is the universal testimony of Lord Salisbury's guests, whether at Hatfield or in Arlington Street, that he is seen at his very best in his own house. The combination of such genuine amiability in private life with such calculated brutality in public utterance constitutes a psychological problem which might profitably be made the subject of a Romanes Lecture.
Barring the shyness, from which Mr. Balfour is conspicuously free, there is something of Lord Salisbury's social manner about his accomplished nephew. He has the same courtesy, the same sense of humour, the same freedom from official solemnity. But the characteristics of the elder man are exaggerated in the younger. The cynicism which is natural in Lord Salisbury is affected in Mr. Balfour. He cultivates the art of indifference, and gives himself the airs of a jaded Epicurean who craves only for a new sensation. There is what an Irish Member, in a moment of inspiration, called a "toploftiness" about his social demeanour which is not a little irritating. He is too anxious to show that he is not as other men are. Among politicians he is a philosopher; among philosophers, a politician. Before that hard-bitten crew whom Burke ridiculed—the "calculators and economists"—he will talk airily of golf and ladies' fashions; and ladies he will seek to impress by the Praise of Vivisection or the Defence of Philosophic Doubt. His social agreeableness has, indeed, been marred by the fatuous idolatry of a fashionable clique, stimulating the self-consciousness which was his natural foible; but when he can for a moment forget himself he still is excellent company, for he is genuinely amiable and thoroughly well informed.
NOTES:
1897.
Cromartie, 4th Duke.
XVI.
CONVERSATION—continued.
The writer of these chapters has always felt some inward affinity to the character of Lord St. Jerome in Lothair, of whom it is recorded that he loved conversation, though he never conversed. "There must be an audience," he would say, "and I am the audience." In my capacity of audience I assign a high place to the agreeableness of Lord Rosebery's conversation. To begin with, he has a delightful voice. It is low, but perfectly distinct, rich and sympathetic in quality, and singularly refined in accent. It is exactly the sort of voice which bespeaks the goodwill of the hearer and recommends what it utters. In a former chapter we agreed that the chief requisite of good conversation is to have something to say which is worth saying, and here Lord Rosebery is excellently equipped. Last week the newspapers announced with a flourish of rhetorical trumpets that he had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday.[21] Some of the trumpeters, with a laudable intention to be civil, cried, "Is it possible that he can be so old?" Others, with subtler art, professed themselves unable to believe that he was so young. Each compliment contained its element of truth. In appearance, air, and tastes Lord Rosebery is still young. In experience, knowledge, and conduct he is already old. He has had a vivid and a varied experience. He is equally at home on Epsom Downs and in the House of Lords. His life has been full of action, incident, and interest. He has not only collected books, but has read them; and has found time, even amid the engrossing demands of the London County Council, the Turf, and the Foreign Office, not only for study, but—what is much more remarkable—for thought.
So far, then, as substance goes, his conversation is (to use Mr. Gladstone's quaint phrase) "as full of infinitely varied matter as an egg is full of meat;" and in its accidents and ornaments it complies exactly with the conditions laid down in a former chapter—a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; habitual deference to the tastes and prejudices of other people; a courteous desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a recollection that even the most patient hearers (among whom the present writer reckons himself) may sometimes wish to be speakers. To these gifts he adds a keen sense of humour, a habit of close observation, and a sub-acid vein of sarcasm which resembles the dash of Tarragon in a successful salad. In a word, Lord Rosebery is one of the most agreeable talkers of the day; and even if it is true that il s'écoute quand il parle, his friends may reply that it would be strange indeed if one could help listening to what is always so agreeable and often so brilliant.
A genial journalist recently said that Mr. Goschen was now chiefly remembered by the fact that he had once had Sir Alfred Milner for his Private Secretary. But whatever may be thought of the First Lord of the Admiralty as a politician and an administrator, I claim for him a high place among agreeable talkers. There are some men who habitually use the same style of speech in public and in private life. Happily for his friends, this is not the case with Mr. Goschen. Nothing can be less agreeable than his public style, whether on the platform or in the House of Commons. Its tawdry staginess, its "Sadler's Wells sarcasm," its constant striving after strong effects, are distressing to good taste. But in private life he is another and a much more agreeable man. He is courteous, genial, perfectly free from affectation, and enters into the discussion of social banalities as eagerly and as brightly as if he had never converted the Three per Cents, or established the ratio between dead millionaires and new ironclads. His easiness in conversation is perhaps a little marred by a Teutonic tendency to excessive analysis which will not suffer him to rest until he has resolved every subject and almost every phrase into its primary elements. But this philosophic temperament has its counterbalancing advantages in a genuine openness of mind, willingness to weigh and measure opposing views, and inaccessibility to intellectual passion. It is true that on the platform the exigencies of his position compel him to indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispassionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle. Himself a good talker, Mr. Goschen encourages good talk in other people; and in old days, when the Art of Conversation was still seriously cultivated, he used to gather round his table in Portland Place a group of intimate friends who drank '34 port and conversed accordingly. Among these were Lord Sherbrooke, whose aptness in quotation and dexterity in repartee have never, in my experience, been surpassed; and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, whose "sunny face and voice of music, which lent melody to scorn and sometimes reached the depth of pathos," were gracefully commemorated by Lord Beaconsfield in his sketch of Hortensius. But this belongs to ancient history, and my business is with the conversation of to-day.
Very distinctly of to-day is the conversation of Mr. Labouchere. Even our country cousins are aware that the Member for Northampton is less an ornament of general society than the oracle of an initiated circle. The smoking-room of the House of Commons is his shrine, and there, poised in an American rocking-chair and delicately toying with a cigarette, he unlocks the varied treasures of his well-stored memory, and throws over the changing scenes of life the mild light of his genial philosophy. It is a chequered experience that has made him what he is. He has known men and cities; has probed in turn the mysteries of the caucus, the green-room, and the Stock Exchange; has been a diplomatist, a financier, a journalist, and a politician. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that his faith—no doubt originally robust—in the purity of human nature and the uprightness of human motive should have undergone some process of degeneration. Still it may be questioned whether, after all that he has seen and done, he is the absolute and all-round cynic that he would seem to be. The palpable endeavour to make out the worst of every one—including himself—gives a certain flavour of unreality to his conversation; but, in spite of this peculiarity, he is an engaging talker. His language is racy and incisive, and he talks as neatly as he writes. His voice is pleasant, and his utterance deliberate and effective. He has a keen eye for absurdities and incongruities, a shrewd insight into affectation and bombast, and an admirable impatience of all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore. He is by no means inclined to bow his knee too slavishly to an exalted reputation, and analyzes with agreeable frankness the personal and political qualities of great and good men, even if they sit on the front Opposition bench. As a contributor to enjoyment, as a promoter of fun, as an unmasker of political and social humbug, he is unsurpassed. His performances in debate are no concern of mine, for I am speaking of conversation only; but most Members of Parliament will agree that he is the best companion that can be found for the last weary half-hour before the division-bell rings, when some eminent nonentity is declaiming his foregone conclusions to an audience whose whole mind is fixed on the chance of finding a disengaged cab in Palace Yard.
Like Mr. Labouchere, Lord Acton has touched life at many points—but not the same. He is a theologian, a professor, a man of letters, a member of society; and his conversation derives a distinct tinge from each of these environments. When, at intervals all too long, he quits his retirement at Cannes or Cambridge, and flits mysteriously across the social scene, his appearance is hailed with devout rejoicing by every one who appreciates manifold learning, a courtly manner, and a delicately sarcastic vein of humour. The distinguishing feature of Lord Acton's conversation is an air of sphinx-like mystery, which suggests that he knows a great deal more than he is willing to impart. Partly by what he says, and even more by what he leaves unsaid, his hearers are made to feel that, if he has not acted conspicuous parts, he has been behind the scenes of many and very different theatres.
He has had relations, neither few nor unimportant, with the Pope and the Old Catholics, with Oxford and Lambeth, with the cultivated Whiggery of the great English families, with the philosophic radicalism of Germany, and with those Nationalist complications which, in these later days, have drawn official Liberalism into their folds. He has long lived on terms of the closest intimacy with Mr. Gladstone, and may perhaps be bracketed with Canon MacColl and Sir Algernon West as the most absolute and profound Gladstonian outside the family circle of Hawarden. But he is thoroughly eclectic in his friendships, and when he is in London he flits from Lady Hayter's tea-table to Mr. Goschen's bureau, analyzes at the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks's, and by dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.
The ranks of our good talkers—none too numerous a body at the best, and sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter—have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell. For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during the last nine—in short, since he entered Parliament—that the admirable qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before that time his delightful Obiter Dicta had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest. What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect. To "birrell" is now a verb as firmly established as to "boycott," and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it was seen that his predominant quality was strength.
An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel
nicknamed him "The Harmonious Blacksmith," and the
collocation of words happily hits off the special quality of
his conversation. There is burly strength in his positive
opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his
thorough knowledge of the persons and things
that he discusses.
In his sledge-hammer blows against humbug and
wickedness, intellectual affectation, and moral baseness, he
is the Blacksmith all over. In his geniality, his sociability,
his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness to amuse or be
amused, the epithet "harmonious" is abundantly justified.
He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the
eighteenth century, in which his studies have chiefly lain.
He says what he means, and calls a spade a spade, and
glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He is the jolliest of
companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps the
most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people
are too "cultured" to read books, though willing enough to
chatter about them.
NOTES:
May 7, 1897.
XVII.
CLERGYMEN.
Clerus Anglicanus stupor mundi. I believe that this complimentary proverb originally referred to the learning of the English clergy, but it would apply with equal truth to their social agreeableness. When I was writing about the Art of Conversation and the men who excelled in it, I was surprised to find how many of the best sayings that recurred spontaneously to my memory had a clerical origin; and it struck me that a not uninteresting chapter might be written about the social agreeableness of clergymen. A mere layman may well feel a natural and becoming diffidence in venturing to handle so high a theme.
In a former chapter I said something of the secular magnificence which surrounded great prelates in the good old days, when the Archbishop of Canterbury could only be approached on gilt-edged paper, and even the Bishop of impecunious Oxford never appeared in his Cathedral city without four horses and two powdered footmen. In a certain sense, no doubt, these splendid products of established religion conduced to social agreeableness. Like the excellent prelate described in Friendship's Garland, they "had thoroughly learnt the divine lesson that charity begins at home." They maintained an abundant hospitality; they celebrated domestic events by balls at the episcopal palace; they did not disdain (as we gather from the Life of the Hon. and Rev. George Spencer) the relaxation of a rubber of whist, even on the night before an Ordination, with a candidate for a partner. They dined out, like that well-drawn bishop in Little Dorrit, who "was crisp, fresh, cheerful, affable, bland, but so surprisingly innocent;" or like the prelate on whom Thackeray moralized: "My Lord, I was pleased to see good thing after good thing disappear before you; and think that no man ever better became that rounded episcopal apron. How amiable he was! how kind! He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Establishment."
But the agreeableness which I had in my mind when I took upon myself to discourse of agreeable clergymen was not an official but a personal agreeableness. We have been told on high authority that the Merriment of Parsons is mighty offensive; but the truth of this dictum depends entirely on the topic of the merriment. A clergyman who made light of the religion which he professes to teach, or even joked about the incidents and accompaniments of his sacred calling, would by common consent be intolerable. Decency exacts from priests at least a semblance of piety; but I entirely deny that there is anything offensive in the "merriment of parsons" when it plays round subjects outside the scope of their professional duties.
Of Sydney Smith Lord Houghton recorded that "he never, except once, knew him to make a jest on any religious subject, and then he immediately withdrew his words, and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them;" and I regard the admirable Sydney as not only the supreme head of all ecclesiastical jesters, but as, on the whole, the greatest humorist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment—rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was—subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson.
Peter Plymley's Letters, and those addressed to Archdeacon Singleton, the Essays on America and Persecuting Bishops, will probably be read as long as the Tale of a Tub or Macaulay's review of Montgomery's Poems; while of detached and isolated jokes—pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb—an incredible number of those which are current in daily converse deduce their birth from this incomparable Canon.
When one is talking of facetious clergymen, it is inevitable to think of Bishop Wilberforce; but his humour was of an entirely different quality from that of Sydney Smith. To begin with, it is unquotable. It must, I think, have struck every reader of the Bishop's Life, whether in the three huge volumes of the authorized Biography or in the briefer but more characteristic monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to the reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and good stories collected from other people are all that the books disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his time. We know from one of his own letters that he peculiarly disliked the description which Lord Beaconsfield gave of him in Lothair, and on the principle of Ce n'est que la vérité qui blesse, it may be worth while to recall it: "The Bishop was particularly playful on the morrow at breakfast. Though his face beamed with Christian kindness, there was a twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane self-complacency, even to a sense of earthly merriment. His seraphic raillery elicited sympathetic applause from the ladies, especially from the daughters of the house, who laughed occasionally even before his angelic jokes were well launched."
Mr. Bright once said, with characteristic downrightness, "If I was paid what a bishop is paid for doing what a bishop does, I should find abundant cause for merriment in the credulity of my countrymen;" and, waiving the theological animus which the saying implies, it is not uncharitable to surmise that a general sense of prosperity and a strong faculty of enjoying life in all its aspects and phases had much to do with Bishop Wilberforce's exuberant and infectious jollity. "A truly emotional spirit," wrote Matthew Arnold, after meeting him in a country house, "he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest for the other."
A scarcely less prominent figure in society than Bishop Wilberforce, and to many people a much more attractive one, was Dean Stanley. A clergyman to whom the Queen signed herself "Ever yours affectionately" must certainly be regarded as the social head of his profession, and every circumstance of Stanley's nature and antecedents exactly fitted him for the part. He was in truth a spoiled child of fortune, in a sense more refined and spiritual than the phrase generally conveys. He was born of famous ancestry, in a bright and unworldly home; early filled with the moral and intellectual enthusiasms of Rugby in its best days; steeped in the characteristic culture of Oxford, and advanced by easy stages of well-deserved promotion to the most delightful of all offices in the Church of England. His inward nature accorded well with this happy environment. It was in a singular degree pure, simple, refined, ingenuous. All the grosser and harsher elements of human character seemed to have been omitted from his composition. He was naturally good, naturally graceful, naturally amiable. A sense of humour was, I think, almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed. Lord Beaconsfield spoke of his "picturesque sensibility," and the phrase was happily chosen. He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of graphic description; and all glorified by something of the poet's imagination. His conversation was incessant, teeming with information, and illustrated by familiar acquaintance with all the best that has been thought and said in the world.
Never was a brighter intellect or a more gallant heart housed in a more fragile form. His figure, features, bearing, and accent were the very type of refinement; and as the spare figure, so short yet so full of dignity, marked out by the decanal dress and the red ribbon of the Order of the Bath, threaded its way through the crowded saloons of London society, one felt that the Church, as a civilizing institution, could not be more appropriately represented.
A lady of Presbyterian antecedents who had conformed to Anglicanism once said to the present writer, "I dislike the Episcopal Church as much as ever, but I love the Decanal Church." Her warmest admiration was reserved for that particular Dean, supreme alike in station and in charm, whom I have just now been describing; but there were, at the time of speaking, several other members of the same order who were conspicuous ornaments of the society in which they moved. There was Dr. Elliot, Dean of Bristol, a yearly visitor to London; dignified, clever, agreeable, highly connected; an administrator, a politician, an admirable talker; and so little trammelled by any ecclesiastical prejudices or habitudes that he might have been the original of Dr. Stanhope in Barchester Towers. There was Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, whose periodical appearances at Court and in society displayed to the admiring gaze of the world the very handsomest and stateliest specimen of the old English gentleman that our time has produced. There was Dr. Church, Dean of St. Paul's, by many competent judges pronounced to be our most accomplished man of letters, yet so modest and so retiring that the world was never suffered to come in contact with him except through his books. And there was Dr. Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff, who concealed under the blandest of manners a remorseless sarcasm and a mordant wit, and who, returning from the comparative publicity of the Athenaeum to the domestic shades of the Temple, would often leave behind him some pungent sentence which travelled from mouth to mouth, and spared neither age nor sex nor friendship nor affinity.
The very highest dignitaries of the Church in London have never, in my experience, contributed very largely to its social life. The garden-parties of Fulham and Lambeth are indeed recognized incidents of the London season; but they present to the critical eye less the aspect of a social gathering than that of a Church Congress combined with a Mothers' Meeting. The overwhelming disparity between the position of host and guests is painfully apparent, and that "drop-down-dead-ativeness" of manner which Sydney Smith quizzed still characterizes the demeanour of the unbeneficed clergy. Archbishop Tait, whose natural stateliness of aspect and manner was one of the most conspicuous qualifications for his great office, was a dignified and hospitable host; and Archbishop Thomson, reinforced by a beautiful and charming wife, was sometimes spoken of as the Archbishop of Society. Archbishop Benson looked the part to perfection, but did not take much share in general conversation, though I remember one terse saying of his in which the odium theologicum supplied the place of wit. A portrait of Cardinal Manning was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and I remarked to the Archbishop on the extraordinary picturesqueness of the Cardinal's appearance "The dress is very effective," replied the Archbishop dryly, "but I don't think there is much besides." "Oh, surely it is a fine head?" "No, not a fine head; only no face."
Passing down through the ranks of the hierarchy, I shall presently have something to say about two or three metropolitan Canons who are notable figures in society; but before I come to them I must offer a word of affectionate tribute to the memory of Dr. Liddon. Probably there never was a man whose social habit and manner were less like what a mere outsider would have inferred from his physical aspect and public demeanour. Nature had given him the outward semblance of a foreigner and an ascetic; a life-long study of ecclesiastical rhetoric had stamped him with a mannerism which belongs peculiarly to the pulpit. But the true inwardness of the man was that of the typical John Bull—hearty, natural, full of humour, utterly free from self-consciousness. He had a healthy appetite, and was not ashamed to gratify it; liked a good glass of wine; was peculiarly fond of sociable company, whether as host or guest; and told an amusing story with incomparable zest and point. His verbal felicity was a marked feature of his conversation. His description of Archbishop Benson (revived, with strange taste, by the Saturday Review on the occasion of the Archbishop's death) was a masterpiece of sarcastic character-drawing. The judicious Bishop Davidson and the accomplished Canon Mason were the subjects of similar pleasantries; and there was substantial truth as well as genuine fun in his letter to a friend written one dark Christmas from Amen Court: "London is just now buried under a dense fog. This is commonly attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-window at Westminster."