XVIII.
CLERGYMEN—continued.
OF the "Merriment of Parsons" one of the most conspicuous instances was to be found in the Rev. W.H. Brookfield, the "little Frank Whitestock" of Thackeray's Curate's Walk, and the subject of Lord Tennyson's characteristic elegy:—
"Brooks, for they called you so that knew you best—
Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes,
How oft we two have heard St. Mary's chimes!
How oft the Cantab supper host, and guest,
Would echo helpless laughter to your jest!
You man of humorous-melancholy mark
Dead of some inward agony—is it so?
Our kindlier, trustier Jaques, past away!
I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark:
Σκιας οναρ—dream of a shadow, go,—
God bless you. I shall join you in a day."
This tribute is as true in substance as it is striking in phrase. I have noticed the same peculiarity about Mr. Brookfield's humour as about Jenny Lind's singing. Those who had once heard it were always eager to talk about it. Ask some elderly man about the early triumphs of the Swedish Nightingale, and notice how he kindles. "Ah! Jenny Lind! Yes; there was never anything like that!" And he begins about the Figlia, and how she came along the bridge in the Sonnambula; and you feel the tenderness in his tone, as of a positive love for her whose voice seems still ringing through him as he talks. I have noticed exactly the same phenomenon when people who knew Mr. Brookfield hear his name mentioned in casual conversation. "Ah! Brookfield! Yes; there never was any one quite like him!" And off they go, with visible pleasure and genuine emotion, to describe the inimitable charm, the touch of genius which brought humorous delight out of the commonest incidents, the tinge of brooding melancholy which threw the flashing fun into such high relief.
Not soon will fade from the memory of any who ever heard it the history of the examination at the ladies' school, where Brookfield, who had thought that he was only expected to examine in languages and literature, found himself required to set a paper in physical science. "What was I to do? I know nothing about hydrogen or oxygen or any other 'gen.' So I set them a paper in common sense, or what I called 'Applied Science.' One of my questions was, 'What would you do to cure a cold in the head?' One young lady answered, 'I should put my feet in hot mustard and water till you were in a profuse perspiration.' Another said, 'I should put him to bed, give him a soothing drink, and sit by him till he was better.' But, on reconsideration, she ran her pen through all the 'him's' and 'he's,' and substituted 'her' and 'she.'"
Mr. Brookfield was during the greater part of his life a hard-working servant of the public, and his friends could only obtain his delightful company in the rare and scanty intervals of school-inspecting—a profession of which not even the leisure is leisurely. The type of the French abbé, whose sacerdotal avocations lay completely in the background and who could give the best hours of the day and night to the pleasures or duties of society, was best represented in our day by the Rev. William Harness and the Rev. Henry White. Mr. Harness was a diner-out of the first water; an author and a critic; perhaps the best Shakespearean scholar of his time; and a recognized and even dreaded authority on all matters connected with the art and literature of the drama. Mr. White, burdened only with the sinecure chaplaincies of the Savoy and the House of Commons, took the Theatre as his parish, mediated with the happiest tact between the Church and the Stage, and pronounced a genial benediction over the famous suppers in Stratton Street at which an enthusiastic patroness used to entertain Sir Henry Irving when the public labours of the Lyceum were ended for the night.
Canon Malcolm MacColl is an abbé with a difference. No one eats his dinner more sociably or tells a story more aptly; no one enjoys good society more keenly or is more appreciated in it; but he does not make society a profession. He is conscientiously devoted to the duties of his canonry; he is an accomplished theologian; and he is perhaps the most expert and vigorous pamphleteer in England. The Franco-German War, the Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule, and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the dimensions of solid treatises. Canon MacColl is genuinely and ex animo an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well. His inflexible integrity and fine sense of honour have enabled him to play, with credit to himself and advantage to the public, the rather risky part of the Priest in Politics. He has been trusted alike by Lord Salisbury and by Mr. Gladstone; has conducted negotiations of great pith and moment; and has been behind the scenes of some historic performances. Yet he has never made an enemy, nor betrayed a secret, nor lowered the honour of his sacred calling.
Miss Mabel Collins, in her vivid story of The Star Sapphire, has drawn under a very thin pseudonym a striking portrait of a clergyman who, with his environment, plays a considerable part in the social agreeableness of London at the present moment. Is social agreeableness a hereditary gift? Nowadays, when everything, good or bad, is referred to heredity, one is inclined to say that it must be; and, though no training could supply the gift where Nature had withheld it, yet a judicious education can develop a social faculty which ancestry has transmitted. It is recorded, I think, of Madame de Stael, that, after her first conversation with William Wilberforce, she said: "I have always heard that Mr. Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but I did not know that he was also the wittiest." The agreeableness of the great philanthropist's son—Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester—I discussed in my last chapter. We may put aside the fulsome dithyrambics of grateful archdeacons and promoted chaplains, and be content to rest the Bishop's reputation for agreeableness on testimony so little interested as that of Matthew Arnold and Archbishop Tait. The Archbishop wrote, after the Bishop's death, of his "social and irresistibly fascinating side, as displayed in his dealings with society;" and in 1864 Mr. Arnold, after listening with only very moderate admiration to one of the Bishop's celebrated sermons, wrote: "Where he was excellent was in his speeches at luncheon afterwards—gay, easy, cordial, and wonderfully happy."
I think that one gathers from all dispassionate observers of the Bishop that what struck them most in him was the blending of boisterous fun and animal spirits with a deep and abiding sense of the seriousness of religion. In the philanthropist-father the religious seriousness rather preponderated over the fun; in the bishop-son (by a curious inversion of parts) the fun sometimes concealed the religiousness. To those who speculate in matters of race and pedigree it is interesting to watch the two elements contending in the character of Canon Basil Wilberforce, the Bishop's youngest and best-beloved son. When you see his graceful figure and clean-shaven ecclesiastical face in the pulpit of his strangely old-fashioned church, or catch the vibrating notes of his beautifully modulated voice in
"The hush of our dread high altar,
Where The Abbey makes us We,"
you feel yourself in the presence of a born ecclesiastic, called from his cradle by an irresistible vocation to a separate and sanctified career. When you see him on the platform of some great public meeting, pouring forth argument, appeal, sarcasm, anecdote, fun, and pathos in a never-ceasing flood of vivid English, you feel that you are under the spell of a born orator. And yet again, when you see the priest of Sunday, the orator of Monday, presiding on Tuesday with easy yet finished courtesy at the hospitable table of the most beautiful dining-room in London, or welcomed with equal warmth for his racy humour and his unfailing sympathy in the homes of his countless friends, you feel that here is a man naturally framed for society, in whom his father and grandfather live again. Truly a combination of hereditary gifts is displayed in Canon Wilberforce; and the social agreeableness of London received a notable addition when Mr. Gladstone transferred him from Southampton to Dean's Yard.
Of agreeable Canons there is no end, and the Chapter of Westminster is peculiarly rich in them. Mr. Gore's ascetic saintliness of life conceals from the general world, but not from the privileged circle of his intimate friends, the high breeding of a great Whig family and the philosophy of Balliol. Archdeacon Furse has the refined scholarship and delicate literary sense which characterized Eton in its days of glory. Dr. Duckworth's handsome presence has long been welcomed in the very highest of all social circles. Mr. Eyton's massive bulk and warm heart, and rugged humour and sturdy common sense, produce the effect of a clerical Dr. Johnson. But perhaps we must turn our back on the Abbey and pursue our walk along the Thames Embankment as far as St. Paul's if we want to discover the very finest flower of canonical culture and charm, for it blushes unseen in the shady recesses of Amen Court. Henry Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul's, is beyond all question one of the most agreeable men of his time. In fun and geniality and warm-hearted hospitality he is a worthy successor of Sydney Smith, whose official house he inhabits; and to those elements of agreeableness he adds certain others which his admirable predecessor could scarcely have claimed. He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave to gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and nature, literature and life. His temperament is essentially musical, and, indeed, it was from him that I borrowed, in a former paragraph, my description of Jenny Lind and her effect on her hearers. No man in London, I should think, has so many and such devoted friends in every class and stratum; and those friends acknowledge in him not only the most vivacious and exhilarating of social companions, but one of the moral forces which have done most to quicken their consciences and lift their lives.
Before I have done with the agreeableness of clergymen I must say a word about two academical personages, of whom it was not always easy to remember that they were clergymen, and whose agreeableness struck one in different lights, according as one happened to be the victim or the witness of their jocosity. If any one wishes to know what the late Master of Balliol was really like in his social aspect, I should refer him, not to the two volumes of his Biography, nor even to the amusing chit-chat of Mr. Lionel Tollemache's Recollections, but to the cleverest work of a very clever Balliol man—Mr. W.H. Mallock's New Republic. The description of Mr. Jowett's appearance, conversation, and social bearing is photographic, and the sermon which Mr. Mallock puts into his mouth is not a parody, but an absolutely faultless reproduction both of substance and of style. That it excessively irritated the subject of the sketch is the best proof of its accuracy. For my own part, I must freely admit that I do not write as an admirer of Mr. Jowett; but one saying of his, which I had the advantage of hearing, does much to atone, in my judgment, for the snappish impertinences on which his reputation for wit has been generally based. The scene was the Master's own dining-room, and the moment that the ladies had left the room one of the guests began a most outrageous conversation. Every one sat flabbergasted. The Master winced with annoyance; and then, bending down the table towards the offender, said in his shrillest tone—"Shall we continue this conversation in the drawing-room?" and rose from his chair. It was really a stroke of genius thus both to terminate and to rebuke the impropriety without violating the decorum due from host to guest.
Of the late Master of Trinity—Dr. Thompson—it was said: "He casteth forth his ice like morsels. Who is able to abide his frost?" The stories of his mordant wit are endless, but an Oxford man can scarcely hope to narrate them with proper accuracy. He was nothing if not critical. At Seeley's Inaugural Lecture as Professor of History his only remark was—"Well, well. I did not think we could so soon have had occasion to regret poor Kingsley." To a gushing admirer who said that a popular preacher had so much taste—"Oh yes; so very much, and all so very bad." Of a certain Dr. Woods, who wrote elementary mathematical books for schoolboys, and whose statue occupies the most conspicuous position in the ante-chapel of St. John's College—"The Johnian Newton." His hit at the present Chief Secretary for Ireland,[22] when he was a junior Fellow of Trinity, is classical—"We are none of us infallible—not even the youngest of us." But it requires an eye-witness of the scene to do justice to the exordium of the Master's sermon on the Parable of the Talents, addressed in Trinity Chapel to what considers itself, and not without justice, the cleverest congregation in the world. "It would be obviously superfluous in a congregation such as that which I now address to expatiate on the responsibilities of those who have five, or even two, talents. I shall therefore confine my observations to the more ordinary case of those of us who have one talent."
NOTES:
The Right Hon. G.W. Balfour.
XIX.
REPARTEE.
Lord Beaconsfield, describing Monsignore Berwick in Lothair, says that he "could always, when necessary, sparkle with anecdote or blaze with repartee." The former performance is considerably easier than the latter. Indeed, when a man has a varied experience, a retentive memory, and a sufficient copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling may attain the character of a disease. The "sparkle" evaporates while the "anecdote" is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called "Anecdotage" is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no means inclined to admit the general inferiority of contemporary conversation to that of the last generation, I am disposed to think that in the art of repartee our predecessors excelled us.
If this is true, it may be partly due to the greater freedom of an age when well-bred men and refined women spoke their minds with an uncompromising plainness which would now be voted intolerable. I have said that the old Royal Dukes were distinguished by the racy vigour of their conversation; and the Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King Ernest of Hanover, was held to excel all his brothers in this respect. I was told by the late Sir Charles Wyke that he was once walking with the Duke of Cumberland along Piccadilly when the Duke of Gloucester (first cousin to Cumberland, and familiarly known as "Silly Billy") came out of Gloucester House. "Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Gloucester, stop a minute. I want to speak to you," roared the Duke of Cumberland. Poor Silly Billy, whom nobody ever noticed, was delighted to find himself thus accosted, and ambled up smiling. "Who's your tailor?" shouted Cumberland. "Stultz," replied Gloucester. "Thank you. I only wanted to know, because, whoever he is, he ought to be avoided like a pestilence." Exit Silly Billy.
Of this inoffensive but not brilliant prince (who, by the way, was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge) it is related that once at a levée he noticed a naval friend with a much-tanned face. "How do, Admiral? Glad to see you again. It's a long time since you have been at a levée." "Yes, sir. Since I last saw your Royal Highness I have been nearly to the North Pole." "By G---, you look more as if you had been to the South Pole." It is but bare justice to this depreciated memory to observe that the Duke of Gloucester scored a point against his kingly cousin when, on hearing that William IV. had consented to the Reform Bill, he ejaculated, "Who's Silly Billy now?" But this is a digression.
Early in the nineteenth century a famous lady, whose name, for obvious reasons, I forbear to indicate even by an initial, had inherited great wealth under a will which, to put it mildly, occasioned much surprise. She shared an opera-box with a certain Lady D---, who loved the flowing wine-cup not wisely, but too well. One night Lady D--- was visibly intoxicated at the opera, and her friend told her that the partnership in the box must cease, as she could not appear again in company so disgraceful. "As you please," said Lady D---. "I may have had a glass of wine too much; but at any rate I never forged my father's signature, and then murdered the butler to prevent his telling."
Beau Brummell, the Prince of Dandies and the most insolent of men, was once asked by a lady if be would "take a cup of tea." "Thank you, ma'am," he replied, "I never take anything but physic." "I beg your pardon," replied the hostess, "you also take liberties."
The Duchess of Somerset, born Sheridan, and famous as the Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, was pre-eminent in this agreeable art of swift response. One day she called at a shop for some article which she had purchased the day before, and which had not been sent home. The order could not be traced. The proprietor of the establishment inquired, with great concern, "May I ask who took your Grace's order? Was it a young gentleman with fair hair?" "No; it was an elderly nobleman with a bald head."
The celebrated Lady Clanricarde, daughter of George Canning, was talking during the Franco-German War of 1870 to the French Ambassador, who complained bitterly that England had not intervened on behalf of France. "But, after all," he said, "it was only what we might have expected. We always believed that you were a nation of shopkeepers, and now we know you are." "And we," replied Lady Clanricarde, "always believed that you were a nation of soldiers, and now we know you are not"—a repartee worthy to rank with Queen Mary's reply to Lady Lochleven about the sacramental character of marriage, in the third volume of The Abbot.
A young lady, who had just been appointed a Maid of Honour, was telling some friends with whom she was dining that one of the conditions of the office was that she should not keep a diary of what went on at Court. A cynical man of the world who was present said, "What a tiresome rule! I think I should keep my diary all the same." "Then," replied the young lady, "I am afraid you would not be a maid of Honour."
In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting figure was Henry Luttrell. It was known that he must be getting on in life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one knew. At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank—"Now, Luttrell, we're all dying to know how old you are. Just tell me." Eyeing his questioner gravely, Luttrell made answer, "It is an odd question; but as you, Lady Holland, ask it, I don't mind telling you. If I live till next year, I shall be—devilish old."
For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen, for Lord Holland's genial humour, and for Lady Holland's indiscriminate insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay's Life and Charles Greville's Journals, and the enormous mass of contemporary memoirs. Most of these verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some social or literary topic; but now and then, when political passion was really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.
Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice. Sir James Mackintosh, who, as the writer of the Vindiciae Gallicae, had been the foremost apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution and its authors, their works and ways. Having thus become a vehement champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O'Coighley, the priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and France, was the basest of mankind. "No, Mackintosh," replied that sound though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; "he might have been much worse. He was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman. He was a priest; he might have been a lawyer. He was a rebel; he might have been a renegade."
These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age. Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them. When the Greville Memoirs—that mine of social information in which I have so often quarried—came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was, if he had read them. He replied, "No. I do not feel attracted to them. I remember the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton." This three-edged compliment has seldom been excelled. In a lighter style, and more accordant with feminine grace, was Lady Morley's comment on the decaying charms of her famous rival, Lady Jersey—the Zenobia of Endymion—of whom some gushing admirer had said that she looked so splendid going to court in her mourning array of black and diamonds—"it was like night." "Yes, my dear; minuit passé." A masculine analogue to this amiable compliment may be cited from the table-talk of Lord Granville—certainly not an unkindly man—to whom the late Mr. Delane had been complaining of the difficulty of finding a suitable wedding-present for a young lady of the house of Rothschild. "It would be absurd to give a Rothschild a costly gift. I should like to find something not intrinsically valuable, but interesting because it is rare." "Nothing easier, my dear fellow; send her a lock of your hair."
When a remote cousin of Lord Henniker was elected to the Head Mastership of Rossall, a disappointed competitor said that it was a case of ενεκα του κυριου; but a Greek joke is scarcely fair play.
When the New Review was started, its accomplished Editor designed it to be an inexpensive copy of the Nineteenth Century. It was to cost only sixpence, and was to be written by bearers of famous names—those of the British aristocracy for choice. He was complaining in society of the difficulty of finding a suitable title, when a vivacious lady said, "We have got Cornhill, and Ludgate, and Strand—why not call yours Cheapside?"
Oxford has always been a nursing-mother of polished satirists. Of a small sprig of aristocracy, who was an undergraduate in my time, it was said by a friend that he was like Euclid's definition of a point: he had no parts and no magnitude, but had position. In previous chapters I have quoted the late Master of Balliol and Lord Sherbrooke. Professor Thorold Rogers excelled in a Shandean vein. Lord Bowen is immortalized by his emendation to the Judge's address to the Queen, which had contained the Heep-like sentence—"Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness for the great office to which we have been called." "Wouldn't it be better to say, 'Conscious as we are of one another's unworthiness'?" Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, the wittiest, most learned, and most genial of Irishmen, said of a well-known man of science—"His only fault is that he sometimes forgets that he is the Editor, not the Author, of Nature." A great lawyer who is now a great judge, and has, with good reason, the very highest opinion of himself, stood as a Liberal at the General Election of 1880. His Tory opponents set on foot a rumour that he was an Atheist, and when Henry Smith heard it he said, "Now, that's really too bad, for--- is a man who reluctantly acknowledges the existence of a Superior Being."
At dinner at Balliol the Master's guests were discussing the careers of two Balliol men, the one of whom had just been made a judge and the other a bishop. "Oh," said Henry Smith, "I think the bishop is the greater man. A judge, at the most, can only say, 'You be hanged,' but a bishop can say, 'You be d---d.'" "Yes," twittered the Master; "but if the judge says, 'You be hanged,' you are hanged."
Henry Smith, though a delightful companion, was a very unsatisfactory politician—nominally, indeed, a Liberal, but full of qualifications and exceptions. When Mr. Gathorne Hardy was raised to the peerage at the crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and thereby vacated his seat for the University of Oxford, Henry Smith came forward as a candidate in the Liberal interest; but his language about the great controversy of the moment was so lukewarm that Professor Freeman said that, instead of sitting for Oxford in the House of Commons, he ought to represent Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia Minor.
Of Dr. Haig-Brown it is reported that, when Head Master of Charterhouse, he was toasted by the Mayor of Godalming as a man who knew how to combine the fortiter in re with the suavīter in modo. In replying to the toast he said, "I am really overwhelmed not only by the quality, but by the quantity of his Worship's eulogium."
It has been a matter of frequent remark that, considering what an immense proportion of parliamentary time has been engrossed during the last seventeen years by Irish speeches, we have heard so little Irish humour, whether conscious or unconscious—whether jokes or "bulls." An admirably vigorous simile was used by the late Mr. O'Sullivan, when he complained that the whisky supplied at the bar was like "a torchlight procession marching down your throat;" but of Irish bulls in Parliament I have only heard one—proceeding, if my memory serves me, from Mr. T. Healy: "As long as the voice of Irish suffering is dumb, the ear of English compassion is deaf to it." One I read in the columns of the Irish Times: "The key of the Irish difficulty is to be found in the empty pocket of the landlord." An excellent confusion of metaphors was uttered by one of the members for the Principality in the debate on the Welsh Church Bill, in indignant protest against the allegation that the majority of Welshmen now belonged to the Established Church. He said, "It is a lie, sir; and it is high time that we nailed this lie to the mast." But a confusion of metaphors is not a bull.
Among tellers of Irish stories, Lord Morris is supreme; one of his best depicts two Irish officials of the good old times discussing, in all the confidence of their after-dinner claret, the principles on which they bestowed their patronage Said the first, "Well, I don't mind admitting that, caeteris paribus, I prefer my own relations." "My dear boy," replied his boon companion, "caeteris paribus be d----d." The cleverest thing that I have lately heard was from a young lady, who is an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman. Their irreverent compatriot has nicknamed them
"The storied Erne and animated bust."
Frances Countess Waldegrave, who had previously been married three times, took as her fourth husband an Irishman, Mr. Chichester Fortescue, who was shortly afterwards made Chief Secretary. The first night that Lady Waldegrave and Mr. Fortescue appeared at the theatre in Dublin, a wag in the gallery called out, "Which of the four do you like best, my lady?" Instantaneously from the Chief Secretary's box came the adroit reply: "Why, the Irishman, of course '"
The late Lord Coleridge was once speaking in the House of Commons in support of Women's Rights. One of his main arguments as that there was no essential difference between the masculine and the feminine intellect. For example, he said, some of the most valuable qualities of what is called the judicial genius—sensibility, quickness, delicacy—are peculiarly feminine. In reply, Serjeant Dowse said: "The argument of the hon. and learned Member, compendiously stated, amounts to this—because some judges are old women, therefore all old women are fit to be judges."
To my friend Mr. Julian Sturgis, himself one of the happiest of phrase-makers, I am indebted for the following gems from America.
Mr. Evarts, formerly Secretary of State, showed an English friend the place where Washington was said to have thrown a dollar across the Potomac. The English friend expressed surprise; "but," said Mr. Evarts, "you must remember that a dollar went further in those days." A Senator met Mr. Evarts next day, and said that he had been amused by his jest. "But," said Mr. Evarts, "I met a mere journalist just afterwards who said, 'Oh, Mr. Evarts, you should have said that it was a small matter to throw a dollar across the Potomac for a man who had chucked a sovereign across the Atlantic.'" Mr. Evarts, weary of making many jokes, would invent a journalist or other man and tell a story as his. It was he who, on a kindly busybody expressing surprise at his daring to drink so many different wines at dinner, said that it was only the indifferent wines of which he was afraid.
It was Mr. Motley who said in Boston—"Give me the luxuries of life, and I care not who has the necessaries."
Mr. Tom Appleton, famous for many witty sayings (among them the well-known "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris"), heard some grave city fathers debating what could be done to mitigate the cruel east wind at an exposed corner of a certain street in Boston. He suggested that they should tether a shorn lamb there.
A witty Bostonian going to dine with a lady was met by her with a face of apology. "I could not get another man," she said; "and we are four women, and you will have to take us all in to dinner." "Fore-warned is four-armed," said he with a bow.
This gentleman was in a hotel in Boston when the law forbidding the sale of liquor was in force. "What would you say," said an angry Bostonian, "if a man from St. Louis, where they have freedom, were to come in and ask you where he could get a drink?" Now it was known that spirits could be clandestinely bought in a room under the roof, and the wit pointing upwards replied, "I should say, 'Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel.'"
Madame Apponyi was in London during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867, and, like all foreigners and not a few Englishmen, was much perplexed by the "Compound Householder," who figured so largely in the discussion. Hayward explained that he was the Masculine of the Femme Incomprise.
One of the best repartees ever made, because the briefest and the justest, was made by "the gorgeous Lady Blessington" to Napoleon III. When Prince Louis Napoleon was living in impecunious exile in London he had been a constant guest at Lady Blessington's hospitable and brilliant but Bohemian house. And she, when visiting Paris after the coup d'état naturally expected to receive at the Tuileries some return for the unbounded hospitalities of Gore House. Weeks passed, no invitation arrived, and the Imperial Court took no notice of Lady Blessington's presence. At length she encountered the Emperor at a great reception. As he passed through the bowing and curtsying crowd, the Emperor caught sight of his former hostess. "Ah, Miladi Blessington! Restez-vous longtemps à Paris?" "Et vous, Sire?" History does not record the usurper's reply.
Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869, lived at a beautiful villa near Torquay, and an enthusiastic lady who visited him there burst into dithyrambics and cried, "What a lovely spot this is, Bishop! It is so Swiss." "Yes, ma'am," blandly replied old Harry of Exeter, "it is very Swiss; only there is no sea in Switzerland, and there are no mountains here." To one of his clergy desiring to renew a lease of some episcopal property, the Bishop named a preposterous sum as the fine on renewal. The poor parson, consenting with reluctance, said, "Well, I suppose it is better than endangering the lease, but certainly your lordship has got the lion's share." "But, my dear sir, I am sure you would not wish me to have that of the other creature."
Still, after all, for a bishop to score off a clergyman is an inglorious victory; it is like the triumph of a magistrate over a prisoner or of a don over an undergraduate. Bishop Wilberforce, whose powers of repartee were among his most conspicuous gifts, was always ready to use them where retaliation was possible—not in the safe enclosure of the episcopal study, but on the open battlefield of the platform and the House of Lords. At the great meeting in St. James's Hall in the summer of 1868 to protest against the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, some Orange enthusiast, in the hope of disturbing the Bishop, kept interrupting his honeyed eloquence with inopportune shouts of "Speak up, my lord." "I am already speaking up," replied the Bishop in his most dulcet tone; "I always speak up; and I decline to speak down to the level of the ill-mannered person in the gallery." Every one whose memory runs back thirty years will recall the Homeric encounters between the Bishop and Lord Chancellor Westbury in the House of Lords, and will remember the melancholy circumstances under which Lord Westbury had to resign his office. When he was leaving the Royal Closet after surrendering the Great Seal into the Queen's hands, Lord Westbury met the Bishop, who was going in to the Queen. It was a painful encounter, and in reminding the Bishop of the occurrence when next they met, Westbury said, "I felt inclined to say, 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?'" The Bishop in relating this used to say, "I never in my life was so tempted as to finish the quotation, and say, 'Yea, I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity.' But by a great effort I kept it down, and said, 'Does your lordship remember the end of the quotation?'" The Bishop, who enjoyed a laugh against himself, used to say that he had once been effectually scored off by one of his clergy whom he had rebuked for his addiction to fox-hunting. The Bishop urged that it had a worldly appearance. The clergyman replied that it was not a bit more worldly than a ball at Blenheim Palace at which the Bishop had been present. The Bishop explained that he was staying in the house, but was never within three rooms of the dancing. "Oh, if it comes to that," replied the clergyman, "I never am within three fields of the hounds."
One of the best replies—it is scarcely a repartee—traditionally reported at Oxford was made by the great Saint of the Tractarian Movement, the Rev. Charles Marriott. A brother-Fellow of Oriel had behaved rather outrageously at dinner overnight, and coming out of chapel next morning, essayed to apologize to Marriott: "My friend, I'm afraid I made rather a fool of myself last night." "My dear fellow, I assure you I observed nothing unusual."
In a former chapter about the Art of Conversation I referred to the singular readiness which characterized Lord Sherbrooke's talk. A good instance of it was his reply to the strenuous advocate of modern studies, who, presuming on Sherbrooke's sympathy, said, "I have the greatest contempt for Aristotle." "But not that contempt which familiarity breeds, I should imagine," was Sherbrooke's mild rejoinder. "I have got a box at the Lyceum to-night," I once heard a lady say, "and a place to spare. Lord Sherbrooke, will you come? If you are engaged, I must take the Bishop of Gibraltar." "Oh, that's no good. Gibraltar can never be taken."
In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the College, made the speech of the evening. His theme was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said, "we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King. It seems to me that the New Historians prove too much—indeed, they prove the very point which they contest. If the lands had belonged to the King, he would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College."
Lord Beaconsfield's excellence in conversation lay rather in studied epigrams than in impromptu repartees. But in his old electioneering contests he used sometimes to make very happy hits. When he came forward, a young, penniless, unknown coxcomb, to contest High Wycombe against the dominating Whiggery of the Greys and the Carringtons, some one in the crowd shouted, "We know all about Colonel Grey; but pray what do you stand on?" "I stand on my head," was the prompt reply, to which Mr. Gladstone always rendered unstinted admiration. At Aylesbury the Radical leader had been a man of notoriously profligate life, and when Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before. "What do you say to that, sir?" "I say that we all sow our wild oats, and no one knows the meaning of that phrase better than you, Mr.----."
A member of the diplomatic service at Rome in the old days of the Temporal Power had the honour of an interview with Pio Nono. The Pope graciously offered him a cigar—"I am told you will find this very fine." The Englishman made that stupidest of all answers, "Thank your Holiness, but I have no vices." "This isn't a vice; if it was you would have it." Another repartee from the Vatican reached me a few years ago, when the German Emperor paid his visit to Leo XIII. Count Herbert Bismarck was in attendance on his Imperial master, and when they reached the door of the Pope's audience-chamber the Emperor passed in, and the Count tried to follow. A gentleman of the Papal Court motioned him to stand back, as there must be no third person at the interview between the Pope and the Emperor. "I am Count Herbert Bismarck," shouted the German, as he struggled to follow his master. "That," replied the Roman, with calm dignity, "may account for, but it does not excuse, your conduct."
But, after all these "fash'nable fax and polite annygoats," as Thackeray would have called them, after all these engaging courtesies of kings and prelates and great ladies, I think that the honours in the way of repartee rest with the little Harrow boy who was shouting himself hoarse in the jubilation of victory after an Eton and Harrow match at Lord's in which Harrow had it hollow. To him an Eton boy, of corresponding years, severely observed, "Well, you Harrow fellows needn't be so beastly cocky. When you wanted a Head Master you had to come to Eton to get one." The small Harrovian was dumfounded for a moment, and then, pulling himself together for a final effort of deadly sarcasm, exclaimed, "Well, at any rate, no one can say that we ever produced a Mr. Gladstone."
XX.
TITLES.
The List of Honours, usually published on Her Majesty's Birthday, is this year[23] reserved till the Jubilee Day, and to sanguine aspirants I would say, in Mrs. Gamp's immortal words, "Seek not to proticipate." Such a list always contains food for the reflective mind, and some of the thoughts which it suggests may even lie too deep for tears. Why is my namesake picked out for knighthood, while I remain hidden in my native obscurity? Why is my rival made a C.B., while I "go forth Companionless" to meet the chances and the vexations of another year? But there is balm in Gilead. If I have fared badly, my friends have done little better. Like Mr. Squeers, when Bolder's father was two pound ten short, they have had their disappointments to contend against. A., who was so confident of a peerage, is fobbed off with a baronetcy; and B., whose labours for the Primrose League entitled him to expect the Bath, finds himself grouped with the Queen's footmen in the Royal Victorian Order. As, when Sir Robert Peel declined to form a Government in 1839, "twenty gentlemen who had not been appointed Under Secretaries for State moaned over the martyrdom of young ambition," so during the first fortnight of 1897 at least that number of middle-aged self-seekers came to the regretful conclusion that Lord Salisbury was not sufficiently a man of the world for his present position, and inwardly asked why a judge or a surgeon should be preferred before a company-promoter or a party hack. And, while feeling is thus fermenting at the base of the social edifice, things are not really tranquil at the summit.
It is not long since the chief of the princely House of Duff was raised to the first order of the peerage, and one or two opulent earls, encouraged by his example, are understood to be looking upward. Every constitutional Briton, whatever his political creed, has in his heart of hearts a wholesome reverence for a dukedom. Lord Beaconsfield, who understood these little traits of our national character even more perfectly than Thackeray, says of his favourite St. Aldegonde (who was heir to the richest dukedom in the kingdom) that "he held extreme opinions, especially on political affairs, being a Republican of the reddest dye. He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders of men except dukes, who were a necessity." That is a delicious touch. St. Aldegonde, whatever his political aberrations, "voiced" the universal sentiment of his less fortunate fellow-citizens; nor can the most soaring ambition of the British Matron desire a nobler epitaph than that of the lady immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby:—
"She drank prussic acid without any water,
And died like a Duke-and-a-Duchess's daughter."
As, according to Dr. Johnson, all claret would be port if it could, so, presumably, every marquis would like to be a duke; and yet, as a matter of fact, that Elysian translation is not often made. A marquis, properly regarded, is not so much a nascent duke as a magnified earl. A shrewd observer of the world once said to me: "When an earl gets a marquisate, it is worth a hundred thousand pounds in hard money to his family." The explanation of this cryptic utterance is that, whereas an earl's younger sons are "misters," a marquis's younger sons are "lords." Each "my lord" can make a "my lady," and therefore commands a distinctly higher price in the marriage-market of a wholesomely-minded community. Miss Higgs, with her fifty thousand pounds, might scorn the notion of becoming the Honourable Mrs. Percy Popjoy; but as Lady Magnus Charters she would feel a laudable ambition gratified.
An earldom is, in its combination of euphony, antiquity, and association, perhaps the most impressive of all the titles in the peerage. Most rightly did the fourteenth Earl of Derby decline to be degraded into a brand-new duke. An earldom has always been the right of a Prime Minister who wishes to leave the Commons. In 1880 a member of the House of Russell (in which there are certain Whiggish traditions of jobbery) was fighting a hotly contested election, and his ardent supporters brought out a sarcastic placard— "Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield! He made himself an earl and the people poor"; to which a rejoinder was instantly forthcoming—"John, Earl Russell! He made himself an earl and his relations rich." The amount of truth in the two statements was about equal. In 1885 this order of the peerage missed the greatest distinction which fate is likely ever to offer it, when Mr. Gladstone declined the earldom proffered by her Majesty on his retirement from office. Had he accepted, it was understood that the representatives of the last Earl of Liverpool would have waived their claims to the extinct title, and the greatest of the Queen's Prime Ministers would have borne the name of the city which gave him birth.
But, magnificent and euphonious as an earldom is, the children of an earl are the half-castes of the peerage. The eldest son is "my lord," and his sisters are "my lady;" and ever since the days of Mr. Foker, Senior, it has been de rigueur for an opulent brewer to marry an earl's daughter; but the younger sons are not distinguishable from the ignominious progeny of viscounts and barons. Two little boys, respectively the eldest and the second son of an earl, were playing on the front staircase of their home, when the eldest fell over into the hall below. The younger called to the footman who picked his brother up, "Is he hurt?" "Killed, my lord," was the instantanteous reply of a servant who knew the devolution of a courtesy title.
As the marquises people the debatable land between the dukes and the earls, so do the viscounts between the earls and the barons. A child whom Matthew Arnold was examining in grammar once wrote of certain words which he found it hard to classify under their proper parts of speech that they were "thrown into the common sink, which is adverbs." I hope I shall not be considered guilty of any disrespect if I say that ex-Speakers, ex-Secretaries of State, successful generals, and ambitious barons who are not quite good enough for earldoms, are "thrown into the common sink, which is viscounts." Not only heralds and genealogists, but every one who has the historic sense, must have felt an emotion of regret when the splendid title of twenty-third Baron Dacre was merged by Mr. Speaker Brand in the pinchbeck dignity of first Viscount Hampden.
After viscounts, barons. The baronage of England is headed by the bishops; but, as we have already discoursed of those right reverend peers, we, Dante-like, will not reason of them, but pass on—only remarking, as we pass, that it is held on good authority that no human being ever experiences a rapture so intense as an American bishop from a Western State when he first hears himself called "My lord" at a London dinner-party. After the spiritual barons come the secular barons—the "common or garden" peers of the United Kingdom. Of these there are considerably more than three hundred; and of all, except some thirty or forty at the most, it may be said without offence that they are products of the opulent Middle Class. Pitt destroyed deliberately and for ever the exclusive character of the British peerage when, as Lord Beaconsfield said, he "created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy." And in order to gain admission to this "plebeian aristocracy" men otherwise reasonable and honest will spend incredible sums, undergo prodigious exertions, associate themselves with the basest intrigues, and perform the most unblushing tergiversations. Lord Houghton told me that he said to a well-known politician who boasted that he had refused a peerage: "Then you made a great mistake. A peerage would have secured you three things that you are much in need of—social consideration, longer credit with your tradesmen, and better marriages for your younger children."
It is unlucky that a comparatively recent change has put it out of the power of a Prime Minister to create fresh Irish peers, for an Irish peerage was a cheap and convenient method of rewarding political service.[24] Lord Palmerston held that, combining social rank with eligibility to the House of Commons, it was the most desirable distinction for a politician. Pitt, when his banker Mr. Smith (who lived in Whitehall) desired the privilege of driving through the Horse Guards, said: "No, I can't give you that; but I will make you an Irish peer;" and the banker became the first Lord Carrington.
What is a Baronet? ask some. Sir Wilfrid Lawson (who ought to know) replies that he is a man "who has ceased to be a gentleman and has not become a nobleman." But this is too severe a judgment. It breathes a spirit of contempt bred of familiarity, which may, without irreverence, be assumed by a member of an exalted Order, but which a humble outsider would do well to avoid. As Major Pendennis said of a similar manifestation, "It sits prettily enough on a young patrician in early life, though, nothing is so loathsome among persons of our rank." I turn, therefore, for an answer to Sir Bernard Burke, who says: "The hereditary Order of Baronets was created by patent in England by King James I. in 1611. At the institution many of the chief estated gentlemen of the kingdom were selected for the dignity. The first batch of Baronets comprised some of the principal landed proprietors among the best-descended gentlemen of the kingdom, and the list was headed by a name illustrious more than any other for the intellectual pre-eminence with which it is associated—the name of Bacon. The Order of Baronets is scarcely estimated at its proper value."
I cannot help feeling that this account of the baronetage, though admirable in tone and spirit, and actually pathetic in its closing touch of regretful melancholy, is a little wanting in what the French would call "actuality." It leaves out of sight the most endearing, because the most human, trait of the baronetage—its pecuniary origin. On this point let us hear the historian Hume—"The title of Baronet was sold and two hundred patents of that species of knighthood were disposed of for so many thousand pounds." This was truly epoch-making. It was one of those "actions of the just" which "smell sweet and blossom in the dust." King James's baronets were the models and precursors of all who to the end of time should traffic in the purchase of honours. Their example has justified posterity, and the precedent which they set is to-day the principal method by which the war-chests of our political parties are replenished.
Another authority, handling the same high theme, tells us that the rebellion in Ulster gave rise to this Order, and "it was required of each baronet on his creation to pay into the Exchequer as much as would maintain thirty soldiers three years at eight-pence a day in the province of Ulster," and, as a historical memorial of their original service, the baronets bear as an augmentation to their coats-of-arms the royal badge of Ulster—a Bloody Hand on a white field. It was in apt reference to this that a famous Whip, on learning that a baronet of his party was extremely anxious to be promoted to the peerage, said, "You can tell Sir Peter Proudflesh, with my compliments, that we don't do these things for nothing. If he wants a peerage, he will have to put his Bloody Hand into his pocket."
For the female mind the baronetage has a peculiar fascination. As there was once a female Freemason, so there was once a female baronet—Dame Maria Bolles, of Osberton, in the County of Nottingham. The rank of a baronet's wife is not unfrequently conferred on the widow of a man to whom a baronetcy had been promised and who died too soon to receive it. "Call me a vulgar woman!" screamed a lady once prominent in society when a good-natured friend repeated a critical comment. "Call me a vulgar woman! me, who was Miss Blank, of Blank Hall, and if I had been a boy should have been a baronet!"
The baronets of fiction are, like their congeners in real life, a numerous and a motley band. Lord Beaconsfield described, with a brilliancy of touch which was all his own, the labours and the sacrifices of Sir Vavasour Firebrace on behalf of the Order of Baronets and the privileges wrongfully withheld from them. "They are evidently the body destined to save this country; blending all sympathies—the Crown, of which they are the peculiar champions: the nobles, of whom they are the popular branch; the people, who recognize in them their natural leaders.... Had the poor King lived, we should at least have had the Badge," added Sir Vavasour mournfully.
"The Badge?"
"It would have satisfied Sir Grosvenor le Draughte; he was for compromise. But, confound him, his father was only an accoucheur."
A great merit of the baronets, from the novelist's point of view, is that they and their belongings are so uncommonly easy to draw. He is Sir Grosvenor, his wife is Lady le Draughte, his sons, elder and younger, are Mr. le Draughte, and his daughters Miss le Draughte. The wayfaring men, though fools, cannot err where the rule is so simple, and accordingly the baronets enjoy a deserved popularity with those novelists who look up to the titled classes of society as men look at the stars, but are a little puzzled about their proper designations. Miss Braddon alone has drawn more baronets, virtuous and vicious, handsome and hideous, than would have colonized Ulster ten times over and left a residue for Nova Scotia. Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Barnes Newcome will live as long as English novels are read, and I hope that dull forgetfulness will never seize as its prey Sir Alfred Mogyns Smyth de Mogyns, who was born Alfred Smith Muggins, but traced a descent from Hogyn Mogyn of the Hundred Beeves, and took for his motto "Ung Roy ung Mogyns." His pedigree is drawn in the seventh chapter of the Book of Snobs, and is imitated with great fidelity on more than one page of Burke's Peerage.
An eye closely intent upon the lesser beauties of the natural world will find a very engaging specimen of the genus Baronet in Sir Barnet Skettles, who was so kind to Paul Dombey and so angry with poor Mr. Baps. Sir Leicester Dedlock is on a larger scale—in fact, almost too "fine and large" for life. But I recall a fleeting vision of perfect loveliness among Miss Monflathers's pupils—"a baronet's daughter who by some extraordinary reversal of the laws of Nature was not only plain in feature but dull in intellect."
So far we have spoken only of hereditary honours; but our review would be singularly incomplete if it excluded those which are purely personal. Of these, of course, incomparably the highest is the Order of the Garter, and its most characteristic glory is that, in Lord Melbourne's phrase, "there is no d----d nonsense of merit about it." The Emperor of Lilliput rewarded his courtiers with three fine silken threads, one of which was blue, one green, and one red. The Emperor held a stick horizontally, and the candidates crept under it, backwards and forwards, several times. Whoever showed the most agility in creeping was rewarded with the blue thread.
Let us hope that the methods of chivalry have undergone some modification since the days of Queen Anne, and that the Blue Ribbon of the Garter, which ranks with the Golden Fleece and makes its wearer a comrade of all the crowned heads of Europe, is attained by arts more dignified than those which awoke the picturesque satire of Dean Swift. But I do not feel sure about it.
Great is the charm of a personal decoration. Byron wrote: