Chapter XXXIV: An Old Photograph-Book (2)

What made our perfect ease of intercourse more remarkable was that, as far as the Cardinal's immediate object was concerned, my visit was a total failure. I had no sympathy with his scheme for the endowment of denominational teaching, and, with all the will in the world to please him, I could not even meet him half way. But this untoward circumstance did not import the least difficulty or restraint into our conversation. He gently glided from business into general topics; knew all about my career, congratulated me on some recent success, remembered some of my belongings, inquired about my school and college, was interested to find that, like himself, I had been at Harrow and Oxford, and, after an hour's pleasant chat, said, "Now you must stay and have some luncheon." From that day to the end of his life I was a frequent visitor at his house, and every year that I knew him I learned to regard and respect him increasingly.

Looking back over these fourteen years, and reviewing my impressions of his personality, I must put first the physical aspect of the man. He seemed older than he was, and even more ascetic, for he looked as if, like the cardinal in _Lothair_, he lived on biscuits and soda-water; whereas he had a hearty appetite for his midday meal, and, in his own words, "enjoyed his tea." Still, he carried the irreducible minimum of flesh on his bones, and his hollow cheeks and shrunken jaws threw his massive forehead into striking prominence. His line of features was absolutely faultless in its statuesque regularity, but his face was saved from the insipidity of too great perfection by the imperious--rather ruthless--lines of his mouth and the penetrating lustre of his deep-set eyes. His dress--a black cassock edged and buttoned with crimson, with a crimson skullcap and biretta, and a pectoral cross of gold--enhanced the picturesqueness of his aspect, and as he entered the anteroom where one awaited his approach, the most Protestant knee instinctively bent.

His dignity was astonishing. The position of a cardinal with a princely rank recognized abroad but officially ignored in England was difficult to carry off, but his exquisite tact enabled him to sustain it to perfection. He never put himself forward; never asserted his rank; never exposed himself to rebuffs; still, he always contrived to be the most conspicuous figure in any company which he entered; and whether one greeted him with the homage due to a prince of the Church or merely with the respect which no one refuses to a courtly old gentleman, his manner was equally easy, natural, and unembarrassed. The fact that the Cardinal's name, after due consideration, was inserted in the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor immediately after that of the Prince of Wales and before Lord Salisbury's was the formal recognition of a social precedence which adroitness and judgment had already made his own.

To imagine that Cardinal Manning regarded station, or dignity, or even power, as treasures to be valued in themselves would be ridiculously to misconceive the man. He had two supreme and absorbing objects in life--if, indeed, they may not be more properly spoken of as one--the glory of God and the salvation of men. These were, in his intellect and conscience, identified with the victory of the Roman Church. To these all else was subordinated; by its relation to these all else was weighed and calculated. His ecclesiastical dignity, and the secular recognition of it, were valuable as means to high ends. They attracted public notice to his person and mission; they secured him a wider hearing; they gave him access to circles which, perhaps, would otherwise have been closed. Hence, and for no other reason, they were valuable.

It has always to be borne in mind that Manning was essentially a man of the world, though he was much more than that. Be it far from me to disparage the ordinary type of Roman ecclesiastic, who is bred in a seminary, and perhaps spends his lifetime in a religious community. That peculiar training produces, often enough, a character of saintliness and unworldly grace on which one can only "look," to use a phrase of Mr. Gladstone's, "as men look up at the stars." But it was a very different process that had made Cardinal Manning what he was. He had touched life at many points. A wealthy home, four years at Harrow, Balliol in its palmiest days, a good degree, a College Fellowship, political and secular ambitions of no common kind, apprenticeship to the practical work of a Government office, a marriage brightly but all too briefly happy, the charge of a country parish, and an early initiation into the duties of ecclesiastical rulership--all these experiences had made Henry Manning, by the time of his momentous change, an accomplished man of the world.

His subsequent career, though, of course, it superadded certain characteristics of its own, never obliterated or even concealed the marks left by those earlier phases, and the octogenarian Cardinal was a beautifully-mannered, well-informed, sagacious old gentleman who, but for his dress, might have passed for a Cabinet Minister, an eminent judge, or a great county magnate.

His mental alertness was remarkable. He seemed to read everything that came out, and to know all that was going on. He probed character with a glance, and was particularly sharp on pretentiousness and self-importance. A well-known publicist, who perhaps thinks of himself rather more highly than he ought to think, once ventured to tell the Cardinal that he knew nothing about the subject of a painful agitation which pervaded London in the summer of 1885. "I have been hearing confessions in London for thirty years, and I fancy more people have confided their secrets to me than to you, Mr. ----," was the Cardinal's reply.

Once, when his burning sympathy with suffering and his profound contempt for Political Economy had led him, in his own words, to "poke fun at the Dismal Science," the _Times_ lectured him in its most superior manner, and said that the venerable prelate seemed to mistake cause and effect. "That," said the Cardinal to me, "is the sort of criticism that an undergraduate makes, and thinks himself very clever. But I am told that in the present day the _Times_ is chiefly written by undergraduates."

I once asked him what he thought of a high dignitary of the English Church, who had gone a certain way in a public movement, and then had been frightened back by clamour. His reply was the single word "_infirmus_," accompanied by that peculiar sniff which every one who ever conversed with him must remember as adding so much to the piquancy of his terse judgments. When he was asked his opinion of a famous biography in which a son had disclosed, with too absolute frankness, his father's innermost thoughts and feelings, the Cardinal replied, "I think that ---- has committed the sin of Ham."

His sense of humour was peculiarly keen, and though it was habitually kept under control, it was sometimes used to point a moral with admirable effect.

"What are you going to do in life?" he asked a rather flippant undergraduate at Oxford.

"Oh, I'm going to take Holy Orders," was the airy reply.

"Take care you get them, my son."

Though he was intolerant of bumptiousness, the Cardinal liked young men. He often had some about him, and in speaking to them the friendliness of his manner was touched with fatherliness in a truly attractive fashion. And as with young men, so with children. Surely nothing could be prettier than this answer to a little girl in New York who had addressed some of her domestic experiences to "Cardinal Manning, England."

"My Dear Child,--You ask me whether I am glad to receive letters from little children. I am always glad, for they write kindly and give me no trouble. I wish all my letters were like theirs. Give my blessing to your father, and tell him that our good Master will reward him a hundredfold for all he has lost for the sake of his faith. Tell him that when he comes over to England he must come to see me. And mind you bring your violin, for I love music, but seldom have any time to hear it. The next three or four years of your life are very precious. They are like the ploughing-time and the sowing-time in the year. You are learning to know God, the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the presence and voice of the Holy Ghost in the Church of Jesus Christ. Learn all these things solidly, and you will love the Blessed Sacrament and our Blessed Mother with all your heart. And now you will pray for me that I may make a good end of a long life, which cannot be far off. And may God guide you and guard you in innocence and in fidelity through this evil, evil world! And may His blessing be on your home and all belonging to you! Believe me always a true friend, Henry Edward, Card. Abp. of Westminster."

The Cardinal had, I should say, rather a contempt for women. He exercised a great influence over them, but I question if he rated their intellectual and moral qualities as highly as he ought, and their "rights" he held in utter detestation. General society, though in his later days he saw little of it except at the Athenaeum, he thoroughly enjoyed. Like most old people, he was fond of talking about old days, and as he had known hosts of important and interesting men, had a tenacious memory, and spoke the most finished English, it was a pleasure to listen to his reminiscences. He wrote as well as he talked. His pointed and lucid style gave to his printed performances a semblance of cogency which they did not really possess; and his letters--even his shortest notes--were as exquisite in wording as in penmanship. As he grew older, he became increasingly sensible of the charms of "Auld Lang Syne," and he delighted to renew his acquaintance with the scenes and associations of his youth.

On July 15, 1888, being the first day of the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's, a few old Harrovians of different generations met at a Harrow dinner. The Cardinal, who had just turned eighty, was invited. He declined to dine, on the ground that he never dined out, but he would on no account forego the opportunity of meeting the members of his old school, and he recalled with pride that he had played for two years in the Harrow Eleven. He appeared as soon as dinner was over, gallantly faced the cloud of cigar-smoke, was in his very best vein of anecdote and reminiscence, and stayed till the party broke up.

The Cardinal's friendships were not, I believe, numerous, but his affection for Mr. Gladstone is well known. It dated from Oxford. Through Manning and Hope-Scott the influence of the Catholic revival reached the young member for Newark, and they were the godfathers of his eldest son. After their secession to Rome in 1851 this profound friendship fell into abeyance. As far as Manning was concerned, it was renewed when, in 1868, Mr. Gladstone took in hand to disestablish the Irish Church. It was broken again by the controversy about _Vaticanism_, in 1875, and some fifteen years later was happily revived by the good offices of a common friend. "Gladstone is a very fine fellow," said the Cardinal to me in 1890. "He is not vindictive. You may fight him as hard as you like, and when the fight is over you will find that it has left no rancour behind it."

This affection for Mr. Gladstone was a personal matter, quite independent of politics; but in political matters also they had much in common. "You know," wrote the Cardinal to Mrs. Gladstone on her Golden Wedding, "how nearly I have agreed in William's political career, especially in his Irish policy of the last twenty years." He accepted the principle of Home Rule, though he thought badly of the Bill of 1886, and predicted its failure from the day when it was brought in. The exclusion of the Irish members was in his eyes a fatal blot, as tending rather to separation than to that Imperial federation which was his political ideal. But the Cardinal always held his politics in subordination to his religion, and at the General Election of 1885 his vigorous intervention on behalf of denominational education which he considered to be imperilled by the Radical policy, considerably embarrassed the Liberal cause in those districts of London where there is a Roman Catholic vote.

It is necessary to say a word about Cardinal Manning's method of religious propagandism. He excelled in the art of driving a nail where it would go. He never worried his acquaintance with controversy, never introduced religious topics unseasonably, never cast his pearls before unappreciative animals. But when he saw a chance, an opening, a sympathetic tendency, or a weak spot, he fastened on it with unerring instinct. His line was rather admonitory than persuasive. When he thought that the person whom he was addressing had an inkling of the truth, but was held back from avowing it by cowardice or indecision, he would utter the most startling warnings about the danger of dallying with grace.

"I promise you to become a Catholic when I am twenty-one," said a young lady whom he was trying to convert.

"But can you promise to live so long?" was the searching rejoinder.

In Manning's belief, the Roman Church was the one oracle of truth and the one ark of salvation; and his was the faith which would compass sea and land, sacrifice all that it possessed, and give its body to be burned, if it might by any means bring one more soul to safety. If he could win a single human being to see the truth and act on it, he was supremely happy. To make the Church of Rome attractive, to enlarge her borders, to win recruits for her, was therefore his constant effort. He had an ulterior eye to it in all his public works--his zealous teetotalism, his advocacy of the claims of labour, his sympathy with the demand for Home Rule; and the same principle which animated him in these large schemes of philanthropy and public policy made itself felt in the minutest details of daily life and personal dealing. Where he saw the possibility of making a convert, or even of dissipating prejudice and inclining a single Protestant more favourably towards Rome, he left no stone unturned to secure this all-important end. Hence it came that he was constantly, and not wholly without reason, depicted as a man whom in religious matters it was impossible to trust; with whom the end justified the means; and whose every act and word, where the interests of his Church were involved, must be watched with the most jealous suspicion.

All this was grossly overstated. Whatever else Cardinal Manning was, he was an English gentleman of the old school, with a nice sense of honour and propriety. But still, under a mass of calumny and exaggeration, there lay this substratum of truth--that he who wills the end wills the means; and that where the interests of a sacred cause are at stake, an enthusiastic adherent will sometimes use methods to which, in enterprises of less pith and moment, recourse could not properly be had.

Manning had what has been called "the ambition of distinctiveness." He felt that he had a special mission which no other man could so adequately fulfil, and this was to establish and popularize in England his own robust faith in the cause of the Papacy as identical with the cause of God. There never lived a stronger Papalist. He was more Ultramontane than the Ultramontanes. Everything Roman was to him divine. Italian architecture, Italian vestments, the Italian mode of pronouncing ecclesiastical Latin were dear to him, because they visibly and audibly implied the all-pervading presence and power of Rome. Rightly or wrongly, he conceived that English Romanism, as it was when he joined the Roman Church, was practically Gallicanism; that it minimized the Papal supremacy, was disloyal to the Temporal Power, and was prone to accommodate itself to its Protestant and secular environment. Against this time-serving spirit he set his face like a flint. He believed that he had been divinely appointed to Papalize England. The cause of the Pope was the cause of God; Manning was the person who could best serve the Pope's cause, and therefore all forces which opposed him were in effect opposing the Divine Will. This seems to have been his simple and sufficient creed, and certainly it had the merit of supplying a clear rule of action. It made itself felt in his hostility to the Religious Orders, and especially the Society of Jesus. Religious Orders are extra-episcopal. The Jesuits are scarcely subject to the Pope himself. Certainly neither the Orders nor the Society would, or could, be subject to Manning. A power independent of, or hostile to, his authority was inimical to religion, and must, as a religious duty, be checked, and, if possible, destroyed. Exactly the same principle animated his dealings with Cardinal Newman. Rightly or wrongly, Manning thought Newman a half-hearted Papalist. He dreaded alike his way of putting things and his practical policy. Newman's favourite scheme of establishing a Roman Catholic college at Oxford, Manning regarded as fraught with peril to the faith of the rising generation. The scheme must therefore be crushed and its author snubbed.

I must in candour add that these differences of opinion between the two Cardinals were mixed with and embittered by a sense of personal dislike. When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof. I ventured to ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches. He replied that he had, and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety, after a moment's pause he added, "But if you ask me if they are like poor Newman, I am bound to say--_a photograph_."

It was, I suppose, matter of common knowledge that Manning's early and conspicuous ascendency in the counsels of the Papacy rested mainly on the intimacy of his personal relations with Pius IX. But it was news to most of us that (if his biographer is right) he wished to succeed Antonelli as Secretary of State in 1876, and to transfer the scene of his activities from Westminster to Rome, and that he attributed the Pope's disregard of his wishes to mental decrepitude. The point, if true, is an important one, for his accession to the Secretaryship of State, and permanent residence in Rome, could not have failed to affect the development of events when, two years later, the Papal throne became vacant by the death of Pius IX. But _Deo aliter visum_. It was ordained that he should pass the evening of his days in England, and that he should outlive his intimacy at the Vatican and his influence on the general policy of the Church of Rome. With the accession of Leo XIII. a new order began, and Newman's elevation to the sacred purple seemed to affix the sanction of Infallibility to views and methods against which Manning had waged a Thirty Years' War. Henceforward he felt himself a stranger at the Vatican, and powerless beyond the limits of his own jurisdiction.

Perhaps this restriction of exterior activities in the ecclesiastical sphere drove the venerable Cardinal to find a vent for his untiring energies in those various efforts of social reform in which, during the last ten years of his life, he played so conspicuous a part. If this be so, though Rome may have lost, England was unquestionably a gainer. It was during those ten years that I was honoured by his friendship. The storms, the struggles, the ambitions, the intrigues which had filled so large a part of his middle life lay far behind. He was revered, useful, and, I think, contented in his present life, and looked forward with serene confidence to the final, and not distant, issue. Thrice happy is the man who, in spite of increasing infirmity and the loss of much that once made life enjoyable, thus

"Finds comfort in himself and in his cause,
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] 1903

V.

LORD HOUGHTON.

It is narrated of an ancient Fellow of All Souls' that, lamenting the changes which had transformed his College from the nest of aristocratic idlers into a society of accomplished scholars, he exclaimed: "Hang it all, sir, we were _sui generis_." What the unreformed Fellows of All Souls' were among the common run of Oxford dons, that, it may truly (and with better syntax) be said, the late Lord Houghton was among his fellow-citizens. Of all the men I have ever known he was, I think, the most completely _sui generis_. His temperament and turn of mind were, as far as I know, quite unlike anything that obtained among his predecessors and contemporaries; nor do I see them reproduced among the men who have come after him. His peculiarities were not external. His appearance accorded with his position. He looked very much what one would have expected in a country gentleman of large means and prosperous circumstances. His early portraits show that he was very like all the other young gentlemen of fashion whom D'Orsay drew, with their long hair, high collars, and stupendous neckcloths. The admirably faithful work of Mr. Lehmann will enable all posterity to know exactly how he looked in his later years with his loose-fitting clothes, comfortable figure, and air of genial gravity. Externally all was normal. His peculiarities were those of mental habit, temperament, and taste. As far as I know, he had not a drop of foreign blood in his veins, yet his nature was essentially un-English.

A country gentleman who frankly preferred living in London, and a Yorkshireman who detested sport, made a sufficiently strange phenomenon; but in Lord Houghton the astonished world beheld as well a politician who wrote poetry, a railway-director who lived in literature, a _libre-penseur_ who championed the Tractarians, a sentimentalist who talked like a cynic, and a philosopher who had elevated conviviality to the dignity of an exact science. Here, indeed, was a "living oxymoron"--a combination of inconsistent and incongruous qualities which to the typical John Bull--Lord Palmerston's "Fat man with a white hat in the twopenny omnibus"--was a sealed and hopeless mystery.

Something of this unlikeness to his fellow-Englishmen was due, no doubt, to the fact that Lord Houghton, the only son of a gifted, eccentric, and indulgent father, was brought up at home. The glorification of the Public School has been ridiculously overdone. But it argues no blind faith in that strange system of unnatural restraints and scarcely more reasonable indulgences to share Gibbon's opinion that the training of a Public School is the best adapted to the common run of Englishmen. "It made us what we were, sir," said Major Bagstock to Mr. Dombey; "we were iron, sir, and it forged us." The average English boy being what he is by nature--"a soaring human boy," as Mr. Chadband called him--a Public School simply makes him more so. It confirms alike his characteristic faults and his peculiar virtues, and turns him out after five or six years that altogether lovely and gracious product--the Average Englishman. This may be readily conceded; but, after all, the pleasantness of the world as a place of residence, and the growing good of the human race, do not depend exclusively on the Average Englishman; and something may be said for the system of training which has produced, not only all famous foreigners (for they, of course, are a negligible quantity), but such exceptional Englishmen as William Pitt and Thomas Macaulay, and John Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, and Richard Monckton Milnes.

From an opulent and cultivated home young Milnes passed to the most famous college in the world, and found himself under the tuition of Whewell and Thirlwall, and in the companionship of Alfred Tennyson and Julius Hare, Charles Buller and John Sterling--a high-hearted brotherhood who made their deep mark on the spiritual and intellectual life of their own generation and of that which succeeded it.

After Cambridge came foreign travel, on a scale and plan quite outside the beaten track of the conventional "grand tour" as our fathers knew it. From the Continent Richard Milnes brought back a gaiety of spirit, a frankness of bearing, a lightness of touch which were quite un-English, and "a taste for French novels, French cookery, and French wines" with which Miss Crawley would have sympathized. In 1837 he entered Parliament as a "Liberal Conservative" for the Borough of Pontefract, over which his father exercised considerable influence, and he immediately became a conspicuous figure in the social life of London. A few years later his position and character were drawn by the hand of a master in a passage which will well bear yet one more reproduction:--

"Mr. Vavasour was a social favourite; a poet, and a real poet, and a troubadour, as well as a Member of Parliament; travelled, sweet-tempered, and good-hearted; amusing and clever. With catholic sympathies and an eclectic turn of mind, Mr. Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything; which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr. Vavasour's breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or country--one might almost add your character--you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced. A real philosopher, alike from his genial disposition and from the influence of his rich and various information, Vavasour moved amid the strife, sympathizing with every one; and perhaps, after all, the philanthropy which was his boast was not untinged by a dash of humour, of which rare and charming quality he possessed no inconsiderable portion. Vavasour liked to know everybody who was known, and to see everything which ought to be seen. His life was a gyration of energetic curiosity; an insatiable whirl of social celebrity. There was not a congregation of sages and philosophers in any part of Europe which he did not attend as a brother. He was present at the camp of Kalisch in his yeomanry uniform, and assisted at the festivals of Barcelona in an Andalusian jacket. He was everywhere and at everything: he had gone down in a diving-bell and gone up in a balloon. As for his acquaintances, he was welcomed in every land; his universal sympathies seemed omnipotent. Emperor and King, Jacobin and Carbonaro, alike cherished him. He was the steward of Polish balls, and the vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave dinners to Louis Blanc."

Lord Beaconsfield's penetration in reading character and skill in delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than in the foregoing passage. Divested of its intentional and humorous exaggerations, it is not a caricature, but a portrait. It exhibits with singular fidelity the qualities which made Lord Houghton, to the end of his long life, at once unique and lovable. We recognize the overflowing sympathy, the keen interest in life, the vivid faculty of enjoyment, the absolute freedom from national prejudice, the love of seeing and of being seen.

During the Chartist riots of 1848 Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother: "Tell Miss Martineau it is said here that Monckton Milnes refused to be sworn in a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment's notice." And those who knew Lord Houghton best suspect that he himself originated the joke at his own expense. The assured ease of young Milnes's social manner, even among complete strangers, so unlike the morbid self-repression and proud humility of the typical Englishman, won for him the nickname of "The Cool of the Evening." His wholly un-English tolerance and constant effort to put himself in the place of others whom the world condemned, procured for him from Carlyle (who genuinely loved him) the title of "President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company." Bishop Wilberforce wrote, describing a dinner-party in 1847: "Carlyle was very great. Monckton Milnes drew him out. Milnes began the young man's cant of the present day--the barbarity and wickedness of capital punishment; that, after all, we could not be sure others were wicked, etc. Carlyle broke out on him with, 'None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Companies for me. We _do_ know what is wickedness, _I_ know wicked men, men whom I _would not live with_--men whom under some conceivable circumstances I would kill or they should kill me. No, Milnes, there's no truth or greatness in all that. It's just poor, miserable littleness.'"

Lord Houghton's faculty of enjoyment was peculiarly keen. He warmed not only both hands but indeed all his nature before the fire of life. "All impulses of soul and sense" affected him with agreeable emotions; no pleasure of body or spirit came amiss to him. And in nothing was he more characteristically un-English than in the frank manifestation of his enjoyment, bubbling over with an infectious jollity, and never, even when touched by years and illness, taking his pleasures after that melancholy manner of our nation to which it is a point of literary honour not more directly to allude. Equally un-English was his frank openness of speech and bearing. His address was pre-eminently what old-fashioned people called "forthcoming." It was strikingly--even amusingly--free from that frigid dignity and arrogant reserve for which as a nation we are so justly famed. I never saw him kiss a guest on both cheeks, but if I had I should not have felt the least surprised.

What would have surprised me would have been if the guest (whatever his difference of age or station) had not felt immediately and completely at home, or if Lord Houghton had not seemed and spoken as if they had known one another from the days of short frocks and skipping-ropes. There never lived so perfect a host. His sympathy was genius, and his hospitality a fine art. He was peculiarly sensitive to the claims of "Auld Lang Syne," and when a young man came up from Oxford or Cambridge to begin life in London, he was certain to find that Lord Houghton had travelled on the Continent with his father, or had danced with his mother, or had made love to his aunt, and was eagerly on the look-out for an opportunity of showing gracious and valuable kindness to the son of his ancient friends.

When I first lived in London Lord Houghton was occupying a house in Arlington Street made famous by the fact that Hogarth drew its interior and decorations in his pictures of "Marriage a la Mode." And nowhere did the social neophyte receive a warmer welcome, or find himself amid a more eclectic and representative society. Queens of fashion, professional beauties, authors and authoresses, ambassadors, philosophers, discoverers, actors--every one who was famous or even notorious; who had been anywhere or had done anything, from a successful speech in Parliament to a hazardous leap at the Aquarium--jostled one another on the wide staircase and in the gravely ornate drawing-rooms. And amid the motley crowd the genial host was omnipresent, with a warm greeting and a twinkling smile for each successive guest--a good story, a happy quotation, the last morsel of piquant gossip, the newest theory of ethics or of politics.

Lord Houghton's humour had a quality which was quite its own. Nothing was sacred to it--neither age, nor sex, nor subject was spared; but it was essentially good-natured. It was the property of a famous spear to heal the wounds which itself had made; the shafts of Lord Houghton's fun needed no healing virtue, for they made no wound. When that saintly friend of temperance and all good causes, Mr. Cowper-Temple, was raised to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, Lord Houghton went about saying, "You know that the precedent for Billy Cowper's title is in _Don Juan?_--

'And Lord Mount Coffee-house, the Irish peer,
Who killed himself for love, with drink, last year.'"

When a very impecunious youth, who could barely afford to pay for his cab fares, lost a pound to him at whist, Lord Houghton said, as he pocketed the coin, "Ah, my dear boy, the _great_ Lord Hertford, whom foolish people called the _wicked_ Lord Hertford--Thackeray's Steyne and Dizzy's Monmouth--used to say, 'There is no pleasure in winning money from a man who does not feel it.' How true that was!--" And when he saw a young friend at a club supping on _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne, he said encouragingly, "That's quite right. All the pleasant things in life are unwholesome, or expensive, or wrong." And amid these rather grim morsels of experimental philosophy he would interject certain _obiter dicta_ which came straight from the unspoiled goodness of a really kind heart. "All men are improved by prosperity," he used to say. Envy, hatred, and malice had no place in his nature. It was a positive enjoyment to him to see other people happy, and a friend's success was as gratifying as his own. His life, though in most respects singularly happy, had not been without its disappointments. At one time he had nursed political ambitions, and his peculiar knowledge of foreign affairs had seemed to indicate a special line of activity and success. But things went differently. He always professed to regard his peerage as "a Second Class in the School of Life," and himself as a political failure. Yet no tinge of sourness, or jealousy, or cynical disbelief in his more successful contemporaries ever marred the geniality of his political conversation.

As years advanced he became not (as the manner of most men is) less Liberal, but more so; keener in sympathy with all popular causes; livelier in his indignation against monopoly and injustice. Thirty years ago, in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1866, his character and position were happily hit off by Sir George Trevelyan in a description of a walk down Piccadilly:--

"There on warm midsummer Sundays Fryston's Bard is wont to wend,
Whom the Ridings trust and honour, Freedom's staunch and jovial friend:
Loved where shrewd hard-handed craftsmen cluster round the northern
kilns--
He whom men style Baron Houghton, but the Gods call Dicky Milnes."

And eighteen years later there was a whimsical pathos in the phrase in which he announced his fatal illness to a friend: "Yes, I am going to join the Majority--and you know I have always preferred Minorities."

It would be foreign to my purpose to criticize Lord Houghton as a poet. My object in these chapters is merely to record the characteristic traits of eminent men who have honoured me with their friendship, and among those there is none for whose memory I cherish a warmer sentiment of affectionate gratitude than for him whose likeness I have now tried to sketch. His was the most precious of combinations--a genius and a heart. An estimate of his literary gifts and performances lies altogether outside my scope, but the political circumstances of the present hour[4] impel me to conclude this paper with a quotation which, even if it stood alone, would, I think, justify Lord Beaconsfield's judgment quoted above--that "he was a poet, and a true poet." Here is the lyrical cry which, writing in 1843, he puts into the mouth of Greece:--

"And if to his old Asian seat,
From this usurped, unnatural throne,
The Turk is driven, 'tis surely meet
That we again should hold our own;
Be but Byzantium's native sign
Of Cross on Crescent[5] once unfurled,
And Greece shall guard by right divine
The portals of the Easter world."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] March 1897.

[5] The Turks adopted the sign of the Crescent from Byzantium after the Conquest: the Cross above the Crescent is found on many ruins of the Grecian city--among others, on the Genoese castle on the Bosphorus.

VI.

RELIGION AND MORALITY.

In these chapters I have been trying to recall some notable people through whom I have been brought into contact with the social life of the past. I now propose to give the impressions which they conveyed to me of the moral, material, and political condition of England just at the moment when the old order was yielding place to new, and modern Society was emerging from the birth-throes of the French Revolution. All testimony seems to me to point to the fact that towards the close of the eighteenth century Religion was almost extinct in the highest and lowest classes of English society. The poor were sunk in ignorance and barbarism, and the aristocracy was honeycombed by profligacy. Morality, discarded alike by high and low, took refuge in the great Middle Class, then, as now, deeply influenced by Evangelical Dissent. A dissolute Heir-Apparent presided over a social system in which not merely religion but decency was habitually disregarded. At his wedding he was so drunk that his attendant dukes "could scarcely support him from falling."[6] The Princes of the Blood were notorious for a freedom of life and manners which would be ludicrous if it were not shocking. Here I may cite an unpublished diary[7] of Lord Robert Seymour (son of the first Marquis of Hertford), who was born in 1748 and died in 1831. He was a man of fashion and a Member of Parliament; and these are some of the incidents which he notes in 1788:--

"The Prince of Wales declares there is not an honest Woman in London, excepting Ly. Parker and Ly. Westmoreland, and those are so stupid he can make nothing of them; they are scarcely fit to blow their own Noses."

"At Mrs. Vaneck's assembly last week, the Prince of Wales, very much to the honour of his polite and elegant Behaviour, measured the breadth of Mrs. V. behind with his Handkerchief, and shew'd the measurement to most of the Company."

"Another Trait of the P. of Wales's Respectful Conduct is that at an assembly he beckoned to the poor old Dutchess of Bedford across a large Room, and, when she had taken the trouble of crossing the Room, he very abruptly told her he had nothing to say to her."

"The Prince of Wales very much affronted the D. of Orleans and his natural Brother, L'Abbé de la Fai, at Newmarket, L'Abbé declaring it possible to charm a Fish out of the Water, which being disputed occasioned a Bett; and the Abbé stooped down over the water to tickle the Fish with a little switch. Fearing, however, the Prince said play him some Trick, he declared he hoped the Prince would not use him unfairly by throwing him into the water. The Prince answer'd him that he would not upon his Honor. The Abbé had no sooner began the operation by leaning over a little Bridge when the Prince took hold of his Heels and threw him into the Water, which was rather deep. The Abbé, much enraged, the moment he got himself out run at the Prince with great violence, a Horse-whip in his Hand, saying he thought very meanly of a Prince who cou'd not keep his word. The Prince flew from him, and getting to the Inn locked himself in one of the Rooms."

"Prince of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Duke and Dutchess of Cumberland, and Miss Pigott, Mrs. F.'s companion, went a Party to Windsor during the absence of _The Family_ fm. Windsor; and going to see a cold Bath, Miss P. expressed a great wish to bathe this hot weather. The D. of C. very imprudently pushed her in, and the Dut. of C. having the presence of mind to throw out the Rope saved her when in such a disagreeable State from fear and surprise as to be near sinking. Mrs. F. went into convulsion Fits, and the Dut. fainted away, and the scene proved ridiculous in the extreme, as Report says the Duke called out to Miss P. that he was instantly coming to her in the water, and continued undressing himself. Poor Miss P.'s clothes entirely laid upon the Water, and made her appear an awkward figure. They afterwards pushed in one of the Prince's attendants."

So much for High Life at the close of the eighteenth century. It is more difficult to realize that we are separated only by some sixty years from a time when a Cabinet Minister and a brother of the Sovereign conducted a business-like correspondence on the question whether the Minister had or had not turned the Prince out of the house for insulting his wife. The journals, newspapers, and memoirs of the time throw (especially for those who can read between the lines) a startling light on that hereditary principle which plays so important a part in our political system. All the ancillary vices flourished with a rank luxuriance. Hard drinking was the indispensable accomplishment of a fine gentleman, and great estates were constantly changing owners at the gaming-table.

The fifth Duke of Bedford (who had the temerity to attack Burke's pension, and thereby drew down upon himself the most splendid repartee in literature) was a bosom-friend of Fox, and lived in a like-minded society. One night at Newmarket he lost a colossal sum at hazard, and, jumping up in a passion, he swore that the dice were loaded, put them in his pocket, and went to bed. Next morning he examined the dice in the presence of his boon companions, found that they were not loaded, and had to apologize and pay. Some years afterwards one of the party was lying on his death-bed, and he sent for the duke. "I have sent for you to tell you that you were right. The dice _were_ loaded. We waited till you were asleep, went to your bedroom, took them out of your waistcoat pocket, replaced them with unloaded ones, and retired."

"But suppose I had woke and caught you doing it."

"Well, we were desperate men--_and we had pistols_."

Anecdotes of the same type might be multiplied endlessly, and would serve to confirm the strong impression which all contemporary evidence leaves upon the mind--that the closing years of the eighteenth century witnessed the _nadir_ of English virtue. The national conscience was in truth asleep, and it had a rude awakening. "I have heard persons of great weight and authority," writes Mr. Gladstone, "such as Mr. Grenville, and also, I think, Archbishop Howley, ascribe the beginnings of a reviving seriousness in the upper classes of lay society to a reaction against the horrors and impieties of the first French Revolution in its later stages." And this reviving seriousness was by no means confined to Nonconformist circles. In the eighteenth century the religious activities of the time proceeded largely (though not exclusively) from persons who, from one cause or another, were separated from the Established Church. Much theological learning and controversial skill, with the old traditions of Anglican divinity, had been drawn aside from the highway of the Establishment into the secluded byways of the Nonjurors. Whitefield and the Wesleys, and that grim but grand old Mother in Israel, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, found their evangelistic energies fatally cramped by episcopal authority, and, quite against their natural inclinations, were forced to act through independent organizations of their own making. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century things took a different turn.

The distinguishing mark of the religious revival which issued from the French Revolution was that it lived and moved and had its being within the precincts of the Church of England. Of that Church, as it existed at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the characteristic feature had been a quiet worldliness. The typical clergyman, as drawn, for instance, in Crabbe's poems and Miss Austen's novels, is a well-bred, respectable, and kindly person, playing an agreeable part in the social life of his neighbourhood, and doing a secular work of solid value, but equally removed from the sacerdotal pretensions of the Caroline divines and from the awakening fervour of the Evangelical preachers. The professors of a more spiritual or a more aggressive religion were at once disliked and despised. Sydney Smith was never tired of poking fun at the "sanctified village of Clapham" and its "serious" inhabitants, at missionary effort and revivalist enthusiasm. When Lady Louisa Lennox was engaged to a prominent Evangelical and Liberal--Mr. Tighe of Woodstock--her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, said, "Poor Louisa is going to make a shocking marriage--a man called _Tiggy_, my dear, a Saint and a Radical." When Lord Melbourne had accidently found himself the unwilling hearer of a rousing Evangelical sermon about sin and its consequences, he exclaimed in much disgust as he left the church, "Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life!"

Arthur Young tells us that a daughter of the first Lord Carrington said to a visitor, "My papa used to have prayers in his family, but none since he has been a Peer." A venerable Canon of Windsor, who was a younger son of a great family, told me that his old nurse, when she was putting him and his little brothers to bed, used to say, "If you're very good little boys, and go to bed without giving trouble, you needn't say your prayers to-night." When the late Lord Mount Temple was a youth, he wished to take Holy Orders; and the project so horrified his parents that, after holding a family council, they plunged him into fashionable society in the hope of distracting his mind from religion, and accomplished their end by making him join the Blues.

The quiet worldliness which characterized the English Church as a whole was unpleasantly varied here and there by instances of grave and monstrous scandal. The system of Pluralities left isolated parishes in a condition of practical heathenism. Even bare morality was not always observed. In solitary places clerical drunkenness was common. On Saturday afternoon the parson would return from the nearest town "market-merry." He consorted freely with the farmers, shared their habits, and spoke their language. I have known a lady to whom a country clergyman said, pointing to the darkened windows where a corpse lay awaiting burial, "There's a stiff 'un in that house." I have known a country gentleman in Shropshire who had seen his own vicar drop the chalice at the Holy Communion because he was too drunk to hold it. I know a corner of Bedfordshire where, within the recollection of persons living thirty[8] years ago, three clerical neighbours used to meet for dinner at one another's parsonages in turn. One winter afternoon a corpse was brought for burial to the village church. The vicar of the place came from his dinner so drunk that he could not read the service, although his sister supported him with one hand and held the lantern with the other. He retired beaten, and both his guests made the same attempt with no better success. So the corpse was left in the church, and the vicar buried it next day when he had recovered from his debauch.

While the prevailing tone of quiet worldliness was thus broken, here and there, by horrid scandals, in other places it was conspicuously relieved by splendid instances of piety and self-devotion, such as George Eliot drew in the character of Edgar Tryan of Milby. But the innovating clergy of the Evangelical persuasion had to force their way through "the teeth of clenched antagonisms." The bishops, as a rule, were opposed to enthusiasm, and the bishops of that day were, in virtue of their wealth, their secular importance, and their professional cohesiveness, a formidable force in the life of the Church.

In the "good old days" of Erastian Churchmanship, before the Catholic revival had begun to breathe new life into ancient forms, a bishop was enthroned by proxy! Sydney Smith, rebuking Archbishop Howley for his undue readiness to surrender cathedral property to the Ecclesiastical Commission, pointed out that his conduct was inconsistent with having sworn at his enthronement that he would not alienate the possessions of the Church of Canterbury. "The oath," he goes on, "may be less present to the Archbishop's memory from the fact of his not having taken the oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach to take it for him--a practice which, though I believe it to have been long established in the Church, surprised me, I confess, not a little. A proxy to vote, if you please--a proxy to consent to arrangements of estates, if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Fly to take the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he presides--all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary indolence ever recorded in history." In this judgment the least ritualistic of laymen will heartily concur. But from Archbishop Howley to Archbishop Temple is a far cry, and the latest enthronement in Canterbury Cathedral must have made clear to the most casual eye the enormous transformation which sixty years have wrought alike in the inner temper and the outward aspect of the Church of England.

Once Dr. Liddon, walking with me down the hall of Christ Church, pointed to the portrait of an extremely bloated and sensual-looking prelate on the wall, and said, with that peculiar kind of mincing precision which added so much to the point of his sarcasms, "How singular, dear friend, to reflect that _that person_ was chosen, in the providential order, to connect Mr. Keble with the Apostles!" And certainly this connecting link bore little resemblance to either end of the chain. The considerations which governed the selection of a bishop in those good old days were indeed not a little singular. Perhaps he was chosen because he was a sprig of good family, like Archbishop Cornwallis, whose junketings at Lambeth drew down upon him the ire of Lady Huntingdon and the threats of George III., and whose sole qualification for the clerical office was that when an undergraduate he had suffered from a stroke of palsy which partially crippled him, but "did not, however, prevent him from holding a hand at cards." Perhaps he had been, like Bishop Sumner, "bear-leader" to a great man's son, and had won the gratitude of a powerful patron by extricating young hopeful from a matrimonial scrape. Perhaps, like Marsh or Van Mildert, he was a controversial pamphleteer who had tossed a Calvinist or gored an Evangelical. Or perhaps he was, like Blomfield and Monk, a "Greek Play Bishop," who had annotated Aeschylus or composed a Sapphic Ode on a Royal marriage. "Young Crumpet is sent to school; takes to his books; spends the best years of his life in making Latin verses; knows that the _Crum_ in Crumpet is long and the _pet_ short; goes to the University; gets a prize for an Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews; takes Orders; becomes a bishop's chaplain; has a young nobleman for his pupil; publishes a useless classic and a Serious Call to the Unconverted; and then goes through the Elysian transitions of Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power."

Few--and very few--are the adducible instances in which, in the reigns of George III., George IV., and William IV., a bishop was appointed for evangelistic zeal or pastoral efficiency.