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STUDIES OF MEN 
 
STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE W. SMALLEY 
 
 LONDON 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1895 
 
 t /El 
 
I\,-^1S2-T^ 
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 
These Studies appeared originally for the 
 most part in the New York Trihme. The 
 Visit to Prince Bismarck is reprinted from 
 the Fortnightly Review by permission of the 
 proprietors. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 LORD GRANVILLE 
 
 MR. BALFOUR 
 
 MR. PARNELL 
 
 THE SEVENTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 
 
 MR. SPURGEON 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 THE GERMAN EMPEROR 
 
 THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISMARCKS 
 
 A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK . 
 
 THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 
 
 PROFESSOR TYNDALL . 
 
 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 SIR WILLIAM HARCOCRT 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 
 
 LORD BOWEN 
 
 WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS 
 
 PRESIDENT CARNOT . 
 
 THE PRIME MINISTER . 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 8 
 17 
 38 
 48 
 
 55 
 66 
 86 
 
 97 
 
 107 
 
 151 
 167 
 179 
 
 193 
 212 
 
 226 
 
 237 
 
 250 
 
 257 
 269 
 
viii CON'l'KiNTS 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MR. FROUDE .... 
 
 . 286 
 
 MR. WINTHROP 
 
 306 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 
 • 313 
 
 MR. JOHN WALTER 
 
 • 333 
 
 FRANCIS MAGNARD 
 
 • 354 
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL . 
 
 362 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 
 
 • 387 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 [LONDON, AUGUST 1890] 
 
 To most Englishmen of this generation Newman was 
 a great name, and hardly more. To many he was not 
 even that. His work was done long ago. His influ- 
 ence survived, more as a tradition than as an active 
 force. His books were read by a minority : a minority 
 really, I suspect, growing less. The man himself was 
 never seen, or seen only by those near to him and 
 always about him at the Oratory. His correspond- 
 ence, at one time incessant, had ceased almost entirely, 
 for of late years he had lost control over the muscles of 
 his fingers and could hardly hold a pen, or not without 
 an effort. When he made the effort he could still pro- 
 duce that clear, carefully formed handwriting, which to 
 the last expressed the peculiar precision of his mind. 
 On the general world he made no claim. The art of 
 self-advertisement was not his, and in current affairs 
 his interest was of late but dim. In many companies 
 you might mention Newman's name and elicit no 
 response — nothing to show clearly that people knew 
 whether he was living or not — living in this world or 
 another, as he would say. And yet, to the last. Car- 
 dinal Newman was a great spiritual force, and his 
 death leaves a void in the spiritual life of England, 
 and perhaps elsewhere, not at all likely to be filled. 
 
2 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 There is no second Newman, no one who resembles or 
 approaches him on the ground where he was strongest. 
 
 The question is often asked how a man with great 
 natural acuteness of mind and logical training can 
 accept assertions for which there is no evidence, or no 
 sufficient evidence. Newman seems to have been sent 
 into the world to supply an answer to this question. 
 The question itself, however, is modern, at least in this 
 form. It is a product of the scientific spirit. If the 
 demand for evidence had arisen in the early stages of 
 the Church, the religious history of this planet would 
 have been something very difi"erent from what it now 
 is. Most of us have known men whose minds worked 
 with great power up to a certain point and there 
 stopped, and beyond that point did not work at all. 
 They were like a steam-engine, capable of developing 
 ten thousand horse-power within the length of its 
 piston stroke ; and a thousandth part of an inch 
 beyond, impotent. Of such minds Newman's was the 
 type, and one of the most brilliant instances. Within 
 his own range he could do anything ; no sophistry 
 could escape him ; there was no armour in which he 
 could not find a joint if he wanted to. Outside of it, 
 he was credulous as a child. 
 
 What one would like most to know is whether the 
 dividing line between belief and scepticism was drawn 
 by an act of will, or whether the boundaries of these 
 two domains were settled for him at the beginninff. 
 Faith, said Pascal, is an act of will. No remark in the 
 history of the religious world throws more light on the 
 subject. Pascal's biographers have taken little note of 
 it, though it goes further than anything else toward 
 the solution of the problem of Pascal's life ; the union 
 of belief and of scepticism which makes his attitude to 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 3 
 
 many questions so perplexing, and his real place in the 
 Church still a matter of dispute. Newman, consciously 
 or unconsciously, seems to have adopted the remark of 
 Pascal. His mind, like that of the great Frenchman, 
 was in the beginning, and probably to the end, one 
 which craved exactness, which loved suspense, which, 
 in its normal condition, accepted nothing without 
 proof, which was, in fact, mathematical and scientific. 
 Credulity cannot have been his natural disposition. 
 But he deliberately renounced the use of his reason 
 when he had to answer for himself the deepest ques- 
 tions of religion and of life. 
 
 One of the men who knew him best says that on such 
 subjects as revelation, for example, Newman never had 
 any doubts. Religion was with him, not a residuum of 
 probabilities, but a personal matter between him and 
 the Deity. That is a subject I will not pursue further, 
 but what I wish to point out is that his natural subtle- 
 ness of mind deserted him long before he came to the 
 more awful mysteries. Turn to any of the books in 
 which he handles historical questions relating to Rome, 
 or to the early Church, or to miraculous occurrences 
 which lack altogether such authority as may be deduced 
 from scriptural narrative. Newman accepts these latter 
 without any real evidence, without inquiry even. 
 
 Nothing could be more curious than the explanation 
 given by Mr. Mozley of the final step which took him 
 over to Rome. Everybody but Newman himself had 
 long seen that he was going ; that his search for the 
 via media had no better prospect of success than a quest 
 for the Holy Grail. But Mr. Mozley says that what 
 turned the scale was an article by Dr. Wiseman on the 
 Donatists ; a fact, if it be a fact, which would imply 
 that up to this time the moral scandals aifecting the 
 
4 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Church of. Rome had been the chief obstacle to his 
 going over. He, or if not he his friends, fully believed 
 that the effect of his going would be to re-establish the 
 dominion of the Pope over England ; one of the most 
 tremendous revolutions in human affairs that can be 
 conceived of. And whether this convulsion should or 
 should not occur was to be determined by the fact 
 whether a particular view of the opinions held by a 
 sect of the Church of North Africa in the fourth 
 century was or was not correct. 
 
 Neither such refinements as these, nor Newman's 
 great attainments, nor even his genius, explain his 
 ascendency over the English mind, nor his position in 
 the Oxford movement. He had, indeed, an intellectual 
 activity and range rare in any age. He read and 
 poured forth the results of his reading copiously ; per- 
 haps too copiously. His was, if not one of the most 
 learned, one of the most various minds of his time. He 
 always seemed, says Mr. Froude, better informed on 
 common topics of conversation than any one else who 
 was present. In theology he had great acquirements ; 
 in history also, and in many other matters, and he was 
 such a master of dialectic as Rome herself must admire ; 
 rich as she has ever been in professors of casuistry, and 
 of mental gymnastics of every kind. These things 
 and many more were part of Newman's equipment for 
 his life campaign. But they do not explain him, nor 
 his influence, nor the unique reputation he had in Eng- 
 land. The secret lay not in gifts or accomplishments, 
 mainly, but in character. 
 
 For those who did not know Newman, Froude's 
 account of him is the best. There is nothing in all 
 the long biographies published since his death which 
 sets forth the man so vividly as what Froude says of 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 6 
 
 him in his letters on the Oxford Counter-Reformation, 
 written in 1881, and published in the Fourth Series of 
 the Short Studies on Great Subjects. Froude, always 
 taking his own point of view, starts with a parallel 
 between Newman and Julius Csesar. The passage that 
 left the deepest impression on me when I first read it 
 was this : — 
 
 'In both there was an original force of character 
 which refused to be moulded by circumstances, which 
 was to make its own way, and become a power in the 
 world ; a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain 
 for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, 
 but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweet- 
 ness, singleness of heart and purpose. Both were 
 formed by nature to command others, both had the 
 faculty of attracting to themselves the passionate devo- 
 tion of their friends and followers, and in both cases, 
 too, perhaps the devotion was rather due to the per- 
 sonal ascendency of the leader than to the cause which 
 he represented.' 
 
 True indeed is this last suggestion, how true is best 
 indicated by the summary of his work which another 
 comrade has given : ' Several thousand have thus 
 accompanied Newman, not into the wilderness, but 
 into magnificent churches, and into well-furnished and 
 well-frequented drawing-rooms. But that multitude 
 which responded to the Gospel call on the shores of 
 Genesareth hold aloof and hears not the voice of a 
 shepherd.' And will long continue to hold aloof. Not 
 by the genius of Newman nor by the persuasiveness of 
 any man or set of men is this Protestant island ever 
 again to be Romanised. If that was the aim of New- 
 man's life, his life was a failure. But he is of that 
 select band whom no church can rightly claim ; whose 
 
6 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 life is not an ambition, but a lesson and a beautiful 
 memory. He might have gone over to Mohamme- 
 danism, it would have been the same ; and he would 
 have had just as good a chansce of carrying his country- 
 men with him. Three centuries of religious and 
 political freedom have made England what she is to- 
 day, and Newman himself could not have been the man 
 he was had he been bom under other influences, or 
 begun life as a subject of the Pope. 
 
 It is his literary work which has given him a greater 
 hold on the Protestant millions than all his theological 
 and ecclesiastical efforts. That he was a master of 
 English prose is conceded by those who dispute some 
 of his other titles to renown. He ranks, as a writer, 
 among the first half-dozen writers of the century. 
 Those who would put him at the head of this select 
 group have yet to make good their case. He leaves 
 behind him no great work, no single book that can be 
 called great, unless the Apologia be an exception. His 
 forty volumes are forty volumes of Miscellanies. Nearly 
 every one of them was written for some purpose of the 
 moment. The Apologia itself was an answer to Kings- 
 ley's unhappy question, ' What, then, does Dr. Newman 
 mean .'' ' It is the one by which to the general public 
 he is best known, and probably the only one which will, 
 for its own sake and on its own merits, have any lasting 
 fame or many generations of readers. It has something 
 of the fascination which Newman himself had. 
 
 It fascinates men who are not men of letters and who 
 do not care deeply for literature as such — who would 
 make her, and do make her, the handmaid of politics 
 or of statesmanship. One of the foremost men in 
 English public life told me only this week that he 
 never travelled without the Apologia. I thought it a 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 7 
 
 better testimony to the book and to its author than if 
 it had come from a devotee of pure literature. He found 
 in this autobiography something which took him away 
 from the commoner concerns of life ; lifted him into a 
 purer air, revealed to him, perhaps, the better part of 
 his own nature. But who is there that makes of any 
 other of Newman's writings his friend and companion ? 
 His sermons were read, are still read. They are, or 
 many of them are, admirable discourses ; but they are 
 sermons, and sermons they must remain. His ' Lead, 
 kindly light' is an immortal hymn. That and the 
 Apologia excepted, it were rash indeed to predict 
 immortality of the rest. I am almost tempted to call 
 him a great journalist, so fragmentary was his writing ; 
 so strictly did it answer the appeal, ' Give us day by 
 day our daily bread ' ; so accurately adapted was it to 
 the necessities of the particular occasion on which he 
 wrote. Whether he expressed himself in a column or 
 a volvime is accidental, not essential. His books did 
 the work, in a measure and within limits, which they 
 were meant to do when written. They affected the 
 thought and to some extent modified the lives of his 
 readers. None the less were they occasional, and none 
 the less are they likely to be ephemeral. That is why 
 it is so difficult to look upon Newman's place in Enghsh 
 literature as a very great one for all time to come. 
 
LORD GRANVILLE 
 
 [LONDON, APRIL 1891] 
 
 One more of the admirable figures belonging to the 
 past generation and not to this is gone, Lord Granville, 
 and of him, too, it has to be said that he leaves no 
 successor. Time was, at least in England, when genera- 
 tion succeeded to generation and the new was not 
 unlike the old. There was a spiritual heirship which 
 never failed. The line of descent was not interrupted. 
 The Amurath of to-day was the lineal offspring and 
 true copy of the Amurath who went before him. There 
 was no break, no real interruption, nothing like the 
 arrival of a new breed, or the development of a different 
 species. But who and where are the men of to-day 
 who stand to those of yesterday in the same relation 
 which those of yesterday bore to those of the day 
 before ? They do not exist. The new-comers are 
 excellent in their way ; they have considerable qualities ; 
 they will get on in the world and leave great names, 
 perhaps; but they none the less belong to a class apart. 
 They may even, if you insist upon it, be better ; never 
 the same. I go over again the familiar list of real 
 celebrities, men of real distinction of the last fifty or 
 sixty years, whether here in England or in America — 
 Kinglake, Hayward, Houghton, Browning, Charles 
 Sumner, Emerson, and many more — and I ask again, 
 
LORD GRANVILLE 9 
 
 who is there like them ? They were the product of a 
 time which has passed away. 
 
 Lord Granville, who is just dead, was one of the best 
 of this group, and one of the last. Do not think less 
 well of him if I say that he was the outgrowth of an 
 aristocratic society, and that in no other society would 
 he have been possible. I speak of him both in his 
 private and his public capacity ; as a person and as a 
 politician or statesman. The new Democracy of Great 
 Britain will do many things; some of them useful, 
 perhaps even great. One thing which it will not do is 
 to bring forth men like Lord Granville, or like any of 
 those who were of his type. The conditions of produc- 
 tion are not the same; the product will not be the 
 same. The patrician is passing out of politics ; if in- 
 deed he be not, as a class, already out. He survives in 
 the person of Lord Salisbury, and in other persons. 
 The individual has not altogether withered, but the 
 class from which he sprang has lost its grip. There is 
 a book, less well-known than it might be, on The 
 Governing Families of England. Its title is descrip- 
 tive of a state of things which exists no longer. The 
 governing families do not govern. They do not even 
 reign. 
 
 Lord Granville, to be sure, hardly belonged to these 
 great families, except by virtue of his descent on the 
 mother's side. She was the second daughter of the 
 fifth Duke of Devonshire, and so some of the blood of 
 the Cavendishes flowed in Lord Granville's veins. But 
 from his youth upward he enjoyed those advantages of 
 position which in this country are reckoned to give a 
 man who has them some twenty-five years' start of a 
 man who has them not. He began life at twenty as 
 attache to the British Embassy in Paris, where his 
 
10 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 father was Ambassador. Five years later, at twenty- 
 five, he was Under-Secretaiy for Foreign Affairs. The 
 present Under-Secretary, Sir James Fergusson, is fifty- 
 nine years old. Lord Granville has been something 
 ever since that time ; has been in ofiice, that is, when- 
 ever the Liberal party, or its pi-esent successor, the 
 Gladstonian party, has been in office. It is forty years 
 since he first became Foreign Minister, at the not too 
 mature age of thirty-six. 
 
 Perhaps among the many offices and dignities he 
 held, that which seemed least suitable to him was the 
 Lord Wardenship of the Cinque Ports. Longfellow's 
 fine poem has indissolubly associated that post with the 
 great Duke of Wellington, who held it nearly a quarter 
 of a century. It might be hard to name two men 
 between whom in many essential traits of character the 
 contrast was stronger than between Lord Granville and 
 the Duke of Wellington. Between them came Lord 
 Dalhousie and Lord Palmerston, yet stiU the transition 
 seems violent. The great soldier, the great Viceroy of 
 India, the great Prime Minister — the pre-eminent 
 Englishman of his time — what was there in common 
 between them and the smooth diplomatist who, ever 
 since 1866, has kept watch and ward at the gateway of 
 England .'' It sounds simpler to say he has been tenant 
 of Walmer Castle. But they had, all of these men, 
 this one thing at least in common. They all belonged 
 to that Aristocracy which the Democracy is now turn- 
 ing out of doors. 
 
 He has, of late years, led that little minority of the 
 House of Lords which now calls itself the Opposition. 
 It was almost as weak when the Liberals were in power 
 as it is now, and to lead this forlorn hope against Lord 
 Salisbury's big battalions required something better 
 
LORD GRANVILLE li 
 
 than mere courage. A battle, said Wellington in Spain, 
 is the last resource of a good general. On that maxim 
 Lord Granville acted. He avoided general engage- 
 ments, and so kept his little squad together. He was 
 an antagonist well suited to Lord Salisbury, whom it 
 would be difficult to surpass or to equal in his own 
 manner. What Lord Granville did was to meet him 
 in another manner; less serious, less in intellectual 
 force, far less in authority. He was adroit, good- 
 humoured, and excelled in handling grave matters with 
 freedom of mind, and with a certain jauntiness which 
 at least gave his followers the impression that no great 
 disaster was to be feared. 
 
 The Duke of Argyll has a phrase about Lord Gran- 
 ville to which the rare merit of originality may be 
 accorded. He is speaking of his friend's power of 
 uniting people or of keeping them united, and he calls 
 him 'a born amalgam.' Perhaps it is fairer to give 
 the whole sentence; it generally is. 'Amidst every 
 variety of composition, and in many narrow passages of 
 public policy. Lord Granville seemed a born amalgam.' 
 The testimony is the more striking from the Duke of 
 Argyll, because if an analogous expression had to be 
 sought for him, I fear he might be called a born dis- 
 solvent. The Duke is a very able and public-spirited 
 man, who has been found by his colleagues difficult 
 to work with. He does not readily take any point 
 of view but his own ; from that, he sees with intense 
 clearness. 
 
 This testimony from the Duke of Argyll is the more 
 welcome because it was felt that the House of Lords 
 eulogies on Lord Granville were somewhat dry and in- 
 adequate. The Duke meant to have been there, and 
 it is a pity he was not, because, of all living British 
 
12 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 orators, he has a stateliness and vigour of style which on 
 such an occasion would have served him well, and served 
 also the memory of the friend whom he deplores. But 
 he was ill, and he sends his speech, in the form of a 
 letter, to The Times, where it will be read by more 
 people than would have listened to the oration or read 
 the report of it. He had been Lord Granville's col- 
 league in every Liberal Administration since 1853 down 
 to 1881. The Duke is very generous. He refers to 
 the criticisms on his late colleague as Foreign Minister, 
 and, while admitting that his acts created ' expensive 
 liabilities for the future,' declares that Lord Granville 
 'never took a single step without full consultation with 
 his colleagues, and every one he did take rested, and 
 must continue to rest, upon the equal responsibility of 
 them all.' 
 
 It is generous, but it is also official. Of course it 
 is true theoretically. In fact, it is but partly true. 
 Neither Lord Granville nor any other Foreign Minister 
 ever consulted all his colleagues on all — seldom on 
 any — of the more momentous questions that had to be 
 dealt with. He consulted some. There is always a 
 Cabinet within a Cabinet. When the pinch comes, 
 and publicity comes, and Parliamentary discussion and 
 the comment of the press come, the whole Cabinet is, 
 as the Duke says, equally responsible. The men who 
 never heard a word about the despatch or decision 
 which may have led England into war or discreditable 
 evasion of war, bear their own share of the discredit or 
 disgrace or glory as the case may be. But I used the 
 word generous because the effect of this statement 
 is to relieve Mr. Gladstone, and the Duke of Argyll is 
 under no obligation to say a word which may relieve 
 Mr. Gladstone from any part of the public censure 
 
LORD GRANVILLE 13 
 
 which rests upon him in consequence of his handling 
 of Foreign or Colonial AiFairs while he was Prime 
 Minister. Egypt, South Africa, and the rest, all the 
 various events which during two at least of Mr. Glad- 
 stone's administrations brought obloquy upon England, 
 were the direct results of Mr. Gladstone's interference ; 
 or, since the word may imply more than I mean, I will 
 say interposition. The cringing to Russia, the cringing 
 to Prince Bismarck, the cringing to the Boers, the 
 general feebleness of English foreign policy from 1880 
 to 1885, are to be set down to Mr. Gladstone's account, 
 primarily and mainly. Nobody knows it better than 
 the Duke of Argyll, but he was during part of the time 
 one of Mr. Gladstone's colleagues, and he manfully 
 shoulders his share of the discredit. 
 
 Sometimes a hint towards a man's character may be 
 had from the nickname which his friends, or perhaps 
 his enemies, bestow on him. Sometimes, but not 
 always ; perhaps not often ; as those nicknames most 
 current in London of recent years would prove. Lord 
 Granville's was ' Pussy,' and in his case it was, to some 
 extent, descriptive. It was in common use at the 
 Foreign Office. That office is not usually supposed to 
 be in too great a hurry about the transaction of busi- 
 ness, nor to be consumed with zeal. But Lord Granville 
 took things so easily that even the Foreign Office was 
 sometimes disturbed. There used to be 17,000 des- 
 patches a year. Now there are 70,000. Lord Gran- 
 ville, says one of his eulogists, could deal with the 
 former number ; the latter was too much for him. The 
 increase seems to have occurred between his first and 
 his last tenure of the post. If he dealt with the 17,000, 
 he dealt with them at his leisure ; at his own time and 
 not to suit somebody else's impatience. In this respect 
 
14 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 he followed with fidelity the habits of the interesting 
 animal who lent him her name. Pussy is much too 
 dignified to hurry, and when she is indolent, knows 
 how to be indolent. So did Lord Granville. He 
 carried it too far at times, but the knowledge is invalu- 
 able. However, I suppose it was the softness and 
 flexible grace of his nature, and perhaps his sinuous 
 method of proceeding toward his aim, to which he 
 owed his sobriquet. Of course I use sinuous in no ill 
 sense. 
 
 I once saw Lord Granville do an act which, slight in 
 itself, I thought very characteristic of him. It was 
 when he was Foreign Minister, and Lady Granville was 
 giving a party at the Foreign Office. The host and 
 hostess were on the landing of the great staircase, 
 receiving their guests, who were streaming in by hun- 
 dreds. The Prince and Princess of Wales had not 
 arrived, and were likely to arrive at any moment ; and 
 such is the etiquette relating to royalty that Lord and 
 Lady Granville had to be on the alert, and must get to 
 the bottom of the staircase before the royalties had 
 passed up the corridor. In this state of expectation, 
 two guests were announced — let us say Mr. and Mrs. 
 Jones — two very humble units in the brilliant pro- 
 cession which was advancing up the staircase. In 
 another country than England it would hardly be 
 imderstood, but here a guest not known to the Foreign 
 Minister or his wife may easily enough pass both of 
 them in the crush without greeting or recognition. 
 Lord Granville knew Mr. Jones and shook hands with 
 him. Mrs. Jones, with a dozen other ladies equally 
 unremarked, was passing on. The first notes of ' God 
 Save the Queen,' proclaiming the approach of the 
 royalties, were heard just then. Lord GranviUe heard 
 
LORD GRANVILLE 15 
 
 them, but he stopped Mr. Jones, with that leisurely 
 manner which he had in such perfection, and said: 
 ' Pray introduce me to Mrs. Jones before you go up.' 
 And he found time to murmur a polite greeting in 
 Mrs. Jones's ear, while the music swelled and the Prince 
 and Princess drew near ; and he reached the hall to 
 receive them, with an infinitesimal fraction of a second 
 to spare. A slight thing, as I said, but the courtesy 
 of it, and the consideration for an unknown lady, and 
 the wish to give pleasure, and the perfect coolness 
 which enabled him to do what he wanted, when a man 
 less well-bred might have been flurried, were all traits 
 which help explain Lord Granville's attractiveness. 
 
 A man is likely to be praised, here as elsewhere in 
 the world, for qualities which he has and other men 
 have not, or have in less degree. It is with character 
 as with bric-k-brac — rarity is an important element 
 of value. So the English extol Lord Granville for 
 speaking fluent and accurate French, and for making 
 an after-dinner speech to which it was possible to listen 
 with pleasure and without too great a strain on the 
 digestion. It were hard to say which of these two 
 accomplishments is in this country the more rare. 
 Prince Bismarck, who regarded Lord Granville with 
 too much of that feeling which a huge mastiff may be 
 supposed to entertain toward the animal who lent a 
 familiar name to the English statesman, used to observe 
 in his cynical way that the late Lord Ampthill was the 
 only Englishman he ever knew who, with good French, 
 had at the same time veracity of nature. It will do no 
 harm if we bracket Lord Granville with Lord Ampthill, 
 and admit that each of them had a mastery of the 
 Gallic tongue, and that each could, as the Persians 
 thought needful for a good man, speak the truth. 
 
16 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 They were both straightforward, honourable, loyal men. 
 The after-dinner performances of Lord Granville were 
 almost unique ; so happy was he in phrase and with 
 such a gift of saying the right thing where most men 
 would have said the wrong one, or missed the mark 
 somehow or other. He used words nicely ; his sentences 
 were put together in a workman-like way ; they had 
 both flow and finish. 
 
 As for the substance of his public addresses and of his 
 private talk and of his conduct of affairs, I will say 
 briefly that in all these and all other matters he had 
 tact. And if it can be truthfully affirmed of a man 
 that he has tact, not much else need be said. Tact, 
 like charity, covers a multitude of sins, and also of 
 deficiencies, and is besides a virtue of the most positive 
 and admirable kind. Neither of sins nor of deficiencies 
 had Lord G-ranville any unusual share — he had probably 
 less than most men, and so his tact could all be em- 
 ployed in drawing veils over the sins and deficiencies of 
 other less gifted men. He almost never made a mistake 
 or an enemy. 
 
MR. BALFOUR 
 
 [LONDON, OCTOBER 1891] 
 
 If Mr. Balfour read the papers he might or might 
 not be gratified by the eulogies poured out on him 
 these last few days. But he does not read the papers. 
 That is one of his peculiarities, and one that may 
 account, in part, for the distinction of mind which he 
 preserves amid the confusions and ignoble influences of 
 political life. Emerson said : ' If we should give to the 
 great writers, to Milton, or Bacon, or Wordsworth, the 
 time we give to the newspapers — but who dare speak of 
 such a thing ? ' I know not whether Mr. Balfour is a 
 reader of Emerson, nor whether he ever spoke in public 
 of such a thing as his omission to read' those sources of 
 intelligence — and of other things — which we call news- 
 papers. But his view and Emerson's are in efiect the 
 same, and I imagine no public man of his time has 
 known so little of the contents of the press from day to 
 day as Mr. Balfour. Of course he loses something by 
 this abstention. It is conceivable that he may also 
 gain something. In most matters there is a balance of 
 loss and gain, and Mr. Balfour long since satisfied him- 
 self that for him there was more to be gained in other 
 quarters than in the daily press of England. Had his 
 lot been cast in America his view might have been 
 
18 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 different. That is a matter of speculation into which 
 we need not now enter. 
 
 But what I wish to point out is that Mr. Balfour's 
 power of not reading newspapers may be a key, or one 
 key, to a very original and interesting character. The 
 conception of public life without newspapers is indi- 
 vidual ; entirely peculiar to him, I imagine. I know 
 of nobody else in England who holds it or practises it. 
 The reading of newspapers may be likened to the use 
 of intoxicating liquors, of which some people take more 
 and some less ; hardly anybody abstains altogether. I 
 mean hardly anybody in public life in this country ; a 
 few fanatics excepted who are hardly in public life. So 
 engrossing are the occupations of those who have the 
 conduct of affairs that many find little time to devote 
 to newspapers. You may often hear a Minister who is 
 questioned in the House of Commons about some story 
 in a paper make answer that he has not seen it. He 
 reads, as it were, by proxy. The journals of the day 
 are read for him by one of his private secretaries, and 
 marked, or extracts from them laid before him ; extracts 
 which refer to his own department of business. 
 
 If you travel up to town by rail any morning you 
 will see how the Englishman of the period reads his 
 paper. He toils through it with a conscientiousness 
 which is admirable ; aU conscientiousness is admirable. 
 He reads only one, but he reads that thoroughly; 
 editorials and all, and the beholder wonders in what 
 condition his mind must be when the operation has 
 been accomplished, and the last word reached. Does 
 he digest this multifarious mass ? But such an inquiry 
 takes us too far. I want the newspaper reader of the 
 railway only as a contrast, and he would be just as 
 good a contrast if he had been caught in a club or at 
 
MR. BALFOUR 19 
 
 his own breakfast-table ; best of all perhaps at the 
 latter, where he absorbs all this printed wisdom into 
 his system, very much as he does his coffee and boiled 
 eggs. 
 
 An eminent Gladstonian, who will some day lead 
 the remains of the Gladstonian party, has a theory that 
 the influence of the English press is slight, and the 
 influence of the leading article, or editorial, slighter 
 stiU. He is a man who finds pleasure in paradox. But 
 if he really held the view which it amuses him to main- 
 tain in the presence of journalists, he might be asked 
 to consider the newspaper reader of the kind just men- 
 tioned ; him and his ways. If he studied him, he would 
 as soon think of saying that his coffee and boiled eggs 
 had no influence on his physical system, as that his 
 newspaper had no influence on his mental system. 
 Later in the day the same man pours out to his neigh- 
 bour what he has gathered ; each of them imparts 
 these same views to the other, and neither of them 
 suspects that his own or his friend's wisdom is not 
 entirely spontaneous and original. His thinking has 
 been done for him, and done so cleverly that he fully 
 believes he has done it himself. There is a story that 
 Southey was once describing to Mme. de Stael the dis- 
 tribution of his time : so many hours of reading before 
 breakfast on one subject, and so many hours after break- 
 fast on another subject, and so many hours writing, and 
 then more reading, till the whole day was gone. ' And 
 pray, Mr. Southey,' inquired the Frenchwoman, ' when 
 do you think ? ' The same question might be put to 
 the kind of reader I have been describing. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, it may be imagined, does his thinking 
 and much else during the hours when the Philistine is 
 having his done for him. Upon his first entry into 
 
20 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 public life his opponents derided his gifts as academic. 
 They thought him a man of books, and, what they 
 despised still more, a mere thinker, a man to whom 
 metaphysics were more than the machine ; another 
 John Stuart Mill, and a lesser. It was long before he 
 troubled himself to disturb this notion. He took no 
 very active part in the business of the House, or even 
 in the conduct of those affairs which the Fourth Party, 
 of which he was a kind of honorary member, made their 
 own. He was thought indifferent if not indolent. He 
 was in no hurry. He seemed to care little for the 
 reputation to be gained by debate. He spoke none too 
 often, and rather negligently. The observer in the 
 House, he who took note of novelties, might sometimes 
 hear a flashing sentence which fell from Mr. Balfour's 
 lips in a tone very unlike the deliverances of the average 
 debater ; a sentence equally incisive and illuminative. 
 The manner was gentle, easy, impassive ; as if the 
 object he had before him in speaking were hardly worth 
 an effort. This manner misled the House, which is 
 jealous, and tolerates nothing like neglect of its own 
 good opinion, and demands conformity to its own 
 standards. It changed very gradually. It was never 
 really flung off till Mr. Balfour became Irish Secretary, 
 and even then the manner changed less than the 
 man. 
 
 There was a point of likeness between him and a 
 very different personage, Lord Hartington. Both of 
 them wore the same armour ; neither cared one straw 
 for the shafts which the Irish brigade launched against 
 them. It used to be matter of complaint against Mr. 
 Balfour that he showed too plainly his contempt for 
 the calumnies and insults which the Irish showered 
 upon him as they had upon every previous Irish Secre- 
 
MR. BALFOUR 21 
 
 tary, and will upon his successor, and, I suppose, upon 
 all Irish Secretaries to the end of time. The Irish are 
 deficient in imagination, and slow to perceive that their 
 Saxon foe may really despise accusations which he and 
 they know to be the offspring of political animosity. 
 Presently, however, they discovered that they had met 
 their match in debate, and more than their match. If 
 the new Secretary had ever been indolent he had woke 
 up. Serious duties had fallen upon him, and in the 
 presence of serious duties the dilettante element in his 
 character vanished. The intellectual energy and the 
 courage which he had heretofore applied to the pro- 
 blems of the closet were now seen to be equally capable 
 for the market-place and the forum. Mr. Balfour 
 became the most formidable debater whom the Irish 
 had had to confront in that office. They had set 
 themselves to exasperate him, and they ended by being 
 themselves exasperated. They could not make him 
 angry, and they were angry because they could not. 
 The power of polite repartee was a greater power than 
 the mere abuse and vulgar invective which it was 
 employed to meet. A storm of insulting personalities 
 raged about him. The Irish had met nothing quite so 
 disconcerting before as this nonchalance of bearing, 
 united with the capacity of easy retort upon those who 
 beset him. Mr. Foster, Sir George Trevelyan, Sir 
 Michael Hicks-Beach, each in his own way, had proved 
 not perhaps unequal to the contest, but sensitive. It 
 was possible to inflict pain on all of them, and possible 
 for none of them wholly to conceal the pain he endured ; 
 heroically but visibly. Mr. Campbell Bannerman 
 puzzled them by his stoicism — the stoicism of a tough 
 nature on which mere taunts fell harmlessly — but his 
 attitude was purely defensive, and he had no talent for 
 
22 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 making his foes suffer otherwise than from the failure 
 of their attacks. 
 
 Mr. Balfour had only to be himself He is tall and 
 slim, with long legs, and his long legs were for awhile an 
 Irish grievance. The Pamellites — all the Irish were 
 then Pamellites — accused their owner of ' sprawling ' 
 on the Treasury Bench. The awful accusation has 
 again been heard since the late Secretary has become 
 First Lord of the Treasury. Dr. Holmes said that the 
 American was the only person who knew what to do 
 with the small of his back, and he sits on it. I am 
 afraid Mr. Balfour did as much, and when this feat 
 had been accomplished, his legs seemed to become 
 their own masters ; they wound themselves into knots 
 and unwound themselves, and assumed various angles 
 to the rest of his body, and each attitude was to the 
 angry Irishman on the watch for evil meanings an atti- 
 tude of oiFence. The worst of it was that these con- 
 tortions occurred while the attack on him from the 
 Irish benches was hottest, and while every nerve and 
 sinew in his body, legs included, ought to have been 
 strained and tense to meet the storm. What business 
 had an Irish Secretary's lower limbs to be amusing 
 themselves while the Irish patriot was proving the 
 Irish Secretary to be a monster of cruelty and iniquity .'' 
 No doubt it was provoking. It was more provoking 
 still when the same legs were called on to support the 
 weight — no very great weight — of their rightful master; 
 when he was, in House of Commons phrase, on them, 
 and meeting the hurricanes and whirlwinds of Pamellite 
 rhetoric with a calmness and a polished serenity of de- 
 portment which did more than anything else to con- 
 vince the patriotic and anguished Irish soul that the 
 hurricanes and whirlwinds had been got up in vain. If 
 
MR. BALFOUR 23 
 
 I may be forgiven for saying so, there was in the treat- 
 ment which both Mr. Balfour and Mr. Parnell accorded 
 to the representatives of Ireland something equally 
 hateful to these representatives. Mr. Parnell was 
 their superior, and there is, on the whole, nothing which 
 the inferior soul so much resents as superiority. 
 
 II 
 
 If there be in fact — it is what the Irish are for ever 
 alleging against him — anything cynical or contemptu- 
 ous in Mr. Balfour, it is, I think, intellectual and not 
 emotional or supercilious. He has a clear intelligence, 
 and with it a certain impatience of that sort of intelli- 
 gence which is less clear than his own. He treated Mr. 
 Parnell with respect — no question about the clearness 
 of his intelligence or that he was a man who, so far as 
 mental gifts and force of character went, was entitled 
 to respect. He treated the rest of the Irish with 
 civility. This latter attitude did not prevent his saying 
 many plain things to them. They were said within the 
 strictest limits of decorum, and were for that reason 
 the more deadly. It is a secret which none of the Irish 
 except Mr. Parnell has discovered. You might say of 
 them, or an Irishman might, as Grattan said of Corry : 
 ' There is scarce a word they utter which is not a viola- 
 tion of the privileges of the House.' The passage is 
 interesting enough to continue : — 
 
 ' But I did not call him to order. Why ? Because 
 the limited talents of some men render it impossible for 
 them to be severe without being unparliamentary, but 
 before I sit down I shall show him how to be severe 
 and Parliamentary at the same time.' 
 
 It is not quite in Mr. Balfour's manner to announce 
 
24 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 beforehand that he is going to crush an enemy ; he is 
 not Irish, he is Scotch. But Grattan's menace is one 
 which Mr. Balfour has often fulfilled. He is a debater 
 who answers to the description of Fox, probably the 
 greatest debater the House ever saw, — he goes out in 
 all weathers. This is not comparing him to Fox ; 
 comparisons may almost always be avoided, and are 
 almost always misleading. Nor is it much of a compli- 
 ment to say of any man that he reminds us of some 
 other man. It is enough if he reminds us of himself, if 
 he be individual, genuine, and a real force. 
 
 Five years ago Mr. Balfour was, like Napoleon Third, 
 the nephew of his uncle. To-day it is not quite clear 
 whether the uncle or the nephew be the stronger man. 
 Lord Salisbury is sixty- one. Prime Minister, Foreign 
 Minister, the chief of a great party. Mr. Balfour is 
 but forty-three, and his public career may be said to 
 date from his acceptance of the Irish Secretaryship. 
 But he is to-day leader of the assembly which, little as 
 Lord Salisbury likes it, is the real centre of political 
 authority in this country. He has made himself in 
 these few years what he is — one of the first three 
 debaters in the House. He has made himself master 
 of the art not only of debate but of legislation. His 
 conduct of the Land Purchase Bill was probably the 
 most skilful among some similar exploits because the 
 Land Purchase Bill was one of the most difficult mea- 
 sures ever submitted to the House, and because Mr. 
 Balfour succeeded where Mr. Gladstone had failed. 
 
 His education as a debater and legislator and master 
 of Parliamentary strategy and tactics had to be carried 
 on while he was governing Ireland, and governing it 
 with a success for which there is no precedent in these 
 days. His duties in Dublin were more difficult than 
 
MR. BALFOUR 25 
 
 his duties in Westminster. He had to meet in Ireland 
 the most powerful politico-agrarian organisation of 
 modern times ; to deal with a conspiracy, criminal in 
 part and dependent on crime, to which a great portion 
 of the Irish people were parties. He had to meet in 
 the House of Commons one of the two or three greatest 
 Parliamentary leaders of this century : the rival of Peel 
 and of Disraeli. He had been Mr. Gladstone's pupil and 
 friend. Like everybody who comes in personal contact 
 with that commanding nature, he had felt its influence 
 deeply. People said he would never shake it off, just 
 as Sir Staflford Northcote never shook it oS. But Mr. 
 Balfour is made of sterner stuff than the amiable Devon- 
 shire baronet. He broke with Mr. Gladstone com- 
 pletely. He emancipated his mind from the servitude 
 in which the elder statesman would have kept it. He 
 drew the necessary distinction between the Gladstone 
 of other days, whom we all honoured and still honour, 
 and the Gladstone who took the plunge of 1886, and 
 whose moral nature seemed from that moment to suffer 
 a transformation not less extraordinary than that of his 
 political principles. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, like others, had to choose between an 
 old friendship and the obligations of public duty. He 
 chose with no more hesitation than any man of a 
 generous nature must feel when such an alternative is 
 put before him. The obligation of public duty was 
 paramount ; it is a tradition of English statesmanship 
 that it should be paramount. He exposed Mr. Glad- 
 stone's perversions and prevarications of Irish affairs. 
 His speeches on Mitchelstown and the even more 
 melancholy Dopping incident, and Mr. Balfour's replies 
 to them, may serve as samples. Not since Disraeli 
 quitted the House of Commons had Mr. Gladstone 
 
26 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 been met in this spirit or with this firmness. He hardly 
 knew what to make of it. He assumed towards his old 
 friend that air of pained regret for his unaccountable 
 errors which has often proved so effective. But in 
 this case it was not effective. Fact and argument 
 were too much for rhetoric ; the truth prevailed : the 
 victory in debate rested with the younger man, and 
 Mr. Gladstone changed his methods. 
 
 The Gladstonian idolaters, in the press and else- 
 where, told you in those days that Mr. Balfour ' in- 
 sulted ' their god. I heard the same thing said of Mr. 
 Bright, when Mr. Bright refused to follow his lifelong 
 friend and leader down the steep grade that led to the 
 Parnellite camp. They meant, in each case, the same 
 thing. It was an ' insult ' to Mr. Gladstone to cling to 
 an opinion or a policy after he had abandoned it. It 
 was an insult to prove him in the wrong ; to state facts 
 when he took refuge in fancies ; to rely on evidence 
 rather than on the accuracy of his emotions. All these 
 offences Mr. Balfour committed ; and Mr. Bright be- 
 fore him. To both of them the necessity of breaking 
 with a friend was distressing, and to both of them 
 loyalty to truth and to reason and to the Union were 
 more than sentiment and affection. 
 
 Mr. Balfour gained a hold at the same time on the 
 people. It may be doubted whether he greatly cared 
 to. His mind is not of that order which requires the 
 confirmation of a popular majority for the verification 
 of truth. He would not, I think, put the Sermon on 
 the Mount to vote, either in the House of Commons 
 or before the constituencies. He has convictions which 
 a general election would not upset ; beliefs which are 
 not at the disposal of a political caucus. He would 
 dare to say an unpopular thing, or to do one. The 
 
MR. BALFOUR 27 
 
 outcry against his Irish policy, whether in Ireland or 
 England, never moved him. He had studied the situa- 
 tion ; he had made up his mind ; he had adopted a 
 policy. If the country and the House agreed with him 
 and supported him, well and good. He rejoiced in the 
 support for the sake of the policy he thought wise, and 
 of the country to which it would restore peace. If not, 
 if his majority failed him, he would hand over his 
 authority to another. But in no circumstances can I 
 conceive Mr. Balfour undergoing a conversion because 
 a majority was not to be had at any other price. Never 
 would he have appealed to the people of England at 
 one election to give him a majority to maintain the 
 Union and to deal with Ireland independently of the 
 Irish, and when it had been refused have discovered that 
 Ireland could only be dealt with dependently upon the 
 Irish, and by disunion. 
 
 Nevertheless — or may it have been because he would 
 neither flatter them nor surrender to them ? — the people 
 of England presently began to respect this young man, 
 and to like him. He succeeded to that inheritance of 
 sympathetic goodwill which a former colleague had 
 flung away. He became a popular favourite without 
 ever making an appeal to popular passion or prejudice 
 or a single concession to popular caprice. It was 
 creditable both to the people and to him. Mr. Bryce 
 notes it as a trait of the American people that they 
 expect conformity, and neither understand nor respect 
 independence, nor tolerate a statesman or writer who 
 refuses to obey their wish. I do not believe it. I 
 believe the exact contrary. I think it far more likely 
 to be true of England than of America, because the 
 political training and general intelligence of the new 
 majority in England are so far inferior to the 
 
28 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 American standard. Mr. Balfour's career shows that it 
 is not true, or not always true, here. More than that, 
 he is hy birth, and by nature, what is called an aristo- 
 crat, and not a democrat. In tastes and in feelings as 
 well as in opinion and in his political ideas, he is remote 
 from any conceivable democratic view. But even this 
 remoteness and this spirit of self-reliance do not dimi- 
 nish the regard in which he is held. He attracts a 
 greater audience than any other of his party to any 
 platform from which he speaks. He speaks with tact 
 and good sense and good breeding, and knows how to 
 reach other minds. 
 
 When the Tories of Birmingham revolted against 
 the edict of the Carlton Club which condemned them 
 to accept a Liberal Unionist candidate, the situation 
 was perhaps the most perilous, from a party point of 
 view, which has occurred since the Unionists have been 
 in power. The local managers simply refused to be 
 bound by the solemn compact between their leaders and 
 the Liberal Unionists. They were determined to re- 
 claim that share in the Parliamentary representation of 
 Birmingham to which their numbers entitled them. 
 As so often happens with the local ' bosses,' they shut 
 their eyes to all consideration of general policy. For 
 a moment, it seemed as if the alliance between Tories 
 and Liberal Unionists might be endangered by this 
 stubbornness in Birmingham, — an alliance on which 
 depended not merely the existence of their Government 
 but the existence of the Union. Mr. Balfour was 
 asked to go down and talk to these rebellious and 
 stiff-necked gentlemen of the Midlands. He went. 
 He made them a short speech, — short, but so full of 
 sweetness and light, so persuasive, so convincing, that 
 they were completely won over. They renounced their 
 
MR. BALFOUR 29 
 
 claims. They submitted themselves to the authority 
 of the Carlton and of the Cabinet. They did what 
 they were wanted to do. The breach was healed ; the 
 peril averted. It was said at the time, and I think 
 truly said, that nobody but Mr. Balfour could have 
 wrought this miracle. Wrought it was, at any rate, 
 and by him, and it is a good illustration of the singular 
 fascination he exercises upon popular bodies as well as 
 upon the House of Commons and upon individuals. 
 
 Ill 
 
 [LONDON, MAY 1 894] 
 
 They who did not hear and do not read Mr. Balfour 
 on Monday on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, and 
 who yet care to know what sort of a speech he made, 
 may well be puzzled by the conflicting opinions of the 
 papers. ' One of the most brilliant, searching, and 
 impressive speeches that he has ever delivered in the 
 House of Commons,' says the chief Unionist authority. 
 Then if you turn to the party organ of Liberalism you 
 read : ' His speech on the first reading of the Welsh 
 Church Bill was one of the tamest and the most per- 
 functory he has ever delivered in the House of Commons.' 
 This you may think nothing but the natural antagonism 
 of friend and foe. But it is not quite that. There is 
 a streak of fairness even in politics, if you know where 
 to look for it. Turn to another Liberal organ and 
 you will find this speech described as expert, unequal, 
 but with intervals of eloquence and force, and its 
 tone almost consistently good. Take a third Liberal 
 authority, and you will be assured that Mr. Balfour 
 made the best of a bad case. A fourth Liberal thinks 
 nothing could have been more admirably attuned than 
 
30 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 the opening, that it was in the best Gladstonian par- 
 liamentary style, and that it 'had that elevation of 
 tone which Mr. Balfour perhaps recalls to one more 
 than any other speaker left in the House.' 
 
 As to Mr. Balfour, it may be said on the evidence of 
 the best judges on both sides of the House of Commons, 
 that he is rapidly becoming a very great member of 
 Parliament indeed. I have heard from a dozen sources 
 a remark to the effect that Mr. Gladstone's mantle has 
 descended upon him and not upon any of those who sat 
 by the great Liberal's side. Mr. Balfour inherits the 
 great traditions which to Mr. Gladstone were always 
 precious ; traditions from which he never departed till 
 late in life, and seldom then. He has something of the 
 dignity, the elevation of tone, the courtesy, the grand 
 manner, which distinguished Mr. Gladstone. It might 
 be hard to say who else on the floor of the House has 
 them. The Speaker has, and he has also the authority 
 which, in a measure, belongs to his office but which is 
 never really effective unless it be personal also. 
 
 On one ever-memorable occasion Mr. Peel showed 
 how full the measure of it was, when Mr. Gladstone 
 totally failed to exert his as Leader of the House — I 
 mean the night of the riot last year. I always thought, 
 and I still think, that Mr. Gladstone knew himself to 
 be responsible for that deplorable explosion of pent-up 
 passions — passions which he, perhaps unwittingly at 
 first and beyond question in the end regretfully, had 
 provoked. So depressing was the effect upon himself 
 that when the Speaker called upon him to give an 
 account of what had happened, he could not. During 
 the tumult, the din of battle, the exchange of blows, 
 the old man had sat with a white, scared face, shrink- 
 ing from the reality which was before him. He had 
 
MR. BALFOUR 31 
 
 made no effort to quell the riot. It is no reproach to 
 an old man past eighty that he had not. But neither 
 had Mr. Balfour, nor was Mr. Balfour, when asked by 
 the Speaker for his statement, in much better condition 
 to give it than Mr. Gladstone. It was not a question 
 mainly of age, but of temperament, and both men 
 seemed to feel the same abhorrence of a violent scene, 
 and the same incapacity to deal with it or to accept 
 any part, even for good, in such a transaction. Whereas 
 the mere return of the Speaker to the chair, his mere 
 presence, his look, and the sound of his magnificent 
 voice, every tone instinct with command, had sufficed 
 to restore order. I had no intention of recurring to 
 this painful episode, but it throws light on the analogies 
 between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Balfour. Neither of 
 them was, or is, an ideal leader, because both of them 
 possess in a high degree certain qualities which fit 
 them for other things than the leadership of an assembly 
 which is often turbulent and often, like Martha, anxious 
 about many things which are not vital nor of high 
 import. 
 
 Mr. Balfour's growth as leader and as debater has 
 been retarded much more by his qualities than by his 
 defects. It was long before he could persuade himself 
 to take politics very seriously ; and I am certain that 
 nobody else could have persuaded him to do it. The 
 two things he had most in common with Mr. Gladstone 
 were sweetness of nature and intellectuality. Mr, 
 Gladstone was put so early to political work that the 
 more delicate and tender traits of his character took on 
 a certain robustness which was perhaps in the begin- 
 ning foreign to him. The gold was alloyed to make 
 it more fit for the mechanical arts of public life. Mr. 
 Balfour entered politics as an amateur, and an amateur 
 
32 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 he long remained. He served no regular apprentice- 
 ship. His membership of the Fourth Party left him 
 full leisure for the pursuits he preferred. As a states- 
 man, Ireland taught him his fullest if not his first 
 lesson. To govern that country, and to govern it 
 firmly and well, is no holiday task, nor can any man 
 emerge from a four years' experience of rule at Dublin 
 Castle without a feeling that he has been tried as by 
 fire. If he is not consumed he comes out the stronger. 
 It adds temper to the steel, but there must be 
 steel. 
 
 Then, in the true English fashion, having thoroughly 
 learned the high and difficult business of administration 
 and of government, Mr. Balfour was summoned to a 
 post requiring totally different qualifications. Upon 
 the death of Mr. W. H. Smith, he was made leader of 
 the House of Commons. Perhaps you remember with 
 what eager glee, during the first few weeks and even 
 months, the Gladstonian organs predicted and pro- 
 claimed his failure. He made various mistakes. He 
 provoked hostilities among his own followers, some of 
 whom talked of mutiny and of deposing their chief. 
 Mr. Balfour's way of meeting the revolt was entirely 
 characteristic. ' By all means,' he said, ' I shall be only 
 too delighted if you will ; and if you disown my 
 authority I shall go to-morrow.' The rebels collapsed. 
 Quite slowly, as if there were always leisure and always 
 time enough for everything, he learnt his business. The 
 only real obstacle to his success was his easy indifference. 
 He had other interests in life than the second readinar 
 of a stupid bill, or the discipline of a party which, if 
 not stupid, was, in Mill's time, as he told us, the 
 stupider. He came down to the House late and went 
 away early. Not on those terms can this zealous and 
 
MR. BALFOUR 33 
 
 exacting body be controlled. I imagine that Mr. 
 Balfour went through a struggle with himself as he did 
 with the House. He had to choose whether he would 
 lead or not. He came to see clearly what sacrifices 
 leadership involves, and what Mr. Disraeli meant when 
 he said that the secret of leading the House of Commons 
 is to be always there. It is a hard trial and a hard 
 life, physically and mentally. But Mr. Balfour resolved 
 to accept the conditions, and to apply himself to the 
 duties of the post he had accepted as he would to a 
 problem in metaphysics. From that moment his suc- 
 cess was secure, — secure but very far from complete. 
 It is not complete yet. He is growing. If anybody 
 thinks that a criticism, perhaps he will recall the de- 
 finition of wisdom as ' to grow old learning,' and 
 perhaps he will remember that Mr. Gladstone once 
 accepted it as a description of his own life. 
 
 As matters now stand, Mr. Balfour has but one rival 
 in the House as a debater, and if you look at oratory 
 as something more than a provision for the contentious 
 necessities of the moment, he has none. Alone he 
 touches the note which rang from the silver trumpet 
 that was Mr. Gladstone's. Alone he breathes the 
 upper air. Alone he treads with a sure foot the heights 
 which Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone — and in our 
 time no other — trod before him. He is not yet, and 
 he probably may never be, the equal of either, but he is 
 of kin to both. He has not Bright's noble simplicity. 
 He has not Mr. Gladstone's infinite variety, nor his 
 august personality. But he has the intellectual in- 
 tegrity of the one, and the power which the other 
 possessed in a still higher degree, of broadening the 
 range of debate and lifting it into a purer region. 
 
 He is capable, and I know not who else is capable, of 
 c 
 
34 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 the heroic strain in the commonly rather prosaic affairs 
 which a Legislature has to deal with. In a few sen- 
 tences near the end of the Welsh speech there is a tone 
 which has hardly been heard in the House since death 
 closed the lips of Mr. Bright. He said : ' I cannot say 
 how this battle of disestablishment, of which the first 
 guns were fired on Thursday night, will end. I dare 
 not venture to prophesy, for I do not know. But this 
 I will say, that this is one of those causes in which, if 
 we are to be defeated, I would rather perish with the 
 side that loses than triumph with the side which is 
 victorious.' That is what I mean by the heroic, which 
 I might equally well cite as an example of spiritual 
 exaltation. It is followed almost at once by the 
 philosophical estimate, never wanting from any speech 
 on a subject on which Mr. Balfour really feels deeply : 
 
 ' I suppose we all attempt to gauge and estimate the 
 forces which are silently at work moulding the future of 
 society. I believe that those forces are on our side. 
 (Hear, hear !) I believe now that the prospects of the 
 Church Establishment, even in the face of this bill, are far 
 brighter than they were a generation ago. I think a new 
 spirit is springing up. The democracy, which is slowly 
 moulding for good or for evil the creed on which it will 
 attempt to guide the destinies of this country, is not, I 
 think, in harmony with the kind of speeches to which we 
 have listened to-night or with the idea which lies behind 
 such speeches. I believe the democracy hold, as I hold, 
 that for the welfare of the community this standing wit- 
 ness to great spiritual forces in every parish of the country 
 is a vital necessity, and that they will not allow the 
 machinery by which these great objects are to be carried 
 out to be impaired, either to satisfy the greed of a too 
 economical ratepayer or to satisfy the envy of rival Non- 
 comformist sects,' 
 
MR. BALFOUR 35 
 
 There are in this same speech other passages which 
 reveal the real Balfour very clearly, but I will make no 
 more quotations. These are enough to indicate that 
 the Leader of the Opposition understands well how to 
 appeal to the whole House, and that there are subjects 
 of which the interest is to him immensely greater than 
 the interest of politics. 
 
 Feb. 1895. — Mr. Balfour's reappearance as a theo- 
 logian, long expected though it has been, stirs no little 
 interest among not theologians only, but among philo- 
 sophers, men of science, and men of the world. The 
 newspapers, which seldom seek to handle such matters 
 editorially, discuss him with animation, if not always 
 with a very clear view of what he is aiming at. They 
 discuss him in certain quarters, also, with a feeling of 
 dismay, due to their perception of the fact that the 
 Conservative leader is in the high sense of the word 
 a sceptic ; such a sceptic, that is, as Montaigne was, 
 as Pascal was, and perhaps, nearest of all, as Newman 
 was. His spirit, where it is not sceptical, is essentially 
 scientific. Perhaps there is not so very much diffei-ence 
 between the two. His book is entitled The Founda- 
 tion of Belief. At first sight, or as a first impression, 
 he may seem rather to unsettle the foundations than to 
 strengthen them. That will not, I think, be found the 
 ultimate effect of this treatise. It might almost be 
 described as a new religion on the ruins of the new 
 philosophy. That would come as near the truth as 
 most epigrams do. But the book cannot be dismissed 
 in an epigram, and of course cannot be reviewed by 
 cable. I do not attempt an account of it. I wish only 
 to remark that it cannot be put aside, either by meta- 
 physicians or theologians. It is, from whatever point 
 
36 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 of view you look at it, a contribution to the thought of 
 the time on the most important and difficult problems 
 of all time. 
 
 Mr. Balfour has long been a philosophical student. 
 He knows the literature of his subject. Long before 
 he made a name in politics or led a party or graduated 
 as a statesman, he was known to his friends and to a 
 few readers of unusual books as an acute and daring 
 thinker, trained in a severe school of dialectic. His- 
 torically and ethically he is master of his subject, and 
 as a logician he has not many superiors in this or other 
 fields. Thus equipped, he has plunged into what may 
 still be called the conflict between religion and science. 
 He attacks Rationalism and Naturalism, of which he 
 deems an ethical Nihilism the inevitable outcome. He 
 rejects the philosophy of the senses. He declares the 
 assumption of the existence of a God more defensible 
 on scientific grounds than the proposition of science that 
 there is an independent material world. Nevertheless, 
 he shrinks throughout from anything like a definite 
 statement of belief. He offers only a provisional solu- 
 tion of existing difficulties. Once more he affirms, as 
 all theologians have had to affirm, the necessity of faith, 
 which he curiously qualifies as a faith not in excess of 
 reason, as if reason had anything to do with that 
 matter. The synthesis of which he is in search, a 
 synthesis in which scientific thought and religious 
 thought may find a common denominator, is not to be 
 had without sacrifices on both sides. 
 
 Some of the admissions and assertions Mr. Balfour 
 makes must leave the orthodox aghast. Most certainly 
 they will not accept his processes, hardly even his con- 
 clusions, nor yet his definition of the knowable and 
 unknowable, and still less his adoption of Hume's 
 
MR. BALFOUR 37 
 
 arguments. Hume, nevertheless, and his own mind, led 
 him to a conclusion remote from Hume's, and though 
 he will not base a conclusion on the old argument from 
 design, which Hume refuted once for all, he reaches in 
 the end the theory that the origin of the world must 
 be sought in the presupposition of a rational being. 
 On that the new religion is to rest, and the new religion 
 on such a basis is not so very far off from the old, 
 except that it will contain a good deal less of dog- 
 matic theology and much more of spiritual insight, as 
 well as of that unflinching effort toward truth to 
 which the intellect and reason have more to say than 
 mere unaided faith. As a whole, Mr. Balfour's book 
 will be thought an attempt to make a stand against 
 Agnosticism, and so it is; but Agnosticism has none the 
 less a firmer hold on his mind than he himself is aware 
 of, and the ultimate effect of his speculations may 
 supply a foundation for scepticism rather than a 
 foundation for belief. 
 
MR. PARNELL 
 
 [LONDON, OCTOBER 1891] 
 
 SiNGiiLAK indeed is the decree of destiny which on the 
 same day struck down two of the three foremost men 
 in the House of Commons. Mr. W. H. Smith was its 
 actual leader, Mr. Parnell had proved himself its master; 
 and whatever may be said of his position at the moment 
 of his death, the record of the last ten years cannot be 
 blotted out, and that record may almost be summed up 
 in a sentence. This one man, an Irishman, at first 
 without a following, and at the last with only a minor- 
 ity of one-eighth of the whole body, set himself to 
 defy, to degrade, and to overmaster the most ancient 
 and powerful and dignified legislative body in the 
 world. And he succeeded. He forced Parliament to 
 tolerate him, to listen to him, to give up its time to do 
 the work he wanted done, to register his policy in many 
 and many an Act, to treat with him as an equal, to 
 accept whatever humiliation he chose to put upon this 
 august assembly, and finally almost to pass a bill for 
 the disunion of the Kingdom it exists to protect. He 
 entered in 1881 upon a struggle with the most powerful 
 party leader of modern times, who had not only a party, 
 but the whole force of English public opinion behind 
 him in his effort to maintain the union of these king- 
 doms and to put down rebellion. In five years he had 
 
MR, PARNELL 39 
 
 beaten him, forced him to capitulate, imposed his own 
 policy upon him, imposed himself upon him, and become 
 his leader and the real leader of what was left of a 
 proud party with a splendid history. He had been, 
 during this same period and after, the true author of 
 the agrarian and social revolution which has transformed 
 the Ireland of 1880 into the Ireland of to-day. There 
 could not be a better measure of this man's transcendant 
 ability than the diiference between the two. 
 
 It would be diificult to name any ruler or leader in 
 history who has accomplished so much with such slender 
 means. In the first place, it is Mr. Parnell's work, and his 
 alone. He has had no colleagues. He has had domestics. 
 There were among the eighty-five Irish Members half a 
 dozen who have shown signs of capacity for particular 
 kinds of work, agitators, rhetoricians, smart attorneys, 
 and the like, but not one with one single gift of leader- 
 ship or of statesmanship, Mr. Pamell alone excepted. 
 He treated them like domestics. He appointed them 
 and removed them and paid them. They were put to 
 whatever work he thought useful. They did what they 
 were told. None of them were in his confidence. They 
 resented it, but submitted. I'liey were aware of his 
 superiority. When their chance came, they turned on 
 him. 
 
 What, then, was his mental and moral equipment ? 
 The second will not detain us long. His morals con- 
 sisted in not having any. To him scruples of conscience 
 were so many political obstacles, and he swept them 
 away. One of those Liberals whom force of circum- 
 stances made his ally, himself a man who could on 
 occasion override punctilios, was wont to describe 
 Mr. Parnell as a man sans fol ni hi. He stuck at 
 nothing. He would tell the truth when the truth 
 
40 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 was useful, and the other thing when that was useful. 
 He was a master of intrigue and of all the baser arts 
 of public life. For human nature he had a sovereign 
 contempt, and he believed that men were to be ruled 
 by appeals to what is worst in them ; and to that he 
 appealed accordingly. The whole Home Rule agita- 
 tion was based on that — the appeal, primarily, to 
 selfishness, to covetousness, to what Mr. Parnell thought 
 the natural desire of everybody to possess what did not 
 belong to him. He succeeded. What other test could 
 any political leader desire ? He conferred in this 
 way great material advantage upon great bodies of 
 his countrymen, and he demoralised and debauched 
 the Irish conscience. Is any material or political ad- 
 vantage great enough to repay a nation for its 
 moral deterioration ? When Mr. Parnell's services to 
 Ireland are summed up, that, too, is a question which 
 will have to be considered. 
 
 Probably Mr. Parnell had no liking for crime, but 
 neither had he any detestation of the criminal. If out- 
 rages in Ireland and dynamite in London helped on 
 the cause of Irish independence, he welcomed the aid 
 of the men who employed either or both. The Phoenix 
 Park murders seem to have shocked him. To all other 
 crimes he showed a callous indifference, and some of 
 his latest public efforts were in behalf of the unhanged 
 scoundrels who tried to blow up London and assas- 
 sinate Members of Parliament by wholesale. He will 
 always be remembered as an Irish patriot. Yet the 
 supreme passion of his life was not so much love of 
 Ireland as hatred of England. It is not likely that 
 he ever deluded himself as to the injury Home Rule 
 would do England. He wanted Home Rule, and much 
 more than Home Rule, for Ireland's sake, and wanted 
 
MR. PARNELL 41 
 
 it all the more because it would impair English prestige 
 and disintegrate the English Empire. 
 
 His abilities are best judged by his work. When 
 you reckon up what Mr. Parnell has done, you have 
 reckoned up the man. His natural aptitudes for public 
 life seemed few; of the showier kind he had almost 
 none. He was no orator, but as he had to speak he 
 taught himself the art of saying with perfect precision 
 and perfect clearness what he wished to convey to his 
 audience. He could calculate political forces with a 
 precision not less remarkable. His study of politics 
 was purely scientific. In his long contest with the 
 House he respected nothing which other men respected. 
 He used the Irish peasants as Napoleon used the 
 French peasants, and the conscription was hardly a 
 more terrible instrument than the evictions which Mr. 
 Parnell compelled his confiding countrymen to undergo. 
 Mr. Gladstone said they were sentences of death. If 
 they were, Mr. Parnell pronounced them. 
 
 If his aim was not rebellion, it was revolution, and 
 he announced his motto in his earliest speech : ' All 
 or any means ' to compass his ends. If he did not join 
 the Physical Force party, it was because he thought it 
 easier to destroy the Constitution from within than 
 from without. It was his plan to make himself master 
 of the English citadel and to turn their own guns 
 against the Saxons ; for he declared that he would 
 make the Government of Ireland impossible, and so 
 he did, till Mr. Balfour appeared on the scene. He 
 first conceived, or first put in practice on a great scale, 
 the idea of making the Irish abroad support the Irish 
 war at home. He opposed the Plan of Campaign, not 
 because it was dishonest and immoral, but because he 
 saw clearly that it must fail. 
 
42 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Every one of these incidents in his history is an 
 indication of his intellectual character. He could 
 organise, he could administer, he could govern. Had 
 he lived, he was the best argument for Home Rule. 
 The man who ruled Ireland without the machinery of 
 government, and against the Government, who held it 
 for so many years in the hollow of his hand, could 
 surely have ruled it with law and authority on his 
 side. Or, rather, he could have ruled one Ireland. 
 Whether he could have ruled the other, with wealth, 
 intelligence, energy, and most of the forces which are 
 most potent in life against him, is another question. 
 It is doubtful whether he had any genius for war or 
 for armed conflict. 
 
 Mr. Parnell's success in proving the Pigott letters 
 forgeries was complete enough to blind those who 
 wished to be blinded to the gravity of the judgment 
 against him on other points. The judgment of this 
 tribunal will, nevertheless, stand, and Mr. Parnell must 
 go down to posterity convicted of complicity in a 
 criminal conspiracy. He was, moreover, convicted out 
 of his own mouth of duplicity, of wilfully deceiving the 
 House of Commons by stating what he knew to be un- 
 true. But the policy of the Liberal party at that time 
 required that Mr. Parnell should be whitewashed, just 
 as it has since required that he should be blackened. 
 Each operation was performed with equal thorough- 
 ness and equal lack of scruple. The iniquities of the 
 Land League were condoned or condemned, according 
 to political exigencies. So were the iniquities of the 
 Divorce Court. Mr. Parnell's reputation in England 
 became the plaything of party. The whole history — 
 the inside history — of the proceedings before the Special 
 Commission will never be known, nor the full extent 
 
MR. PARNELL 43 
 
 of the debt of Mr. Parnell to Mr. George Lewis. That 
 debt was not Mr. Parneirs only, for at that time he 
 was identified with the Gladstonian party, and it is 
 not too much to say that the fortunes of that singular 
 coahtion depended on Mr. Lewis's professional skill. 
 He pulled that case out of the fire. He it was who 
 detected Pigott as the forger, he who put together 
 that most remarkable fabric of proof which Sir Charles 
 Russell handled in court with skill not less remarkable. 
 He it was who dealt with the whole case, and who 
 turned what seemed certain disaster into something 
 like triumph. 
 
 There is, I believe, an explanation of the stubborn- 
 ness with which The Times refused to make the apology 
 which most people thought Mr. Parnell entitled to on 
 the Pigott count. There is, at any rate, a story which 
 may now be told, coming as it does from a very different 
 quarter. The Pigott letters were beyond all question 
 forged. It was, however, believed by some who had 
 good means of knowing the facts, that Mr. Parnell was 
 less innocent than he seemed. He did write, they say, 
 a letter not unlike the forged letter in extenuation of 
 the Phoenix Park crime. That letter was at the time 
 in existence. Pigott went to America in search of it. 
 He could not find it, or could not lay hold of it, but 
 he learned the contents of it in substance, and when he 
 came back fabricated a letter as nearly like it as he 
 could. I am far from vouching for the truth of this 
 too plausible tale, but I think there was a time when 
 it was deemed true in The Times office. 
 
 The history of the Divorce Court proceedings must, 
 like that of the Special Commission, remain to some 
 extent a mystery. On one point, however, Mr. Parnell's 
 fame may be cleared. He never told Mr. Davitt, or 
 
44 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, or any go-between who sought his con- 
 fidence, that he was innocent. What he did say was 
 that he should come out all right. And that he be- 
 lieved. There were others who believed it, for various 
 reasons, good or bad. It is probable enough that if 
 Mr. Parnell had left himself in Mr. Lewis's hands he 
 would have been cleared. But Mrs. CShea intervened. 
 This lady preferred that there should be a divorce. 
 Her ascendency over Mr. Parnell was, as it had long 
 been, complete, and she prevailed. Mr. Parnell took 
 himself and his defence elsewhere, and finally, as all 
 the world knows, declined to appear. 
 
 His relations with Mrs. O'Shea had, of course, long 
 been notorious. They were known to everybody who 
 knew anything about him. They were beyond doubt 
 known for years to those Liberal leaders who afterward 
 renounced and deserted him because, as they said, of 
 his adultery. It was not the adultery which shocked 
 the moral consciousness of these sensitive natures; it 
 was the legal proof of it in open court which roused 
 them to the enormity of the offence committed by the 
 leader to whom they had surrendered. Nay, it was not 
 even that ; it was the revolt of the Nonconformist con- 
 science. I speak of the Nonconformist conscience now, 
 as ever, with respect. If one cannot always think its 
 judgments enlightened, its sincerity is beyond dispute, 
 and sincerity in public life is admirable in proportion 
 to its rarity. It was the conviction, the reluctant con- 
 viction, of Mr. Gladstone that he must choose between 
 Mr. Parnell and the great body of his Nonconformist 
 supporters. It was the reports of the agents of Mr. 
 Schnadhorst from all over the country, and from con- 
 stituencies of every shade, that the Dissenters of 
 England would make Mr. Parnell's retirement the 
 
MR. PARNELL 46 
 
 absolute condition of their continued allegiance to Mr. 
 Gladstone. Those are the true reasons for Mr. Glad- 
 stone's letter to Mr. Morley, and the interval between 
 the dates of the decree of divorce and the appearance 
 of Mr. Gladstone's ultimatum cannot be filled up in 
 any other way. 
 
 What happened on the other side of the Irish 
 Channel proves that more sinister influences there got 
 the upper hand. The priests saw their chance. There 
 had been a long struggle between them and Mr. Parnell, 
 and he had come oif victor in every important contest. 
 He had forced the priests and the -whole Episcopal 
 hierarchy to be his obedient servants. He had taken 
 Ireland — political Ireland — out of the hands of Rome. 
 But Rome has a long memory and a long arm, and 
 knows how to bide her time. She had beaten Prince 
 Bismarck ; she was not likely to give in to Mr. Parnell. 
 Her hour came when the decree was pronounced in the 
 Divorce Court. She struck remorselessly, and the blow 
 was fatal. She deposed the Uncrowned King, and she 
 resumed that political control which she has never 
 admitted and never will admit to be separable from her 
 spiritual ascendency. 
 
 Then was to be seen the most astonishing spectacle 
 of modern times, a close political co-operation between 
 the Romish priesthood in Ireland and the Puritans of 
 England. It is unavowed, but it is none the less real, 
 and at the head of it stands the one Englishman to 
 whom Popery and Dissent are alike most hateful. Never 
 was there a more appalling instance of the lengths to 
 which political ambition will lead a scrupulously con- 
 scientious soul. 
 
 Ireland, or part of that part of Ireland over which 
 the Uncrowned King once bore sway, will give him a 
 
46 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 public funeral, hallow his memory, and build up the 
 usual myths and legends about their dead hero's name. 
 Yet the very effort to do this proves how critical the 
 situation is, and how absurd it is to say that Mr. 
 Pamell's death can have no political effect. The col- 
 leagues who betrayed him would fain join in honouring 
 his memory, and dare not. Their appearance would 
 provoke a riot. Mr. ParnelPs grave would be the scene 
 of a hand-to-hand conflict. They have prudently and 
 wisely elected to stay away. Mr. Parnell, deserted by 
 the great body of his countrymen, foi- whom he had 
 done so much, deserted and ostracised by the English 
 Liberals under Mr. Gladstone's imperious lead, remained 
 a formidable force ; and Parnellism may still be a force. 
 
 It is idle to predict the course of Irish politics, or of 
 English either, for they turn on the Irish. Mr. Glad- 
 stone may regard Mr. Parnell's death as a direct 
 Providential interposition in his own behalf. It may 
 prove so, or it may prove the contrary. But the 
 chances are that the Irish party, as always before Mr. 
 Pamell's time, will again split into factions, dissolve 
 before the temptations of office, and become again the 
 tool of English politicians. Mr. Parnell kept it per- 
 fectly independent, and used it to one single end. It is 
 not merely that the only leader is gone. The one man 
 is gone who knew the whole Irish question. The others 
 know bits and pieces of it. Mr. Parnell was a master 
 of business, a master of details as well as of general 
 policy. He knew the historical, the political, the 
 economical, and the social sides of the Irish question, 
 all of them, and all of them thoroughly. 
 
 To talk of replacing him by any of his subordinates 
 is to give up half the battle. Mr. Dillon, perhaps the 
 best of them, perhaps the most honest, is a creature of 
 
MR. PARNELL 47 
 
 impulse and rashness. Mr. O'Brien is an hysterical 
 egotist. Mr. Healy, with all his lawyer-like cleverness 
 and knowledge of Parliamentary forms, and sharpness 
 of mind, is absolutely unfitted to lead a party. Mr. 
 M'Carthy is a man of letters, honourable, honest, able 
 for many kinds of good work, and totally unfit for the 
 responsibilities he nominally bears. Mr. Sexton is a 
 fluent speaker, but volubility is the cheapest of Irish 
 talents. Who else is there.? The mantle of Mr. 
 Parnell is not to be divided, or if it is, the future of 
 Irish politics and of Home Rule can never be what he 
 would have made it. His life and work became at the 
 end a wreck. He went to his grave in gloom. He 
 might have recovered his hold on Ireland, or might 
 not; but to say that any other, or any group of 
 others, can take his place and play his part, is to say 
 that a committee of third-rate incapables can do the 
 work of a great leader who, whatever his faults, had 
 at least as much political genius as any man of his time. 
 
THE SEVENTH DUKE OF 
 DEVONSHIRE 
 
 [LONDON, DECEMBER 1891] 
 
 If the life of the late Duke of Devonshire had no 
 other lesson, it would have this : that a public man 
 may be useful to his country as well by holding aloof 
 from politics as by devoting himself directly to the 
 service of the State. Never has the Duke taken much 
 share in the business of political life, but never has there 
 been a period in his long career when he was not 
 remarkable for public spirit, and for the wise conduct 
 of great affairs. Notoriety counts for so much in these 
 days that it can do no harm if we remind ourselves at 
 intervals — the intervals are apt to be long — that the 
 private station also is a post of honour. 
 
 Yet it is in truth hardly possible to speak of the 
 station of a Duke of Devonshire as private. There are 
 Dukes and Dukes. This was the greatest of all. We 
 may think what we like of titles and of rank, but we 
 must take things as they are. No judgment formed 
 otherwise than with strict reference to the facts as they 
 are is worth a straw. The facts are that in this country 
 title and rank still confer many advantages. Perhaps 
 in no class are they more generally respected than in 
 those classes where they do not exist; and by none 
 more than by those who in public decry them. There is 
 
THE SEVENTH DUKE OP DEVONSHIRE 49 
 
 but a single sphere in life in which they impose, or may 
 impose, a serious disability on their possessor, and that 
 is in politics. 
 
 Lord Rosebery, whose ambition is boundless, has 
 been deploring in his Pitt the grim humour of the 
 English constitution which exiles a Peer from the 
 House of Commons, the governing body of the country. 
 We shall see presently what the effect of this grim 
 humour is in Lord Hartington's case. But the late 
 Duke is an instance in the opposite direction ; one that 
 even Lord Rosebery might profitably consider. The 
 Duke had abilities which would have given him a great 
 place in public life had he thought that his duty 
 required him to take up that burden. None was more 
 sagacious, none had a sounder judgment of affairs and 
 of men. Orator he was not, but oratory is not, in the 
 last resort, the gift most essential to the government of 
 a kingdom. There have been orators who were states- 
 men ; and many more statesmen, including nearly all 
 the greatest, who were not orators. Not always has 
 the world held that the conduct of public affairs from 
 the platform, even though it be the platform of a rail- 
 way station, is the best conduct. The power of making 
 the worse appear the better reason may bring him who 
 possesses it to great place, and the State to its lowest 
 ebb of fortune. 
 
 I will quote what I have heard indirectly — and only 
 because I heard it indirectly — Lord Hartington's tribute 
 to his father. Lord Hartington said he had never known 
 any other man whose judgment on great matters was so 
 sure, or whose counsel in a difficult political crisis was so 
 weighty. He added that for whatever he himself had 
 done in public life he owed more to his father than to 
 all other influences put together. I can only give that 
 
 D 
 
50 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 as hearsay, but I believe it represents what Lord 
 Hartington said and thought. It is a testimony which 
 cannot be rated too high. The relations between these 
 two men, father and son, are known to have been of the 
 closest. The Duke's affectionate pride in his son's 
 success was not less because he himself had followed a 
 different path. I suppose the most democratic of us 
 may admit that even a Duke is human, and that like the 
 Jew he hath senses, affections, passions. In the latter 
 years of his life calamities had come to him : a son had 
 been murdered by the assassins of Phoenix Park ; 
 another dying only last year who had been in many 
 things as a staff to his old age. Lord Hartington 
 alone was left: he and one daughter. Nobody, says 
 a friend to the family, would doubt how much he 
 was to his father who had seen the father's face 
 light up when the son came into the room, or had 
 heard him break through his reserve to speak of his 
 son. 
 
 Pathetic indeed in latter years — pathetic and sym- 
 pathetic — was the figure of the Duke as he sat at the 
 head of the long table in the great dining-room at 
 Chatsworth. His grave, strong face, the crown of white 
 hair which fell carelessly over the high, broad forehead, 
 the eyes alive and alight with a fire that seemed still 
 young, the dignity, the beautiful, quiet distinction of 
 manner, the stamp of intellect on the features, the 
 bearing which had all the courtesy of an earlier century 
 and was not the less stately for the bent head and the 
 slight stoop — all these traits gave to him the air of one 
 of the portraits by Titian or Van Dyck which hung 
 hard by. He was as alert in mind as ever, his faculties 
 clear, his judgment firm and sober and sound. His 
 simplicity was that of the grarid seigneur, and so was 
 
THE SEVENTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 61 
 
 his genuineness ; never in his life had he felt called 
 upon to seem to be something he was not. 
 
 It need not be supposed that any dislike to new ideas 
 or hostility to the modern spirit withdrew the Duke of 
 Devonshire from politics. Twice he proved the contrary, 
 and each time on one of the greatest questions which 
 have divided this kingdom. He was Member for the 
 University of Cambridge, one of the most conservative 
 of constituencies, from 1829 to 1831, and his speech 
 for the Reform Bill cost him his seat. In 1869 he — a 
 great Irish landlord, one of those monsters of whom 
 Mr. Davitt would sweep away every trace from Ireland 
 and elsewhere — spoke in the House of Lords for the 
 disestablishment of the Irish Church. He was a Whig 
 in the best sense : a member of a great family which for 
 generations had been Whig when to be a Whig was 
 to be everything that was most liberal in English 
 politics. 
 
 The liberalism of the Cavendishes goes back at least 
 to the sixteenth century : a respectable antiquity in 
 itself. The liberalism of that period meant liberalism 
 in religious matters, and the chief founder of the for- 
 tunes of the family was that William Cavendish who 
 was one of Henry the Eighth's commissioners for re- 
 ceiving the surrender of religious houses. Like the 
 Russells, the Cavendishes received not only svu-renders 
 but lands. The Earl of Devonshire, who afterward 
 became the first Duke, was a well-known opponent of 
 the Court after the Restoration ; a staunch Protestant 
 when Romanism had become the fashion and the road 
 to favour ; a friend of Lord William Russell, for whom 
 he had the courage to appear as a witness at that sad 
 trial ; a prime mover in the Revolution of 1688, one of 
 the seven signers of the paper inviting the Prince of 
 
52 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Orange over from Holland, and the first nobleman who 
 appeared in arms on his landing. King William re- 
 warded him handsomely in 1694! with the Marquisate 
 of Hartington, and the Dukedom of Devonshire. On 
 the same day the head of the Russells became Duke of 
 Bedford, which gave rise to a long unsettled dispute 
 which Duke was entitled to precedence over the other. 
 It was a question which patent first passed the seal, 
 and was decided in favour of the Duke of Devonshire. 
 Even to this day it was still sometimes asked which of 
 the great noblemen who bore these titles has the right 
 to walk in to dinner before the other. There have 
 been many Cavendishes since the first Duke ; never one 
 who attached himself to the party of reaction. He 
 who is just dead at eighty-three was the seventh Duke 
 of Devonshire. 
 
 What withdrew the late Duke from politics was, in 
 addition to his evident dislike of the coarser forms of 
 that party struggle which, in this country, seldom 
 knows a truce, the care of his great estates. The care 
 of landed property in this kingdom has always meant, 
 and still means, something more than the receipt of 
 rent. The great landlord is a kind of small Providence 
 to his tenants : for good or for ill. What the Duke of 
 Devonshire was, one of his chief political opponents 
 shall say : ' The management of his English property 
 was a model to every landlord ; the management of his 
 Irish property extorted the admiration of the [Land 
 League.' I suppose even Mr. Davitt, or that decayed 
 oracle Mr. Henry George, would admit that if there 
 could be a good landlord the Duke of Devonshire 
 was one. 
 
 I believe it is true that he has spent on his Irish 
 estates more than he has ever received in the shape of 
 
THE SEVENTH DUKE OP DEVONSHIRE 53 
 
 rent ; and spent it for the benefit of the tenants. At 
 Lismore and in Derbyshire, in Westmorland and in 
 Yorkshire, in Lancashire and in Sussex, and wherever 
 else these vast properties lay, he was beloved by his 
 tenants. In all the grumblings of farmers and the 
 manifold grievances of tenants of every kind, none ever 
 was heard of against this greatest landlord of all. He 
 owned more than 200,000 acres ; not one of them, oddly 
 enough, in the county from which he took his title. 
 More than a quarter lay in Ireland. But he was not 
 content to conserve ; he created. Most men would 
 have thought that the respotasibilities of so great a 
 territory were heavy enough. But he moved with the 
 time. He put a million sterling into the mines, the 
 shipbuilding yards, the docks, railways, ironworks, 
 and other varied industries, which in twenty years raised 
 the population of Barrow-in-Furness from 300 to 
 20,000, and in twenty more to over 50,000. He 
 created Eastbourne, a name which once denoted a little 
 village or two, now a fashionable watering-place of 
 some 40,000 inhabitants. 
 
 All his life long, from the time when he was Wrangler 
 at Cambridge, the bent of his mind was to exact and 
 applied science. He gave great sums to Owens College 
 in Manchester. He founded the Cavendish Laboratory 
 at Cambridge, and by his personal influence, by addresses, 
 by service on Royal Commissions, and in many other 
 ways promoted the teaching of physical science. In 
 that also he was modem, but not narrow. He was not 
 only a student of mathematics and of other science ; he 
 was one of the first classical scholars in the University 
 of Cambridge, of which he became and remained 
 Chancellor for forty years. An open-minded man in 
 all things, with perhaps as many widely varying in- 
 
54 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 terests in life as any one of his time ; from youth to 
 age doing good to other men, and doing it so quietly 
 that, notwithstanding his rank, his wealth, his position, 
 his innumerable relations with the busy world about 
 him, his name was rather seldom in the newspapers. 
 All things considered, that is a eulogy on which it 
 might be difficult to improve. 
 
MR. SPURGEON 
 
 [LONDON, FEBRUARY 1 89 2] 
 I 
 
 Me. Spurgeon's death, and what has been said of him 
 since his death, raise again the question whether the 
 general opinion about a man be or be not truly ex- 
 pressed during his life. Honour is now done to his 
 memory by those who did little honour to the man. 
 He was regarded by large classes of people in England 
 as a kind of show, something to be seen and heard 
 because it was, in its own way, of a superior kind. The 
 arriving stranger, especially the American, used to be 
 told : ' Oh, you must be sure to hear Spurgeon,' just as 
 he was told not to miss the Zoological Gardens or the 
 Lyceum. The lions of Regent's Park and of Welling- 
 ton Street and of the Tabernacle were all lions, and all 
 worthy of a visit. Spurgeon was the Beecher of this 
 country, said the travelled Englishman, who had strayed 
 as far as Plymouth Church. The comparison is an 
 obvious one, and it was commonly made by those to 
 whom both were merely spectacles, or a kind of natural 
 phenomena. It is not fair to Spurgeon to press the 
 comparison, at least on the private side, since Spur- 
 geon's private life was entirely free from scandal. 
 
 But hardly anywhere in the innumerable comments 
 
 on the great English preacher who died on Sunday will 
 
 55 
 
56 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 any reminiscence of this Barnum view be found, except 
 in the news columns. The Barnum touch — I am 
 reluctant to say it, and I mean to anger nobody — 
 comes out in the unlucky telegrams which announced 
 his death. Outside the Tabernacle in London were 
 posted up printed copies of this despatch : ' Our be- 
 loved pastor entered heaven 11.5 Sunday night. 
 Harrald.' And on the door of the Mentone Hotel, 
 where he was staying, appeared a placard : ' Mr. 
 Spurgeon fell asleep in Jesus at 11.5 p.m.;' which is 
 in a more extravagant taste than the other. The effect 
 in both cases is grotesque because of the incongruity. 
 The mixture of Biblical imagery with the arithmetical 
 notation of a railway time-table disturbs the mind, and 
 so does the title ' Mr.,' applied as it is to the Christian 
 departing in the ecstasy of hope in his Redeemer. The 
 world might also have been spared the testimony of 
 one of the news agencies that 'all persons staying at 
 the hotel speak in eulogistic terms of his manners and 
 disposition.' Some of the papers have good sense and 
 good feeling enough to suppress these impertinences, 
 but they seem to have been borne on the wings of the 
 wind to the uttermost parts of the earth. 
 
 In those journals which are known as dissenting 
 organs, nothing but panegyric was to be expected. 
 Spurgeon was, as the great journal which is before all 
 things a Church of England organ says, the best-known 
 and most popular Nonconformist minister of the day. 
 As such the Nonconformists do him homage. It is 
 sincere, it is honourable to them and to him, but it is 
 not particularly profitable to the inquirer who cares to 
 make out what manner of man he was. An estimate 
 must be discriminating if it is to be helpful ; it must 
 be, in the right sense of the word, critical. I hope it 
 
MR. SPURGEON 67 
 
 may be said without offence that the attitude of the 
 Nonconformist mind with reference to Nonconformist 
 things or persons is not primarily a critical attitude. 
 Like all other sects, the English Dissenters give up to 
 sect something of what was meant for mankind. They 
 glorify the great Nonconformist preacher because he 
 was a great Nonconformist preacher. We all sym- 
 pathise with their loyalty to their leader, and respect 
 them and him the more for it. None the less are we 
 obliged to turn elsewhere for an accurate account of 
 the man. 
 
 Yet when we turn elsewhere we are still confronted 
 with the language of eulogy ; less indiscriminate, with 
 less of that rash use of the superlative which is the 
 most ineffective of all methods of eulogy, but penetrated 
 with both admiration and sympathy ; neither of them 
 stinted or grudging. Spurgeon was thought in life to 
 have ruffled the taste of the fastidious, and not of the 
 fastidious only. He outraged the religious sensibilities 
 of many excellent people, one used to hear ; he was a 
 rock of offence to Churchmen. Well, Churchmen in 
 this country — the word means, of course, members of 
 the Church of England — have always, consciously or 
 unconsciously, held themselves above those who are not 
 Churchmen. Their collective attitude is that of the 
 superior person, and that is naturally disagreeable to 
 the inferior person, or to the person who knows that 
 he is thought to be inferior. The Church of England 
 all over England is the Church of good society. If you 
 wish not merely to be saved, but to be saved in good 
 company, it is the Church, and not the Chapel, you will 
 select as a means of grace. Whether one be more effica- 
 cious than the other from a doctrinal or religious point of 
 view may be disputed. We do not know so accurately 
 
58 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 as might be wished about the next world, but it is 
 pretty generally assumed that in the next world an 
 introduction from either will ensure the new-comer a 
 good reception. In this world, or in that small insular 
 part of it which lies between the Atlantic and the 
 North German oceans, the social ascendancy of the 
 Church is conceded. It is conceded reluctantly and 
 resentfully by those who are not of it, but it is conceded. 
 
 On Spurgeon, therefore, rained down during most of 
 his long ministry the kind of critical comment which 
 the superior person or sect commonly bestows on him 
 whom he thinks inferior. I used sometimes to wonder 
 whether, had the preacher of the Tabernacle been a 
 clergyman of the Church, we should have heard so much 
 about his vulgarity, his irreverence, his coarseness, and 
 other sins against the proprieties. There is no use in 
 wondering. It is impossible to conceive of Spurgeon in 
 a surplice, or as anything but what he was, a free and 
 independent minister of what he believed to be true 
 religion. He had a mission. He was tremendously in 
 earnest. He believed himself sent into this world to 
 save the souls of his fellow-men from damnation, in 
 which also he believed ; and he did not care how he 
 saved them so long as they were saved. Out of these 
 convictions and impulses came his strength and also 
 his weakness. He would do anything to get hold of 
 his audience; tell a story, or crack a joke, or use the 
 homeliest illustration, or treat the God whom he 
 worshipped with what others sometimes thought 
 blasphemous familiarity. 
 
 He shocked some of his hearers and many more who 
 were not his hearers. Legends and myths formed about 
 him as they did about Beecher. The story that 
 Beecher began one of his discourses with the words ' It 
 
MR. SPURGEON 69 
 
 is damned hot,' is paralleled by the story of Spurgeon's 
 choosing for text to a funeral sermon on one of his 
 deacons : ' And the beggar died.' Neither was true ; 
 both were widely believed. Spurgeon's sliding down 
 the rail of his pulpit stairs was another of these inven- 
 tions, and there were people — ^there always are — who 
 would tell you they had seen him do it, and probably 
 supposed they had. Upon the strength of such ficti- 
 tious anecdotes, and of others which were not fictitious, 
 the general Church opinion of Spurgeon was formed. 
 
 It gave him, I imagine, little or no concern. The 
 public to whom he appealed was not an ecclesiastical 
 public ; not the aristocracy, not society. He appealed 
 to the people, and, among the people, chiefly to the 
 middle classes. He was of them and with them all his 
 life long. He understood them and they him. It was 
 they who, Sunday after Sunday for so many years, 
 thronged the great Tabernacle across the river. He 
 and they were the spiritual heirs of the same Puritanism 
 which we in America think of as part of the freight of 
 the Mayjlower, and have kept as the faith of our 
 forefathers. Spurgeon cared little for the niceties of 
 theological formulas, but to the main points of his creed 
 he clung with aU the energy of his nature. He used to 
 say he was fortunate in having begun his ministry with 
 little education. In no sense was he a scholar ; of 
 divinity he knew almost nothing, of patristic learning, 
 or church history, or doctrinal instruction, he had 
 hardly a smattering. It was the absence of all these 
 that constituted his equipment. He cared only to 
 preach Christ and him crucified. The Bible held all 
 the theology he wanted, and of the Bible itself he had 
 no critical knowledge. He knew nothing and cared 
 nothing about the results of modern linguistic and 
 
60 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 historical and palseontological inquiry into the authen- 
 ticity of the Scriptures, or about the genuineness of 
 particular books, or parts of books, or the inroads 
 which science has made upon the Mosaic cosmogony. 
 To him the Bible was the Bible. Half the secret of 
 his strength was in the limitation of his knowledge. 
 He was disturbed by no doubt ; what he believed he 
 believed. For a man whose aim is to make others 
 believe, no endowment is comparable to this power 
 of faith. 
 
 II 
 
 In the present position of the religious world in 
 England, Mr. Spurgeon was invaluable to the Noncon- 
 formist body, among whom he was the foremost man. 
 His loss is to them irreparable. He leaves no successor; 
 men of genius seldom do, and Spurgeon's claim to 
 genius of a certain kind cannot well be denied. What 
 the mass of people care most for in a cause is the man 
 behind it, and Spurgeon was the man. He was the 
 incarnation of English Nonconformity. In the struggle 
 and conflict of sects, a leader is a host in himself. 
 Spurgeon's leadership was of the kind which in these 
 days is most effective ; perhaps in all ages of religious 
 history has been most effective. Whatever else he was 
 ignorant of, he understood human nature ; or, to put 
 it more truly, he understood men and women. 
 
 His was a commanding personality, to begin with ; 
 he would have been a power if he had been dumb. He 
 impressed himself, not only on the six or seven thousand 
 people who came every Sunday to the Tabernacle, but 
 on those who did not come. No doubt, the circulation 
 of his printed sermons had something to do with this, 
 but the man had much more. The personal legend is 
 
MR. SPURGEON 61 
 
 more than the printed word. I will venture on an 
 illustration not meant to be irreverent, but chosen only 
 because it is the most forcible. What is Christianity 
 to all Christendom.? Is it not Christ.? The Jew 
 whom Pilate crucified has given his name to the religion 
 he taught, and left behind him not so much a body of 
 doctrine as a new ethical statement of the rule of life. 
 People read the Gospels and the rest of the New 
 Testament. But when they close the book and go 
 about their business, it is the individual Christ who 
 goes with them, and the story of his life which affects 
 their lives, if anything affects them. Or I will put it 
 in another way. Take Christ out of the New Testa- 
 ment and what is left ? Much that is admirable ; 
 nothing that would have revolutionised a world. Of 
 course, I don't suggest any parallel, not even the most 
 remote, between the two men, Christ and Spurgeon, 
 except that they were both men. 
 
 Spurgeon had no creative genius ; he has contributed 
 nothing to religion or to ethics, nothing doctrinal or 
 vital or formative. Creeds and dogmas are what they 
 were before his voice was heard. But he has contributed 
 Spurgeon, and it will be many a generation before the 
 echo of those tones which filled the Tabernacle Sunday 
 after Sunday has ceased to vibrate in men's memories. 
 He was something more than a bulwark to his own 
 church ; he was a beacon light which shone from afar. 
 We in America do not forget that he was of the faith 
 and of the church widest spread in our country. We 
 have no Nonconformity, happily, because we have no 
 conformity ; no State Church to provoke Dissent, and 
 therefore no Dissent. But the great Nonconformist 
 none the less belongs to us. If we could not all go to 
 the Tabernacle we read him and read about him. We 
 
62 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 bought his sermons in print. They had, it is said, a 
 greater circulation in the United States than in England ; 
 naturally, since the number of readers is so much greater. 
 Whether we stole the Gospel according to Spurgeon, 
 or paid for it, I don't know. Perhaps we did both. 
 There used to be, nay, there still are, people in America 
 who hold that because literature is a profitable thing 
 for the people, the people ought to have a legal right 
 to purloin it from its owners. The argument, if it can 
 be called an argument, is just so much better for religion 
 as religion is better than mere literature. 
 
 Spurgeon's eloquence has been a good deal discussed ; 
 it was this and that or the other thing ; or none of 
 them, according to the judgment of the critic. But 
 the first thing, and also the last, to be said about it is 
 that it did its work. Eloquence in the strict sense it 
 may not have been ; eloquence in the highest sense it 
 certainly was not. But to Spurgeon, speech was an 
 instrument for the conversion of souls, or for stimulating 
 religious enthusiasm. He wanted to attract great 
 companies of people to what he called the house of God, 
 to hear what he believed to be the word of God ; and 
 when they were there to fix their attention and hold it, 
 and to plant in their minds something that would stick 
 there, take root, perhaps, and spring up and bring 
 forth first blossom and then fruit; but at any rate 
 something they could not forget. 
 
 To this end nothing came amiss to him ; or almost 
 nothing. He had the first requisite for public speaking, 
 a voice of great volume and compass, capable of infinite 
 modulation. He had a diction which was almost too 
 copious. The two books out of which it came were 
 Shakespeare and the Bible. He read his Shakespeare, 
 and perhaps knew it, as Bright knew Milton. They 
 
MR. SPURGEON 63 
 
 were the two books — the Bible and Shakespeare — out 
 of which, as you will remember, Kossuth taught himself 
 English in an Austrian gaol. If a man has mastered 
 either — but the Bible for choice — he has little need for 
 anything more. I mean, of course, the real Bible, 
 King James's Bible, the Authorised Version, and not 
 that miserable thing called the Revised Version ; out of 
 which, however, a man may well learn How English 
 Ought Not to be Written; or how the noblest 
 monument of English literature may be defaced and 
 degraded by revisers who thought much of the Hebrew 
 and Greek sense, and very little of its right expression 
 in English, and not at all of the reverence due to the 
 text in which the genius of the English language is 
 immortalised. 
 
 Spurgeon was no rhetorician, no master of style. 
 His printed sermons will not for a moment bear 
 comparison with Newman's or Liddon's. It is not 
 quite a fair test. A sermon in print is a dead thing. 
 But it is fair to Spurgeon because of the immense and 
 amazing number of readers he secured for a kind of 
 prose most of which is, by general consent, more 
 wearisome to the flesh than any other. Probably the 
 secret in his case is. the vitality of the man ; his force, 
 his earnestness, his energy, his enthusiasm, unquenchable 
 even in print. Some of the blood which ran in his veins 
 in a full tide overflowed into the printed, cold book. 
 Something of the man is there. But in the pulpit, or 
 rather on the platform, since the pulpit he abhorred, 
 the whole man was there. It was not merely a voice, not 
 an orator, not a minister of religion merely or mainly, 
 but a man. It was with Spurgeon, as Pascal says of 
 the writer : ' You expected to find a book ; you are 
 astonished and enchanted to find a man.' So, whether 
 
64 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 it be as orator or as divine or as the leader of a great 
 ecclesiastical party, we come back to the same point ; 
 here was a man. 
 
 On the purely human side there was a great deal that 
 was admirable in Spurgeon; his charity before all 
 things. His creed was not charitable in a broad sense ; 
 there was too much damnation in it, but the man was 
 broader than his creed ; no uncommon thing, happily. 
 To take only the coarser form of charity, I suppose 
 nobody was ever more open-handed about money. He 
 gave out of all proportion to his means ; in his mind, 
 or rather in his heart, means signified something to give 
 away. He fulfilled the maxim which Mr. Carnegie has 
 preached and may yet practise, that it is the duty of a 
 rich man to die poor. The Tabernacle gave him, or 
 might have given him, a great income. Whatever it was 
 he seems to have spent it on others. He was oflpered 
 $1000 a night in gold to lecture in America. He said 
 he knew nothing about lecturing, he could only preach, 
 and if he went to America to preach he would not take 
 money for it. 
 
 He knew the value of money as well as anybody, and 
 when he had to manage it for others, managed it with 
 marked ability. His orphanages were always said to 
 be models of business order. His accounts ' were 
 accurate and would bear auditing. Nobody ever 
 challenged him in vain to submit them to strict pro- 
 fessional inquiry ; a challenge which has been addressed 
 to Mr. General Booth without result. I imagine that 
 the leader of the Salvation Army was of real service 
 to Spurgeon. He was a service because he was a 
 warning. For that or some other good reason the 
 great preacher's coarseness grew in latter years less 
 coarse. He quietly dropped some of his faults of 
 
MR. SPURGEON 65 
 
 manner ; age had softened him and power brought with 
 it moderation. 
 
 Another side of his character comes out in his answer 
 to the lecture somebody read him about smoking. He 
 said he smoked to the glory of God ; and that shocked 
 some most worthy people. He explained — he need 
 not have explained — that, according to Scripture, a 
 man could glorify God in eating and drinking, and 
 so might he in smoking. Scripture, of course, closed 
 the mouths of the worthy objectors. It is per- 
 missible to be racy if you put your raciness in a 
 Biblical garb. He could use the pen otherwise than in 
 composing sermons. He wrote much in the journal he 
 called The Sword and Trowel; pithily and to the 
 point. Sometimes he reminds one of Cobbett ; a writer 
 who had more in him than ever came out. Spurgeon 
 had shrewdness and sense and worldly wisdom, — more 
 than all, he had a perfect reliance on himself and a per- 
 fect independence of mind. He was never ' deaconed.' 
 The Tabernacle was his ; if it had ceased to be his, he 
 would have created another the Sunday after he left 
 the first. He taught good lessons to his people, but 
 the best lesson of all was his life and his character. 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 [lONDONj OCTOBER 1892] 
 
 I 
 
 A WORD of explanation is due to readers of these belated 
 notes. On the day after Tennyson's death I sent you 
 two letters which I hear have been lost. To rewrite 
 them, as you wish, is not easy. Weeks have gone by. 
 The atmosphere is no longer the same. The first feel- 
 ings and impulses of the public have faded out. The 
 poet has been buried; the world has gone about its 
 usual business. The freshness of the general sympathy 
 has grown, not perhaps stale, but less fresh. There 
 were a few days during which everybody talked about 
 him. If he is mentioned now, he is mentioned as 
 Wordsworth might be. He has become a classic : his 
 place is in the past. It is hardly possible to return 
 after an interval to the mood in which a public loss 
 leaves one. The sense of the loss may be just as keen ; 
 one's admiration for the man or for the poet is no less. 
 But a writer who wishes to convey to distant readers 
 the impression made on his mind by the spectacle of a 
 great people bowed by a great grief must do it at once 
 or not at all. Anything one can put on paper now 
 must be inadequate. There are, however, many things 
 one would like to say, even if one cannot resay the par- 
 ticular thing first said. 
 
TENNYSON 67 
 
 What was most striking at first was the outburst of 
 affection for Tennyson which seemed almost universal. 
 The expression of it in public was remarkable : in 
 private it was more remarkable still. It was most 
 remarkable of all because it was not, and could not 
 have been to any great extent, personal. Few men 
 who have filled so great a space in the intellectual life of 
 their time have dwelt so much alone. He was almost 
 a recluse. He did not care much for society, nor society 
 very much for him. He seldom or never allowed him- 
 self to be lionised. He had, at times, a house in 
 London, in ' that long, unlovely street,' which bears 
 Harley's name, and there Lady Tennyson sometimes 
 entertained. But he formed no regular part of the 
 social existence which so often has so much influence on 
 fame and on popularity. He was a frequenter of no 
 club. He never entered the House of Lords for the 
 business of legislation. He was never seen at New- 
 market, which is not only the Turf headquarters, but a 
 great social centre. He did not go to private views, 
 nor to first nights, nor to Court, except privately ; and 
 never, or hardly ever, was a figure in any of the great 
 public functions which are so many stages on which 
 many a practised performer exhibits himself to the gaze 
 of the public. I do not think he ever attended a Lord 
 Mayor's dinner, or ever anywhere made a public speech. 
 
 He chose to live at Freshwater or at Aldworth ; 
 places not inaccessible, certainly, but remote indeed 
 from ' streaming London's central roar.' There he 
 exercised a certain hospitality, in a fashion of his own. 
 He received his own friends ; rarely his friends' friends. 
 There or elsewhere he led a self-centred life. Friends 
 he had, of course ; not very many, but deeply attached 
 to him, and in no English household were family ties 
 
68 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 closer than his ; in none the domestic life more beauti- 
 ful. He could draw out deep feelings of attachment 
 in other men even more self-centred than himself. 
 Carlyle had almost an affection for him : and there 
 were others, though none so remarkable as that grim, 
 dour Scotch peasant who dwelt apart in Chelsea and 
 forged thunderbolts for the world. In short, it is to be 
 said of Tennyson that if he was loved, he was loved 
 deeply ; in his own phrase, he was to each friend all 
 in all or nothing at all. They who mourned for him 
 most bitterly were they who knew him well, or who 
 knew him never. 
 
 People had a certain idea of his personality ; of his 
 appearance ; of his masculine force of character ; of his 
 remoteness from other men ; of his curt manner, and, 
 on occasion, roughness of speech or total silence ; of his 
 impatience ; of many other traits, attractive or other- 
 wise, all merging into a real grandeur of nature ; an 
 individuality that was impressive if not always attach- 
 ing. But so far as he was really known, he was known 
 by his poems. Out of the thirty-five millions of his 
 fellow-countrymen, not more than a few thousands ever 
 saw him or spoke to him. They knew what manner of 
 man he was outwardly by innumerable photographs. 
 He was as frequent in the shop windows as a profes- 
 sional beauty. They knew, perhaps, Millais's portrait 
 of him ; a fine picture, but too theatrical in pose and 
 treatment ; such a Tennyson as he might have looked 
 on the other side of the footlights whither as author, 
 not actor, an unfulfilled ambition led him, all in vain. 
 And yet there was, beyond all question, on the morrow 
 of his death a most general and genuine sorrow through- 
 out the land. It must have been the poet whom these 
 millions regretted, yet the poems were not dead ; only 
 
TENNYSON 69 
 
 the man ; and the sorrow which fell upon England is 
 a testimony to the unselfishness of human nature and 
 to the sympathies which are, after all, eternal in the 
 human breast. 
 
 The causes of all this are well worth considering and 
 getting at, if one could, but among them all there is, it 
 seems to me, one conspicuously false and one con- 
 spicuously true. The false one is the religious. An 
 effort is made to represent Tennyson as a great religious 
 teacher, and a great part of the homage offered him is 
 set down to the religious sentiment which pervades this 
 people. There is but very slight foundation for that 
 notion. One writer tries to draw a contrast between 
 Tennyson and Renan ; all to the disadvantage of the 
 latter, of course, since it is the orthodox view which 
 this singular theorist presents to his readers. Tennyson, 
 he says, lifts us into another world. ' If he had not 
 Renan's learning, he had a range of thought far wider 
 and covering a very different field.' And he proceeds 
 to allege, in his authoritative way and from a position 
 of great authority, that Tennyson had, almost from his 
 first appearance, a powerful influence in forming the 
 minds and in directing the thoughts of his kind — 
 meaning the religious thoughts — and ' never wasted his 
 efforts in the wilderness of barren cribicism.' 
 
 Not by such eccentricities as this is Tennyson's fame 
 to be advanced, or the source of the love men bore 
 him to be discovered. He was no ecclesiastic and no 
 theologian. He was not, in any right sense of the 
 words, a religious teacher. He had — not perhaps 
 from the beginning but during all his mature life — a 
 profoundly religious soul, but nowhere in his writings 
 is there any considerable body of evidence tending to 
 show that he looked upon himself as sent into this world 
 
70 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 with a divine mission. There is little or nothing in his 
 poetry that is apostolic. What he valued in religion 
 was not dogma, but the spirit. Like Newman, he had 
 doubted, and like Newman's, his settled faith was, in a 
 measure, an act of will. It is the religious fervour and 
 the passion of immortality which breathes through 
 'In Memoriam,'' to which the notion of Tennyson's 
 missionary influence is mostly traceable. If Arthur 
 Hallam had not died, on what would the conception of 
 Tennyson as a religious teacher rest .'' Like Words- 
 worth he 
 
 By the vision splendid 
 
 Is on his way attended. 
 
 But neither of these two great poets — and Tennyson 
 far less than Wordsworth, who afiirmed that he came 
 as a teacher — thought it needful to preach poetry from 
 a pulpit, or put religion into a metrical form. 
 
 The true note in Tennyson, that which, apart from 
 his poetic genius, endeared him to his countrymen, was 
 the note of heroic patriotism. What the English felt 
 as they heard of his passing, was that a great English- 
 man was gone. From his earliest to his latest breath 
 he sang the love of country. This seagirt isle, with its 
 imperial dependencies, was to him the world. What- 
 ever was heroic he valued ; whatever was both heroic 
 and English he loved. If there was anything he 
 despised and detested it was the modem notion which 
 would make England into a Holland, reduce the Empire 
 to a parish, and put trade before the flag. He was an 
 Englishman of Elizabeth's days. The spirit of Gren- 
 ville and of Haleigh was his ; of Howard and of Drake. 
 If it burned in any breast of his own days, so much the 
 better. Gordon was to him as much a hero and 
 martyr as Cranmer was. What he hated was the inane 
 
TENNYSON 71 
 
 internationalism which has striven, and striven vainly, 
 to supplant in English hearts the love of this English 
 land. He hated the peace-at-any-price people. Aid- 
 worth was distant from Manchester by millions of miles. 
 The pure air which the poet breathed on the fir-clad 
 slopes of his Sussex home had nothing in common with 
 the poisoned vapours on which the men of the Man- 
 chester school nourished their blood. The Manchester 
 school has died out, leaving as its spawn what is called 
 the New Radicalism. For that also, and for the men, 
 or most of them, who preach and practise it, Tennyson 
 had a healthy and manly scorn. That, too, will die 
 out. 
 
 I do not believe that the love of country, or the love 
 of fighting for the sake of country, has ever gone out 
 of the heart of this English race, but if it had Tennyson 
 would have rekindled the fire. No such appeal had for 
 long been heard in England as that summons to arms 
 which put life into the volunteer movement, and gave 
 England another army. ' Balaclava,' ' Lucknow,' the 
 ' Ballad of the Revenge,' and many another, ring with 
 the clash of steel. Emerson well said that the ' Ode on 
 the Death of the Duke of Wellington' was a more 
 magnificent monument than any or all of the histories 
 of the Duke's life. There is not a line of it which is 
 not aflame with patriotism. His admiration for Gordon, 
 and his righteous anger against the abandonment of 
 that noble soul to his martyrdom in the Soudan, are of 
 the same fibre. That, and not merely his melody, nor 
 in any degree his religious rhapsodies, is why the great 
 Poet, like the great Duke, is buried ' with an Empire's 
 lamentation,' buried ' to the noise of the mourning of 
 a mighty nation.' 
 
 The attempts to assign to Tennyson a definite and 
 
72 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 permanent position as poet are numerous. Whether 
 any of them is completely successful is another matter. 
 The ambition to anticipate the verdict of posterity is a 
 natural one, perhaps laudable, but is not free from peril 
 to him who indulges it. Posterity is apt to pay little 
 heed to these predictions. Browning used to say that 
 he regarded foreign opinion as a kind of contem- 
 poraneous posterity. This might seem to point to 
 America, and in a letter written some time before this 
 — the third or fourth of this short series — I spoke of 
 Mr. Stedman's criticism on Tennyson as one of the 
 fullest and most adequate of all. But Browning would 
 not admit that America came within the category of 
 foreign countries. If we keep to English estimates it 
 is to be said that, while the hand of the Philistine is 
 visible in many, some of them are delicate and true, as 
 far as they go, if not complete. To sum them up 
 within the limits of a concluding paragraph is impos- 
 sible, and it is now, perhaps, rather late to attempt it 
 in a newspaper. 
 
 Many of Tennyson's qualities and gifts were such as 
 nobody could miss, and every writer oiFers you a cata- 
 logue of them. There are but two points on which 
 I wish to say a word, and Browning's name suggests 
 the first. There never were, that I heard of, any 
 Tennyson Societies, as there were Browning Societies, 
 and the reason is plain. The Laureate wrote so as to 
 be understanded of the people, and not to require, as 
 Browning certainly did, even during his lifetime, an 
 army of commentators and expositors. His lucid 
 simplicity was as admirable as it was characteristic. 
 He had no theory of poetry which was compatible 
 with obscurity, or with rough workmanship. He left 
 the grotesque on one side. He chiselled and finished ; 
 
TENNySON 73 
 
 sometimes, no doubt, over-anxiously, for the changes 
 in the later editions are seldom for the better. But 
 he was true to his convictions. That he had something 
 in common with Browning may be admitted, but it was 
 touching the substance of things unseen ; not at all 
 as to the method of poetic workmanship, or the true 
 definition of poetry. 
 
 The two men were friends, but I doubt whether 
 Tennyson ever quite understood the growth of the 
 fame which came so late in Browning's life, or what 
 element of popularity there was in him. They were 
 both deeply concerned with some of the deepest 
 problems of human nature ; that was the real bond of 
 intellectual and spiritual sympathy between them. It 
 may be imagined that the discussion of their own work 
 was not usual with them. Browning, indeed, had many 
 friends who cared for him, and cared not for his poetry. 
 He had the magnanimity to disregard his friends' blind- 
 ness or indifference to the work of his life. He would 
 meet people day after day, on intimate terms socially, 
 and exchange views with them freely on all or most 
 other subjects, and never seem to remember that they 
 had nothing to say to him of the one theme he cared 
 for most — his own poetry. Such, I conceive, were 
 the relations in which he stood to Tennyson, except 
 that his intimacy with Tennyson was not very 
 close. 
 
 The other point is this : Tennyson was in literature 
 the supreme artist of his time and of his own country. 
 No Englishman of his day has so perfectly understood 
 the use of words. When all else is said, when inspira- 
 tion, poetic genius, melody, rhythmical variety, his 
 mastery over metres, and all his other gifts are allowed 
 for in estimating the effect and influence of his writing, 
 
74 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 the final analysis comes back to this point : It is above 
 all things a work of art, and the supreme art is in the 
 choice and use of words. The best words in the best 
 order — that is poetry, said Coleridge. Yet Tennyson 
 is of a country which cares little for art and knows less, 
 whether it be of canvas, or of the printed page, or of 
 marble, or whatever else. Hence, it is, I suppose, that 
 so little is said of Tennyson's art ; so little acknowledg- 
 ment made of the place it holds in his poetry. The 
 English concern themselves with results ; seldom with 
 processes. They are content to perceive that a poem 
 or a picture is beautiful ; not asking why it is beautiful. 
 That is why so much of the English criticism, full as it 
 is of appreciation, is so imperfect, and why it gives you 
 no full account of the matter, and no disclosure of the 
 secret on which the poet's fame may ultimately rest. 
 
 For style, which Tennyson had in the highest sense, 
 is of no time and of all time. The taste in poetry may 
 change, and does change, but a master of English 
 remains a master. He had it in prose also, though 
 little of his prose has become public except letters. It 
 has been said of Byron, with no true discernment, that 
 his letters are finer than his poems. Nobody would 
 now say it of Tennyson, nor can any prose writer be put 
 by his side. Not Carlyle, who was a great writer if not 
 a great writer of English, and who had, even in prose, 
 that quality of picturesqueness, or of presenting pictures 
 to the eye or to the mind, which is itself a poetic 
 quality. Not Ruskin, who has himself said that no 
 page of his is worth a line of Tennyson's ; an acknow- 
 ledgment as true as it is generous. Not Mr. Froude 
 perfect as his writing is in its own kind ; since perfect 
 prose is a thing entirely different from perfect poetry. 
 Not Matthew Arnold, though his best prose and his 
 
TENNYSON 7S 
 
 best poetry are each as fine as the best of any other of 
 his own time, and though, as man of letters, he must, 
 by virtue of the scope and play of his genius, stand ever 
 in the front rank. And if not any one of these, who 
 else can be named ? 
 
 Tennyson's art has something of a subtler and pm-er 
 and more divine nature than any of these. Like 
 Wordsworth, though in a less degree, he has written 
 too much, and like Wordsworth, as he takes his march 
 down the ages, time will sift and winnow his work. 
 Some of it must be left behind, but, if any critical 
 opinion is permanent, and if the future of English 
 literature is to have any convictions and canons in 
 common with the present, and with three centuries 
 that have gone before, the best of Tennyson must be 
 immortal. 
 
 II 
 
 The anecdotes of Tennyson of which this letter will 
 be made up are all, so far as I know, unpublished. It 
 is easy to say they were new when first written out 
 some weeks ago ; less easy to be sure now that none of 
 them has got into print ; but I will, at any rate, use 
 none that I have seen. I string them together without 
 trying to classify them, or to moralise on them over- 
 much. 
 
 Among the men whom Tennyson knew best and liked 
 best was Lord Houghton, the Milnes and the Dicky 
 Milnes of some of the letters, and of all his early life. 
 Houghton, with all his worldliness, had a real affection 
 for his friends, and perhaps for none more than for the 
 brother-poet who so completely outshone him that the 
 title of brother-poet seems misplaced, if not ludicrous. 
 
76 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 But did not Sir Edwin Arnold claim Matthew Arnold 
 as a namesake and brother? Houghton, moreover, 
 liked chafF, and liked to amuse himself at his friend's 
 expense. Tennyson, perhaps, did not like it, but 
 defended himself in his own way. This oddly-assorted 
 pair, on a certain evening now many years ago, were 
 dining together at the house of a common friend, and 
 Houghton betook himself to his favourite amusement. 
 He sat directly opposite Tennyson, and the moment 
 either of them spoke to the other everybody else became 
 silent. ' Tennyson,' said Houghton in his easy way, 
 for no Englishman was ever lighter in hand, ' I have 
 got a number of your earliest unpublished poems in 
 your own handwriting, and as soon as you are dead I 
 shall print them.' Tennyson stared grimly at his 
 tormentor, and, after a pause which fixed everybody's 
 attention, answered : ' You beast.' It was said half 
 humorously, half angrily, but it silenced Houghton as 
 if it had been a blow. 
 
 If the threat had any serious meaning in it, fate 
 ordained that it should never be fulfilled. Houghton, 
 born in the same annus mirabilis of 1809, which pro- 
 duced Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone and our dear 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, died seven years before his 
 friend. Nor need any one imagine Houghton capable 
 of a disloyal act. He was not. 
 
 Little as Tennyson cared for society, he was sometimes 
 to be met in houses which interested him, and one of 
 these was the Duchess of Bedford's, in Eaton Square, 
 now the Dowager Duchess. It was at a party there 
 one evening that he saw a certain great lady, of whom 
 he had heard, but whom he did not know. He desired 
 to be introduced to her, or, perhaps — for his ways were 
 sometimes regal — desired that she might be presented 
 
TENNYSON 77 
 
 to him. In whichever way it was, the ceremony was 
 transacted, and Tennyson's second remark was this 
 
 question: 'O Lady , do I know Lord ?' 
 
 The person about whom he thus inquired was a Peer 
 who, though young, had won much distinction in 
 public life, and was widely known in private. His wife, 
 as it happened, was devoted to him, and jealous of any 
 word which sounded like disparagement of his position 
 or indifference to his renown. She looked Tennyson in 
 the face and answered, with perfect composure of 
 manner : ' I am sure. Lord Tennyson, I can't say. I 
 never heard him mention your name in my life.' For 
 a moment the poet was staggered by this straight hit 
 from the shoulder, but he had the good sense and good 
 temper to take it well. He liked to be met on even 
 terms, and liked a man, or a woman either, who would 
 face him in his most arrogant moods. They became 
 friends and parted friends, with the expression of a wish 
 on Tennyson's part that the husband would come and 
 . see him ; which I rather think he never did. 
 
 Tennyson's dislike to intrusions upon his solitude 
 showed itself at times in an entire disregard of con- 
 ventionalities. He allowed himself to indulge in what, 
 in anybody else, would be called downright rudeness. 
 One of his neighbours, with whom he was on good terms, 
 once asked leave to bring to Aldworth a lady who was 
 visiting him — a lady well known in society, as her 
 husband is well known in a world much wider than 
 society. She had, it was carefully explained, a great 
 desire to see the poet, for whose writings her admira- 
 tion was great. Tennyson assented with amiability, 
 telling his friend to bring her to luncheon on a day 
 named in the following week. When they arrived the 
 poet had forgotten all about it, and, by ill-luck, was in 
 
78 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 one of his solitary moods. The lady was introduced, 
 the poet bowed. Luncheon was announced and they 
 went in ; she sat next her host, who uttered not a word 
 during the meal; at the end of which he rose and 
 retired in silence to his own room. She left the house, 
 to which she had made this pilgrimage in a spirit of 
 hope and of reverence, not having once heard so much 
 as the sound of the poet's voice. 
 
 It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that 
 Aldworth or Freshwater was a hermit's cave, or that 
 hospitality was unknown to the poet. There were 
 certain friends whom he liked to have with him ; some- 
 times old, sometimes new. It was one of the latter 
 who paid him a visit, no great number of years ago, at 
 a kind of crisis in his poetic life, when ' The Cup ' had 
 been, or was about to be, produced at the Lyceum 
 Theatre. Dinner over, the butler, having filled this 
 guest's glass, placed the decanter of port before his 
 master. The talk was on a subject which deeply in- 
 terested Tennyson ; none other, I imagine, than the 
 production of this same play from which the poet 
 fondly and vainly hoped his fame as a dramatic writer 
 was to take its rise. 
 
 As he talked he drank, and, not noticing his friend's 
 empty glass, filled his own till the decanter was drained. 
 Then he said : ' That was a very good bottle of port, 
 don't you think ? Shall we have another ? ' And the 
 guest assenting, the butler brought in a second decanter 
 which went through just the same experience as the 
 
 first ; Mr. having one glass from the butler, and 
 
 Tennyson, entirely engrossed in talk as before, consum- 
 ing all the rest. Early next morning his guest awoke 
 to find Tennyson standing by his bed, and regarding 
 him with a sort of friendly solicitude. 
 
TENNYSON 79 
 
 'How are you this morning?' was the host's query. 
 
 ' All right, thanks.' 
 
 ' Sure you are all right ? ' 
 
 ' Quite sure.' 
 
 ' Ah, but pray, Mr. , do you always drink two 
 
 bottles of port after dinner ? ' 
 
 Tennyson, like Browning, preferred port to all other 
 wines. It is a taste they shared with other great men ; 
 with Mr. Gladstone and Lord Eldon, and many more. 
 Lord Eldon notoriously liked bad port ; the sort of 
 black-strap of which Dr. Johnson's friend observed, in 
 answer to another's complaint : ' It is thick and it is 
 black, and it makes you drunk ; what more can you 
 want .'' ' Tennyson's preferences ran in the same direc- 
 tion I have heard. He liked what the publican calls 
 ' fruity ^ port, which is the horror of the true port-wine 
 drinker. However, there is a story which, in some 
 slight degree, tends to confute this calumny — I hope it is 
 a calumny. His friends used to send him anything parti- 
 cularly good which came in their way. One of them, 
 an eminent man of science, once despatched to him a 
 small parcel of the vintage of '47. When next they 
 met the poet remarked : ' That port of yours was filthy 
 stuff; it was all muddy.' The eminent man of science 
 mildly suggested that he had, perhaps, not given it 
 time enough to rest after its journey. 'Rest.-' There 
 wasn't enough of it to put away. You only sent me 
 half-a-dozen.' 
 
 If there be connoisseurs of port in America, where 
 port used not to be in fashion, they may like to hear 
 the opinion of the man of science on the question how 
 long port ought to be kept after travelling before it is 
 ready to drink. ' There is not,' he declared, ' in any 
 bottle of port of any vintage any crust or sediment 
 
80 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 which will not, a half hour after the bottle be placed 
 on end, so completely sink to the bottom as to be in- 
 visible.' But that, though the judgment of science, 
 is not one in which the hardened connoisseur can be 
 expected to concur. 
 
 We need not take part in the criticisms upon Tenny- 
 son's liking for solitude. If any man is entitled to 
 judge for himself how much he will see of other men, 
 surely the poet is. He can be a poet only on his own 
 conditions, and knows in what circumstances he can 
 think and write, and in what others he cannot. Nor, 
 I may add, has the notion that the private life of a 
 public man is public property ever got a solid foothold 
 in this country. The interviewer exists in England, 
 but he has not yet become an integral part of the social 
 fabric. The better journals will have little or nothing 
 to do with him. The tourist and the sightseer have, 
 no doubt, pretty free ways. They used to dog the 
 poet's footsteps and to enter, or try to enter, where the 
 interviewer would not, knowing he had no chance. 
 There was an awkward paragraph in The Times about 
 their nationality. Referring to the pertinacity of ex- 
 cursionists bent on a glimpse of Tennyson that journal 
 says : 
 
 ' Prominent among these during the summer months, 
 when the poet made Aid worth his home, were Americans, 
 some of whom have been known to make a fortnight's 
 sojourn in the neighbourhood with the sole object of 
 seeing him.' 
 
 That is not agreeable reading for us, nor do I think 
 it fair to impute this sort of morbid curiosity to 
 Americans especially. The English tourist, from 'Arry 
 upward, is apt to take large views of his privileges. 
 The American is much less intrusive, and at least as 
 
TENNYSON 81 
 
 likely as his English cousin to think himself in need of 
 credentials ; which, indeed, a particular class of travellers 
 consider ought to be forthcoming when asked for, 
 whether from friend or stranger. It takes time for the 
 arriving American of this class to grasp the fact that 
 letters of introduction are here given sparingly. The 
 rule is never to give such a letter unless the giver has 
 some claim upon him to whom the introduction is 
 sought. 
 
 I knew a case not long since which may serve as a 
 specimen. A man of some distinction in his profession 
 called upon one of his countrymen in London. He 
 said : ' I know you are busy and I will take none of 
 your time, nor ask you any favour which will give you 
 trouble. All I want is letters to Salisbury, Gladstone, 
 and Tennyson.' It was useless to try to persuade him 
 that it was impossible to give such letters. He departed 
 convinced that his friend was not disposed to oblige him. 
 
 If the letter to Tennyson had been written it would 
 not have served his purpose ; nor to the others. Things 
 are not here done in that way. But I suppose no day 
 passes when the American Minister is not pestered with 
 similar demands. Tennyson protected himself as best 
 he 'might against these, as against other hero-wor- 
 shippers ; and was able to live his own life when once 
 he had established a reputation for moroseness. It was 
 his fixed resolve that he would not suffer his life to be 
 frittered away in mere civilities. 
 
 Tennyson's impatience of criticism lasted long after 
 his immense success might have made him indiiFerent 
 to individual censures. He never overcame his dislike 
 to it ; if it never shook his belief in himself and his 
 work, it annoyed him. He was content with nothing 
 short of universal approbation. When occasion offered 
 
 F 
 
82 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 he took an odd revenge on those who presumed to judge 
 him. A writer of the critical kind once assured him 
 that he could always tell what lines wrote themselves 
 from pure inspiration, and what others had been 
 laboured. In response to Tennyson's invitation he 
 quoted a famous verse as an instance of poetic 
 spontaneity. ' Ah, yes,' drawled the poet, ' I smoked 
 a dozen pipes over that line.' 
 
 It was not difficult to induce Tennyson to read his 
 own poems to a select circle. The poem he preferred 
 was ' Maud,' or perhaps he only preferred it for reading 
 aloud. It was, at any rate, the one he most often 
 chose when asked to recite. He read with enthusiasm. 
 Whether the poems really gained much from the 
 author's delivery of them is an open question. His 
 voice was deep rather than musical, and his elocution 
 peculiar to himself. Still, these audiences were always 
 interesting, and one of them was more interesting than 
 all the others. 
 
 Tennyson was one of the party invited some years 
 since by Sir Donald Currie on a yachting trip : the 
 yacht provided being an ocean steamer of the South 
 Africa line, known as the ' Pembroke Castle.' Mr. 
 Gladstone was another guest, I think — certainly he was 
 on one of the two or three trips then taken. There 
 was on board a young English girl, since married and 
 dead, whose beauty and intelligence and charm were 
 all remarkable. Tennyson attached himself to this 
 brilliant and sympathetic creature. He was often 
 asked to read, and it became his habit to read holding 
 her hand, which, in the fervour of recitation, he often 
 pressed. 
 
 The ship put in at Copenhagen and the Princess of 
 Wales and the Empress of Russia, then on a visit to 
 
TENNYSON 83 
 
 her old home, came on board. There was luncheon, 
 and after luncheon Tennyson was asked to read, and 
 did, sitting between the Empress on one side and the 
 English girl on the other. When it was over and 
 they had gone up on deck, he asked the girl whether 
 she thought the Empress liked it. 
 
 ' Well,' answered she, ' her Majesty must have thought 
 it a little unusual.' 
 
 ' What do you mean .'' ' 
 
 ' I mean that I don't think the Empress is in the 
 habit of having her hand squeezed in public even by 
 poets.' 
 
 It seemed proper to Tennyson to offer to the Empress 
 his most humble apologies for his mistake. The 
 Empress laughed and told him she had enjoyed the 
 reading extremely. 
 
 Of Tennyson, as of Victor Hugo, it has been said 
 that he avenged the author upon the publisher. 
 Both were good men of business, with an adequate 
 sense of the money value of their writings, and both 
 were capable of driving a bargain. I don't know that 
 Tennyson has ever had the credit, as Hugo had, of 
 ruining his publishers. It was, I believe, true that 
 the tremendous prices Hugo was in a position to ob- 
 tain brought one, or more than one, of these gentle- 
 men to bankruptcy. It is certainly true that, after 
 his fame was established, Tennyson was able to exact 
 large sums, and that, either because the terms were 
 more profitable on one side than on the other, or for 
 some other good reason, he changed his publishers 
 pretty often. In other words, they did not care to 
 renew their contracts with him. 
 
 But for many years past Tennyson's London pub- 
 lishers have been Messrs. Macmillan, an eminent firm. 
 
84 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 who are believed to adjust their relations with authors 
 on strict business principles. I am only repeating the 
 gossip of the trade when I say they were understood to 
 pay the poet a very large sum yearly for the right of 
 printing and selling such of his poems as were already 
 in print. When a new poem came out, a new bargain 
 was made for that particular transacbion. I think it 
 lionourable, both to the poet and the publisher, that 
 the relations between theni should have existed so 
 long, and on a basis of mutual good-will as well as of 
 business. So close were these relations that, upon the 
 author's death, it was the publishers to whom the 
 arrangements of the funeral, so far as they concerned 
 the public, were confided. Mr. Craik, one of the 
 partners in the firm, had, I think, the practical conduct 
 of the whole business, and had to grant or refuse 
 admission to the abbey — no easy task when you consider 
 that the applications exceeded 10,000 for less than 
 2000 places. 
 
 The talk about the absence of the Prince of Wales 
 from Tennyson's funeral soon died away. Few of the 
 English papers joined in it, nor did the one which 
 started it persevere. I think I said at the time that it 
 was doubtful whether etiquette or some rule of court 
 did not prevent his attendance. On inquiry I am told 
 that is so. No member of the royal family is expected 
 to be present at the funeral of any subject, unless of 
 one of the royal household ; in that case it becomes 
 optional. ' If,' said my informant — a person who 
 understands these high matters — ' the rule were once to 
 be relaxed, it would be impossible to draw a line. If 
 the Prince of Wales had gone to Tennyson's funeral, 
 how could he have stayed away from half a dozen others 
 which may be expected to occur during his lifetime?' 
 
TENNYSON 85 
 
 This argument does not seem very conclusive, but I 
 give it as it was given to me. 
 
 Perhaps, since even kings and princes are human, the 
 Queen or her son may consider that the margin between 
 royalty and the subject is already narrow enough, and 
 that it is not expedient to reduce it in any way. More 
 probably, the Prince lacked a sufficiently powerful 
 motive to create a precedent or take a new departure. 
 And, as I said before, no comment would have been 
 made on his absence had not some too zealous Glad- 
 stonian thought it desirable to divert criticism from his 
 chief. Mr. Gladstone's absence had a reason, and a 
 good reason, but the reason publicly assigned was a bad 
 one ; hence the censure which fell upon him. Even 
 that he has survived, and about him, too, or about his 
 conduct in this particular, the talk has come to an end. 
 
 Some of the stories I have given you may seem to 
 some of Tennyson's American admirers lacking in 
 reverence for the great master who is gone. I do not 
 think so. They are, at any rate, not told in a spirit 
 of irreverence, nor of antipathy. They are told because 
 they are illustrative ; they show, each one of them, a 
 side of his character or some trait which helps explain 
 the man. There are points in which one would have 
 liked Tennyson to be other than he was ; so are there 
 in all men. But we cannot make him over, or make 
 anybody over. We have to make the best of him, and 
 to be thankful for him, and to draw such best lesson as 
 we can from his life and character. Let the fierce 
 light beat upon him as upon the throne ; few men can 
 better endure to be known fully. The spirit in which 
 a great memory is to be approached is, I grant, a spirit 
 of reverence, but it is also, and above all things, to be 
 a spirit of sincerity and of complete truthfulness. 
 
THE GERMAN EMPEROK 
 
 [berliNj may 1893] 
 
 Not the least remarkable thing about Berlin is the 
 TempeUiof Parade Ground. Here are 8000 acres of 
 land set apart, since 1721, for purely military purposes 
 — it is a parade ground and nothing more — now just 
 upon the edge of one of the newest and most rapidly 
 growing parts of the town, where land is worth so much 
 per square foot for building purposes. The speculative 
 builder has, in this case, to give way to the practical 
 soldier, and the German taxpayer, one of the most 
 heavily burdened mortals now extant, sees himself 
 obliged to provide a space on which two respectable 
 armies may manoeuvre, and sometimes do. We were 
 too soon for the great Spring Review, which occurs near 
 the end of May, but you can never in Berlin be too 
 soon or too late for a military spectacle of some kind. 
 
 We had a spectacle from our windows opening on 
 the Wilhelms Platz every morning, if we chose to get 
 up to look at it, at six o'clock. The garrison of Berlin 
 is a restless body, and some part of it for ever in move- 
 ment — infantry, cavalry, and perhaps artillery most 
 frequently of all. Lest we might miss it, or lest the 
 good Berliners should forget they are in a state of semi- 
 siege, or lest they should sleep too late, the troops have 
 bands with them at this early hour, and magnificent 
 bands they are. No better, if so good, martial music 
 
THE GERMAN EMPEROR 87 
 
 anywhere now to be heard. So we did not mind being 
 waked up, any more than the little world of foreigners 
 at Homburg last year minded. There, also, at six 
 o'clock or earlier, troops were under arms and bands 
 playing. It did not signify whether you minded or 
 not. The convenience of the military, not of the 
 civilian, and least of all the foreigner, is considered first 
 of all in Germany and most of all in Berlin. Later in 
 the day are to be seen the regiments coming back from 
 their morning's work at Tempelhof ; the Emperor at 
 their head perhaps. And there is no hour in the day 
 when you may not see some sort of a military proces- 
 sion ; all in the way of business, and as part of the 
 regular operations of the army in time of peace. 
 
 The Emperor's appearance on these and other occa- 
 sions still excites curiosity and interest. Nobody is 
 visible so often in the streets of Berlin. People stop to 
 look at him, and some of them take off their hats. 
 There are no cheers. He is greeted with civility ; of 
 enthusiasm there is none. He is not popular, and he is 
 not trusted. ' Nobody knows what he will do next,' 
 observed one of his subjects, by way of summing up the 
 general feeling toward him, and the general anxiety. 
 
 The Emperor, as all the world knows, takes himself 
 very seriously in all his imperial capacities, and in none 
 more than as a soldier. He lives at Potsdam in the 
 New Palace. He is in the saddle every morning at six, 
 rides in to Berlin, sixteen miles, and out to Tempelhof 
 which he reaches at eight, when a review begins lasting 
 till one o'clock or later. At two he goes to lunch, or 
 perhaps it is dinner ; is, at any rate, a solid mid-day 
 meal. After these seven or eight hours on horseback 
 and of hard work drilling and manoeuvring, and after 
 his solid two o'clock meal, the ruler of Germany thinks 
 
88 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 himself in proper condition to attend to affairs of State. 
 He attends to them or not, as he sees fit. The business 
 of State which has to wait for His Imperial Majesty's 
 attention is, for the most part, very much in arrears. 
 He is not a good man of business and not methodical. 
 
 The State, in fact, or the Empire, seems to be to the 
 Emperor a kind of diversion from the serious business 
 of his life. The serious business is the Army. That is 
 one view. On the other hand, there are Germans who 
 will tell you that the Army is the Emperor's toy. It 
 really does amuse him to devote five or six hours a day 
 to the duties of a drill-sergeant. Drill, manoeuvres, 
 dress, the least details of military life afford him an 
 infinite delight. Did he not the other day issue an- 
 other of those military encyclicals for which he is 
 famous ? These solemn documents bear on various sub- 
 jects relating to the business of soldiering — sometimes 
 duel-fighting, sometimes beer- drinking ; both which 
 pastimes His Imperial Majesty encourages ; by precept, 
 if not by example. This time the exhortation of the 
 Hohenzollern monarch related to the wearing of pointed 
 shoes and of high collars ; both of which His Imperial 
 Majesty strongly disapproves and discourages. 
 
 We were told we ought to see one of these morning 
 drills at the Tempelhof, and we did. To witness the 
 great Spring Review is the privilege of a few. You 
 may not happen to be in Berlin at the right time, and, 
 if you are, it is a matter of high diplomacy to get per- 
 mission for a carriage to go on the ground ; the best or 
 perhaps the only good way of seeing the performance. 
 There is a tradition in Berlin that Mr. Phelps once 
 drove out on one of these great occasions with a pro- 
 cession of seven carriages ; each containing four or 
 more of his countrymen and countrywomen ; so that 
 
THE GERMAN EMPEROR 89 
 
 some thirty Americans were privileged to look on 
 while the German Army was inspected by the German 
 Emperor; or so much of the German Army as con- 
 stitutes the garrisons of Berlin and Potsdam. This 
 was a distinct triumph for the United States. No 
 Ambassador ever had more than four carriages ; and no 
 other Minister so many as four. It was one more proof 
 of Mr. Phelps's talent for diplomacy ; a talent which the 
 diplomatist has so often to display, if he can, in little 
 things as well as in great. 
 
 But on ordinary mornings anybody may venture, not 
 on, but to the edge of the parade ground, and get a 
 very good view of what is going on. E. and I drove 
 out, not indeed at eight, but toward eleven ; which was 
 in good time for the manoeuvres. The three hours' 
 inspection and drill we were willing to take for granted. 
 I dare say the soldiers would have been still more will- 
 ing. ' They are worked to death,' was the remark of a 
 military expert, ' and so are their officers.' It does not 
 seem to occm: to the imperial enthusiast who presides 
 over their destinies that everybody may not have the 
 same passion for playing at war which he has, nor the 
 same degree of physical energy. There are, however, 
 not a few Germans who fear lest the play be only a 
 preparation for war in earnest. These daily drills and 
 manoeuvres are a new thing. It is a new thing for a 
 German Emperor to inspect in person and command in 
 person regiment after regiment, as if to assure himself 
 that every part of that immense military machine which 
 goes by the name of the German Army is in perfect 
 order and ready for immediate use. Does he mean it 
 for immediate use .'' 
 
 That is the question which men are anxiously asking 
 themselves, and sometimes each other. The Emperor's 
 
90 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ambition is without botmds. His confidence in his own 
 mihtary capacity has no known limits. His technical 
 knowledge is large. He certainly does understand his 
 trade as a soldier, and would, in the opinion of com- 
 petent judges, be an excellent commanding officer of a 
 regiment, probably a good general of brigade ; perhaps 
 a sufficient general of division. Will any competent 
 judge go further than that ? Can it be said of any 
 officer till he has been tried in actual war that he is fit 
 to command a corps d'arme'e ? Can it be known whether 
 he could handle an army on a field of battle .'' Napoleon, 
 it is true, had never commanded more than a few bat- 
 talions when he planned and executed that wonderful 
 first Italian campaign which he never surpassed. But 
 is it absolutely certain that the Emperor William 
 Second is a Napoleon ? Is he even a Frederick ? He 
 may be both, but how is one to know ? The number 
 of generals who have proved themselves fit for war on a 
 great scale is not large. It is never large. 
 
 The Emperor's talents seem to be talents for detail. 
 He does not take broad views in politics. He might 
 not take broad views in war. It makes one think of 
 Moltke's remark that he was not quite sure he could 
 set a squadron in the field. That the Emperor can is 
 beyond dispute. That he can also conduct a campaign 
 is his own conviction ; which not all those about him 
 share. Hence the apprehensions at which I hinted 
 above. The Emperor longs for all kinds of fame, and 
 for military fame most of all. He is thought, rightly 
 or wrongly, capable of plunging two nations into war 
 in order that he may win this military fame. No doubt 
 he would do it conscientiously — that is where the danger 
 lies. He can always persuade himself that he has a 
 divine command. 
 
THE GERMAN EMPEROR 91 
 
 The old Emperor was content to leave the conduct 
 of military operations in the hands of the Staff, of 
 which Moltke was simply Chief It is not believed 
 that this yoimg Emperor will do so, and if he did there 
 is no longer a Moltke. The new Chief of Staff was 
 chosen by Moltke, but if the Emperor prefers'to be his 
 own Chief of Staff, as General Grant sometimes did, 
 who or what can prevent him? No man can say 
 whither the spirit of adventure, coupled as it is with 
 no misgivings as to his ability to play any part, may 
 lead him. The Emperor of Russia excepted, no man 
 living wields such power as this precocious Hohenzollem. 
 The Emperor of Russia, however, is amenable to advice. 
 The German Emperor notoriously is not, whether in 
 lesser or greater affairs. He will not hearken to the 
 experienced officers who hint to him that he is over-, 
 doing it with his soldiers ; that mere human flesh and 
 blood, with no divine right or Hohenzollem lineage to 
 fall back on, are not equal to the task he sets and the 
 work he exacts. 
 
 One result of this procedure struck me as ominous. 
 The two o'clock dinner lasts, for the officers, the greater 
 part of the afternoon ; is sometimes not over till six or 
 seven in the evening, said a friend who knows the army 
 and its ways. Men who have been on parade and much 
 hustled about from eight in the morning till past one 
 become hungry and thirsty. The dinner is a copious 
 one, and the drinking heavy, both during and after 
 dinner. And what do you suppose is the fashionable 
 beverage of the smart German officer of the Guards 
 to-day ? Champagne and port, mixed. It makes one 
 think with a shudder of the absinthe which softened 
 the French brain under the Empire which collapsed in 
 1870. 
 
92 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 These gloomy forebodings seem, I admit, out of place 
 in the Tempelhof, and in the sunshine which bathes 
 the broad plain and flashes back from steel and from 
 gold epaulettes and from a thousand polished surfaces. 
 The parade-ground is cut in two by a public road, 
 along which the public is allowed to drive, taking its 
 chance of being swept away in a charge of cavalry. 
 There are carriages and cabs, and either side of the 
 road is lined thinly with spectators. You come upon 
 the scene as suddenly as if a curtain had gone up, for 
 you pass in a moment out from among the streets of 
 Berlin into the country, and on each hand the smooth 
 expanse of the Tempelhof stretches before you. It is 
 an almost level plain, dipping here and there into slight 
 hollows, and rising on the left into a hill. Nearer, on 
 the same side, is a wood. 
 
 There were, as far as one could judge, two regiments 
 of infantry, nearly all on the right of the road, as we 
 drove up ; there was a body of cavalry on the crest of 
 the hill, and, as presently became evident, a force in 
 the wood. Mounted police kept the line ; troops 
 excepted, nobody allowed on any part of the ground. 
 To the left, between the woods and the road, was a 
 group of horsemen, and in the centre of the group the 
 Emperor. He had about him a staff that might suffice 
 for the commander of an army on a real field of battle ; 
 plumed generals and scores of gilt officers of various 
 grades ; the military members of various embassies and 
 legations in Berlin completing the company, while 
 mounted orderlies hung on the outskirts and at every 
 moment galloped off with messages for the forces engaged. 
 The mimicry of war was perfect. The Emperor was 
 but dimly visible from where we were, and if, in our 
 eagerness to behold or even to identify the Imperial 
 
THE GERMAN EMPEROR 93 
 
 face and figure, we ventured a foot upon the turf, a 
 mounted policeman rose out of the earth to warn us 
 back, with equal firmness and civility ; for never once 
 did I hear in Berlin, or elsewhere in Germany, a rude 
 or harsh word from these panoplied guardians of the 
 public peace. ' Would you have the kindness to keep 
 in line with the others — I am obliged to ask you ; ' 
 such was the address of this gallant officer mounted 
 on a gallant grey, who rode slowly up and down the 
 front of the spectators. 
 
 However, we knew the Emperor was there and could 
 imagine the features we had seen before — the hard face 
 with its self-contained and self-satisfied look, the eyes 
 too neeir together, the expression of unrest, the air of 
 irrepressible vigour, which makes him seem always to 
 be wanting to do something else ; the critical gaze fixed 
 on his troops which forgets to note no fault, no mistake, 
 no speck on any button, no wavering in the line which 
 ought to be drawn across the field as with a pencil and 
 a ruler on a sheet of paper. I imagine there is not 
 much fault to be found, yet they say His Majesty never 
 omits to summon about him after a review the colonels 
 and field officers of the regiments, and general if there 
 be one, and read them one and all a lecture on the art 
 of war and on their shortcomings in the exercise of the 
 morning. He is a terror to his own soldiers, whatever 
 he may prove to be to the foe. 
 
 In the next hour we saw a battle ; acted from begin- 
 ning to end with a sense of reality and seriousness which 
 the theatre never gives you and no written account can 
 express. If it was not on a great scale, it was perfect 
 in each particular and a spectacle of extreme beauty. 
 Seldom is it in actual war that any one beholder or 
 actor can grasp the whole scene, but here the whole was 
 
94 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 as plainly visible as if in truth it were a performance 
 on a stage. They were no puppets nor marionettes, but 
 real men ; no amateurs either, or militia or mere show 
 troops, which one often has to call the English ; but an 
 integral portion of the most tremendous military force 
 in the world, with the prestige of victory on its banners. 
 Under the scrutiny of those piercing Imperial eyes, no 
 man dared do his duty less seriously than if the contest 
 were real. It was real to him ; to the officers above all. 
 Everything was transacted with the utmost energy and 
 precision of which the trained German soldier is capable. 
 
 The business they were set to do presently became 
 plain even to the eye of the civilian. The wood on the 
 left was held by a defending force ; invisible to us or to 
 the attacking troops. The battalions massed on the 
 far side of the road were to carry it if they could. 
 It was beautiful to see them set out upon this little 
 campaign. The compact masses of soldiery slowly shook 
 themselves into open order. The squares and columns 
 formed into line ; duly distributed into advance guard, 
 main body, and reserves. A company of skirmishers 
 broke suddenly loose from the front, scattered, ran for- 
 ward, fired, and dropped on the ground. At first they 
 attracted no attention from the enemy, who on his 
 part kept fast to his wood half a mile away. They 
 sprang up after a minute and ran forward again, 
 followed at a distance by the advance guard whom in 
 turn the main body followed ; the reserves standing 
 fast. When this movement was perceived from the 
 wood, volleys broke forth, and the assailants dropped 
 again, when they had delivered their volley in reply. 
 
 There was something uncanny and incomprehensible 
 about the whole proceeding. From both wood and 
 open field came crash after crash of musketry and no 
 
THE GERMAN EMPEROR 95 
 
 smoke ; they were firing with the new smokeless powder. 
 It was quite evident at once that smokeless powder has 
 its drawbacks as well as advantages. You see better, 
 but you are also seen better. The attacking body on 
 a groimd which afforded no cover whatever was simply 
 a target for the skilled riflemen in the woods — a target 
 which spread over a great space, in a blaze of sunlight, 
 in which glittered a thousand spikes on a thousand 
 helmets, and every gilt button and steel scabbard and 
 buckle and epaulette was a target by itself. The effect 
 was as dazzling for us as it was dangerous to the troops 
 themselves ; the whole plain sparkled and gleamed and 
 glowed with these innumerable points of reflected light. 
 But skirmishers and their supports went steadily for- 
 ward ; the rush at the double quick was repeated as 
 soon as the fire from the wood died away ; and so 
 many yards of ground gained and held at every rush. 
 Presently the reserves also moved up. Almost at the 
 same moment a body of cavalry flashed out of the 
 wood, poured along the crest of the hill, and threatened 
 the right flank of the advancing enemy. The right 
 flank swung steadily round till it had ceased to be a 
 flank and become a solid wall of armed men facing this 
 new foe, into which it delivered a hail of blank cartridges 
 that sent the cavalry headlong over the brow of the hill, 
 dismounted the guns of the battery which the cavalry 
 supported, and cleared that part of the ground alto- 
 gether. Once the cavalry and guns reappeared, but 
 their fate was the same. They could not live under 
 that fire and had to vanish. 
 
 No more, I thought, could the infantry have lived 
 long on that flat uncovered field, had there been bullets 
 in the rifles from the wood. Next us stood a little 
 cluster of military critics who commented freely, being 
 
96 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 out of the Emperor''s hearing, upon all these transac- 
 tions. When finally the infantry advancing in line, 
 reserves included and skirmishers still well in front, 
 swept on to the edge of the wood and into it and the 
 defenders fled in the wake of their cavalry and artillery, 
 I asked one of these gentlemen, plainly an old soldier, 
 if, over such ground as that, infantry could ever have 
 got near the wood. 'Never,' was his answer. The 
 strength of the fire had shown that the force in among 
 the trees was considerable enough to have annihilated 
 the regiments outside. But if you do not know the 
 conditions under which an engagement of this sort takes 
 place, criticism is thrown away, and we of course did 
 not know them. 
 
 It was possible to occupy the mind with something 
 beside tactics, to enjoy the brilliancy and animation of 
 the scene, and to believe we had seen a battle in minia- 
 ture ; as we had. What is called a sham fight is often 
 a meagre imitation of battle without interest or beauty 
 or veri-similitude. This was so like the real thing as 
 to make one remember the rather comprehensive remark 
 of a soldier who is not German : ' There are no soldiers 
 but the German.' Such remarks are not meant to be 
 taken literally ; they are only a form of the superlative, 
 only a note of admiration. Whether the Germans are 
 still the best troops in Europe is a point on which, with 
 or without the Emperor's help, the world will presently 
 have an opportunity of forming fresh opinions. 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE 
 BISMARCKS 
 
 [BERLIN, MAY 1 893] 
 
 The road from Berlin to Friedrichsruh, whither we 
 were bound on Wednesday, lies historically though not 
 geographically through Schonhausen. This was the 
 birthplace, and for a great part of his life the home, 
 of Prince Bismarck ; and to it he still returns often, 
 though now as a visitor only. He gave it last year, 
 or year before, to his eldest son. Count Herbert — not, 
 as was afterward said, as a wedding gift, for the transfer 
 was made before the wedding was thought of. Count 
 Herbert was his son — that was enough, and if it were 
 not enough the younger Bismarck had been for many 
 years, and in different capacities, his father's right hand 
 man, and such he remained while Minister of State for 
 Foreign Affairs ; perhaps more then than ever. And 
 it is at Schonhausen with his Austrian bride, who is 
 haK English also, that Count Bismarck now lives. 
 Berlin sees no more of him than of his father, and 
 the public service, which had no more capable servant 
 among the men of his generation, sees nothing either. 
 Since his father's disgrace Count Herbert has been, in 
 the American phrase, out of politics ; to the immeasur- 
 able surprise at first of the youthful Emperor, who 
 thought he could turn off the father, with rather less 
 
98 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ceremony than an English gentleman would use to a 
 domestic servant, and yet keep the son. But, in this 
 as in some other matters, the Emperor found himself 
 mistaken. Nothing even to this day occasions him 
 so much astonishment as the consciousness of his 
 own mistakes, or the fact that other people consider 
 them mistakes. The frequency of them seems never 
 to diminish his surprise. 
 
 The station of Schonhausen is two hours by rail from 
 Berlin ; the house which gives its name to the village 
 — or borrows it, I know not which — is seven or eight 
 minutes' drive from the lonely station. A straight 
 sunny road between green fields leads to the village, 
 where it turns and broadens into a street; on either 
 side of which are a few red-roofed, sleepy-looking 
 houses. The village lies, in memory of its feudal 
 origin, as Petworth and many an English village does, 
 just outside the gates of the house. Turning sharply 
 out of the street, we pass on the left what may be either 
 a lodge or a farmhouse, or both ; a medley of build- 
 ings fills or encloses the space we are traversing ; in a 
 moment we are at the front door, and a huge Bavarian 
 boarhound stalks up to the victoria and makes friendly 
 advances to the two strangers before we have set foot 
 on the doorstep. 
 
 If you will recall the beginning of Prince Bismarck's 
 life as a Prussian squire of a superior kind, it will help 
 you to form a notion of what Schonhausen is like. Not 
 a castle, not a great house ; a mansion built with sim- 
 plicity of stone. The actual fabric, with its immensely 
 thick walls, dates in great part from the end of the 
 seventeenth century. Parts are much older. There 
 has been a house or, in earlier times, a convent here 
 for many centuries. Whenever the ground is disturbed, 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISMARCKS 99 
 
 bricks and other fragments of an ancient edifice come 
 to light. The original date was about 1200. In the 
 Thirty Years' War the whole was destroyed ; then re- 
 built in whole or in part, more than once. The old 
 cellars still extend far underneath the terrace, and there 
 used to be, perhaps still is, if one tried, a communica- 
 tion underground with the church. 
 
 The house and the estate came into the possession of 
 the Bismarck family, much against their will, in 1560. 
 The property they then owned attracted the attention of 
 the Elector of that day and he coveted it, and since there 
 was not then much other law than that of the strongest, 
 and the Elector was strongest, the Bismarcks had to 
 surrender their old home. They received in exchange 
 Schonhausen, and have been here ever since. A good 
 estate, not a great one. The house, of three stories, is 
 without pretension outside or in ; roomy, comfortable, 
 encompassed and overshadowed by trees, and a room or 
 two darkened by them, notably one in the right-hand 
 comer, where the finest horse-chestnut in North Ger- 
 many rises far above the roof, with two others hardly 
 less fine. Trees, as I said, on all sides and much 
 shrubbery, and it is not too easy without a guide to find 
 one's way amid the many buildings for farm purposes, 
 which show in what a practical spirit the estate has been 
 managed. 
 
 An orchard of old apple and other fruit trees extends 
 far on the right. A gate to the left leads to water, a 
 marshy stream whence you may hear the croaking of 
 frogs, and by the stream is a grey old moss-grown 
 statue, peppered with bullets. The Prince used it in 
 times past as a target, and was a good shot. The gar- 
 den is large and rambling, and there are graves among 
 the bushes, one of them that of an elder brother, with 
 
100 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 an inscription setting forth that his early death was the 
 only sorrow he ever caused his parents. It is a German 
 feeling and a German custom, this burying of the dead 
 near the family instead of at a distance and among 
 strangers — as if they still belonged to the family. And 
 do they not .-' The highroad divides the estate into two 
 parts. Formerly it was all one ; then was split between 
 two brothers, one of whom parted with his share. The 
 Germans handsomely bought it back and gave it to 
 Prince Bismarck. 
 
 On a grassy space in the garden are a number of old 
 cannon taken from the French at Strasburg and else- 
 where ; some very curious. Most curious of all are two 
 of Louis xivth's time, covered once with fleurs-de-lys. 
 The Republicans of '93, who cut off another Louis's 
 head, could not tolerate the royal flower, and did their 
 best to scrape them off ; but only those on top. Under- 
 neath they are not touched. Such was the extent 
 of this Vandal sincerity. Count Bismarck told us 
 that these trophies were frequently visited by the 
 butcher who comes to buy cattle off the farm ; an old 
 soldier, with a soldier's love for such relics of war and 
 victory. To others also they are, if not exactly lovable, 
 full of historic interest. We thought them, like the 
 tapestry from the council chamber, a fitting gift from 
 the old Emperor to his Chancellor. The two gifts 
 together symbolise his public life. 
 
 A large square hall divides the house inside ; drawing- 
 room and dining-room on one hand, library and morn- 
 ing-room on the left ; other rooms also. A staircase at 
 the farther end leads to a similar upper hall, with, to 
 the right, a large room, now the boudoir of Countess 
 Bismarck, and next it the room where Otto von Bis- 
 marck-Schonhausen was bom. Into this, though now 
 private and furnished in a wav which would certainly 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISMARCKS 101 
 
 have surprised young Otto, with a delicate feminine 
 elegance which tells its own story, we were allowed to 
 look. The sun was streaming in, yet there is a legend 
 that a ghost walks here; history of this disembodied 
 spirit, or any reason why it should still visit the place, 
 unknown. But as one legend begets another, the last 
 owner but one of Schonhausen is supposed to have seen, 
 or if not seen, to have become aware of the presence of 
 this restless spirit by some means more mysterious than 
 mere human vision. 
 
 You may pass thence into a large room hung with 
 embroidered silk tapestry. The same tapestry once 
 covered the walls of the council chamber of the Palace 
 in the Wilhelmstrasse, which was Prince Bismarck's 
 residence from 1862 till 1878 ; and the Foreign OiEce 
 also. Catherine of Russia sent it as a gift, originally, 
 I forget to whom ; and that was the use made of it. 
 When Prince Bismarck moved into No. 77, next door 
 in the same street, the old place was dismantled, in whole 
 or in part, and the contents sold. The old Emperor 
 bought this tapestry, and gave it to his Chancellor, 
 saying to him, or writing to him : 'It has witnessed 
 all your struggles and triumphs ; it ought to be yours. 
 Accept it from me.' So it was sent to Schonhausen, and 
 there rested for many years, rolled up. Then it was 
 hung about the room it now decorates ; a beautiful thing 
 in itself, said E., and its history more beautiful still. 
 
 As we arrived for luncheon the room we saw first was 
 the dining-room ; interesting from many associations, 
 with an outlook upon the orchards, and interesting also 
 from the wedding presents which covered sideboards 
 and tables; some of them from England; an early 
 English silver bowl of great size and beauty among 
 them. After luncheon, coffee was served in the garden 
 
102 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 under the trees, the great dog still keeping us company ; 
 and then came the visit to the museum. 
 
 The museum is a Bismarck museum. Here is a large 
 building of two stories, and in a dozen rooms are collected 
 all kinds of mementos and oiFerings to the Prince. It 
 is a veritable museum with many objects interesting in 
 themselves, and all interesting for his sake. Some are 
 now to be seen at Chicago, whither the German Com- 
 missioner has carried them, but the greater part of the 
 collection is still here. In the entrance-hall are more 
 French cannon ; these also are imperial presents ; among 
 them some of those dreaded French mitrailleuses which, 
 in 1870, were to sweep the German armies off the face 
 of French earth ; but did not. Modern as they are, 
 they are out of date ; no more mitrailleuses are made 
 or used. The shot did not scatter. Seventeen shot in 
 the shoulder of a single comrade of Count Bismarck at 
 Mars-la-Tour ; more than were needed. 
 
 There are, all through the rooms, presents from all 
 parts of the world, and from every kind of person. The 
 Emperors' room is entered first. It is a collection of 
 Emperors — of portraits given by the sitters — the 
 Emperors William First and Second of Germany ; the 
 late Emperor Frederick of Germany; the Emperors 
 of Austria and of Russia ; the King of Italy — all life- 
 size, full-length, and, with perhaps one exception, of 
 inconsiderable merit as works of art. Never, I suppose, 
 had any subject such a collection of imperial mementos. 
 The Queen of England, who is also, by grace of Lord 
 Beaconsfield, Empress of a considerable part of the rest 
 of the world — she is there also. In this or another room 
 are the Pope with his bland face, and Cardinal Anto- 
 nelli, very highly coloured. Uncoloured, and modestly 
 hung in a corner, is a photograph of the size, I think, 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISMARCKS 103 
 
 known as imperial, of President Cleveland ; an offering 
 volunteered by him duiing his first Presidency. Mr. 
 Bayard is there also, and the Prince of Wales, though I 
 do not know why I should bracket the late Secretary of 
 State with the Heir to the British Throne, except that 
 they are both, photographically speaking, of the same 
 size. 
 
 Hard by is an offering from the United States, much 
 more remarkable than any likeness of any living Ameri- 
 can ; nothing less than the desk on which Jefferson wrote 
 the Declaration of Independence, or the first draft of it, 
 with an inscription in rather faded ink testifying to the 
 fact, on the authority, so far as I could make out, of a 
 certain Mr. Coolidge. How came it here ? Why should 
 a relic of the Revolution of the very highest interest 
 and importance be in this museum at Schonhausen, 
 rather than in Philadelphia or in Washington ? ' Sent 
 to my father as a gift by an American admirer,' is 
 Count Herbert's explanation of the matter ; name of 
 the giver apparently unknown ; at any rate not men- 
 tioned, and I did not like to pursue the inquiry. But 
 the history of such an object must be known by some- 
 body, and I dare say some good American will look into 
 the question and let us know. Desk with every look of 
 genuineness, of mahogany, some fifteen inches square, 
 folding and imfolding, with what the cabinetmakers call 
 a slope, and green baize lining ; just such a machine, 
 said Mr. Phelps, to whom I described it, as they did use 
 in those days. Whether we ought to go to war to 
 recover it is a question for the American people. 
 
 There is a lesser copy of the large picture in the Old 
 Palace at Berlin representing the proclamation of the 
 Emperor at Versailles ; copy better than the original. 
 Perhaps the most pathetic object in the museum is the 
 
104 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 rash-bottomed chair on which Napoleon in. sat in the 
 peasant's cottage at Donchery, after he had ridden out 
 from Sedan in the early morning of September 3, to sur- 
 render himself and his army to the German Emperor. 
 Prince Bismarck, as he said quaintly, sat there with him 
 'trying to amuse him,' while the staffs were discussing 
 the terms of the capitulation. A fine bust of Moltke 
 is not far off, by a sculptor whose name I ought to remem- 
 ber but do not ; a man who understands his trade yet 
 devoid of any love for the heroic or ideal, or for any- 
 thing but the plain facts of the head and face. It 
 was done very late in Moltke's life, and looks like a 
 cast taken after death. Moltke did not like it. I 
 thought I saw a faint resemblance to the cast of Lord 
 Beaconsfield taken by Boehm, but that was probably 
 fancy. 
 
 Of busts and statues and statuettes of Prince 
 Bismarck there are scores, if not hundreds ; mostly 
 modelled, I judge, from photographs, or from a chance 
 view of the man ; hardly one of them very good, except 
 the statuette by Schafer, of which the original, life- 
 size or larger, is, I believe, at Cologne. This is the 
 real Bismarck in figure and pose, and a good piece of 
 sculptor's work. Many portraits of him also, Lenbach's 
 the only very good one. You cannot easily count the 
 number of books and albums containing addresses to 
 the Chancellor of all dates, freedoms of cities and the 
 like, and as many bouquets, or skeletons of bouquets, 
 or ribbons with which they were tied, pendent from the 
 walls. Far more personal and biographical than these 
 are the fencing foils, and masks and duelling swords, 
 used by Prince Bismarck at the university. Relics 
 from other and more serious battlefields abound, from 
 all, I think, where the Prince had been present, or in 
 
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISMARCKS 105 
 
 the origin of which he had a share — that is, of all since 
 he became Minister in 1862. There are many hundreds 
 of volumes, all presents, and a thousand different gifts 
 and different kinds of gifts, of which I cannot make 
 even the briefest mention. They are from every quarter 
 of the civilised globe, and from some uncivilised ; a 
 marvellously carved ivory tusk, for example, from the 
 Emperor of China, and another, hardly less marvellous, 
 from the King, or whatever he was, of Burmah. This 
 museum is open to the public, and there are many 
 visitors. You may study here many an episode of the 
 Prince's career. The gifts continue to flow in. There 
 is a visitors' book, a volume of some size, and among 
 the names of those who have been to view the collection 
 recently you may read in those large, heavy, firm letters 
 which suggest so vividly the colossal personality of the 
 writer, the name ' von Bismarck.' It occurs again in the 
 visitors' book, kept in the house itself. He comes now 
 as a guest only to the house of his fathers. 
 
 The chiu-ch, standing inside the grounds and close to 
 the house, is a plain fabric of red brick, with a huge, 
 square red brick tower, nearly the size of the church 
 itself, fortress like : the whole dating from the twelfth 
 or thirteenth century. The interior was ravaged during 
 the Thirty Years' War, and nothing escaped except a 
 crucifix in wood, as old as the church itself, midway in 
 the right aisle. The whitewasher, who has defaced so 
 many monuments, has not spared this. There has been 
 a question of cleaning off the whitewash, but there is 
 risk in that and Herr Lenbach advised against it ; so 
 there it hangs, all deathly white, and some of the true 
 character of it hidden beneath its present coating. But 
 nothing can hide the simplicity of it, or the sincerity, 
 or the pathos with which the subject has been treated. 
 
106 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 There is no effort to express passion or agony ; nothing 
 but the helplessness of actual death, and the divine 
 patience with which the agony was endured. 
 
 In the central aisle are stone slabs, with worn and 
 now all illegible inscriptions, the tombs of former Bis- 
 marcks. The mother of the Prince has a tablet to 
 •herself on the wall. Opposite, and high above the 
 floor, is the family pew of the Bismarcks, of black oak, 
 carved in a florid but good manner, of the last century. 
 The pew has the look of a veranda, with roof, slender 
 columns, open spaces and balcony ; the effect of it is 
 fine and even stately, with the Bismarck arms boldly 
 carved above. The whole interior, with its high altar 
 and other features, looks more Catholic than Protestant, 
 but Catholic it is not, and never was. The villagers of 
 Schonhausen are a pious, church-going folk, and fill the 
 chiurch every Sunday, all dressed in deep black. 
 
 I leave Schonhausen with a deep impression, which 
 only an actual visit to the place can convey. What 
 one can describe is Httle. It is the breathing of the 
 air, the actual sight of the birthplace and birthroom of 
 Prince Bismarck, the living for a few hours something 
 of the same life he and his ancestors here lived, amid 
 scenes and sights and sounds familiar to him and to 
 them — this and much else are what fix Schonhausen 
 indelibly in the memory, and enlighten one's mind. E. 
 and I both thought we understood him and German 
 life the better for this experience ; and we felt and saw 
 under what graceful and gracious modem influences the 
 old life was assuming, in some respects, a new form. 
 Schonhausen, at any rate, from which we part with 
 grateful regret, is the true portal to Friedrichsruh. 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 
 
 [BERLIN, MAY 1 893] 
 
 When the Emperor William First gave Friedrichsruh 
 to Prince Bismarck, it certainly was not with any 
 thought of the convenience of the German people. It 
 cannot have occurred to him that they were concerned 
 in the matter, or that a day would ever come when the 
 Prince would be an exile from power, and when the 
 nearness of Friedrichsruh to Hamburg might have a 
 certain influence upon his relations to his fellow-sub- 
 jects, and upon theirs to him. Yet so it is. The 
 accessibility of the place encourages pilgrimages and 
 visits. When Prince Bismarck goes to his other estate 
 of Varzin in the far north-east of Prussia, a day's jour- 
 ney by rail, from Berlin, the pilgrimages and visits 
 become much less frequent. Now events have taken 
 such a turn that Prince Bismarck's communications 
 with the world he used to govern have come to depend 
 on this rather casual intercourse ; except, indeed, when 
 he has occasion to journey through the land. Then 
 we see the jom-ney become a kind of progress ; last 
 year's the most remarkable of all. But when residing 
 at Friedrichsruh he receives many visits and some visitors, 
 many deputations from far and near : students, societies, 
 schools, statesmen, individuals. And these are the occa- 
 sions on which he is likely to say something, so that 
 
 Friedrichsruh has become a kind of platform from which 
 
 107 
 
108 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 its owner addresses his fellow-countrymen and the rest 
 of mankind. Never, as I said, could it have entered into 
 the head of his old comrade and Emperor that a use of 
 this kind would be found for his imperial gift. 
 
 The station of Friedrichsruh is but forty minutes by 
 rail from Hamburg, and the house not more than two 
 minutes' drive from the station. The train passes 
 within a hundred yards of the entrance, and you get 
 your first view of the mansion from the window of the 
 railway carriage. The expresses between Berlin and 
 Hamburg roar past many times a day. The house has 
 neither that seclusion which the Englishman thinks the 
 first condition of agreeable country life, nor that state- 
 liness or splendour which one might expect in an 
 Emperor's gift to his great Chancellor, a gift in acknow- 
 ledgment of the Empire which the servant had bestowed 
 on his sovereign. But the Germans have their own 
 views in these as in other matters, which sooner or later 
 they contrive generally to justify to the world. In 
 1871 the house, or so much of it as then existed, was, 
 or had been, a kind of inn, or boarding-house ; of brick 
 faced with pale yeUow stucco ; the window-frames and 
 doors of a brighter brown-yellow ; no architecture to 
 speak of. It has since been doubled or trebled in size, 
 and has become a spacious, comfortable mansion, quite 
 devoid of external decorative features. But it has 
 angles and gables, with a balcony or two, a broad ter- 
 race, and the trees dignify the edifice, the shadows 
 softening the hard outhnes, and on the side away from 
 the entrance the charm of the place first becomes evi- 
 dent. A few steps have carried you far away from 
 the glare and noise and from the world, and you find 
 yourself in a forest. 
 
 It was, in fact, not the house but the estate which 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 109 
 
 must be considered the Emperor's offering; an estate 
 of 30,000 acres all in timber. There is no cultivated 
 land. The village of Friedrichsruh was built by a 
 certain count who owned a small shooting lodge there. 
 When Prince Bismarck first came, the house was so far 
 from being tenantable that he stayed at the lodge of 
 the forest-keeper, beyond the stream which divides the 
 house from the greater part of the wood. There it was 
 that he first made acquaintance with his new property, 
 which he, with his love of nature and of country life, 
 and perhaps of trees above all, perceived at once to be 
 a noble domain. 
 
 But that is an impression which, to the visitor, comes 
 later. As we drove from the station along the sandy 
 road parallel with the railway, it was the house and not 
 much else that we became aware of ; trees about it on 
 three sides evidently, but the house standing out and 
 standing so near the road that you pull up at the front 
 door almost as soon as you have passed the gate. We 
 were met at the door by Prince Bismarck's secretary. 
 Dr. Chrysander. It sounds like the name of an ancient 
 Greek, but he is neither Greek nor ancient — an accom- 
 plished young German, with a knowledge of English 
 and an amiability of character by which we profited in 
 many ways. 
 
 We were to have arrived for luncheon at half-past 
 twelve, but were late, and the family had already gone 
 in, and we were asked to follow at once. There was time 
 to be aware that we stood in an entrance-hall of some 
 size, decorated in a light varnished wood, with two long 
 stands for coats, on one of which hung a large, full, 
 blue military coat, with red facings and broad fur 
 collar. Easy to imagine what figure it had enveloped. 
 Thence through a morning-room to the right, furnished, 
 
110 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 like all the rooms we saw, with simplicity ; thence into 
 the dining-room, where, at the further end of the long 
 dining-table, sat Prince Bismarck. The room some 
 thirty feet by twenty, with grey painted walls, crowded 
 with pictures ; windows looking on the terrace or bal- 
 cony, and the trees looking in. Here it was that one 
 first felt as if the outer world had been left behind, for 
 from these windows only woods and meadow and stream 
 were visible ; the meadow an amphitheatre rising beyond 
 the water and enclosed by the not distant forest, with 
 which here you become at once on intimate terms. The 
 furniture of the room not remarkable, except the high, 
 straight-backed, deep, capacious armchair, covered with 
 smooth black or perhaps very dark green leather, in 
 which the Prince sat. Princess Bismarck's place was 
 not opposite, but at the side next the windows near the 
 other end ; on the other side the Countess von Rantzau, 
 their daughter, whose husband is German Minister at 
 The Hague ; and there were two other ladies. 
 
 The Prince and Princess rose and came forward to 
 welcome us. The Princess being nearest the entrance 
 I spoke first to her, and introduced E. Strict German 
 etiquette would have required, I believe, that we should 
 have presented ourselves first to the master of the 
 house, but the German, strict himself and strict with 
 his own people, is tolerant to the foreigner. The 
 greetings on either side passed very much as they 
 might in England or America, Not quite so when we 
 sat down. Places had been left on either side of Prince 
 Bismarck for both of us ; as if in recognition of the 
 interest which to us, as to the rest of the world, centred 
 in him. The Princess took her former seat at the side 
 near the upper — or was it the lower ? — end. 
 
 I own myself embarrassed, or at any rate much per- 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 111 
 
 plexed, as I set down these particulars and think of 
 others which are to come, and of my position as the 
 narrator of them. The reader may also be perplexed, 
 and in his interest and mine, perhaps I had better say 
 what had happened. I had been asked to Friedrichsruh 
 before now, but had not gone. When this visit was 
 ai-ranged, I said I would either put the journalist wholly 
 aside or, if Prince Bismarck saw fit, it might be under- 
 stood that I shoidd use my own discretion, and either 
 say nothing or say what I thought best. It was left 
 in that way. Certainly I did not go to Friedi-ichsruh 
 to 'interview' Prince Bismarck, nor did I interview 
 him, nor could I interrogate him, nor shall I repeat 
 much of what he said. If I describe, even in the 
 briefest way, the interior of a private house, and even 
 the inhabitants of it, it is because Prince Bismarck is 
 indisputably the first public man of his time and 
 belongs to history ; — even to some slight extent to 
 that contemporary history which is called journalism; 
 and the world does, I suppose, care to see as much of 
 him as it can, and likes a glimpse of his home and home 
 life, and he is not unwilling to allow it. The frame as 
 well as the portrait is interesting. 
 
 The world, of course, would like to have some things 
 it ought not to have and cannot have. There are 
 limits which I hope not to overpass. If I do, or if I 
 convey a wrong impression of him or of his opinions or 
 feelings on any point, the responsibility is mine. I am 
 availing myself of a permission of which the obligations 
 are the more imperative because it was freely given. 
 
 I had last seen Prince Bismarck in 1888, in the 
 Reichstag ; and on various occasions before that ; 
 notably one evening in his palace in the Wilhelmstrasse 
 — the old one— -of which I have many memories. But 
 
112 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 never till now had I seen him except in uniform, 
 whether in public or private, in Parliament or in the 
 street, or as a figure in a military parade. I don't 
 know that he ever appeared or spoke, whether in the 
 Prussian Diet or in the Reichstag, otherwise than in a 
 soldier's dress. Soldier he has always been, and still is, 
 and nothing seems to be dearer to him than the military 
 character; as, indeed, it is to most Priissians. The 
 civilian in Prussia has ever been, and still is, an inferior 
 being ; Minister, Chancellor, whatever he be, he must 
 be a soldier also if he is to be on a level with the 
 soldier, and one of that military caste which in Prussia 
 is, in one sense, the true aristocracy of the country ; if 
 for no other reason than because the aristocrat belongs 
 invariably to the profession of arms. Prince Bismarck, 
 when I first saw him in 1866, was a major of cuirassiers. 
 He has risen — slowly, inasmuch as he had other things 
 than soldiering to do — to be general, and that is his 
 rank in the army to-day. 
 
 He was now in black from head to foot; black 
 double-breasted frock-coat buttoned to the throat 
 across the chest, relieved by no order or decoration or 
 any touch of colour except that he wore round his 
 neck a yellow, pale yellow or perhaps cream-coloured, 
 soft silk neckcloth, something like the cravat which 
 prevailed in England in the earlier part of the century, 
 but less voluminous, and tied carelessly. He wore no 
 collar. He wore his coat, as I said, like a uniform. It 
 set off the breadth of the shoulders, the depth of the 
 chest, and the whole huge framework and vast body 
 which of itself seemed to fill the room, whether he 
 stood or sat. He towered far above everybody. His 
 manner when he walked down the room as we came in 
 was, above everything, that of the host anxious to 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 113 
 
 welcome his guests. Almost his first word was a regret 
 that the clocks of Friedrichsruh did not keep what he 
 called mid-German railway time; an artificial sort of 
 time, based on an average of difierences for the zone 
 in which it is observed, and extremely helpful to the 
 punctuahty and smooth working of the German railway 
 system. 'Still,' said he, 'here in Friedrichsruh we 
 must have the real time.' All his life long he has gone 
 for reahties ; the makebelieve having no attraction 
 for him nor, to his mind, any validity in pubhc or 
 private affairs. 
 
 There are more Prince Bismarcks than one, and the 
 one which the world knows best may not be the most 
 real of all, nor quite like the one who reveals himself in 
 his own home to his guests. E. and I were both, as 
 we afterward agreed, struck by the same thing at first ; 
 by the kindhness, the geniality of manner, the human 
 and friendly quality in him which came at once to the 
 surface when it was the moment for the expression of 
 this quality, just as a difierent side of his character 
 became evident when the circumstances were different. 
 It is fair in judging a man to put aside, if one can, 
 what one has heard, and to judge with one's own eyes 
 and ears. The English courts have never liked hearsay 
 evidence or second-hand testimony. If everybody is to 
 base his belief on somebody else's observation, how is a 
 genuine impression to be had .'' The word which comes 
 most frequently to one's mind in thinking it all over, 
 is simplicity or sincerity; that and, during the time 
 you are with him, courtesy; courtesy not to us only 
 but to everybody, and you shall by and by see it shown 
 in another and not less charming way. To suppose 
 that the first diplomatist of his time wears his heart on 
 his sleeve, whether of a black coat or a uniform, is 
 
 H 
 
114 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 absurd. I do not mean anything so absurd. What I 
 do mean is that these amiable and friendly or, as I 
 called them, human traits, are just as true as those by 
 which he is more commonly known. 
 
 The face and head which rose out of the black coat 
 and soft pale-yellow neckcloth are known to everybody 
 by pictures and photographs and also by description, 
 and yet they are not known. I have tried before now 
 to describe them. Like others, I thought I knew them 
 well. But every view is a new view. The power of 
 the head and face is what it was. Age has altered, not 
 impaired it. The firmness of outline remains. The 
 muscles of the neck have not lost their elasticity, the 
 head rises aloft and alert ; in the carriage of it some- 
 thing haughty, something almost defiant and victorious, 
 as of one who all his life long has had enemies to deal 
 with, and the habit of overcoming them. The lines 
 and outlines are drawn with a free hand and a wide 
 sweep ; with the breadth to which nature more often 
 attains when she works on a great scale, as in fashioning 
 a mountain range or shaping a continent. The actual 
 measurements of the skull must be extraordinary. I do 
 not know what they are, but no figures could express 
 the sense of intellectual force and force of character. 
 
 Herr Lenbach once spoke of the face as faultless. 
 Nothing, he thought, could be added or taken away 
 without injm-ing it ; all the features were perfect. This 
 is stating the matter too strongly. Herr Lenbach has 
 painted Prince Bismarck often and well ; no one else so 
 well ; the world of the hereafter will owe much to him, 
 for photographs may not last for ever, nor do photo- 
 graphs always tell you what you most want to know 
 about a face. Perhaps, by long study and admiration, 
 Lenbach has in his own mind idealised his sitter. He 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 115 
 
 does not idealise him on cajivas except in the sense that 
 he paints character as well as the external facts of face 
 and figure. If the features were, as he said on that 
 occasion, faultless, they would be, in Tennyson's phrase, 
 faultily faultless. They are nothing of the kind. They 
 are not regular, not classic, not moulded to any known 
 type or accepted standard, or not all of them. 
 
 The face is the man, with all his individuality, and 
 the eyes are the man. They are deep blue — the blue 
 seems to have grown deeper with years — large, full, 
 wide apart, beautiful in repose, and capable of express- 
 ing, without any help from the other features, the most 
 various moods ; authority, tenderness, anger, and many 
 others. The dry light of pure intelligence seems their 
 natural expression till it changes into some other, 
 and when they are turned upon an individual or a Par- 
 hament in a spirit of inquiry, they look through 
 and through the individual or the Parliament. The 
 power of penetrating character, of judging men, has 
 ever been one of his gifts and one of his sources of 
 mastery in pubhc affairs, and this also you see in these 
 piercing orbs ; the light of which is the next moment 
 peaceful and kindly. The eyebrows, which are very 
 heavy, are not so much tangled as interwoven ; the full 
 tufts of white hair braiding themselves into strands. 
 The moustache, which overhangs without concealing 
 the mouth or much altering the expression of the lips, 
 follows the lines of the mouth, which at either end it 
 closely embraces. 
 
 The masterful strength of all the lower part of the 
 face is but the counterpart of the upper ; the capacious- 
 ness of the brain and the wilfulness of the character are 
 each indicated clearly ; neither is out of proportion ; 
 there is neither excess of intelligence nor excess of firm- 
 
116 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ness; the two are in harmony, and you would never 
 fear lest mere activity of mind should turn into Par- 
 ticularism, or lest mere determination should para- 
 lyse the thinking faculties ; nor has either of these 
 catastrophes occurred in actual life. The work of his 
 life has, of course, left its mark upon the worker. The 
 figure before you, with its simple and beautiful dignity, 
 is the history of Germany for thirty years ; a new Thirty 
 Years' War, as beneficent as the old one was destructive. 
 Prince Bismarck, and not the youthful HohenzoUern 
 at Potsdam, is the incarnation of Imperial Germany. 
 
 I will supplement my memories and impressions by 
 an extract from E.'s notes, from which, indeed, I have 
 borrowed already, and shall borrow hereafter, though 
 they were not meant to be printed.^ E. saw the Prince 
 for the first time, and says : 
 
 ' Bismarck's personality gives one a great impression 
 of size, but stUl more of strength and force, physical 
 and mental. He looks at you very directly when 
 speaking to you. Sat very straight in his high, 
 straight-backed armchair, one hand holding his pipe, 
 the other generally on the head of one of the dogs. 
 His gestures few but forcible. Did ever3rthing with 
 energy and earnestness, even to blotting his autograph 
 with great care, so that it should not be smudged. 
 His eyes very bright and full of fire when he was inter- 
 ested, with many twinkles of fun. English rather an 
 effort at first, but came more and more easily. Very 
 courteous ; would not light his pipe till he had asked 
 whether I minded. Evidently very kindly, and beloved 
 by his household. Delights in his woods, and in his 
 pets, not only in the dogs and the swans and ducks but 
 
 1 'E.' is my daughter Evelyn, my companion on this and other 
 journeys, to whom my obligations are many. 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 117 
 
 in his chickens, which are allowed to invade the lawn, 
 to the despair of the gardener. Rebecca, or Bekchen, 
 the favourite of the two great Ulmar dogs, having 
 been longer with him than that " Imperial intruder," 
 Cyrus, who was given him by the present Emperor 
 when the dog that " old William " gave him died.' 
 
 He spoke throughout in English, not without a 
 certain effort. His mastery of English, for conversa- 
 tional purposes and upon a wide range of topics, is 
 tolerably complete. It is not Professor's English, nor 
 that of the student, but idiomatic, vigorous, often 
 colloquial, and ever the English of the man of affairs 
 and of the world. Language is to him an instrument, 
 to be used as he uses other instruments, for his own 
 ends. He has audacities of speech as well as of act. 
 What is wanting to him in English is practice. He 
 had of late, he said, no occasion to speak English more 
 than twice a year, and his fluency was less than it had 
 been. But if he sometimes had to search for the word, 
 he always found it, and always the right word, and 
 sometimes a picturesque one where greater familiarity 
 might have led him or another to use a commonplace 
 one. It was all the more instructive to behold him 
 struggling amid these linguistic difficulties ; you saw 
 the machinery at work, as when on a great steamship 
 you look through a glass partition at the engines doing 
 their twenty knots an hour. Still, the medium some- 
 times hampered him ; but when a change was suggested, 
 he refused. It seemed as if it were part of his concep- 
 tion of his duties as host to express himself in the 
 native tongue of his two guests. 
 
 Many years ago it was said of him that he had re- 
 fused to allow French, which he knows as well as 
 German, to be spoken in his presence. But this he 
 
118 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 declared was an idle tale. ' I never presumed to dic- 
 tate to others in private life. What I did was to pro- 
 test against the use of French in the Prussian Diet, and 
 in matters of German business.' His English grew 
 more and more fluent as he talked. When, at one 
 moment, some wished-for phrase would not frame itself 
 to his mind, he turned to E., with the humorous smile 
 so characteristic of him and so frequent, and said : 
 'There was a time when I could speak Russian,' and 
 he added that he still occasionally read a Russian 
 newspaper. His appointment as Ambassador to 
 Petersburg dates from March 1859; then it was, no 
 doubt, and during the three years he remained there, 
 that he pursued his studies in Russian, and it may be 
 taken for granted he knows the language now as well 
 as then. His is not a mind which lets go of any use- 
 ful knowledge once acquired. 
 
 It did seem, I will add, as if there were a ban upon 
 French. Princess Bismarck much prefers it to English, 
 which she speaks and understands not without effort. 
 But when anything was said to her in French, she took 
 pains to answer in English or German. Two years ago, 
 in Homburg, I had heard her speak French during 
 the greater part of a long and interesting dinner. 
 Prince Bismarck used a single French expression, but 
 that belongs to another part of the story. 
 
 n 
 
 The Prince plunged almost at once into politics, but 
 at first they were the politics of Friedrichsruh. ' They 
 are quite enough to occupy me,' he said, ' and quite as 
 intractable as any I have had to deal with elsewhere. 
 For here at Friedrichsruh we have swans and ducks and 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 110 
 
 rats, who will not live at peace with each other if left 
 to themselves, and they give me a great deal of trouble. 
 The swans are not on good terms with the ducks ; in 
 fact, they want to eat them, or their young ; and the 
 rats are the enemies of both. It is extremely difficult 
 to construct a constitution under which they can all 
 thrive, or to make them understand what is best for 
 each' — then after a pause, and with a twinkle, 
 ' especially the rats.' He continued : ' I try to make 
 my will prevail — I have tried that before, in other 
 aiFairs, and sometimes succeeded and sometimes not — 
 but I have to resort, as I did when I was Chancellor, 
 to all sorts of devices. They will not do as I say 
 merely because I say so. The swans have to be kept 
 to themselves by a wire fence, as you will see. They 
 are the majority, but majorities in Germany do not 
 always have their own way.' This disquisition on the 
 politics of the swans and ducks proceeded for some time 
 with the utmost gravity. There was no effort to apply 
 the allegory closely, or to identify the swans or the 
 ducks, still less the rats, with any existing political party 
 or group. It was, nevertheless, an allegory, and it was 
 possible to imagine that, if one could look into the 
 Prince's mind, simihtudes might be discoverable. 
 
 The Army Bill followed not long after the swans 
 and ducks, and was discussed with equal gravity. 
 Prince Bismarck's opposition to the bill which the 
 Emperor deems vital to Germany has never been 
 a secret, and is, no secret now. He gave his reasons, 
 or some of his reasons, for thinking it a bad bill in 
 itself. The army, he admitted, or indeed asserted, un- 
 doubtedly needs strengthening, but this bill would do 
 it in the wrong way ; or, rather, it would not strengthen 
 the army, it would weaken it. 
 
120 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ' You do not want more men. Increasing the number 
 of men would mean drawing off a great many officers to 
 train the new soldiers. This would involve the making 
 all at once of many new and inexperienced officers; 
 weakening the army in one most essential respect. 
 There are not non-commissioned officers enough ; not 
 enough who could drill all these new men and perform 
 their present duties. You cannot create them. Where 
 are they to come from ? Nor, if you had the men and 
 the officers all ready for the emergency which the 
 framers of this bill contemplate, could you use them 
 for an emergency. When a war breaks out there will 
 be, at first, perhaps three or four battles at different 
 points about the same time. The result of these 
 battles may decide the campaign — must at any rate 
 have a great influence on the fortunes of the war. 
 They will be fought, each one of them, by perhaps 
 200,000 or at most a quarter of a million men on 
 each side. You can use, that is to say, for your own 
 emergency and for what is likely to be the most critical 
 if not decisive moment of the conflict, a million of 
 soldiers. You cannot use more except as reserves, 
 and for future battles which may or may not have to 
 be fought. But you have three millions already. 
 What is the use of another 80,000 ? 
 
 ' No, what the army wants is more artillery. We won 
 our last war with France by artillery. The best artil- 
 lery will win the next, even more certainly. So changed 
 are the conditions of war that without a competent 
 artillery the best infantry can no more by itself win a 
 battle than cavalry could. But in this arm, though we 
 may be still superior to France, we are not superior in 
 the same proportion that we were in 1870. The cer- 
 tainty of victory depends on our maintaining not merely 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 121 
 
 a superiority, but a considerable superiority. That is 
 what a wise bill would aim at. But this is not a wise 
 
 bill, nor are the authors of it wise. The Emperor ' 
 
 but at that word came a pause. Then he resumed, 
 changing the word : 
 
 ' The Government is weak and short-sighted. It has 
 made mistake after mistake. It has flung away posi- 
 tions and advantages, not seeming in the least aware 
 what it was doing at the time. Just when it was likely 
 to be in need of money it cut off a large source of 
 revenue by its new Commercial Treaties. No one had 
 attacked these revenues. They were not felt as a griev- 
 ance or a burden, and they produced fifty millions. 
 Now they hope to carry the Army Bill, finance and all, 
 by threatening the country, by frightening people, by 
 prophesjdng war and ruin and the defeat of the army 
 if it be not increased just as they propose. All this 
 has a bad effect on the minds of the people, and espe- 
 cially, if they believe it, on the soldiers — discourages 
 them, and makes them doubtful of themselves. But 
 there is httle evidence thus far that the panic that they 
 have tried to breed has really taken root among the 
 soldiers or among the German people. We shall know 
 in a few weeks what the German people have to say to 
 this new scheme, and what the fate of the Army Bill 
 is to be. 
 
 'The elections.'' Well, it is very difficult to see 
 where a Government majority is to come from, or how 
 they are to govern without a majority. It is true we 
 carried on the government of Prussia from 1862 to 
 1866 without a budget and without a majority. But 
 if I were again in office, which I shall never be, I could 
 not give to his Imperial Majesty the advice which I 
 gave to the King of Prussia at that time. The circum- 
 
123 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 stances are entirely different, and Germany is not Prussia. 
 I should not do it again. A policy of that kind is not 
 to be drawn into a precedent.' 
 
 The remark of De Tocqueville, in the recently pub- 
 lished Souvenirs, occurred to me: 'I have always 
 noticed that in politics, grave errors are often due to 
 having too good a memory.' I quoted it. ' Yes,' said 
 the Prince, ' mere imitation does not answer. No two 
 situations are alike, and a man should not copy even 
 himself.' 
 
 He thought the Socialists more likely to gain strength 
 in the coming elections than any other party; an opinion 
 I had already heard in Berlin and elsewhere. What 
 was said on this matter of elections should, however, 
 be taken with reference to the date. The conversation 
 occurred on the 17th of May. He was of the same 
 mind about the Socialists as when himself in power. 
 The growth of their numerical power in the country 
 and in Parliament had not shaken his conviction of the 
 soundness of his own policy toward them. He would 
 have pursued it to the end. 
 
 ' Whereas the Government, by treating the Socialists 
 as a political party, a force in the country, to be met 
 seriously and argued with, instead of as robbers and 
 thieves to be crushed, has increased very much their 
 power and importance and the consideration shown 
 them. I would never have allowed this. They are the 
 rats of the country, to be stamped out. I had foreseen 
 this and feared it when I perceived the turn things 
 were taking in a certain quarter. I warned the 
 Emperor against it. The warning was thrown away. 
 True, I was rather in favour of the Labour Conference. 
 I assented to it. I hoped there would be a majority of 
 sane and sensible men, or at least a good proportion of 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 123 
 
 people who would discuss the subject rationally, and 
 that an impression would be made on the Emperor's 
 mind. At the worst, it might serve to him as a kind 
 of notice what he was to expect, and what sort of 
 reception his own ideas would have among those whose 
 benefit he was seeking and to whom he appealed. 
 Nothing of the kind. The Emperor learned nothing. 
 I was wrong — at anyrate I was disappointed. It all 
 came to nothing.' 
 
 Socialism impressed him more as a danger to the 
 Empire than to society — a nearer danger. The 
 Socialists are anti-imperialists. Like Socialists else- 
 where, like the trades-unions in England and in all 
 other countries where they exist, they put class in- 
 terests before the interests of the community. They 
 want to subvert pretty much everything in Germany, 
 no doubt, but first of all the army and the present 
 system of compulsory service, and to abolish the taxes 
 without which the army cannot be maintained. They 
 care not if the Empire be left defenceless. 
 
 I asked if he thought the Socialists carried on their 
 propaganda on a great scale in the army as in England, 
 or at least in London, where Socialists enlist for the 
 purpose, and where the public-houses frequented by the 
 Guards are the headquarters and pulpits of Socialist 
 and Anarchist missionaries. He thought it was not so 
 in Berlin. The garrison of Berlin is collected from all 
 over the Empire. The men from Cologne have little 
 sympathy with the Pomeranians ; the Bavarian and the 
 Saxon do not fraternise in such matters. If there be a 
 danger it would be, for example, in Hamburg, where 
 the Socialists are strong, and a Hamburg regiment 
 might be poisoned by Socialism. So might others. 
 
 His old partiality for Russia came out in the remark 
 
124 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 that, whatever might be Germany's troubles from 
 Socialism, they would never be aggravated from any 
 Russian source. This in answer to my question whether, 
 if Socialistic agitation became aggressive and disturb- 
 ances arose in Germany, her neighbours, east and west, 
 misht not seize the occasion to attack her. But his 
 faith in the good faith of the Emperor of Russia was 
 not to be shaken. The state of things in Russia seemed 
 to him to forbid such a supposition. The party of 
 discontent, whether you call it Socialist or Anarchist 
 or Nihihst, is much the same everywhere. If it is a 
 danger to Germany, it is equally a danger to Russia ; 
 perhaps a much greater danger. The Czar is not the 
 man to lend a hand to the enemies of order, of society. 
 It was hardly worth while, after such a declaration as 
 that, to press the military point of view. As to France, 
 and what she might do in similar circumstances. Prince 
 Bismarck omitted to express any opinion. The world 
 knows well enough already what his views are of the 
 political methods that have, during his time, been in 
 vogue in that country. There is no reason to suppose 
 he has changed these views. 
 
 Author as he is of that universal suffrage which he 
 gave because it could not be withheld. Prince Bismarck's 
 faith in the specifics of modern Radicalism, or of modern 
 Democracy, has very definite limits. He repeated in a 
 different form one or two remarks made during his 
 journey last year, at Jena and elsewhere; which go to 
 the root of things; Radical in that sense only. No- 
 body ever doubted that he believed it the business of 
 a government to govern : a maxim which Radicalism 
 both in Germany and in England is doing its utmost 
 to discredit. But how are you to get your governing 
 Government .-' What is it to be, who are to compose 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 126 
 
 it ? ' There has grown up of late,' said Prince Bismarck, 
 ' a notion that the world can be governed from below. 
 That cannot be.' It is an apothegm which Socialist 
 and Anarchist, and those political parties in all countries 
 which seek for power by pandering to the mob, may 
 consider. Mr. Gladstone himself might reflect on it, 
 should he find time amid his present somewhat engross- 
 ing, and perhaps somewhat confusing, occupations. 
 
 In this view of Socialism, as in all Prince Bismarck 
 said, two traits were visible. He was perfectly ready 
 to own a mistake if he thought he had made one, and 
 he was perfectly loyal to himself and his policy when 
 he still believed himself in the right ; no matter what 
 turn events or opinion had taken. I doubt whether 
 the opinion of others ever gave him much concern ex- 
 cept as a force to be calculated and used or otherwise 
 dealt with. To infallibility, however, he never made 
 the least pretension. He did not claim it for himself, 
 nor respect the claim when made for another. He 
 scoffed at it. He listened with approval to the remark 
 which — rightly or wrongly, I am not sure — I attributed 
 to Newman in those honourable days when Newman 
 stood out against the new Papal heresy of infallibility. 
 ' Before infallibility can have any logical basis or be- 
 come a rule of conduct, you must not only be infallible 
 but infallibly certain you are infallible.' 
 
 I gathered that Prince Bismarck still considered he 
 was right in entering upon a struggle with the Papacy ; 
 that the Kulturkampf was a sound policy; that the 
 May laws were well conceived, and that his ultimate 
 abandonment of the conflict and his compromise with 
 the Pope and the Ultramontane party were the result 
 of events which he was not bound to foresee, and could 
 not have foreseen, and which nobody in fact did fore- 
 
126 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 see. In other words, he entered upon the struggle 
 with a good probability of success, and ultimately 
 surrendered to the inevitable. The policy of conflict 
 was a wise one when adopted, and the policy of retiring 
 from the conflict was also wise. The stress of politics, 
 the necessities of public life, forced him to play off one 
 party against another — no new thing with him, indeed 
 — and finally to purchase support from the Catholic 
 party by concessions to Catholic demands. When the 
 May laws were passed, their passage was imperative ; 
 they were what Germany at that moment most needed. 
 When they were repealed, other objects, only to be 
 attained by consenting to their repeal, had become 
 paramount — they, and no longer the May laws, were 
 what Germany then most needed. 
 
 m 
 
 What was said of England was free from any taint 
 of that dislike to England which Prince Bismarck has 
 sometimes been supposed to cherish. At the most it 
 was indifference, and that not to the English people 
 but to English politics, which he appeared to think 
 sterile if not trivial. He has said in times past sharp 
 things about England, and when German interests came 
 into conflict with English interests he was for Germany 
 and not for England. It might seem hard to censure 
 him for that, or to require that a German should not 
 be a German. But the strong point of the Englishman 
 is not the imagination, nor the use of the imagination 
 in public life. He does not readily put himself in the 
 place of his adversary, nor take the other point of view. 
 He likes better, when he finds somebody in his way, to 
 make him get out if he can ; at any rate, to lift up his 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 127 
 
 voice, which is a powerful one, against the intruder. 
 He has condemned Prince Bismarck before now for the 
 very attitude and policy which, if the German had only 
 been an Englishman, the Englishman would have praised, 
 and would have thought the only natural or possible 
 attitude. The Chancellor used to resent these asperi- 
 ties on public grounds. If the English press attacked 
 him, he used the German press to reply to these 
 attacks. But of any personal iUwill to the English I 
 never saw a trace. 
 
 That neither Prince Bismarck nor the great majority 
 of his countrymen follows English politics closely is pro- 
 bably true. The treatment of such matters in the 
 German press is but occasional. The most enterprising 
 newspaper in Berlin thinks it has abundantly satisfied 
 the appetite of its readers for general English news by 
 a four-line telegram from London. Its money intelli- 
 gence is fuller. Finance is of no nationality. Prince 
 Bismarck's views, so far as he expressed them, may be 
 summed up in a sentence or two : 
 
 'If we have a controversy with England we pay 
 attention to that, and try to understand the English 
 side of it as well as ours. Other international ques- 
 tions, European and not Anglo-German merely, do 
 sometimes, though not very often, make us turn our 
 eyes to England. Otherwise, what chiefly concerns us 
 is the effort of certain parties or persons in Germany to 
 make us copy English Parliamentary institutions.' 
 
 This last was said with that gleam of humour which 
 so often lighted up both his face and the subject he 
 was discussing. He has the faculty of conveying or 
 implying as much by a look as by speech. The listener 
 will do well to be on the watch for it if he wishes not 
 to miss the real significance of what is said. It comes 
 
128 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 without warning. The glow comes into the deep blue 
 eyes as suddenly as a flash of lightning, and the 
 horizon is illuminated. It has long been known that 
 Prince Bismarck viewed with no favour the notions of 
 Anglicising Germany or German institutions which 
 prevailed in more quarters than one. The letter just 
 published, written before the marriage of the late Em- 
 peror Frederick to an English Princess, expressed in 
 advance an opinion which circumstances obliged him to 
 repeat in various forms afterward. The Germans do 
 not like to be Anglicised any more than the English 
 would like to be Germanised. The Briton did not 
 even like to be criticised from a purely German point 
 of view, nor to be told on high German authority 
 many years ago, from an exalted position, that English 
 Parliamentary institutions were on their trial. There 
 is in Germany a party or a political coterie — more 
 than one, no doubt — which has for a long time believed 
 that Germany was to find salvation in England. It 
 does not appear that Prince Bismarck shares that 
 belief, or has any serious apprehension that it will pre- 
 vail, or will ever become the opinion of a majority of 
 the German people. 
 
 When Mr. Gladstone's name was mentioned — it came 
 up incidentally — Prince Bismarck had not a word to say 
 against the Englishman whom he has been supposed to 
 like even less than other Englishmen. He thought it 
 sufficient to express his admiration of Mr. Gladstone's 
 oratory, and of his powers as a Parhamentarian. To 
 Mr. Gladstone's admirers, of whom I am one, that may 
 not seem a very complete estimate, but it must be 
 taken as it is. There is no more. To the first states- 
 man of Europe, the Prime Minister of England appears 
 as a master of speech rather than of affairs — of Par- 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 129 
 
 liamentary tactics rather than of the principles and 
 methods by which, as Themistocles said, a small nation 
 may be made great, or a great nation greater still. 
 That master-stroke of domestic policy, known popularly 
 as Home Rule for Ireland, did not seem to have im- 
 pressed the German Chancellor. It did not even inte- 
 rest him. I almost doubted whether he had any other 
 idea about it than that it was a concession to a faction 
 hostile to England and therefore dangerous to Eng- 
 land, and likely to make the United Kingdom less 
 united and the Empire less imperial. Nor was any 
 other view really to be expected. Prince Bismarck's 
 fame rests in great measure on his unification of Ger- 
 many. He is the creator of an Empire, and his political 
 sympathies with the Englishman who is trying to break 
 up an Empire must necessarily be imperfect. When 
 a man has applied the finest abilities and energies of 
 his time to constructive work, it is natural that he 
 should fail to appreciate an English statesman whose 
 great triumph has been the annihilation of a Church, 
 and whose old age is devoted to the dissolution of 
 the legislative union between the two sections of the 
 United Engdom. Let us excuse Prince Bismarck so 
 far as we can, and not forget that he has full faith 
 in Mr. Gladstone as an orator. 
 
 I quoted, while this topic was still being talked of, 
 the remark of a Frenchman less well known than he 
 deserves to be, M. Doudan, who said of Victor Hugo, 
 'A force de jouer avec les mots, il en est devenu 
 Tesclave ' ; and this I appKed to Mr. Gladstone. ' Yes,' 
 answered Prince Bismarck, ' les mots se jouent de lui.' 
 This was the only French phrase he allowed to pass his 
 lips, and with this, too, came a humorous and illumina- 
 tive gleam into his eyes. 
 
 I 
 
130 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 He would see as clearly as anybody the peril in such 
 linguistic pastimes as Mr. Gladstone permits himself. 
 They become, presently, not pastimes but the serious 
 occupation of his mind and of his life, and the peril is 
 lest words and not acts seem to him the real thing, and 
 mere dexterity of speech the faculty most essential to 
 the ruler of an Empire. Not so has Prince Bismarck 
 formed his conception of public life, or of statesman- 
 ship. If he be not an orator, as Mr. Gladstone is and 
 as Antony said Brutus was, he has at least the gift 
 of picturesque and vivid speech, of imagery, of using 
 images or incidents familiar to his audience in a totally 
 novel and unexpected way. His history is full of them, 
 his pithy sayings are in every German mouth and have 
 even been quoted not infrequently in England. How 
 many of Mr. Gladstone's idolaters can quote a sentence 
 from any of his innumerable speeches, and how many 
 can they quote ? The gift of condensation or brevity 
 is not his. To put a thing too briefly might pin its 
 author to a definite statement, or even pledge. Nor 
 is brevity or directness a peculiarly German quahty 
 either. The Prince's epigram was French in something 
 more than words ; in its brilliancy, its suddenness — for 
 it followed instantaneously on the quotation — its con- 
 ciseness ; in short, in various qualities which we do not 
 always associate with the word German. Prince Bis- 
 marck is assuredly a German of the Germans, but his 
 intellectual equipment is free from the narrowness of 
 mere Teutonic Chauvinism. 
 
 It is a delicate business to repeat opinions about 
 persons, and I will name only one other of those whom 
 Prince Bismarck named. He spoke of Lord Rosebery 
 as an Englishman who had high qualities for the con- 
 duct of public business and had shown them as Foreign 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 131 
 
 Minister. 'But is he also an orator?' queried the 
 Prince. You were left to guess whether he really con- 
 sidered rhetorical fluency an indispensable adjunct to 
 the other qualities of an English Minister, or whether 
 he would have preferred to be told that Lord Rosebery 
 could not speak. It had, however, to be said in the 
 interests of truth that he could, but that, Uke Lord 
 Salisbury, he thought the ideal Foreign Secretary 
 should be dumb ; and with this Prince Bismarck 
 seemed content. The friendship between the two is 
 well known. 
 
 The indilFerence the Prince showed toward English 
 politics did not extend to France : 
 
 'If you live next a volcano, you naturally watch for 
 the smoke out of the crater.' 
 
 But of an immediate eruption he seemed to have no 
 fear. It would be idle for him or for anybody to 
 remind the French of Carlyle's maxim about consuming 
 their own smoke. The French like to hear only what 
 is agreeable. They have reversed the old motto, and 
 it reads in France, ' Grata pro veris.' Probably it will 
 do no service to the memory of Jules Ferry among his 
 own countrymen to say that Prince Bismarck thought 
 his loss a serious one to France ; ' a strong man gone.' 
 The tribute is, nevertheless, one which Jules Ferry's 
 friends may not be sorry to know of. It is more than 
 the Prince said of any living Frenchman. 
 
 A journey to America was suggested, but the Prince's 
 No was peremptory. He would like to go, but the 
 fatigues and inconveniences of travel are such as he 
 does not care to encounter without a strong reason. 
 He cannot sleep well out of his own bed, and sleep is 
 to him medicinal and essential. 'Dr. Schweninger 
 would not let me go ! ' The Chicago Exhibition ? 
 
132 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 No, that was no temptation. He had never cared for 
 exhibitions nor ever thought the benefits of them con- 
 siderable. They do not benefit the country in general 
 nor do much good to industries nor to commerce. The 
 people who profit are the people concerned in the keep- 
 ing of inns, and in getting money out of travellers; 
 hardly anybody else. The enthusiasm about exhibi- 
 tions seemed to him factitious, except so far as it was 
 sentimental. Chicago belongs, I presume, to the senti- 
 mental division. It appeared that his opinion on the 
 subject of Chicago, and of exhibitions in general, had 
 been desired not long since by, I suppose, some repre- 
 sentative of the Chicago press ; as if Chicago were too 
 modest to feel sure that its exhibition was the right 
 thing. But the Prince, whose sense of what is comic 
 has a wide range, had made answer that he had no 
 time to form views on the subject of exhibitions, or of 
 the Chicago Exhibition in particular. He could find 
 interest in a visit to America without that. His own 
 German fellow-countrymen in America would be attrac- 
 tion enough for him. They were to his mind, though 
 I insisted we had no better citizens, still German and 
 still his fellow-countrymen. 
 
 IV 
 
 Twice and thrice Prince Bismarck expressed in no 
 doubtful terms his content in his retirement, and his 
 conviction that his withdrawal from the public service 
 is final. 'My time is over,' he said, with a gesture 
 which meant as much as the words. And still more 
 expressively : ' I shall not go into action again.' 
 
 Never once had he a harsh, or even a hard, word for 
 the Emperor personally. What he said showed, or 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 135 
 
 implied, an odd mixture of respect for the Emperor as 
 Emperor, and of something that was not exactly respect 
 for his abilities or character. His eyes shone more than 
 once when he referred to the Emperor's speeches and 
 his volunteered visits to so many different courts. 
 Perhaps the old Chancellor took a humorous view of 
 what may seem to him the rather boyish, and even 
 schoolboyish, exploits of his august master. But there 
 was no bitterness, no clearly expressed resentment at 
 the Emperor's treatment of himself, and he gave no 
 such accounts of his dismissal as may be heard in Berlin 
 and elsewhere. 
 
 One of these is striking enough to be quoted, coming 
 as it did from one who knows both Emperor and 
 Chancellor. 'The young Emperor,' said this well- 
 informed person, ' got rid of Bismarck because he could 
 not bear to feel himself in the presence of a superior 
 intelligence. With all his quickness and energy, he is 
 not well-informed, and he has not thought seriously on 
 the most serious matters of policy. It was hateful to 
 him to have to listen to one who had ; and who, with 
 every deference of manner, nevertheless looked him 
 straight in the face while he put his own views before 
 him. Needless to say that Bismarck's language was as 
 decorous as it was weighty. But there is nothing which 
 an Emperor who believes himself Emperor and King by 
 Divine Right can so ill endure as to be made to feel 
 himself in the wrong, and that his servant, with no 
 Divine Right to back him, knows better than he. And 
 that is why he got rid of Bismarck.' 
 
 But you would hear nothing of that kind at Fried- 
 richsruh. 
 
 The question of Prince Bismarck's relations with the 
 Emperor came up in connection with two separate 
 
134 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 matters — Prince Albrechf s letter, and the ceremony at 
 Gorlitz. On the first, I prefer to say nothing and to 
 quote nothing. The second requires less discretion. 
 The facts are known. A monument to the late Em- 
 peror William was to be unveiled at Gorlitz, — has since 
 been unveiled — with much, but not too much, pomp 
 and parade ; the young Emperor duly present and 
 making the inevitable speech. It is, however, a monu- 
 ment, not to the late Emperor alone, but also to Count 
 Moltke and Prince Bismarck. The old Emperor's 
 statue is flanked and supported by these two statues of 
 his two chief comrades ; the two chief architects of his 
 great fortune and of Germany''s. The town of Gorlitz 
 had asked Prince Bismarck to take part in the ceremony. 
 He spoke in terms of deep feeling of the honour done 
 him by setting up his statue, and by the invitation. 
 But he could not accept the invitation of the town. It 
 would bring him into the presence: of the Emperor, and 
 as he had not been summoned by the Emperor he 
 could not go. It would be a breach of etiquette — of 
 military etiquette above all. Again the soldier showed 
 himself. 'I am still a General in the army, and a 
 General cannot present himself before the Emperor, 
 who is his commander-in-chief, without an order.' Any 
 word or message from the Emperor, signifying his desire 
 that Prince Bismarck should be present at Gorlitz, would 
 have been equivalent to a command and must have 
 been obeyed. But it was very evident that, while the 
 Prince regretted on other grounds his absence, and 
 though he was perfectly sensible of the discourtesy 
 shown him, he rejoiced to escape the necessity of finding 
 himself in the Emperor's presence. He did not wish 
 to go where he must in some way or other come in 
 contact with the present ruler of Germany. He did 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 135 
 
 not wish for a meeting. It would have put him in an 
 awkward position ; it might have led to grave conse- 
 quences. ' As an ofScer, as a gentleman, I could not 
 have refused the hand of reconciliation if held out to 
 me in such circumstances ; and a reconciliation, or offer 
 of reconciliation, is what it would have seemed to the 
 public' 
 
 So far Prince Bismarck. But the Emperor's conduct 
 in this matter concerns others than the ex-Chancellor ; 
 concerns himself, first of all, and concerns Germany, 
 and public opinion in Germany and elsewhere. The 
 Prince uttered no complaint, but why are not others to 
 say what they think, and who is there who can think 
 the Emperor's conduct magnanimous ? Nobody knew 
 better than he that it was impossible for Prince Bis- 
 marck to go to Gorlitz except upon his summons. He 
 would not suiFer him to take part in an act of homage 
 to the King and Emperor whom he had served for 
 thirty years ; nor to witness the honour done to himself. 
 It seems to have been thought in court circles that 
 Prince Bismarck should have asked permission. That 
 wiU do for a court view, but Germany is not peopled 
 entirely with courtiers, and even the courtier might, if 
 he could detach his mind sufficiently, doubt whether 
 Prince Bismarck was quite the man to sue for leave to 
 come into the presence of the sovereign who had dis- 
 missed him with insult and ignominy from his counsels. 
 The Prince, with his ineradicable Prussian loyalty to 
 the King who has never been loyal to him, may find 
 such excuses for Imperial incivility as I have given 
 above. The world is not all Prussian, and may take 
 and express a view of its own. 
 
 But neither with reference to this or to any other 
 subject did Prince Bismarck's language about the 
 
136 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Emperor pass the bounds which, as an old servant of 
 the House of HohenzoUern, he has always imposed upon 
 himself. Reconciliation is one thing, self-respect is 
 another, and respect for the Throne and for him who 
 sits on it is a third. For reconciliation I do not think 
 Prince Bismarck cares, and I am certain he will not 
 take that first step to it which his enemies in the press 
 and elsewhere are for ever lu-ging him to take. The 
 value of advice from his enemies is a thing he under- 
 stands. I am expressing my own opinion. I could not 
 justify it by a single word which fell from Prince Bis- 
 marck's lips in my hearing. I have no authority to 
 speak for him. I am only recording an impression 
 derived from various sources. Any reconciliation that 
 might take place would, I imagine, be merely formal : 
 save in one event only, which Prince Bismarck is too 
 good a German to wish for — I mean in the event of a 
 disaster, external or internal. 
 
 The Emperor's character is what it is. He cannot 
 make himself over. His confidence in himself is un- 
 shaken by a long series of mistakes and failures. He, 
 at any rate, is not only infallible but infallibly certain 
 he is infallible. He does not want Ministers, he wants 
 clerks. Of what use could a Bismarck be to a ruler of 
 this temper.'' The whole truth about the Emperor's 
 dismissal of his Chancellor has never yet been told. 
 Until it is known, the public is not in a position to 
 judge of the probabilities of what is called a reconcilia- 
 tion, or to appreciate all the difficulties which stand in 
 the way of cordial relations between the two men. It 
 is not ' generous indulgence ' of which Prince Bismarck 
 is in search, nor is he, so far as one can judge, consumed 
 by a passionate wish to see once more the inside of the 
 Palace gates, whether at Potsdam or Berlin. 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 137 
 
 It is perfectly true that Prince Bismarck has expressed 
 himself freely touching the acts and policy of his suc- 
 cessor, and of the men, or some of them, now about the 
 Emperor. I do not believe he has confidence in all of 
 these gentlemen — confidence in either their ability or 
 their political honesty. But since when was it thought 
 disloyal or unpatriotic to hold the opinion that the 
 advisers of the Crown are not all they should be ? That 
 is not an English view, nor is it indeed German. Mini- 
 sters are judged by their public acts. Has Count von 
 Caprivi been a successful Minister ? Was the repeal of 
 the law against the Socialists wise ? Have the Com- 
 mercial Treaties increased the prosperity of Germany .'' 
 Was the School bill a good measure — a bill for making 
 the Government the arbiter of German consciences, and 
 turning the Emperor into Pope.!" Did the enforced 
 withdrawal of that bill, in obedience to an overwhelming 
 public opinion, strengthen the Ministry or the Emperor? 
 Has the present Chancellor shown himself a master of 
 the art of Parliamentary government ? Has the Army 
 bill been carried .'' And is it ' vindictive ' to be aware 
 of these errors, and to decHne to identify yourself with 
 men or measures aUke condemned by failure ? When 
 Lord Sahsbm-y was turned out of office, did he feel 
 obliged to approve everything his successor attempted ? 
 And why should there be less freedom of opinion, or 
 less freedom of expression, for Prince Bismarck than for 
 Lord Salisbury or for Mr. Gladstone .? 
 
 It will do no harm to remember that Prince Bismarck, 
 with all his ambition, has throughout his career kept 
 his ambition strictly in service to his country. It has 
 not been selfish. It has not been personal. It is the 
 aggrandisement of Germany, not the aggrandisement 
 of Bismarck, which has been the aim and rule of his 
 
138 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 public conduct. He has stood up for Germany, for the 
 true interests of Germany, against Emperor, against 
 public opinion, against Europe, against Germany herself. 
 No doubt he has ambition and has pride, and has his 
 share of other human failings, but they have not been 
 suffered to turn him aside from the one overruling 
 purpose of his life — to do at each given moment what 
 is best for his country. There is the record of each 
 crisis to prove it. 
 
 There is in Germany a large party which goes for 
 the Government — any Government — just as steadily 
 as the Irishman 'goes agin it' — against any Go- 
 vernment. This party always has organs. It might 
 be difficult to distinguish between its organs and the 
 organs subsidised, whether with money or news, by the 
 Government. Perhaps it does not matter. This party 
 and its organs in the press have been industriously 
 engaged in praising Count von Caprivi since he became 
 Chancellor. There is a public in other parts of Europe, 
 even in England, which holds similar views, which is 
 apt to regard a Ministry that is in as better than any 
 Ministry that is out. When Prince Bismarck was ex- 
 pelled by the Emperor from the public service, the 
 world held its breath for a while. When things seemed 
 to go on much as before, people recovered the power of 
 respiration and of speech and cried out, 'You see 
 Prince Bismarck's fall makes no difference. The 
 Emperor steers the ship "full steam ahead" just as 
 well without any pilot, or with Cotmt von Caprivi 
 as pilot ' ; which comes perhaps to nearly the same 
 thing. 
 
 That cry has been heard continually since. What 
 did these gentlemen expect.'' Did they expect the 
 German Empire to go to pieces as soon as Prince 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 139 
 
 Bismarck ceased to govern it ? That might have been 
 a testimony to his personal importance, but would have 
 been a poor proof of sagacity in laying its foundations, 
 or of the stability and solidity of its construction. Mr. 
 Tenniel's masterly cartoon in Punch, 'Dropping the 
 Pilot,' made an impression on the English mind, 
 and on other minds. There was a notion, rather 
 widespread, that without the Pilot who had weathered 
 the storm the ship must go on the rocks. But if there 
 are no rocks and no storm and an open sea and plain 
 sailing, the ship does very well for a time without any 
 Pilot. Such has been Germany's good fortune for the 
 last two years, at least so far as foreign policy is con- 
 cerned. But there must come an hour when it will be 
 seen whether a Pilot is wanted or not. 
 
 This is no place to consider the details of German 
 politics, but you may find room for one general reflec- 
 tion. Down to the death of the old Emperor in March 
 1888, and down to the discharge of Prince Bismarck in 
 1890, it was still possible to say that in the public life 
 of Germany the efficient principle was the Idngly prin- 
 ciple. There were constitutions, there were Parliaments, 
 there was a Press, more or less free, there was universal 
 suffrage. Government had become, as it is apt to be- 
 come in these days of democracy, veiled or unveiled, a 
 very complicated affair; but on the whole the King 
 was the real ruler of Prussia, and the King under the 
 name of Emperor the real ruler of Germany. Why ? 
 Because of tradition, and because Prince Bismarck, while 
 framing constitutions and putting the ballot into every 
 man's hand, still kept the substance of power in his 
 own or in the King's. For every open space to which 
 he gave the people access, he built a new buttress 
 to the Throne. He fostered the kingly idea. He 
 
140 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 nourished the sentiment of loyalty, always a very 
 strong one, in every Prussian breast. He left the 
 House of Hohenzollem stronger than he found it, 
 and the ascendancy of Prussia, wherein lies the salva- 
 tion and the hope of all Germany, undisputed and 
 indisputable. 
 
 But now ? The headstrong caprices of this boy- 
 Emperor have undone half the work. Reverence for 
 the Throne is undermined. How can you revere the 
 author of the speeches of William the Second ? The 
 Parliament, no longer guided, no longer feeling that it 
 has a master who will bend it to his own uses, is getting 
 out of hand. Parliamentary institutions are not founded 
 in the hearts of the German people, whatever English 
 enthusiasts may think. They play at Parliaments. 
 The supreme direction of affairs, and the ultimate 
 authority, rest with King and Kaiser. He can declare 
 war and make peace and make treaties. The word 
 ' defensive ' is supposed to limit his right of declaring 
 war, but was there ever a war which the aggressor 
 might not call defensive if he liked ? 
 
 These immense powers remain, but they can only be 
 used effectively by a sovereign who has the confidence 
 of his people. If their confidence in him is impaired, 
 they turn elsewhither. The Reichstag is gaining what 
 the Emperor loses. Whether Germany will be better 
 or worse off under institutions which require genera- 
 tions for their growth and development, may be an 
 open question. But there can be no question of the 
 change that is going on ; of the decay of the principles 
 and methods of political action under which Prussia 
 has grown to be what she is, and by virtue of which 
 the German Empire was called into being. No ques- 
 tion, either, that the change is due to Prince Bismarck's 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 141 
 
 fall ; to the elimination of the most experienced states- 
 man in Europe from kingly and imperial councils, and 
 to the unchecked conduct of affairs by a young Emperor 
 who has little experience, and in whom the want of real 
 political capacity is coupled with the most energetic 
 self-confidence known to mankind. 
 
 The Prince indicated his view clearly enough of his 
 own way of meeting calumnies. It came out a propos 
 of a brief discussion on the different kinds of journal- 
 ism in Germany, France, England, and America. 
 Renan, I said, laid it down as a rule which he had 
 adopted early in life on the counsel of Bertin, editor of 
 the Journal des Debats, never to contradict anything. 
 He did not contradict the current story that the Roth- 
 schilds had paid him a million francs for the Vie de 
 Jisus, nor even deny the authenticity of spurious 
 writings published under his name. 
 
 'What is that,' said the Prince, 'but contempt for 
 public opinion ? A writer of books like Renan, a re- 
 cluse, a man who holds aloof from the world, may be 
 able to afford himself that luxury. A statesman, a 
 politician, cannot. Public opinion is one of the forces 
 on which he relies. If it is corrupted, is he not to 
 purify it.? What becomes of his usefulness if he is 
 discredited ? ' 
 
 He sees a good many newspapers, knows what is said 
 of him, and has means of denying such of the countless 
 fabrications about himself as he thinks deserve notice. 
 The German press has its own ideas of what is right 
 and wrong in such matters, and its own standard of 
 journalism. 'Only printing ink on paper,' was the 
 
142 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Prince's well-known account of the matter in a speech 
 in the Reichstag in 1888. He discussed other papers 
 than German, but in the same tone. It may be 
 doubted whether he is aware of the immense differ- 
 ence between the Press of Germany and the Press of 
 England or America, arising in part out of national 
 characteristics, and in greater part out of the financial 
 independence of the more important papers in both 
 England and the United States. While he was still 
 at lunch, a bundle of German papers was brought in 
 to him, all scored in blue pencil. He glanced at them, 
 laid them down, and said nothing. 
 
 It was more interesting to see his pipe brought in ; 
 a huge machine, with a porcelain jar two feet high in 
 which it rested. With it came a round lacquered tray 
 on which was a collection of instruments, including a 
 lead pencil some fifteen inches long, two silver paper- 
 knives in the form of daggers, both sheathed, a silver 
 letter-opener, and others which, it presently appeared, 
 were tobacco-stoppers and rods for cleaning the pipe, 
 also sheathed. All these he showed us, one after the 
 other, remarking that he could not use quite so many 
 at once, ' but people sometimes like to give me presents, 
 and these are among them.' He would not light his 
 pipe till E. had told him she liked smoking. Then 
 he launched again into talk with fresh zest. The talk 
 flowed on for another hour, the Prince choosing his own 
 topics, dismissing one with a flashing sentence, enlarging 
 upon another, the face radiant at times, the eyes burn- 
 ing, and then the fire dying out to flame up again ; and 
 sometimes the cold glitter of steel came into them, and 
 then the words cut like steel. 
 
 All the while his dogs were about him, appealing to 
 him for the notice they did not often get except from 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 143 
 
 the caress of his left hand. If he would not respond, 
 they turned to us. They had the frank good-nature 
 of the breed, and readily put their huge heads into 
 any friendly hand. Once the Prince tossed a biscuit 
 to Rebecca, which she caught cleverly. His gesture, 
 the movement of the arm, the precision, the rapidity 
 of the act, were one more characteristic of the extra- 
 ordinary man who can do nothing like other men, and 
 who never thought it beneath him to do the least or 
 most trivial thing as well as it could possibly be done. 
 The dogs are magnificent creatures, one blue-black, one 
 of a dense bluish-grey colour, with broad heads and 
 amiable, piercing eyes, and that kind of powerful 
 slouching movement which one more commonly sees 
 behind the bars of a cage, and the gracefulness which 
 comes from tremendous strength. The Prince and the 
 dogs were on easy terms ; his manner to them and 
 theirs to him was charming, but you could see that 
 discipline was maintained. At night they sleep in his 
 bedroom. 
 
 Meantime, all the company except ourselves had 
 slipped away, leaving the Prince to talk on to his 
 guests. We had been two hours at table before there 
 came a pause, and then Dr. Chrysander reappeared to 
 suggest that it was time for the siesta which Dr. 
 Schweninger prescribes to his patient. So with a 
 word of excuse and a half protest against submis- 
 sion, the Prince departed. We were shown to our 
 rooms, and thence Dr. Chrysander fetched us soon 
 after for a stroll in the forest. The forest is a real 
 forest, of red and white beech and much other good 
 timber, well grown but none of very great size, and 
 wherever we went an uncleared undergrowth ; the whole 
 seamed with roads and opening into sunny glades 
 
144 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 clothed in a rough turf and sparkling with spring 
 flowers. The wood is peopled with deer, of which we 
 saw none, and there are wild boar and much other less 
 formidable game; altogether a royal preserve. The 
 Prince loves it, loves the trees and the stream and the 
 shaded walk and the views from the terrace and from 
 the benches along the path. One which takes him 
 by the bank and beyond the sloping meadow to the 
 forester's house is his favourite. He walks there daily, 
 and daily people gather in the road he has to cross, 
 near the bridge, to see him go by. Here, in and about 
 his home, he is loved, and the love and lovers come from 
 all over Germany as well. Not a week passes that there 
 is not a deputation, or a band of students, or some 
 other company of honest Germans with a true reverence 
 for the greatest German of all. Often they arrive daily, 
 sometimes more than one in a day. There had been 
 eight hundred children the day before. There were men 
 waiting by the bridge as we passed. The swans were 
 waiting in their wired-ofF demesne ; a duck with her 
 ducklings, four little bits of floating fluflj sailing by 
 triumphantly, out of all danger from the swans ; the 
 living and visible proof of the success of those domestic 
 politics we had heard described at luncheon. 
 
 As we wandered on. Dr. Chrysander talked to us of 
 the Prince, of his affection for his woods, of his delight 
 in planting trees, and in the young firs — he calls them 
 Christmas firs ; of other tastes and habits. There came, 
 he said, 9000 telegrams and letters on the Prince's last 
 birthday last month ; some 2000 more than last year ; 
 which we liked to hear, and thought loyal of the 
 Germans. Many came from other parts of the world, 
 from other continents, from the antipodes. The pre- 
 sents were in great number. Each telegram, each 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 145 
 
 letter, each present is acknowledged, sooner or later, 
 in the Prince's handwriting. I asked the excellent 
 secretary how long this business of answering took. 
 ' We did not finish last year tiU September,' he said. 
 He seldom answers an ordinary letter himself; prefers 
 using the hand of his secretary. Whoever has seen his 
 autograph will understand that the muscular fatigue of 
 forming the letters and words must be considerable. 
 His handwriting, like everything else about him, is on 
 a large scale ; the signature no larger than the body of 
 the letter. He prefers reading to writing, and reads 
 much. E. asked about the many portraits and statues 
 and busts which we had seen at Schonhausen and here 
 and wherever we went in Germany. ' Oh, the Prince 
 dislikes sitting,' was the answer. ' He will hardly sit 
 even to Lenbach.' And he told us how the painter 
 comes to Friedrichsruh and has to take his chance, or 
 watch for his opportunities; talking with the Prince 
 and observing him as best he can. The last portrait 
 he painted shows you such a Bismarck as you might 
 fancy thundering at a stubborn majority in the Reichs- 
 tag ; full of righteous anger and stern purpose ; light- 
 nings in the eye and the mouth hard as iron. Well, 
 the history of that portrait is this. Prince Bismarck 
 hates crows because they are the enemies of the singing 
 birds he loves. He and Herr Lenbach were walking in 
 the woods when the Prince caught sight of one of these 
 detested crows on the branch of a tree. It was his 
 sudden glance of anger at the crow which the artist 
 seized — one can imagine the look, fierce and even 
 deadly if a look could kill — and this it was which he 
 put on paper when they got home, and the sketch 
 became the portrait we see. It was no Socialist nor 
 Particularist nor human Philistine of any species. 
 
146 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 which provoked this Olympian wrath which Leiibach 
 has fixed for ever on the speaking canvas ; only a crow 
 with no love for music or for musical birds. 
 
 Our walk took us three or four miles through the 
 forest. As we came near the house again we heard 
 singing, and turning into the grounds behind the 
 house saw Prince Bismarck and the family on the 
 balcony, and below it a group of school-children from 
 Hamburg. They were the singers, and sang song after 
 song. There were tables on the grass, and tea and 
 cake and other good things for the children, and the 
 inevitable beer for the masters and perhaps for the 
 children too. We went up on the balcony, to which 
 there is a flight of steps, and tea was going on there 
 also. What I call a balcony is more like a veranda 
 without a roof, a broad square stone terrace with 
 stone balustrade and room for thirty or forty persons 
 besides the tables and seats. This is the scene of the 
 receptions and greetings which occur so often, and 
 here at any rate you are remote enough from the 
 outer world — nothing but the house, which encloses 
 two sides of the grounds, and the trees with every tint 
 of spring green against the dark firs, and flowing 
 stream, and the sloping meadow and woods and blue 
 sky — blue with a black thundercloud coming up. The 
 Prince had completed his costume with a black soft felt 
 hat with sugar-loaf top and broad brim, and carried 
 a stick on which he leaned a little as he walked. He 
 might not care much for the songs ; it is the music of 
 birds he cares for, and he pretends to like the organ in 
 the sitting-room, a mechanical organ ; likes it because, 
 as he said with quaint kindness, it is good exercise for 
 the Princess. But the good little German boys and 
 girls went on singing in good faith, and the Prince 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK 147 
 
 listened and stood at the balustrade looking down with 
 a softened face and friendly eyes at his young admirers. 
 The songs ceased after a while, and one of the masters 
 made a little speech, asking his pupils to notice the 
 beauty of the spring and its foliage, and telling them 
 that if they had a fatherland in which they might 
 peacefully enjoy its beauty, they owed it to the great 
 man who stood there on the terrace. The little 
 creatures cheered with their shrill voices with right 
 goodwill, again and again. Then Prince Bismarck, 
 instead of saying a word or two formally and stiffly 
 from his platform above their little heads, went down 
 the steps, and stood among them, and put his hand on 
 those nearest them, and said simply : ' I thank you 
 very much, my dear children, and your teachers for 
 coming here and singing to me. And I hope you 
 won't get wet going home.' The heavy drops were 
 already falling, and away went the children. But of 
 rain there was almost none. The Prince thought his 
 black, sugar-loaf, broad-brimmed hat a better protec- 
 tion against the rain than an umbrella ; which he never 
 carries. He never carried one in politics either. 
 With his hat and the huge blue cloth coat we had 
 seen in the hall, he defies the rain. He came up 
 the steps again and the party sat down in groups. Dr. 
 Schweninger had arrived, coming by train from Berlin 
 to see his patient, from whom he is seldom very long 
 away. It is not that he is ill, but that he requires 
 watching if he is to be kept in full health. He still 
 has a little of the neuralgia which has tormented him 
 so long. The seventy-eight years he has completed 
 have not tamed his energy, nor does banishment from 
 the public service mean idleness to him. I fancied from 
 what I saw and heard that he was likely to do too 
 
148 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 much unless hindered. A man who has in times past 
 thought sixteen or eighteen hours a fair day's work, 
 does not readily reduce his allowance to within such 
 limits as seem suflBcient to the medical mind. Dr. 
 Schweninger thought him tired and prescribed rest, 
 but the Prince said he would take his rest talking. A 
 personality, this skilful physician, not tall, very dark, 
 eyes and hair and beard jet-black, the short beard so 
 full that not much of the face was visible except the 
 eyes which nothing could obscure, — the eyes of a man 
 whose business is to find out secrets which nature, or 
 perhaps sometimes his patient, would not disclose ; 
 with a half medical, half military manner. Seldom in 
 this nation of soldiers is the military manner wholly 
 wanting. With what intelligence and patient firmness 
 and success he has devoted himself to Prince Bismarck, 
 all the world knows. The Prince introduced us. 
 ' Here,' he said with an affectionate glance at the doctor, 
 'is the man who, if you are ill, can tell you so, and can make 
 you well.' It made one feel as if one ought to have a 
 malady at once, in order to profit by this opportunity. 
 
 As we sat upon the open balcony and watched the 
 clouds gather and the woods darken, it was easy to 
 reflect that elsewhere in Germany than at Friedrichsruh 
 there were clouds and gloom. It was an excellent 
 opportunity for Prince Bismarck, had he been so 
 minded, to pursue his political allegory, and broaden 
 it, and give us a view of Germany as it may yet be, in 
 storm and stress, and without a Pilot. But that has 
 never been his way. He has ever preferred, though 
 the most far-sighted of statesmen, the practical to the 
 imaginative treatment of public affairs ; nor is he the 
 man to speak of himself as one who rides in the whirl- 
 wind and directs the storm. 
 
A VISIT TO PRINCK BISMARCK 149 
 
 He watched the storm and talked of Protection ; a 
 subject on which, as on others, his opinions remain 
 unchanged, and are known. It was Protection to 
 Agriculture which seemed, on this occasion and later, 
 to interest him most. The American view of Protec- 
 tion is not that, nor the English, though his discourse 
 upon the distress of the German farmer and German 
 landowner, with whom he identified himself, would 
 have found an echo in many an English breast. But I 
 will pass from that. 
 
 It is time to bring this long narrative to an end, or 
 rather I will defer the completion of it to what I hope 
 is a distant date. I omit many incidents of a visit which 
 was full of them, and full of a kind of interest which I 
 find it difficult and indecorous to express to the public. 
 What there is of the pathetic in Prince Bismarck's 
 position is not what he would care to have dwelt on. 
 Never once during all our conversation was there a 
 word or look which betokened on his part any feeling 
 that he was entitled to the sympathies of the world. 
 He would be a bold man who should offer them to the 
 Iron Chancellor. For of iron the old Chancellor still 
 is. K his sternness softened at moments, it was never 
 toward himself, and certainly never toward his enemies. 
 You would hardly know who were his enemies but for 
 the restraint he put upon himself in speaking of them. 
 If he is ever to avenge himself upon them, it will not 
 be by mere invective. There came no suggestion from 
 him of vengeance in any form, nor need there come 
 from others, at present. The most cruel fate one can 
 wish to the present Emperor is that he should some 
 day look at his conduct to Prince Bismarck in the 
 light of what Prince Bismarck has done for him and 
 for Germany. 
 
150 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 History will have its own judgment to give on these 
 matters. It may not take much account of the prim 
 criticisms that have been bestowed on him during his 
 retirement. It is more likely to consider that he has 
 fought his own fight in his own way ; not yours, nor 
 mine, nor anybody's else, but his own. He is himself, 
 as he has ever been, adjusting his words and acts to his 
 conception of his duty, — a high one whether right or 
 wrong. The stream of his life flows on as it has ever 
 flowed, ' brimming, and bright, and large.' The fulness 
 and the strength of it are what they were. They were 
 never dependent on Imperial favour. They are not 
 now. And if one may not say that there is something 
 infinitely pathetic in his comparative solitude at Fried- 
 richsruh, it is permissible to see in his attitude all the 
 old dignity, and an unshaken firmness of soul. 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 
 
 [lONDONj OCTOBER 1893] 
 
 Dk. Jowett was remarkable for many things, but most 
 of all for being Dr. Jowett. He played a great part in 
 the intellectual history of England for at least a quarter 
 of a century. He was never the head of what is called 
 a movement. He never led a party. His name was 
 not a flag. But he was a great teacher, a great head 
 of a great college, one of the foremost figures of a great 
 university, a clergyman whose relation to his Church 
 was like that of no other, a scholar who was equally at 
 home with St. Paul and Plato, a Professor of Greek who 
 knew English at least as well as the Hellenic tongue, a 
 theologian to whom dogma was ever a secondary matter, 
 a University Don whose horizon was world-wide ; — and 
 this last is the rarest eulogy of all. 
 
 But he was before and above all other things an indi- 
 viduality. He had definite conceptions of life, and he 
 acted on them. He took the liberty — there is none 
 other the world so often resents — of being himself and 
 not somebody else, and as he had great natural force of 
 character and great acquirements, he impressed himself 
 very deeply on his time, and on those about him. 
 Nobody is left to whom he can be compared. Another 
 of the giants of a great generation is gone. Most of 
 his great contemporaries had passed before him. He 
 
152 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 dies at seventy-six, and whether you look among the 
 men of his own period, or of the generation which came 
 after him, or among those who have since begun to 
 make their mark in life, there are not many whose 
 eminence is comparable to his, or who give promise of 
 approaching his rare excellence of life. 
 
 It may be left to experts to assess the exact technical 
 value of his educational work at Oxford, but one does 
 not need to be an expert to see that it had a very great 
 value indeed. You have only to ask what Balliol Col- 
 lege would have been without him, and what the Uni- 
 versity of Oxford would have been without him. There 
 is a new Oxford since Jowett first appeared on the 
 scene. The mediaeval Oxford has given place to a 
 modern Oxford. She is no longer monastic, no longer 
 ecclesiastical, no longer exclusive, no longer under the 
 domination of a dead spirit, but of a spirit that maketh 
 alive. She has opened her arms and broadened her 
 methods, and liberalised her ideas of education and of 
 university life. In all these changes Jowett bore a part, 
 often a foremost part. It is difficult to conceive of the 
 Oxford of to-day without him, — almost as difficult as 
 of Balliol minus his all-pervading and overmastering 
 personality. 
 
 That is, however, but a single view of an activity 
 that was many-sided. He was one of a band of men 
 who, in our time, have elevated the general conception 
 and theory of education, and of its place in the world. 
 Teaching was to him the highest function, but in no 
 narrow sense of the word. He thought it the great 
 business of the University to raise up men, — or, in his 
 own phrase, English gentlemen, ' who felt that there 
 would be no shame in entering on a career in which 
 learning and usefulness would be the only claims to 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 163 
 
 distinction.' In these ambitious days the aim may 
 seem simple ; but, in common with most men of ample 
 nature, he loved simplicity, and the word to him was 
 not a criticism but a eulogy. Many of his pupils, the 
 men whom he taught and formed, are men of high dis- 
 tinction. They are the foremost to do justice to their 
 master. You will hear them speak of Jowett not merely 
 as one who taught them Greek, but who taught them 
 the conduct of life. In them he lives and wiU long 
 live. They are his best epitaph, — they and the extra- 
 ordinary company of friends whom he had gathered 
 about him. Matthew Arnold, Dean Stanley, Lord Cole- 
 ridge, Lord Bowen, the new Lord of Appeal, Mr. Jus- 
 tice Wright, at whose home he died, Lord Rosebery, 
 to whom he had and who had for him a close attach- 
 ment, the Speaker and many more, attest the quality 
 and range of his friendships. 
 
 He showed in many ways that his regard for his 
 pupils was sincere, and he attached many of them to 
 him but also repelled many by his manner. The 
 average student was repelled. He liked and respected 
 his master in the abstract, or at a distance, but Jowett 
 in the flesh and regarding him across a table was too 
 much for his nerves. There was benignity in his look, 
 but he looked through you all the same. The true way 
 was to face him, to stand up to him ; not aggressively, 
 but quietly. A boy who had been well bred and used 
 to social intercourse on equal terms got on very well 
 with him. The master liked to be met on equal terms. 
 It was, however, difficult for a mere pupil to be on 
 equal terms with the head of a great college. 
 
 It was his habit to ask a certain number of his pupils 
 to breakfast with him, once or twice during a term or 
 oftener. All but the boldest felt it to be an ordeal. 
 
154 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 He welcomed his young guests with a tepid shake of the 
 hand and the glance of a cross-examining counsel. The 
 rest was often silence. The meal went on for many 
 minutes, perhaps, without a word. Jowett was silent 
 by way of encouraging the boys to talk. The boys 
 were silent from nervousness, or from not understanding 
 the mood of the master and the ways of the place, or 
 from a not unnatural fear of one of those forked 
 sentences which at any moment might issue from those 
 thin lips, piercing and transfixing whatever or who- 
 ever was within range. It was awkward enough to sit 
 through such a meal ; the expectation, the possibility 
 of a catastrophe present to everybody's mind except to 
 the host's. 
 
 He, in his real kindliness of spirit, may not have 
 understood why he should be a terror to those who 
 were not evildoers and to whom he meant well. If one 
 of the company spoke out frankly and simply, and had 
 intelligence, all went well. The master listened with a 
 pleased or, at worst, a tolerant expression of counte- 
 nance. Sometimes he answered, and the answer was 
 not always an epigram. It was interesting to note how 
 long this awe of the pupils lasted, even among those 
 who knew themselves his favourites. One night at a 
 house in the country one of them, long since emanci- 
 pated from university control, a legislator in his early 
 youth and reputed confident in his own powers, was 
 intercepted by Jowett after dinner on his way to the 
 smoking-room. ' Come to my room and have a talk,' 
 said the master, in tones both winning and peremptory. 
 The ex-student of Balliol had no choice but to obey. 
 He went, sending a glance over his shoulder which was 
 comic in its dismay. It was more than an hour before 
 he appeared in the smoking-room. We asked how it 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 166 
 
 had gone. ' The old boy was delightful,' he answered, 
 ' and I never was so glad when anything was over.' 
 
 For a man who had a great and a deserved renown as 
 a talker. Dr. Jowett was often singularly silent. He 
 was silent unless the company pleased him, and unless 
 the topic pleased him. Some of those who saw him but 
 seldom, and then not in favourable circumstances, have 
 called him rude. He never was rude, or never con- 
 sciously so, but he had no doubt a certain intellectual 
 arrogance which, though it was entirely intellectual, ex- 
 pressed itself at times in a way which gave offence. He 
 had fits of apparent abstraction. When they seemed 
 to be deepest, they were broken by a remark which indi- 
 cated that nothing of what had been said had escaped 
 him, and that nothing had pleased him. These hard 
 sayings were delivered with a gentleness of demeanour 
 which added to the sting. Woe to the man who talked 
 on a subject he did not understand, if he talked pre- 
 tentiously. For pretence and for the insincerity of 
 character which it implies, Jowett had no mercy. 
 
 He would talk, nevertheless, on the most various sub- 
 jects, and almost always with a marked detachment of 
 mind. You could not fail to see that he held strong 
 opinions and held them strongly. But he liked to put 
 forward his views softly and, as it were, experimentally. 
 His attitude of mind was that of the sceptic ; not in 
 the coarser sense of the word, but in the sense in 
 which it is descriptive of Montaigne and of Pascal, and 
 of Socrates and Plato. If he practised the Socratic 
 method it was not in an argumentative way, and I never 
 knew him persevere with it very far. He preferred to 
 let the talk conduct itself, to wait for the opinions of 
 others, to wait till the topic came round to him, and 
 then to deliver himself of a few luminous sentences 
 
156 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 which often burned as well as flashed. Nor did he hold 
 to one method, nor ever, that I heard, lecture save in 
 the lecture-room or in the pulpit. 
 
 If you liked him, he had charm. Many men did not 
 like him, and to them he was antipathetic, whether in 
 conversation or otherwise. If you felt the fascination of 
 his presence and of his intelligence, you felt it strongly. 
 There was an English lady who saw much of him — she 
 was often his hostess — and who took, I used to think, 
 an almost humorous view of him. Intellectually speak- 
 ing they had not, perhaps, many points of contact, but 
 each was sympathetic to the other. I once remarked to 
 her how often one came into the room and found them 
 both silent. ' Oh, yes,' answered she, ' nobody is so 
 interesting as Jowett when he is silent.' It was said 
 with entire sincerity. 
 
 11 
 
 There were people who accused Jowett of paying 
 court to the great. It was even said that an offshoot 
 from a family of high social position got on better at 
 Balliol than a boy who had none. The best answer to 
 this charge is that BalUol was, of all the colleges of the 
 University of Oxford, pre-eminently the college of the 
 poor. There was and is none other so much frequented 
 by those of narrow means ; none other where so much 
 help is given to the needy student ; none other whose 
 head did so much personally, out of his own heart and 
 his own pocket, for them ; none other on whose honour- 
 list figure the names of so many to whom college and 
 university existence has been a long pecuniary struggle. 
 He was generous of money and generous of his time, 
 which he valued more than money. I doubt whether 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 157 
 
 he had a greater pleasure than that which came to him 
 when he heard of the success of some pupil who owed 
 to him his start in life or his chance of a university 
 education. 
 
 The other point is more difficult to deal with, not on 
 Jowetfs account but from the nature of the subject, 
 and perhaps also from the prejudice of some classes of 
 American readers. There are Americans, as there are 
 Englishmen, whose democracy is in social life of so 
 fierce a kind as to tolerate no compromise with those 
 whom we have been taught to call the classes. If a man 
 have the misfortune to be born into a station of life 
 which by mere birth bestows on him wealth or social 
 rank, away with him. There can be no good in him or 
 in his class. To men of this mind it will be idle to 
 plead in behalf of Jowett, or in behalf of anybody who 
 judges of men as men, and not as members of this 
 or that section in society. To others this may be said : 
 that it was his habit to accept the best, come they from 
 what quarter they might. To care for the best is ever 
 a good rule, and of the best there are many species of 
 many different origins. 
 
 I suppose everybody will accept this view in the 
 abstract. Jowetfs critics themselves might, but their 
 complaint of him began, as so often happens, when he 
 began to put in practice the principle to which, as a 
 principle or as a rule of conduct, nobody objected. Un- 
 doubtedly he liked to have about him men of the 
 world, and of the best world, socially speaking. They 
 and he had much in common, and each had something 
 to impart to the other. His very shyness led him to 
 covet the company of men and women who were free 
 from shyness. They put him at his ease ; whereas two 
 shy persons act and react on each other, and the 
 
158 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 timidity of each increases, and the awkwardness of 
 each. 
 
 Their meeting brought Oxford and London together; 
 and each gained something from the contact. Jowett 
 was something more than a man of letters and very 
 much more than a mere University Don, but he was 
 not quite a man of the world in all respects. He 
 lacked, as we have seen, ease of manner. He was sure 
 of himself in essentials ; not so sure in those social gifts 
 which make the best social intercourse a fine art. 
 Teacher as he was by trade, he knew how to value, and 
 did value highly, those qualities and accomplishments 
 which are not to be derived from books. He liked the 
 charming deportment of well-bred men and women. 
 He liked their serenity, their power of meeting every- 
 body on even terms, their habit of doing and saying 
 the right thing and of omitting to say the wrong thing. 
 He saw very clearly that people who were at the top of 
 the tree had not got there without some knowledge of 
 the art of climbing ; nor without courage, capacity of 
 a high order, and character, which last is, after all, more 
 than attainments. 
 
 He liked the tone which prevails among these fortun- 
 ate persons ; the simplicity, the total absence of pre- 
 tence, or of affectation, or of self-assertion, which is in 
 itself an unfailing test of social position. I dare say he 
 liked women who were well dressed, and who knew how 
 to wear their clothes and how to carry themselves — 
 women, and men too, with soft voices well modulated, 
 and with the accent which comes from long association 
 with the best people, and from that only. If that be a 
 reproach to him, let it be a reproach. Certain it is that 
 he often gathered about him little parties of such 
 people, and the Master's House at Balliol knew many a 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 169 
 
 celebrity as a guest. How should it be otherwise when 
 half the really eminent men and women in England 
 were his personal friends ? 
 
 He has been described as opposed to freedom of 
 thought. I do not think he was ever that. He was 
 opposed to freedom of thought based on mere ignorance. 
 To begin with, he thought for himself, and nobody ever 
 accused him of thinking in the grooves which the Church 
 had cut for him. What he disliked was the premature, 
 or immature, scepticism of youth ; or at any period of 
 life when it was not according to knowledge. He con- 
 sidered that a man who meant to set up for himself in 
 matters of religious or philosophic belief was bound to 
 know the best of what had been said and thought on 
 such subjects. He was not himself a great theologian 
 or a great philosopher, but he had mastered the litera- 
 ture of both subjects. He expected others to do as 
 much before they began to dogmatise. Nor had he a 
 great liking for mere dogma in any form. 
 
 ' He had a strange mind,'' said the late Archbishop 
 Tait of Jowett : ' it is amusing to note how entirely un- 
 interested he is on all the peculiar subjects now exercis- 
 ing the clerical mind. He lives in a region of critical 
 and metaphysical theology, apart by himself.' It is a 
 very true account of him, so far as it goes, and it explains, 
 in part — there are several other quite sufficient explana- 
 tions — why the orthodox clergy always looked at Jowett 
 askance. His was, in truth, a religious mind, but he 
 concerned himself less with the forms than with the 
 substance of things. 
 
 If he belonged to any party in the Church it was the 
 Broad Church ; the distinguishing character of which is 
 not to be a party at all, but to embrace all parties. It 
 is the other parties who refuse to be embraced. Because 
 
160 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 of his breadth of view and of his tolerance of other 
 views than his own, he was persecuted. Oxford perse- 
 cuted him, after such mild fashion as the customs of 
 the present day would permit. She would at one time 
 have starved him if she could, but, finding she could 
 not, grew ashamed of herself, and paid him his wages as 
 professor, and then for four years submitted to be 
 governed by the man whom she could not crush. To 
 this day he has not been wholly forgiven for his paper 
 in Essays and Reviews, and to this day the country 
 parson, still a power at Oxford and elsewhere, holds up 
 his hands in horror if you quote his famous, ' Interpret 
 the Scriptures like any other book.'' 
 
 Sir John Lubbock said of Jowett that he had made 
 Plato an English classic. He did, at any rate, give to 
 the English and American world the first English trans- 
 lation of Plato which was both scholarly and readable. 
 He popularised Plato as nobody had done before. Never, 
 said Emerson, are there at any one time more than a 
 dozen men who really imderstand Plato ; they are suffi- 
 cient to keep the torch alight and to hand it on from 
 generation to generation. Jowett has perhaps in- 
 creased the number. Emerson, I imagine, would have 
 been not a little astonished had he lived to know that 
 three editions of a complete English Plato in expensive 
 form had been published and sold within less than a 
 quarter of a century. 
 
 The Greek tutors at Oxford, not all of whom loved 
 Jowett, cavilled at his renderings, or at many of them, 
 and denied to him a very critical knowledge of Greek. 
 They said he had been helped by half a dozen men. 
 He said so himself. No general fights a great battle 
 without help from his staff. In the two later editions 
 there are many corrections. They matter little. The 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 161 
 
 first is the real book ; those are the pages in which the 
 two minds, those of the Greek and the Englishman, 
 come closest together. Jowett is sometimes slipshod in 
 his English, and more often colloquial and imconven- 
 tional. He does not abstain from slang, nor from 
 outlandish phrases, nor from speech which has in the 
 mouth of the incomparable Athenian a strangely modem 
 sound. In his effort to be easy he is sometimes flippant, 
 and dialogue and transitions are one thing in Greek, 
 quite another in Enghsh. There are other blemishes ; 
 no great work was ever without them, but Jowett's 
 Plato is none the less a great work, and will long remain 
 a monument of literature. 
 
 m 
 
 Jowett's place and rank as a writer of English have 
 been discussed since his death. He has been called a 
 great writer by writers who are deficient in that sense 
 of proportion which is a condition both of good writing 
 and of sound criticism. A great writer Jowett was 
 not. He has, nevertheless, a style that is clear, manly, 
 workmanHke, effective ; not always accurate. It is by 
 no original work but by his translations, and most of 
 all by his translation of Plato, that he will live in 
 English literature. That of itself would remove him 
 from the category of great writers. His introductions 
 to the Dialogues are more remarkable for the substance 
 than for the form of them. They are well written; 
 they are not supremely well written, but they are 
 important and useful contributions to the literature of 
 Plato. 
 
 When you come to the Dialogues themselves you 
 find Jowett at his best. He is not even, and he is by 
 
 I, 
 
162 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 no means always classical; but the flow of the language 
 is often so easy and sustained as to make the reader 
 forget that it is a translation which he has before him. 
 On the other hand, ease occasionally degenerates into 
 rather slipshod colloquialism, and sometimes into inex- 
 cusable inaccuracies. You will chance upon such 
 phrases as ' these sort,' ' mutual friends,' and upon the 
 use of ' disagreeables ' as a substantive. In the Sym- 
 posium people have on ' no end of clothing,' and Alci- 
 biades remarks that he 'had not the face' to detain 
 Socrates. Anytus says in the Meno, ' Neither I nor any 
 of my belongings has ever had anything to do with 
 them.' Will and shall are confounded, as in the 
 Laches, ' I know that I myself will be the sufferer.' So 
 are 'would' and 'should,' Socrates in the Phcedrus 
 asking, ' Would I not regard the conversation of you 
 and Lysias as a thing of higher import.'" This odd 
 use of the genitive of the personal pronoun recurs on 
 the next page : ' He should meet the case of me.' In 
 the Laches also may be found ' as much as ever you 
 like,' which is slang, and the locution is repeated in 
 the Protagoras, ' as soon as ever he is able to understand 
 them.' It is slang also to say of a robber that he 
 ' lifts ' a temple. 
 
 Americanisms are not entirely wanting. Socrates 
 observes in the Phado : ' I reckon that no one who heard 
 me now could accuse me of idle talking.' Plato is even 
 made to talk not only American but French, as in the 
 Republic, ' their necessity is iljaut vwre,"" and there are 
 other instances. He does not reject such an expression as 
 the ' toumure of the language.' Still stranger is the 
 blend of French with Bunyan in such a phrase as ' the 
 Messieurs' vain conceit,' where the eccentricity becomes 
 grotesque. Doctor of Divinity as he is, he swears 
 
THE MASTER OP BALLIOL 163 
 
 now and then. Ctessippus gets angry and cries out, 
 ' Strangers of Thurii, if politeness would allow me, I 
 
 should say, " You be ! " ' He likes archaic forms, 
 
 and writes : ' He thought temperance was doing things 
 orderly and quietly.' Plato is even made to quote 
 Dryden, ' Not one, but all mankind's epitome,' which is 
 to be found in the Republic. The anachronism is not 
 defensible, nor does Jowett trouble himself to defend 
 any of these caprices. Whether he corrects them in 
 the later editions I cannot say. For the reason I gave 
 earlier, I cling to his first rendering : in it is to be 
 found his genuine and authentic view of Plato. 
 
 The elevation of tone throughout the translation is, 
 in, spite of such slips as I have quoted, remarkable. It 
 fails the Master sometimes ; most unhappily of all in 
 the one passage where it was most essential, the noble 
 close of the Apology — 
 
 ' The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our 
 ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God 
 only knows.' 
 
 Probably Jowett's ear played him false, musician 
 though he was, and he was not aware of the flippancy 
 of the concluding words. Church translates, ' Whether 
 life or death is better is known to God, and to God 
 only ' ; which, though inadequate, is tolerable enough. 
 
 This is, however, the exception. Jowett does for the 
 most part lift himself, or is lifted by his author, to the 
 height of the great argument with which he has to 
 deal. Passage after passage may be quoted of which 
 the diction is faultless, and not merely faultless but 
 penetrated with the lofty spirit which animates the 
 original. There are passages and pages which have 
 such dignity and such beauty that, were they but his 
 own in thought, they might be placed beside many a 
 
164 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 masterpiece of English and suffer no harm by the com- 
 parison. The Apology, as a whole, has this sustained 
 energy and splendour. The finer parts of the Republic 
 have it ; so has much of the Phcedo, of the Gorgias, of 
 the PhcEdrus. And it is no light matter to reproduce 
 in English the effect of grace, of beauty, of rhythm, of 
 the ordered and perfectly adjusted method of speech 
 which prevails in the Greek. To him who through a 
 long and difficult Greek author has done this, must ever 
 belong no mean place among good writers of English. 
 
 He did not always seem to care whether he offended 
 people who had given him no offence and no provoca- 
 tion. A distinguished American critic, now dead, sent 
 him a long and eulogistic review of his translation of 
 Plato, published in America, with a letter. Jowett 
 answered him in two lines, thanking him for his ' amus- 
 ing' notice. The writer whom he treated in this 
 scornful way was not, perhaps, a profound Greek 
 scholar, but he was a student of philosophy and very 
 competent to deal with Jowett's work. But in that 
 way did Jowett think proper to treat him. 
 
 So many Jowett stories have been published before 
 and since his death that it is hard to be sure whether 
 any is new. But here is one which, at any rate, I have 
 never seen in print. There was a backward student at 
 BaUiol who, for failure to pass an examination in 
 Greek, was 'sent down.' His mother, a good and 
 devout mother, went to see the master. She explained 
 to him what an excellent lad her son was ; how filial 
 and how pious. ' It is a hard experience for him, this 
 disgrace,' said the old lady ; ' but he will have the con- 
 solations of religion, and there is always one book to 
 which he can turn.' Jowett eyed her and answered: 
 ' Yes, madam, the Greek grammar. Good morning."' 
 
THE MASTER OF BALLIOL 165 
 
 It was Dr. Jowetfs habit to wear on all occasions 
 and at all times what is called full evening dress : black 
 coat, waistcoat, and trousers, and white tie. When I 
 say on aU occasions, I mean that I never saw him in 
 any other raiment than this. Probably he wore in the 
 pulpit what other clergymen of the Church of England 
 wear, and if he went to Court he must have gone in 
 Court dress. But I have seen him as above described 
 in Oxford, in London, and in the country, at all hours 
 of the day. It was the costume in which he came 
 down to breakfast in the country, and in which, sur- 
 mounted by a soft black felt hat with a wide brim, he 
 strolled about the grounds of the country houses where 
 he happened to be staying. Such a costume in the 
 daytime is in this country unusual, and attracted 
 attention; of which Dr. Jowett, though a shy man, 
 seemed altogether unaware. I have since heard that 
 even in the pulpit, at Oxford, and when he preached in 
 Westminster Abbey, he kept on his dress suit, and 
 thought it sufficient to wear over it his Doctor's gown. 
 
 In the days when the ' Best Hundred Books ' mania 
 was rife I once asked Dr. Jowett for his opinion. He 
 laughed at the idea of one man choosing another 
 man's books for him. ' Besides,' added he, ' the number 
 is too great for the pui-pose, so far as it is a useful 
 purpose. A list of twenty-five is quite long enough, 
 and might conceivably be of help to the readers for 
 whom only such a catalogue could be meant.' I asked 
 him if he had ever drawn one up. He said not, but 
 would do it overnight. Next morning he handed it me. 
 I asked if he was willing it should be published as his. 
 He said he had no objection, and that I might take 
 the list with me and do what I liked with it. I took 
 it and mislaid it. Some day, perhaps, it will reappear. 
 
166 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 High on this hst stood Bos well's Johnson. It is 
 significant of Jowetfs range of intellectual interests 
 that such a book should have been, in company with 
 Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, one of those which 
 he thought most valuable to mankind. Dr. Birkbeck 
 Hill, the latest and most accomplished of Boswell's 
 editors, dedicates his edition to Jowett, 'who is not 
 only " an acute and knowing critic," but also " John- 
 sonianissimus " ; in grateful acknowledgment of the 
 kindly interest that he has throughout taken in the 
 progress of this work.' Dr. Hill's is, and is likely long 
 to remain, the standard edition of Boswell. The dedi- 
 cation remains to the end a just testimony to him who 
 inspired it. Jowett quoted rather seldom in conversa- 
 tion. He never cared for display, nor yet to compete. 
 But if he quoted anybody, it was likely to be Boswell, 
 or rather Johnson, for whose character and for whose 
 talk he had an equal admiration. 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL 
 
 [LONDON, DECEMBER 1 893] 
 
 If you met Professor Tyndall for the first time, the 
 impression he made on you was pre-eminently that of 
 the Professor. Whether the meeting took place in the 
 Royal Institution, of which he was so long the execu- 
 tive head, or in society, the impression was precisely 
 the same. He had in the drawing-room the manner of 
 the lecture-desk, just as he had in the lecture-desk the 
 manner of good society. The two were independent 
 and permanent. Before he withdrew from active life 
 and from London I used to see him often, and some- 
 times in circumstances which left a vivid picture in one's 
 mind. He was Resident Director of the Royal Institu- 
 tion in London from the death of Faraday, whose pupil 
 and friend he was, down to his retirement in 1887. 
 
 It may also be said that during that period he was 
 the Royal Institution. It was there that the most 
 brilliant and not the least practical and useful part of 
 his scientific work was done. Tyndall was an ideal 
 Director. He was a first-rate man of science. He 
 stood next after Huxley, who stood next after Darwin, 
 in the Darwinian trilogy. His place in pure science 
 was one of the very highest ; but there were, and are, 
 many men very eminent in pure science who would have 
 been very unfit directors of the Royal Institution. 
 
 167 
 
168 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 The establishment in Albemarle Street is a half-way 
 house between science and society. It performs a 
 great deal of scientific work of high value, quite inde- 
 pendently of other than scientific influences. But it 
 appeals to the public. It gives courses of lectures on a 
 great variety of subjects. Its Friday evenings were at 
 one time a favourite resort of one of the several sets of 
 London society — the most cultivated set — and it was 
 Tyndall who had made them so. Literature was not 
 excluded. It was at the Royal Institution that Renan 
 delivered his celebrated lectures on Marcus Aurelius, 
 afterward published. Many celebrities, English and 
 foreign, have there made their bows to the London 
 public ; or to so much of it as could get access to the 
 very inconvenient, ill-ventilated, and dangerous lecture- 
 room of the Institution. I used sometimes to say to 
 Tyndall that I expected to be poisoned by the bad air, 
 or burned to death on the narrow and crowded stairs. 
 ' You will die in a good cause,' was all the answer to be 
 extracted from him. 
 
 You could not get him to admit that anything was 
 wrong with his darling Institution. He was proud of 
 it, as, in spite of these and some other physical draw- 
 backs, he had a right to be. He delighted in a brilliant 
 audience and in a brilliant lecturer, and spared no pains 
 to bring the two together. There was no shadow of 
 jealousy. I think he knew well enough his own merits 
 as a lecturer. Perhaps he courted comparisons ; at any 
 rate, he did not shrink from them. He got the best 
 men he could. None of them, I think, or not more 
 than one, was his superior in his own line ; in one sense 
 he was certainly superior to all. He was Jacile princeps 
 in the difficult art of presenting delicate scientific 
 experiments to an audience. He rehearsed his effects 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL 169 
 
 as carefully as a stage-manager those of the theatre ; 
 and the lecture-room of the Royal Institution was a 
 theatre. Nothing ever went wrong or missed fire. 
 He took infinite pains to prevent any scientific or 
 experimental miscarriage. People who cared nothing 
 for science came to hear him because he spoke so well, 
 and to see the performances because the performances 
 were so good. 
 
 In truth, lecturing is with the English seldom a 
 fine art, or studied as such. They are after the root of 
 the matter, and do not always, or often, consider form 
 or style. The lecturer seldom troubles himself about 
 his voice or his delivery. Tyndall had a harsh voice, 
 but he made it do its work. He spoke clearly. His 
 sentences had a beginning, a middle, and an end. He 
 was a bom rhetorician and — what is perhaps more — a 
 trained rhetorician. Of course he was not English; 
 he was Irish, or at most Anglo-Irish; his ancestors 
 having migrated two centiuries ago from Gloucestershire 
 to Ireland. But he and his forbears had during these 
 two hundred years breathed the air of Ireland, and had 
 become in many respects altogether Irish. You would 
 never be in doubt when you heard Tyndall speak 
 among what people his youth had been spent and his 
 accent acquired. 
 
 Nor could you doubt that the fervour and force of his 
 written and spoken style owed something, and owed 
 much, to his Irish blood, or to Irish influences of some 
 kind. He had the quickness of wit characteristic of the 
 Irish, and not characteristic of the English. He had 
 the want of humour, or of a sense of humour, also, which 
 his countrymen so often want, at least in the conduct 
 of life and in the affairs of this world. The want of it 
 leads men to take exaggerated views of the importance 
 
170 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 of things which concern themselves. Tyndall took 
 himself very seriously; sometimes too seriously. Of 
 course he had a right to. He knew the value of his 
 work, and was perhaps sometimes a trifle too anxious 
 that other men should know it too, and admit it. 
 Sometimes they did not admit it because they saw 
 that not to admit it teased him. 
 
 That was, however, only occasional. He had the 
 just pride which most very distinguished men of science 
 have ; the desire to be judged by his peers, and by them 
 alone ; not regarding, or regarding little, the applause 
 or censure of the incompetent. It was, indeed, the 
 thoroughness and precision of his training and his 
 methods in research which lay at the foundation of his 
 public successes in the lecture-room. He understood 
 the conditions of experiment. That seems a simple 
 thing to say, but of how many men is it true, or of how 
 many men of science in England who are not near the 
 top ? It came out in his dispute with Dr. Bastian about 
 the development of germs, in a very early stage of the 
 germ controversy. Dr. Bastian insisted that under no 
 conditions could the propagation of these interesting 
 organisms be prevented. He simply, said Tyndall, did 
 not understand how to conduct the experiments. The 
 precautions necessary to insure the exclusion of germs 
 existing in the atmosphere were too minute for any but 
 a first-class manipulator to carry out. Nay, after a 
 long series of these experiments had been conducted 
 privately in the Royal Institution itself by Tyndall, he 
 satisfied himself that the whole atmosphere of the place 
 had become impregnated with them, and he transferred 
 his investigations elsewhither. 
 
 It was, perhaps, the very splendour of his success in 
 popularising science which blinded people to the merit 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL 171 
 
 of his purely scientific work and to the extent and value 
 of his researches. Men of science have themselves done 
 something to spread this view. They are apt to pay 
 no tribute to the Graces. They care too little for 
 accuracy of phrase or diction, though inaccuracy in 
 matter of fact seems to them iniquitous. Darwin was 
 not a writer ; not a good writer in any sense, not clear 
 or precise in the use of language. Tyndall was, and he 
 was much more. So they called his style Corinthian, 
 and the dull men, to whom dulness in others seems a 
 condition of honest work, asked why anybody should 
 presume to write better than the great High Priest of 
 Evolution. 
 
 Tyndall could be interesting on a dry subject, or, as 
 was said of Swift, write well about a broomstick, or, as 
 was said of Dickens, less truly, about a three-legged 
 stool. Like Carlyle, of whom he was a near friend, he 
 had the secret of seeing things vividly and of making 
 others see them vividly. Like Carlyle, also, he was a 
 bom fighter. He had perhaps a knack of getting into 
 controversies, and was not always an easy man to work 
 with. The public profited by this taste or this impulse, 
 or whatever it was. He was admirable as a disputant ; 
 luminous, pointed, convincing ; and not less convincing 
 with a bad case than with a good one. A lawyer would, 
 I suppose, consider that the highest praise of all. 
 
 He liked to mingle in other than scientific struggles. 
 Late in life, and upon his retreat into the country, he 
 took to writing letters on politics ; in which he was not 
 always happy. His politics were those of the Union, 
 as are the politics of the great majority of the educated 
 and intelligent in this country. But he had come to 
 look on Mr. Gladstone with abhorrence, and it grew to 
 be habitual with Tyndall to express this abhorrence in 
 
172 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 language which is unusual among Englishmen in public. 
 His invective diminished the force of his argument. 
 Next to Mr. Gladstone, lighthouses excited him. He 
 had a dispute with the lighthouse authorities, growing 
 out of his position as adviser to the Board of Trade, 
 and his adjectives shook the official world to its official 
 centre. 
 
 With all this, he had the kindest and most generous 
 nature. He was always befriending people; always 
 liberal in money matters; sacrificing pay and emolu- 
 ment sooner than put up for a moment with what he 
 thought injustice to himself or others. A great fortune 
 was easily within his reach ; he had just that aptitude 
 for applied science, or for putting the secrets of science 
 to practical and profitable uses, for which there is in 
 these days an unlimited demand and an illimitable 
 reward. He preferred to work on in the field of pure 
 science. You cannot have forgotten that he gave the 
 profits of his American tour, some $13,000, to certain 
 American universities for the benefit of students engaged 
 in scientific research. He deserves all the tributes you 
 are likely to pay him, and more. For he deserves 
 that kind of homage which is due to purity of character 
 and of aim ; to high-minded views, to unselfishness, to 
 gallantry, and to a sense of honour as stainless as the 
 Alpine snows which he loved. 
 
 II 
 
 I went to Belfast in 1874 to hear Dr. Tyndall's 
 address as President of the British Association for the 
 Advancement of Science. Those were the days when 
 the British Association had an importance much greater 
 than it has since been able to maintain. Its position, 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL 173 
 
 with reference both to the world of science and the 
 world at large, or the intellectual portion of it, was 
 such that the most eminent men of science were glad to 
 take part in its proceedings. English savants looked to 
 the yearly Presidential address as a kind of authentic 
 statement in behalf of science. Sometimes it was a 
 summary of the year's work, sometimes it dealt with 
 the latest or greatest of the new doctrines or newly 
 developed principles, as in Sir William Grove's cele- 
 brated address at Liverpool on the Conservation of 
 Energy. Sometimes the President for the year chose to 
 be individual, and to put forth his own views on some 
 hotly controverted point. The sectional meetings of 
 Association were also, not infrequently, of real scientific 
 interest. Professor Huxley himself read papers to the 
 sections, and many men hardly less eminent than Pro- 
 fessor Huxley. In short, the platform of the British 
 Association was then a pulpit with a sounding-board, 
 and nobody need wish a better spot from which to issue 
 a lay encyclical, urbi et orbi. 
 
 Professor Tyndall's address at Belfast was perhaps 
 the most — I do not say sensational, but the most direct 
 appeal ever made by a President of the Association to 
 the lettered and thoughtful public. It was delivered in 
 a Presbyterian capital, to a crowded audience, gathered 
 from all parts of the kingdom. It was reported in full, 
 and instantly became a topic of discussion and, of course, 
 of controversy. I remember thinking as I listened that 
 I was present on one of those occasions which mark 
 epochs. Next morning I went to see Professor Tyndall. 
 I said to him — 
 
 'Your address seems to me the announcement of a 
 revolution.' 
 
 ' What do you mean by revolution .'' ' 
 
174 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 'I mean a revolution in the relations between the 
 world of science and the rest of the world ; and in the 
 attitude of each to the other, and in the influence of 
 scientific thought upon the general thought of the best 
 people.' 
 
 ' Well,' he answered, ' you have clearly perceived the 
 aim of it. What the effect will be is another matter.' 
 
 And he went on to say that he expected to be attacked, 
 misrepresented, condemned, and probably told that he 
 was undermining the religious basis of society. ' But to 
 that we are all used.' Much of what he foresaw did in 
 fact happen. He was denounced as a materialist and 
 an agnostic — neither of them at that time words of 
 good import, nor is materialist now, though agnostic 
 has long been used otherwise than as a term of reproach. 
 He thought it worth while, so imrelenting was the 
 attack, to set forth later at Birmingham some of the 
 chief misconceptions of his opponents, and to vindicate 
 his own position, and even his own good faith. Explana- 
 tions are commonly a mistake, and Tyndall's was hardly 
 an exception to the rule. But as to the importance of 
 the address and its revolutionary character, there was 
 no mistake. I have just turned to the chief lay authority 
 in all such matters to see what was said of it after twenty 
 years almost had passed, and I find this : 
 
 ' It may be taken as the first clear and immistakable 
 public utterance as to the aims of modern science, and 
 as to the bearings of the doctrine of evolution on the 
 beliefs that have influenced humanity from the beginning.' 
 
 Then, after a reference to the controversy that arose, 
 the writer says, and says most truly : 
 
 ' The address might be delivered now without creat- 
 ing any excitement at all. Tyndall hardly went further 
 than the present Bishop of London does in his well- 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL 176 
 
 known work on Science and Religion, published a few 
 yeaxs ago.' 
 
 The comparison is an instructive one, because the 
 present Bishop of London, Dr. Temple, has shown him- 
 self at critical moments of his career anxious to conform 
 to the general expectation of his Church, and even of 
 the public, with reference to questions which touched 
 on points of orthodoxy. He was one of the authors of 
 Essays and Reviews, and he saw reason to recant the 
 very moderate expressions of ecclesiastical liberalism 
 into which he then fell. He has since been known, and 
 is known down to the present day, as a safe theologian. 
 The spirit of caution attends him. If there be no real 
 difference between the Bishop of London's present views 
 on science and religion and those which Dr. Tyndall 
 proclaimed at Belfast, the period of harmony is clearly 
 approaching. Dr. Temple's authority is not high ; it is 
 because he is the impersonation of the spirit of prudent 
 commonplace that his testimony is valuable. But let 
 any student in America who cares for the intellectual 
 history of this generation read over Tyndall's Belfast 
 address. He will not find it hard reading, but easy, 
 and not merely easy but fascinating. Tyndall had put 
 forth his whole strength. His style, which was always 
 copious and full of colour, is here at its best. He rises 
 to his theme. The audience which heard him was, at 
 moments, electrified. So will the reader be, even now, 
 and if he does not feel that at this day the doctrine of 
 the address is novel, he has only to put himself in the 
 position of those who heard and read it in 1874, to 
 appreciate the tremendous effect of this application of 
 the Natural Law to the Spiritual World. 
 
 In this time of the iconoclast and the democrat, it 
 may be worth remarking that Tyndall was bom in the 
 
176 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 masses, and that his place in the classes was one which 
 he made for himself. His father 'belonged to the 
 poorest class of tradesmen,' but was none the less a man 
 of energy and intellect. He gave his son an education 
 at school and at home ; one perhaps as useful as the 
 other. Civil engineering was to have been young T)m- 
 dall's profession, and he did work at it for a while. The 
 influence of German scientific teaching and the influence 
 of Faraday turned him to piu-e science, and kept him 
 there. It is mentioned vaguely that he once thought 
 of settling in America. For America read Canada. If 
 I remember rightly the story I have heard Tyndall tell, 
 he was a candidate for a professorship in some Canadian 
 college, but failed to get the appointment. His 
 acquaintance with Faraday began casually enough, 
 Tyndall taking a scientific paper to the great chemist, 
 who saw the value both of the paper and of its author, 
 and soon secured for him a professorship of physics in 
 the Royal Institution. And thus it was that the world 
 gained what Toronto lost. 
 
 The climbers of the Alps, who are for the most part 
 enthusiasts if not fanatics, claim Tyndall as one of 
 themselves. He was, indeed, a mountaineer and a good 
 one; his wiry, lean, hard, sinewy, and long-enduring 
 frame just fitting him for the exploits and perils of 
 Alpine life. But he was much more than that ; much 
 more than a pedestrian with the spirit of adventure. 
 The Alps were to him a field of scientific exploration 
 and investigation. While he delighted in difficult and 
 dangerous ascents, he never made one, I imagine, in 
 which he did not study the scientific problems connected 
 with ice. 
 
 It is easy to face danger and death under the excite- 
 ment of conquering new peaks, or rivalling old feats. 
 
PROFESSOR TYNDALL 177 
 
 Tyndall did that, but he faced them just as coolly when 
 studying the mer de glace in the winter. The mer de 
 glace is the happy hunting-ground of Cook's tourists 
 for half a day in the summer, and most of them 
 approach it on donkeys. Tyndall, in the depths of an 
 exceptional winter, lived on it and near it for many 
 days, amid hardships and difficulties that not many 
 men have faced, for the sake of ascertaining the rate of 
 movement of a glacier. However, his attacks on the 
 Matterhom and his solitary ascent of Monte Rosa are 
 probably the achievements on which the Alpine Club 
 would set a higher value than on any scientific work 
 whatever. 
 
 He used to experiment not only on Nature, but on 
 himself. I once asked him what food he took on the 
 mountains. He said the guides commonly consumed a 
 mixture of butter and honey, which they had found 
 supplied, for long excursions, in the most portable form, 
 the greatest amount of heat and nourishment. But for 
 himself he liked cakes of chocolate best, and these he 
 used to eat every two hours while climbing. His love 
 for the Alps was more than scientific, and more than 
 mere mountaineering, or than both together. It was a 
 passion, and they were his home every summer during 
 the last twenty years or so of his Hfe. He had a cottage 
 on the Bel Alp to which he went regularly, and when 
 he chose a country home in England he chose Hind- 
 head, nearly 1000 feet above the level of the sea. He 
 understood, as few men in this fog-laden and mist- 
 enshrouded isle seem to understand, the value of pure, 
 dry, fresh air. It was to him a condition of intellectual 
 vitality. He could work for a time without it, as every 
 Londoner does and must, but he sought it with eager- 
 ness as often as he could escape from town. 
 
 M. 
 
178 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 The tragedy of Tyndall's death calls for no comment, 
 but only for sympathy, and for sympathy above all with 
 the wife who was the blameless author of it. There are 
 memories of the Royal Institution which associate them- 
 selves with her as well as with him. The lecture audi- 
 ences always consisted in part of personal friends, and 
 these were often asked upstairs to the rooms which were 
 the London home of the Tyndalls. There it was, as on 
 other social occasions, that one of the charming sides of 
 Tyndall's nature came out. He was sympathetic to an 
 extraordinary degree, kindly in manner, with a range of 
 conversation that was as remarkable as its ease. Any- 
 thing that interested him at all interested him keenly, 
 and his interests were hers. Dr. Buzzard, who was the 
 pupil, the friend, and the physician of Tyndall, said, in 
 answer to a question at the coroner's inquest : 
 
 ' The relationship between Professor Tyndall and Mrs. 
 Tyndall was one of remarkable affection and devotion ; 
 I think, in the course of a very long experience, I have 
 never seen the devotion which Mrs. Tyndall showed to 
 her husband surpassed.' 
 
 Dr. Buzzard's evidence was not less emphatic on 
 another point. Answering a question whether Dr. 
 Tyndall, who for some years had suffered from insomnia 
 and overwork, had any desire to shorten his life, he 
 answered : ' None whatever. On the contrary, he was a 
 man who fought against death with an extraordinary 
 amount of resolution, and he was keenly anxious to 
 live.' The same thing may be said, not only of his 
 wish to live, but of his conduct of life. He fought 
 against all forms of death, and all forms of imperfect or 
 sluggish life, with extraordinary resolution ; against 
 error, against ignorance, against dishonour, against the 
 least disloyalty to the highest ideal. 
 
STR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 [LONDON, FEBRUARY 1 894] 
 
 'SiE Edward Burne- Jones, Bart., ex-A.R.A.' — alto- 
 gether an odd way of designating an eminent artist, 
 now in his sixty-first year. It becomes the more odd 
 when you consider who and what Sir Edward is, and 
 what his career has been. There are more reasons than 
 one why people are surprised by his acceptance of this 
 title ; and are surprised also by the offer of it. Who 
 offered it .'' query those who like to know the inside 
 history of things. Mr. Gladstone ? His interest in 
 art has never been supposed to be very deep, nor his 
 acquaintance very wide with any art but the accepted 
 and conventional forms of it. I think no one of his 
 colleagues is widely known as a connoisseur of painting, 
 or even as a lover of it, unless perhaps Lord Rosebery, 
 and his interest is largely historical. Sir William Har- 
 court, Mr. John Morley, Lord Spencer, Mr. Fowler 
 of Wolverhampton, Lord Kimberley — which of these 
 estimable gentlemen is the patron of Mr. Burne- Jones ? 
 It is permissible still to call him Mr. Bume-Jones. 
 Until the completion of the ceremonies which make 
 him a full-fledged baronet, his older and simpler name 
 is the true one. Indeed, if he have an eminent patron 
 — a word which he would reject — in politics, it is no 
 
 179 
 
180 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 member of the Gladstonian Cabinet or of the Glad- 
 stonian party. It is Mr. Arthur Balfour, now the 
 possessor of the lovely Brier Rose series of pictures; 
 and Mr. Arthur Balfour, leader of Her Majesty's 
 Opposition, can hardly be supposed to have much 
 influence in the counsels of the party he steadfastly 
 opposes. Nor can Lord Whamcliffe, who owns the 
 fine King Cophetua. 
 
 K, however, you consider another side of the matter, 
 the puzzle becomes perhaps slightly less puzzling. Mr. 
 Bume- Jones, though not a politician, has strong poli- 
 tical sentiments and feelings ; possibly even convictions. 
 He is a Home-Ruler, and he is one of those Radicals 
 whose Radicalism is first cousin to Socialism, or to that 
 form of it which now and then, in minds not very 
 much accustomed to afiairs, springs from sympathy with 
 sufiering and from a feeling that large classes of men 
 and women have a hard life in this world. Amiable 
 persons of that stamp often seem ready to catch at any 
 political nostrum which promises a remedy for such a 
 state of things. Mr. Bume-Jones is the dear and inti- 
 mate friend of men whose names are much more widely 
 known in the world of affairs than his own, and of one 
 or two who have an almost sinister celebrity by reason 
 of their ill-considered enthusiasm for some very doubtful 
 causes ; Mr. William Morris, for one. Does that throw 
 any light on the present appointment .'* I cannot say, 
 and I do not know that it much matters. 
 
 What matters is that on personal grounds and on art 
 grounds Mr. Burne-Jones deserves all the honour that 
 has been bestowed on him. It may not be quite the 
 kind of honour one would have liked to see him receive. 
 Mr. Watts declined it when the same was offered to 
 him ; not, I think, for the first time. Yet Mr. Watts 
 
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 181 
 
 is less remote from the merely conventional than Mr. 
 Bume-Jones is. Mr. Watts, to begin with, is an R.A., 
 and has been in full communion with that great com- 
 pany of painters — a word which includes, for academical 
 purposes, both those who can paint and those who 
 cannot — ^for twenty-six years. He has recognised the 
 State as having concern with art by the gift, or rather 
 by the promised bequest, of one of the finest collections 
 in existence of modem pictures ; a considerable part of 
 the work of his own life, the money value of which 
 would be expressed in large figures. His house and 
 studio in Holland Park have long been the resort of 
 the cultivated and, to some extent, of the fashionable 
 world. His portrait-painting has brought him into 
 relations with many men eminent in public — that is, in 
 political as well as literary or ecclesiastical — life. He 
 has painted fair women and brave men. He has never 
 lost sight of the public as a body to whom in the long 
 run he was responsible as an artist. 
 
 Hardly any of these things are true of Mr. Bume- 
 Jones. His whole art life has been a protest. He has 
 stood aloof from the world. He has looked to no man 
 and to no body of men as a teacher or leader. To 
 Rossetti, perhaps, in some degree, for inspiration or for 
 suggestion, but he is a painter so immensely superior to 
 Rossetti that it seems absiu-d to conceive of him as 
 standing, for any purpose, to Rossetti in the attitude 
 of a pupil. Rossetti was a man of a highly poetical 
 nature, who turned to art as a medium of expression for 
 certain poetical conceptions for which he did not think 
 verse best suited. But he never took the trouble to 
 master the technique of painting. What people value 
 in Rossetti's pictures is not the beauty of their execu- 
 tion, but the beauty and originality of the thought he 
 
182 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 has tried to transfer to canvas. Never once, perhaps, 
 was the effort a complete success ; and perhaps never 
 an entire failure. 
 
 Far otherwise was Mr. Bume-Jones's theory of art. 
 He began by learning the alphabet and the grammar 
 of it. He became a consummate draughtsman. He 
 studied design as a science, and his mastery over it is 
 not less complete than that of a great chemist over the 
 science of chemistry. He was a born colourist ; albeit 
 he often indulges in schemes of colour which seem fan- 
 tastic, just as he draws human figures which, to the 
 eye untutored in his peculiar methods, seem unduly 
 elongated. But if these be errors, they are not the 
 errors of ignorance, they are wilful, and it is not to be 
 doubted that, from his own point of view, they are 
 defensible. Every man's stock of courage, however, is 
 limited, and I never heard of anybody who ventured to 
 ask Mr. Bume-Jones why he sometimes chose to create 
 his women seven feet high, or why the living flesh 
 should assume the livid hue of the corpse. I hardly 
 dare to hint that it is so, even in this private and con- 
 fidential way. When such things are said — at least 
 now — they are said in whispers. Aforetime they used 
 to be announced in all the brutality of print. 
 
 There was a long period during which Mr. Burne- 
 Jones was to the Gentile only another name for foolish- 
 ness. He was misunderstood, neglected, ridiculed, by 
 aU but a few. Before the earlier days of the now 
 extinct Grosvenor Gallery, he was hardly known save 
 to the very elect, by which I mean that holy band who 
 love art for art's sake and not for fashion's sake, or as 
 a topic of conversation at difficult dinners, or as a liveli- 
 hood to the artist and a fortune to the dealer. Now 
 and then he burst on the world with a canvas which the 
 
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 183 
 
 veriest Philistine could not but admire, like the incom- 
 parable ' Chant d' Amour.' He who has not seen that 
 picture knows not how near a modem has approached to 
 the gorgeousness of the Venetian school in its most luxu- 
 riant moment — how near to Giorgione himself. A dozen 
 others might be named, not unworthy to hang beside it, 
 though I think Mr. Burne-Jones himself would prefer 
 that most of them should be hung at a little distance. 
 
 But he had, and has, more than all this ; more than 
 draughtsmanship and craftsmanship, more than design 
 and colour, more even than that poetic feeling and 
 poetic gift which suffused and illuminated his best 
 work. He has individuality and the power of impress- 
 ing it on the painted canvas, and a vigour which 
 seem as inexhaustible as it is various. You were 
 never in any doubt when you stood before one of his 
 pictures — at any rate, before one of the most important 
 — whose were the brain and hand which had produced 
 it. You did not need to look in the corner for the 
 name. It was stamped Bume-Jones all over. He had 
 in the beginning, and maintained through years of 
 neglect or of imperfect appreciation, a just confidence 
 in his own powers. There is probably no higher test 
 of genius ; only the genius must be real and the confi- 
 dence, like wisdom, justified of her children ; that is, 
 by the produced and completed works of the justly 
 confident artist. He was an idealist who knew how to 
 give to idealism the firm consistency without which art 
 remains little more than an inspiration. He had in- 
 dustry, and shrunk from no toil. His patience never 
 wore out. There never was a moment — there is no 
 trace of it in any part of the great body of his paint- 
 ing when he dreamed of surrender. Whether he 
 
 believed the public would come round to him I know 
 
184 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 not. He certainly never thought of going over to the 
 public, or of accepting any standard or canon of art 
 which was not his own. 
 
 In due time the public did surrender. They accepted 
 with a certain pathetic meekness what they could not 
 entirely understand, and there was quite enough which 
 was intelligible to them to vindicate their new admira- 
 tion to themselves. Perhaps Manchester, with its 
 astonishing exhibition of Victorian Art, led the way. 
 There was, at any rate, nobody who stood that rather 
 trying test better than Mr. Burne- Jones; perhaps 
 none so well. A great Manchester dealer, who is also 
 a great London dealer, was quick enough to perceive 
 this new movement in the public mind — indeed the 
 rapidity of the movement of the public mind was 
 never dizzying — and in fact to anticipate it. He 
 entered into relations with this new-old artist ; of 
 which the result, or one result, was that series of 
 enchanting pictures I referred to above, the Brier Rose, 
 and the exhibition of them, not in London or Man- 
 chester only, but in many other parts of England. 
 
 The Royal Academy itself perceived that Mr. Bume- 
 Jones was likely to acquire such a place in public esteem 
 as would give new force to the question. Why is this 
 admirable artist not in the Academy, and what does 
 the Academy exist for if not to recognise excellence in 
 art ? So, very grudgingly, this art-union — I do not 
 say trade-union — elected him an Associate in 1885. 
 He remained an Associate seven or eight years ; then 
 resigned. The step was, I believe, without precedent, 
 but the reason for it not far to seek. Inferior men 
 were chosen into full membership over his head, and 
 he had no mind to remain all his life in a probational 
 and subordinate rank. He consulted his own dignity 
 
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 186 
 
 and the true interests of art by withdrawing. Honours 
 of a different kind were not wanting to him. Oxford 
 had made him a D.C.L. as long ago as 1881, and 
 Exeter College elected him to an Honorary Fellowship, 
 and Birmingham had made him President of her Royal 
 Society of Artists. 
 
 Finally came, only last year, the exhibition at the 
 New Gallery of his collected works, and the conquest 
 was complete. It is the more remarkable because of 
 the isolation and the remoteness of the artist's art. It 
 is not modem, it has no direct relation to modern life. 
 It deals with the land of romance, of tradition, of 
 legend, of poetic imagination, of fantasy. It is a crea- 
 tion, not a reproduction, and these delicate conceptions 
 are offered to the most prosaic age of the most prosaic 
 and practical people who ever lived, and at last are 
 accepted. They are bought and sold at great prices, 
 and the prosaic purchaser, or the supreme political 
 representative of him, when he casts about him for the 
 most suitable form of recognition for this art-historian 
 of fairy-land, can think of nothing so suitable as a 
 baronetcy. It is a singular world. 
 
 II 
 
 It is now said that Sir Edward Bume-Jones's 
 baronetcy, like the one proposed to Mr. Watts, went 
 begging for a while. Mr. Bume- Jones had the oppor- 
 tunity of becoming Sir Edward Bume- Jones so long ago 
 as last summer. Mr. Gladstone offered him a baronetcy 
 at that time, and he declined it. He felt that there 
 was a sort of incongruity between his art and the 
 tribute to it. Carlyle felt the same thing about his 
 literature when Lord Beaconsfield dangled a Grand 
 
186 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Cross of the Bath before the eyes of the grim old Scot. 
 He was enchanted with the compliment, as his letter 
 showed, but he refused it. No doubt he seemed to 
 himself, and to others, a greater man as plain Thomas 
 Carlyle, writer of books, than as Sir Thomas Carlyle, 
 G.C.B. And there was always a doubt whether Tenny- 
 son did well to merge the Poet in the Peer. He might 
 have taken ' Fluctuat nee mergitur ' for his motto, for 
 the poet did keep his head above water, or above what 
 the New Radical now delights to call the Beerage. 
 
 I think I doubted the other day whence came the 
 impulse which lifted Mr. Burne-Jones into Sir Edward. 
 I am now told it was Mr. Gladstone. He and Sir 
 Edward are, it appears, friends, and each has an ad- 
 miration for the other. There is no marvel in that. 
 Mr. Gladstone's interest in art may not be profound, 
 but it exists. It has always been doubtful whether 
 there is any subject in which he is not interested. If 
 any unconventional art appealed to him, it might well 
 be that of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, with its purity, its 
 religious asceticism, its spirituality. At any rate he 
 likes the artist and the artist likes him. Sir Edward, 
 unlike some of his brethren of the brush, cares for other 
 things than his art. He is widely read, and I always 
 thought he might have made a name in literature had 
 he not preferred to make one by painting. Preference 
 it was not, I imagine. Art does not live by prefer- 
 ences, but by the irresistible impulse of a nature which 
 finds there, and not elsewhere, its true expression. It 
 is not an act of will. The man who chooses, who says 
 to himself after deliberation, 'I will not be a lawyer 
 nor a doctor, but a painter' — that man is a bad painter 
 to the end, or no painter at aU. A bird does not say 
 to itself after deliberation, 'I will not walk, but fly.' 
 
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 187 
 
 It cannot do otherwise, nor can the artist. To him, 
 as to the bird, Nature has granted wings, and use them 
 he must. 
 
 But a baronet with wings — is there, or is there not 
 an incongruity? Yet I never heard that Sir John 
 Millais or Sir Frederick Leighton painted worse pic- 
 tures after they had been, as a French paper would have 
 it, ' ennobled.' Nor will Sir Edward Burne-Jones. If 
 he changed his mind, family influences seem to have 
 had something to do with it. He has a son who is on 
 terms of some acquaintance with Lord Salisbury. Mr. 
 Arthur Balfour, whom the father consulted, advised 
 him to accept. So it may be assmned that in the be- 
 stowal and acceptance of this compliment party politics 
 had no place nor influence. It is an odd blending of 
 influences and personahties which have had each some 
 share in this latest addition to the already tolerably 
 long list of English Baronets — Mr. Gladstone, Lord 
 Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, young Mr. Phil Bume-Jones, 
 himself a painter; Dante Rossetti, in his grave, but 
 yet living in the person of his most distinguished dis- 
 ciple ; and finally, Sir Edward Burne-Jones himself. 
 There are no less than seven himdred and fifty-five 
 Baronets of England and of the United Kingdom, 
 ninety -two Baronets of Scotland, and sixty -four 
 Baronets of Ireland. 
 
 The well-deserved distinction conferred on Mr. Burne- 
 Jones has given rise, as might be expected, to cavils. 
 If Mr. Burne-Jones is to become Sir Edward Burne- 
 Jones, Bart., why is no similar honour offered to some 
 of his ex-colleagues of the Royal Academy ? ask some 
 of the admirers of some of these eminent artists. Why 
 not Mr. Alma Tadema, or Mr. Hook, or Mr. Orchard- 
 son ? No doubt some of them are worthy of all honour. 
 
188 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 yet questions of this kind are always indiscreet. They 
 give rise to other questions. They give rise, for example, 
 to this other question : How many Royal Academicians 
 might be made baronets, or made anything, with the 
 general assent, either of the public or of the art world ? 
 It reminds one of the familiar challenge in France to 
 name the members of the French Academy, or to ex- 
 plain why the majority of them are Academicians. It 
 is a challenge seldom accepted, never well met. 
 
 The Royal Academy holds a relation to British Art 
 analogous to that which the French Academy holds to 
 the literature of France. Membership of it implies, 
 theoretically, excellence in some form of art. Perhaps 
 it is hardly fair to ask an American audience what 
 standard of excellence is implied or upheld by certain 
 names which, even in England, are thought to confer 
 little honour upon this honoiu-able body. Some of 
 them are hardly known outside England, or outside 
 London, or even outside Biu-lington House. The re- 
 putation of the Academy depends, however, not upon 
 its least good, but upon its best members. Of these. Sir 
 Frederick Leighton, the president, and Sir John Millais 
 are already baronets. Mr. Watts, as we know, was 
 offered the same title at the same time as Mr. Bume- 
 Jones, and declined it; for the second or third time. 
 I have named three others as entitled by general con- 
 sent to some such honour. Among the three Mr. Alma 
 Tadema is, as a painter, pre-eminent. 
 
 But if the inquiry had to be pushed, who is to be 
 named next? How many more are there who could 
 be named at all without provoking a derisive protest ? 
 Thus far, we have got six names out of forty. It is 
 not a large proportion. To select the least fit would 
 be neither agreeable nor profitable. What one would 
 
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 189 
 
 like to know is whether, out of the remainder of thirty- 
 four, other candidates could be produced, and if so, 
 who? I meaji, of course, candidates who would not 
 make the proposer look foolish. There are certain 
 names which have long been thought to add no lustre 
 to the Academy; men of perfectly respectable character, 
 good fathers of families, punctual in the payment of 
 rates and taxes, full of the most excellent intentions 
 even with respect to the art of painting, but unhappily 
 unable to paint or do other work in the domain of art, 
 and therefore out of place in the Royal Academy. The 
 most enthusiastic believer in this institution would not 
 recommend these gentlemen for any such tribute as that 
 which Mr. Bume-Jones has received, who is not an 
 Academician at all. Does the Government then mean 
 to cast a reflection on the Academy ? I apprehend not. 
 But what they have done for Mr. Bume-Jones is a sort 
 of reminder to this distinguished body, that, as at pre- 
 sent constituted, it does not exhaust the possibilities of 
 art in the United Kingdom. 
 
 Beyond doubt it would be a misfortune if the 
 Academy did exhaust them ; if British art and British 
 art-education had nowhere else to look than Burlington 
 House. Anybody who remembers what the state of 
 both was before the pre-Raphaelite movement, or even 
 before the foundation of the Grosvenor Gallery, will 
 understand what that means. The state of things was 
 deplorable ; the whole tendency of things was deplor- 
 able. The one great influence of the early half-century. 
 Constable, was dead. He had left no mantle behind 
 him, and there were no shoulders it would fit. If the 
 primacy of art had ever belonged to England, it had 
 passed away. Turner not only was not a great influ- 
 ence, he had not yet obtained the limited recognition 
 
190 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 which came to him afterward. Mr. Ruskin's writings 
 were still but the voice of the Oxford Graduate crying 
 in the wilderness. Ultimately they converted a con- 
 siderable portion of the British public, but they had 
 no great vogue abroad and they have remained a 
 closed book to the Academy. Holman Hunt and 
 Rossetti and Millais, before Millais entered upon the 
 more profitable part of his career, were outsiders, and 
 all but MiUais remained outsiders. The Academicians 
 set their faces like flint against novelties ; whether the 
 novelties were native or imported. The glories of the 
 French school, above all of the modem French land- 
 scape-painters, of whom many were the direct descend- 
 ants of Constable, passed unperceived in Piccadilly, or 
 in Trafalgar Square. If they were perceived, they 
 were resisted; sometimes openly scouted, and at all 
 times treated as foreign, and therefore safely to be 
 neglected. 
 
 Look at the dates in MiUais's case. His art life 
 began at eleven years of age. He exhibited at the 
 Academy when he was seventeen, in 1846. His associa- 
 tion with Dante Rossetti and Holman Hunt lasted 
 some ten years. He was chosen an Associate of the 
 Royal Academy in 1853. He remained an Associate 
 for eleven years, and it was not till 1864< that he was 
 finally received into full membership. In the interval, 
 says one of his biographers, he had ' emancipated him- 
 self,' and when his collected works were exhibited at 
 the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887, the exhibition was 
 meant to show, says this academical critic, how he had 
 shaken off the trammels of Pre-Raphaelitism. Well, 
 Pre-Raphaelitism was a protest, and had perhaps done 
 its work. But the point to be noticed in connection 
 with the Academy is plain. It was only by renouncing 
 
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 191 
 
 his first enthusiasms, and by recanting what the Academy 
 considered heresies, that the doors opened to a man who 
 was confessedly one of the most original and accom- 
 plished artists of his time — at that time and for a 
 good while after. 
 
 The men who were in the ascendant were the painters 
 of Derby Days and Railway Stations like Frith, or the 
 historiographers of the himting-field, like the President, 
 Sir Francis Grant. They continued in control down to 
 the election of Sir Frederick Leighton as President in 
 1878. Then a new epoch was foretold. No man who 
 knows what Sir Frederick Leighton's abilities and accom- 
 plishments and loyalty really are, will disparage his 
 efforts or detract from the credit due to the work he 
 has achieved as President. It is sufficient to say that 
 he has not done all that was expected of him, nor all 
 that he himself hoped to do. Traditions were too 
 strong for him. The commercial interests of the 
 Academy and of its members were too strong. The 
 teaching of the Academy was improved in some technical 
 points, but it remained in substance and tendency what 
 it was before. The elections were still governed by 
 considerations alien from art. Abuses survived. The 
 privileges of the Academician were not curtailed. Mr. 
 Horsley and Mr. Herbert, Mr. Wells and Mr. Sant and 
 Mr. Yeames were still entitled to their eight pictures 
 on the line. The new men with new methods might 
 still paint, and the Hanging Committee could be rehed 
 on to sky them with unswerving impartiality. The 
 theory of the private and independent character of the 
 Academy was maintained, and is maintained to this 
 day; a club or private society supported by its own 
 resources and supporting its own schools in the same 
 way. 
 
192 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 The theory is correct: the inference that the Academy 
 has no responsibilities to the State or to the public is 
 extremely incorrect, but it is still advanced, and when 
 public opinion, at a given moment, proves too strong 
 for it, and a semblance of concession is thought ex- 
 pedient, and Mr. Bume-Jones, for example, is offered 
 a back seat, the majority know that he can be kept 
 there, and they do keep him there, and then are 
 scandalised if he takes himself off. And they are 
 scandalised still more when they hear of his being 
 selected for titular distinction, recommended by the 
 Prime Minister to the Queen, and by the Queen offered 
 a rank which, whatever you may think of it, but one 
 other Academician, the President excepted, has been 
 thought worthy to hold. 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 
 
 [LONDON, MARCH 1 894.] 
 
 I 
 
 The building up of the Rosebery legend has already 
 begun. There is naturally a great curiosity to know 
 all that can be known about the new Prime Minister. 
 It is the greater because his public life has of late years 
 been surrounded with a certain reserve. He has ful- 
 filled his own and Lord Salisbury's idea of the Secretary 
 of State for Foreign Afiairs. He has been dumb, or 
 almost dumb. He has made one great speech in the 
 House of Lords and some lesser ones, but he has hardly 
 been seen on the public platform. He has had little to 
 say, except with a pen in his hand, on the burning 
 questions of the hour. He has devoted himself to 
 foreign policy, and the foreign policy of Great Britain 
 is enough, and more than enough, to absorb the energies 
 of any one man. This very absorption, though not 
 quite complete, has withdrawn him from his task- 
 master's eye; his taskmaster being, of course, the 
 British public. And so the taskmaster, by help of his 
 other faithful servants, the newspapers, indemnifies 
 himself as best he can by constructing a legend. They 
 all want to know more than they do, not merely about 
 the Minister, whose record and achievements are open 
 
 N 
 
194 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 to everybody, but about the man. Hence the ' character- 
 sketches,' which seem to me mostly well-meant and 
 good-natured caricatures. Nothing is more remarkable 
 than the way in which stories attach themselves to a 
 particular person for which there is little or no founda- 
 tion in fact. It is the body of these stories which make 
 up what I call the legend. And since nothing travels 
 so fast or so far or lasts so long as error, it may be 
 worth while to set right two or three specimen errors. 
 
 One of these character artists will have it that Lord 
 Rosebery 'knows his Horace by heart.' This seems 
 meant to hand on an ancient tradition. Many of the 
 Prime Ministers of England have been classical scholars. 
 Mr. Gladstone was one of the best, and it is but the 
 other day somebody was saying that he was going to 
 translate the whole of Horace, or perhaps only the 
 whole of the Odes. The pathetic reason was given 
 that this work would make no demand on his eyes. 
 He knew his Horace by heart, as he knows his Homer, 
 in a sense, by heart. Asked once how well he knew it, 
 he answered that if you began with a line at the top of 
 any page, he could complete the page from memory. 
 But of classical learning his successor has very little. 
 He was at Christchurch, Oxford, during the classical 
 period, but Christchurch has never been conspicuous as 
 a ' reading ' college, and Lord Dalmeny, as he then was, 
 did not set himself very strenuously against the fashion 
 or custom of idleness. Many a man, indeed, learns his 
 Horace by heart who is no scholar, and some of them 
 keep up the knowledge. He has ever been pre-emin- 
 ently the poet of the man of the world. I doubt 
 whether Lord Rosebery is of this number. Certainly, 
 if he has any such knowledge he rather hides it under 
 a bushel, modestly. 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 196 
 
 He is presented to the world as a poet. There 
 exists, says one of his portrait-eulogists, at least one un- 
 published poem by him which may see the light some day. 
 There exist, I do not doubt, or have existed, more poems 
 than one, or copies of verses, for which the world, I 
 think, will wait a long time. No man knows better than 
 Lord Rosebery the limitations of his powers. He has 
 written verses for his own amusement and for that of 
 his friends. I have seen him sit down to a table in the 
 drawing-room after dinner, a large company of people 
 talking and playing games, and amid the soft tumult of 
 all these distractions and of his duties as host, produce 
 some notepaper sheets of what are called or used to be 
 called occasional verses. They were turned out as fast 
 as his pen could travel on the paper, metre and rhymes 
 all correct. His friends read them if they liked. They 
 were excellent of their kind, and the improvisation 
 added to their merit. I doubt whether they were pre- 
 served. I am sure they will not be published. Lord 
 Rosebery, who is one of the best of readers, reads very 
 little poetry. That fact alone might dispel the notion 
 that he has any ambition to iSgure as a poet. 
 
 His reading is before all things historical, and it is 
 the political and diplomatic history of England and 
 Scotland — Ireland, also, of late years — which has most 
 occupied him. His knowledge is, on those subjects 
 and in those directions, wide and accurate. If it be 
 possible for accuracy in matters of fact, of dates, of 
 events, to be a foible, it is a foible with him, and 
 he is sometimes impatient of inaccuracy in others ; an 
 impatience which he carefully suppresses. This read- 
 ing began long ago; began in the days when racing 
 was believed to occupy his mind much more than read- 
 ing. One of his earlier friends, who knew him long 
 
196 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 before I did, told me years ago that Lord Rosebery 
 had, as it were, made at that time a secret of the 
 studious side of his life. He read early and late ; long 
 before his comrades of those days were up, and long after 
 they had gone to bed. It may be conjectured that even 
 then he had conceived a high ambition, and was silently 
 fitting himself for the part he meant to play by and by. 
 If you have seen much of him you will have observed 
 that he makes it a rule never to talk to others of sub- 
 jects out of their range, or apart from their known 
 interests and habits. That of itself might explain the 
 imperfect knowledge which his earlier associates, or 
 most of them, had of these solid studies. 
 
 The use he has made of them became evident later. 
 I defer what I have to say of his public life, but I will 
 remark here that in every branch of it, whether parlia- 
 mentary or municipal, whether in the House of Lords 
 or on the platform, or in that important part of public 
 life which consists in private intercourse with other men, 
 he has been distinguished by the fulness and precision 
 of his acquired knowledge. That was the fruit which 
 these early and ever-continued studies bore. Later, 
 they broadened and varied. When he became, or be- 
 fore he first became Foreign Minister, they spread over 
 the Continent. They included a familiar acquaintance 
 with the personages and personal history of all the 
 reigning families of Europe, of all their Ministers, of 
 all those who had to do with affairs abroad. You could 
 consult him as you would consult a Gotha Almanac, 
 and with at least equal certainty of being rightly in- 
 formed. That is a kind of information which few 
 Englishmen possess ; even among the few to whom the 
 political history of the Continent and its diplomatic 
 intricacies are known. 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 197 
 
 These latter, every Foreign Minister in England is 
 supposed to master. Some do and some do not. 
 When the supposition is extended to Prime Ministers — 
 as it must be, since every Prime Minister is to a certain 
 extent his own Foreign Minister — it becomes still more 
 dubious. Mr. Gladstone, who came as near as most men 
 to omniscience, had a blank side to his mind where the 
 world that lay outside the field of English interests was 
 concerned. On second thoughts, I will retract that. It 
 was not blank, but his mind was, on that class of sub- 
 jects, less overflowing with miscellaneous facts than on 
 most others. Of views, however, there never was a de- 
 ficiency. 
 
 It was characteristic of Lord Rosebery that he never 
 afiected to know what he did not know, nor shrunk 
 from asking even elementary questions. There is a 
 story which has afforded, and still aflbrds, delight to the 
 great permanent stafi' of the Foreign Ofiice. One of 
 Lord Rosebery's first acts as Foreign Minister was to 
 send for Sir Edward Hertslet, the eminent chief of the 
 Treaty Department, and ask him point blank : ' What 
 is a protocol .? ' He knew, of course, what a protocol 
 is, but what he wanted was a scientific account of it 
 from the highest authority; or perhaps something 
 which would throw light on a particular protocol then 
 under consideration. Be the reason of the question what 
 it might, he was certainly the first parliamentary chief 
 of the Foreign Ofiice who had ever put such a question. 
 
 But I have wandered further than I meant into the 
 public domain, and I return for a moment to another 
 mistaken statement about Lord Rosebery in his private 
 character. Do not blame me if I deal with such topics. 
 I am but following English writers, and you do not need 
 to be told that the sense of decorum is in the English 
 
198 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 writer much more highly developed than in the mere 
 American. Here are three statements : He is not a 
 statesman ; he is a timid horseman ; he does not care 
 much about shooting — all wrong. If the word sports- 
 man has any generic signification in this country, it 
 means a racing man ; and Lord Rosebery, who was for 
 many years on the turf and then left it, has returned to 
 his early pursuit, and is at this moment the owner of 
 the first favourite for the Derby, of which more anon. 
 He is not a timid but a careless horseman, with a habit 
 of thinking when in the saddle about other subjects 
 than the performance of the animal under him. Every 
 horseman knows how dangerous that is, and Lord Rose- 
 bery has paid dear for this peculiarity, which implies, not 
 timidity, but an undue indifference to his own safety. 
 
 As to shooting, few men are more keen about it, and 
 there are few better or quicker shots. He preserves on 
 a large scale both at Dalmeny and at Mentmore. I 
 have seen him at Mentmore kill 634 rabbits to his 
 own gun within three hours, or a little more. This 
 performance began at about half-past eleven in the 
 morning, continued till luncheon, was resumed after 
 luncheon, and came to an end within about an hour after 
 that. For a man who does not care about shooting 
 it would be a miraculous exploit. It implies, of 
 course, natural gifts and much practice. It would be 
 more correct to say that the killing was done, not to his 
 own gun, but to his own three guns, as he had two 
 loaders ; and there was, of course, the usual regiment 
 of beaters. Perhaps these are samples enough of the 
 well-meant mistakes which have already done some- 
 thing to substitute an imaginary for the real man, 
 and we may let the legend for the present take care of 
 itself. 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 199 
 
 II 
 
 There is good Conservative authority for the state- 
 ment that, notwithstanding Mr. Gladstone''s disappear- 
 ance, England is likely to enjoy another One Man 
 Administration under Lord Rosebery. His party, 
 says this oracle of the other party, have evidently made 
 up their minds to treat him as a hero. They are busy 
 constructing a Rosebery legend, adds the oracle; a 
 remark which interests me the more because I made it 
 yesterday, and one likes to be corroborated. Most 
 heroic lives have a legendary element. Mr. Gladstone's 
 had. But the legend, like the life, is almost always 
 evolved out of the circumstances and exigencies of the 
 situation in which the hero finds himself, and the Rose- 
 bery legend bears immistakable ear-marks of its demo- 
 cratic origin. 
 
 The facts on which it rests may be perfectly true. 
 It is the use made of the facts which leaves the 
 legendary stamp on them. There is, for example, the 
 visit of the new Prime Minister to the London County 
 Council on Tuesday. The visit was actually made and 
 no doubt it was the first time that a Prime Minister of 
 England had paid such a visit to a body which is, after 
 all, only a glorified vestry. The act was simple and 
 natural, but see what it becomes and how it is described 
 from opposite points of view. The organ of Progressive 
 municipal Radicalism hails it with feverish delight. 
 
 'When the Prime Minister of England walks into 
 the chamber of the London Council, where he sits as 
 the representative of Finsbury, it is a truism to say 
 that a democratic regime has been inaugurated.' 
 
 The expert controversialist when he has a doubtful 
 proposition to advance often prefers to call it a truism. 
 
200 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 His appearance was, to this Radical writer, not only 
 picturesque but a promise and a pledge which all 
 Radicals view with joy. Not so the Conservative, who 
 hints that Lord Rosebery was only posing, and that 
 this attitude, though excusable for once, will have to be 
 dropped when the serious business of Government has 
 begun. Neither seems to me a true view. Lord Rose- 
 bery's interest in the London County Council is per- 
 fectly genuine, but his presence in Spring Gardens on 
 Tuesday involved no promise or pledge beyond what 
 had often been given previously. Very likely he meant 
 his colleagues, and also the public, to understand that 
 his interest in the affairs of London was none the less 
 because he now has an Empire to look after. But there 
 certainly was no hysterical or lyrical intention in the 
 act. 
 
 The theory of the One Man Administration is not 
 much strengthened by the first official summons to the 
 party. The invitation to 'a meeting of the Liberal 
 party in the House of Commons to be held at the 
 Foreign Office on Monday, March 12,' went out in the 
 joint names of the Earl of Rosebery and Sir WiUiam 
 Harcourt. I am not sure whether there is a precedent 
 for such a course. It need not be assumed that it 
 means a duumvirate. It does mean to emphasise the 
 fact that Sir William Harcourt is leader in the House 
 of Commons. If the meeting of the Liberal members 
 of the House were an ordinary one it would be sum- 
 moned in the name of the Leader of the House alone. 
 As it is a meeting to hear a statement from the new 
 Prime Minister, the name of the new Prime Minister 
 appears in the notice. But as Sir William Harcourt 
 was next after Lord Rosebery the most conspicuous 
 candidate for the leadership of the whole party, his 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 201 
 
 friends may think the inclusion of his name a graceful 
 recognition, as it is, of the claims he loyally waived. It 
 probably does not go beyond that, unless one is to 
 suppose that Lord Rosebery thinks it worth while to 
 smooth the ruffled plumage of the austere Radicals who 
 cannot, or could not, brook a ' Peer Premier.' 
 
 The phrase, which is hardly English, is Mr. Labou- 
 chere's. He and Mr. Storey and the rest of the mal- 
 content deputation who burst in upon Mr. Marjoribanks 
 with their protest against being ruled by a Peer, may 
 be able to attend a party meeting to which they are 
 convoked by Sir W?lliam Harcourt. The collapse of 
 their little rebellion does not necessarily leave them 
 outside of the party. Mr. Labouchere takes a charac- 
 teristic revenge on the associates who declined to follow 
 him into his ' cave.' The Radicals, he teUs us, love a 
 Lord ; as Byron said Tommy Moore did. Mr. Labou- 
 chere is himself a lofty exception ; perhaps because he 
 had a Lord for uncle. Lord Taunton. 
 
 Times are changing, but a title has been, down to 
 the present moment, little or no hindrance to political 
 ambition in this country. Often it has been a help. 
 There is a story — a true story, this one — of a brief con- 
 versation between an eminent but titled Conservative 
 and the new Premier. The Conservative said : ' You 
 must admit, Rosebery, that our titles have been of 
 great use to us both in our political careers.' I will 
 not say what Lord Rosebery's answer was. But it 
 might be difficult to name any other member of the 
 House of Lords who, both in public and in private life, 
 has shown a stronger desire to find himself on a level 
 with the great multitude of his fellow citizens. It is no 
 secret that he would have rejoiced if he could have sat 
 in the House of Commons. That does not necessarily 
 
202 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 imply any hostility to his own order. It only means 
 that the House of Commons is the centre and true seat 
 of political authority; the governing power in this 
 country; and a man who wishes to govern would 
 naturally like to be at the centre. 
 
 Lord Rosebery has shown in many ways, and, as I 
 said, both in public and private life, a tendency to 
 democratic ideas rare in his order, and a simplicity of 
 taste rarer still. Little things show what a man is 
 really like. Let us take as illustrations some of the 
 things called little, and see whether they do not show 
 that, if he cannot rid himself wholly of the parapher- 
 nalia of his rank, he reduces them to the plainest 
 expression. For titles he seems at times to have a 
 positive aversion. He is Earl of Rosebery, but on the 
 title pages of his published speeches and of his masterly 
 little book on Pitt, you read : ' By Lord Rosebery.' It 
 is probably the only case in the peerage where the peer 
 voluntarily descends to a rank lower than his own. He 
 could not well call himself ' Mr.' Rosebery — it would be 
 misleading — and the time for Citizen Rosebery, or for 
 Citizen Smith, has not yet arrived in this country, nor 
 is likely to arrive in his day. The same form is used 
 on his dinner invitation cards : ' Lord Rosebery requests, 
 etc.,' and it is stamped on his despatch boxes. His 
 signature has, at times, a marked peculiarity. A Peer 
 in this country signs himself Salisbury, Devonshire, and 
 so on. It is, or was, a territorial designation, and no 
 initial precedes the name. Lord Rosebery signs in a 
 manner difficult to reproduce in print, for the initial of 
 his Christian name is made to form a monogram with 
 the R of Rosebery, or sometimes the A and R only are 
 used. The same form may be seen on some of his note- 
 paper, and may also be seen carved in stone on the 
 
LORD ROSEBBRY 203 
 
 medallions over the gateway of The Durdans, a delight- 
 ful country place which he has almost created. 
 
 There are, it is true, precedents for this in earlier 
 times, but not in modern times. I do not think he 
 troubled himself much about precedents, except as 
 answers to friendly critics. Consciously or unconsciously, 
 he was trying to adapt himself and his name to the 
 customs of the great majority of the people. When he 
 was elected first presiding officer of the London County 
 Council he carried a motion that titles should be dropped, 
 and during all his reign over that body he was known 
 only as Mr. Chairman. He delighted in an experience 
 which befel him in New York where the first of a pair 
 of confidence men, professing to know him, addressed 
 him as Smith. ' My name is Rosebery,' was his answer, 
 and at the next comer the confederate rushed up to 
 him with a ' How do you do, Mr. Rosebery ? ' He 
 chose his associates from all classes, and long before 
 Mr. John Burns had shaken off the more violent 
 socialism of his earlier days, referred to him in public 
 as ' my honoured colleague, Mr. Bums.' It is, I think, 
 among that body of colleagues of the London County 
 Council that some of the staunchest supporters are to 
 be found ; a democratic body if ever there was one. He 
 would not separate himself from a man he thought 
 honest because he was mistaken or indiscreet. He once 
 even found, or made, an opportunity to say a good 
 word for the M'Dougall himself. 
 
 The society he prefers is certainly not what is called, 
 or calls itself by way of distinction and for the sake of 
 exclusiveness, society in London. He has seldom been 
 seen in those select circles of late years — seldom, at any 
 rate, at parties or balls, except those which official duty 
 imposed on him. A Foreign Minister is not his own 
 
204 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 master. He must entertain and he must, though 
 more rarely, go to entertainments. Ministerial dinners 
 and Foreign Office receptions are inevitable. When 
 Lord Rosebery must do these things he does them as 
 well as they can be done. His last two receptions will 
 not soon be surpassed in splendour. As for friendships 
 and intimacies, they take no account of rank with any 
 sensible man. To reject a friend or a party leader 
 because he is a Peer, would probably seem to him as 
 foolish as to choose him because he is a Peer. The 
 character not the coronet or the want of it, is what is 
 important. The lists of his guests at Dalmeny, at 
 Mentmore, and at The Durdans, include many a name 
 which the smart world would not recognise, or would 
 recognise with a shudder. Mayfair was once agitated 
 because he was said to have asked his late trainer 
 to dine with him at Brooks's. I do not know whether 
 the anecdote was true, or whether the committee of 
 that ' Whig temple ' remonstrated. But it is quite 
 true that Lord Rosebery regarded Cannon as a friend, 
 and showed that he did in more ways than one. Never, 
 I imagine, has there been an Englishman in any rank of 
 life whose own life was more strictly ordered in accord- 
 ance with the principle that the ties of humanity are 
 universal. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The new Prime Minister is thirteen years younger 
 than was Mr. Gladstone when he first entered upon the 
 duties of that great office. Mr. Gladstone was fifty- 
 nine. Lord Rosebery is forty-six. Those who believe 
 in numerical coincidences may like to take note of the 
 fact that it is just thirteen years since Lord Rosebery 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 206 
 
 first accepted office under the Crown. It was Mr. 
 Gladstone who offered it to him, and the office which 
 Mr. Gladstone then thought Lord Rosebery best fitted 
 to fill was that of Under Secretary at the Home Office. 
 
 Every man in public life has, of course, to serve his 
 apprenticeship. But the circumstances were peculiar. 
 The friendship between the two men was already close. 
 The first and second Midlothian campaigns had been 
 fought, and Mr. Gladstone had been elected to Parlia- 
 ment for and by that constituency. Dalmeny, Lord 
 Rosebery's Scottish home, had been Mr. Gladstone's 
 home during those eventful days. He had seen some- 
 thing of his host's position and popularity in that part 
 of the world. The great meetings in the Edinburgh 
 Com Exchange and in the Waverley Market in the 
 same city had revealed to whoever cared to see it 
 the strength of the hold which this young Scottish 
 nobleman had upon the people of Scotland. I suppose, 
 also, Mr. Gladstone must have known something of the 
 services Lord Rosebery had rendered him in Midlothian. 
 He did not know the full extent of his obligations. 
 Perhaps nobody knew it, or is ever likely to know it, 
 but everybody knew that they were of the kind which 
 had earned an ample recognition. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's measure of what was ample was this 
 Under Secretaryship, and this he offered sixteen months 
 after forming his second administration in April 1880. 
 It adds a little to the piquancy of the present situation 
 that the Home Secretary was then Sir William Har- 
 court. The Under Secretaryship of the Home Office 
 may have been ample to begin with, but when Lord 
 Rosebery had held it for some two years he resigned 
 the post. That was in 1883. He remained out of 
 office till the end of 1884. I dare say he preferred in- 
 
206 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 dependence. I am certain he preferred independence to 
 a subordinate departmental place. But it is not known 
 that any other proposal was made to him till November 
 1884. During that interval it seemed to be Mr. 
 Gladstone's opinion that his government would get on 
 as well without Lord Rosebery as with him. Perhaps 
 the old Prime Minister did not grasp all at once the 
 meaning of his young colleague's resignation. There 
 have been many occasions during Mr. Gladstone's life 
 when his perception of the values of men seemed slow, 
 and not always sure. Indeed, judgment of men, of 
 individuals, has not always been his strong point. 
 
 It was not now. The knowledge of Lord Rosebery's 
 real merits and uses in public life came to him later — ^a 
 good deal later. He had, however, become aware by 
 the end of 1884 that his Ministry needed strengthening. 
 Mr. Fawcett died. Mr. Shaw Lefevre was made Post- 
 master-General in his stead. The political situation 
 had become for various reasons if not critical, menacing. 
 Lord Rosebery had made sundry appearances on public 
 platforms, and developed a degree of influence with the 
 public which was not wholly lost on Mr. Gladstone. 
 He began, after this somewhat long process of educa- 
 tion, to open his mind to the fact that, though Lord 
 Rosebery might be still a young man and still without 
 much official or departmental experience, he had the 
 ear of the country and the unlimited confidence of one 
 very important section of the country. His young 
 friend could bring him, in short, what he wanted, an 
 increase of popularity, and in a Ministry already ueaily 
 five years old and clearly on the down grade, an infu- 
 sion of new blood was obviously desirable, and youth 
 no objection but the contrary. So it was that he 
 made up his mind to ofifer Lord Rosebery the First 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 207 
 
 Commissionership of Works, a post of secondary im- 
 portance, and that of Lord Privy Seal, a great post, 
 historically, which has of late years become mainly 
 honorary. He filled these two offices, with a seat in 
 the Cabinet, till June 1885, when Mr. Gladstone 
 resigned. 
 
 Thus far Lord Rosebery had had no great official 
 opportunity of making his mark. The mark he had 
 made had been individual. In the short administra- 
 tion of 1886 he took his proper position as Foreign 
 Minister. He held it only from February to August, 
 but he at once signalised his fitness for those high 
 duties. The statesmen of the Continent became aware 
 that a new man had arisen in England with whom they 
 would have to deal. This novice handled delicate 
 affairs with the precision and firmness of an old diplo- 
 matic hand. Then came Home Rule, and the long 
 exile from power which his absorption in that subject 
 brought upon Mr. Gladstone and his party. Most men 
 considered it a calamity. Lord Rosebery was in the 
 flower of full manhood, and the blossoming of a sudden 
 reputation was chilled and checked by this long political 
 frost. Yet when 1892 came, and Mr. Gladstone was 
 again borne to power by his Irish allies — and by them 
 alone, since there was a majority against him in Great 
 Britain — Lord Rosebery showed no eagerness to resume 
 the office in which he had distinguished himself. 
 
 He was summoned to it by his chief, by the party, 
 by the country, perhaps by the persuasion of the Queen 
 herself, who had, while he first held the Secretaryship 
 of State for Foreign AiFairs, pronounced him a Heaven- 
 born Foreign Minister. There was, to speak the plain 
 truth, no other man in the Liberal party at that 
 time in whose fitness for that place the nation had any 
 
208 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 confidence whatever. But Lord Rosebery thought that 
 a good time for a yachting trip with his two boys along 
 the west coast of Scotland. He said he was not a 
 candidate for office, and could not accept office. The 
 telegram which at the last moment induced him to 
 change his mind reached him, I believe, at Oban, and 
 he reluctantly came south. It was understood, and it 
 was expected by the country, that he was to have a free 
 hand. It is not necessary to suppose that any doubt 
 on the point had delayed his decision. His desire to 
 remain in private life was due to private considerations, 
 largely if not entirely. But you have only to turn to 
 the newspapers of that day to see how anxiously his 
 presence in the new Ministry was longed for by every- 
 body but those knots of new Radicals whose ideal of 
 national greatness is Holland ; the Holland of to-day 
 which, in spite of her past greatness, is a cipher in 
 European politics. 
 
 The popular estimate of Mr. Gladstone and his 
 foreign affairs — for he in truth conducted them while 
 Lord Granville was Foreign Minister — may be a wrong 
 one, and may be unjust to him. But it existed, and 
 still exists, and it had to be taken account of. It is 
 not too much to say that if Lord Rosebery had per- 
 sisted in his refusal, public confidence would have been 
 withheld from the last Gladstone Administration, so 
 far as foreign affairs were concerned. But he yielded, 
 and he had not been long in the saddle before questions 
 presented themselves for solution well calculated to test 
 both his courage and his capacity. Among them was 
 the Egyptian question. 
 
 Egypt is, in one sense, the Ireland of the Foreign 
 Office. She is always there, and always in trouble of 
 some sort or another. Not unlike the perplexities 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 209 
 
 which the Irish patriot creates for his English rulers 
 are the perplexities which in Egypt are the oiFspring of 
 foreign intrigues — of French intrigues above all. That 
 does not make them the easier to deal with. No man 
 who knows anything about Egypt doubts that English 
 rule in that country has been beneficent and unselfish. 
 There never has been a day since 1882 and the French 
 refusal to bear any longer her joint responsibility of 
 rule — never a day when England would not have been 
 glad to get out of Egypt if she could. The obligations 
 she had accepted bound her to the banks of the Nile. 
 There goes on in Cairo and elsewhere one incessant 
 cabal against English rule. There may be an explosion 
 at any moment. There are frequent explosions at 
 moments the most unexpected. That is what an Eng- 
 lish Foreign Minister has to be ready for. 
 
 Three crises of the gravest character have occurred 
 during the last eighteen months. In each one the 
 enemies of England on the Nile have had the aid of 
 the enemies of England — that is, of any but a Little 
 England — on the banks of the Thames. Europe looks 
 on with curiosity to see how in such circumstances an 
 English Foreign Minister deports himself It was seen 
 that Lord Rosebery supported Lord Cromer to the full. 
 Turkey was sullen, France angry, no European power 
 helpful, and from none was help asked. But the crisis 
 was always disposed of. More than that, it was dis- 
 posed of with little help from his colleagues, with little 
 support from them in Parliament or in the country. It 
 was the country itself which supported him. Mr. Glad- 
 stone's partiality for France and strange belief in French 
 friendship for England indisposed him to take a strong 
 line in Egypt in opposition to France. He spoke with 
 more voices tlian one. Latterly, his view stiffened, and 
 
 o 
 
210 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 once at least he committed himself to the policy of 
 occupation. But more than once before he had used 
 language of a very embarrassing kind. 
 
 There is a story on this point which is probably true, 
 but I prefer to leave the responsibility for it with the 
 French paper in which it first saw the light. Mr. 
 Gladstone had made one of those speeches on Egypt 
 with which for a time he used to rekindle French 
 hopes of seeing England evacuate that country. M. 
 Waddington, then French Ambassador in London, be- 
 took himself to the Foreign Office next day, had his 
 audience, and expressed to Lord Rosebery his hope that 
 now at last the moment had come when England would 
 give effect to her pledges to leave Egypt. He asked 
 Lord Rosebery if he was able to give him any more 
 explicit assurances than those contained in Mr. Glad- 
 stone's gratifying speech of the day before. Lord Rose- 
 bery replied that he could return no answer to M. 
 Waddington's question, because he had not had time 
 to read the Prime Minister's speech ! This story is 
 contained in one of M. Waddington's despatches. It 
 dispelled once for all any lingering doubt as to whether 
 Lord Rosebery or Mr. Gladstone was Foreign Minister. 
 Here or in America the anecdote might make no strong 
 impression. But on the Continent, where strict notions 
 of administrative hierarchy prevail, it was accepted as a 
 revelation, and made Lord Rosebery stronger than ever. 
 
 There have been other difficulties with France ; one, 
 at least, which was quite serious enough. There were 
 difficulties with Russia. There was the Franco-Siamese 
 question. There were African questions, Uganda above 
 all. As one after the other arose, the Chancelleries of 
 Europe were on the qui vive to see whether Lord Rose- 
 bery really had that free hand for which he was believed 
 
LORD ROSEBERY 211 
 
 to have stipulated. They came in each case to the con- 
 clusion that he had. It finally ceased to be a question. 
 It came to be understood that so long as Lord Ilosebery 
 remained at the Foreign Office, the foreign policy of 
 England remained in his hands. It was seen, also, that 
 though his predilections, or rather convictions, were 
 known to be on the side of the Triple Alliance, he held 
 the balance even. If the moment came, he might pro- 
 bably side with Germany against France, but he was 
 not the man to take a premature step, or to show his 
 hand till he was ready to play it. After some months, 
 the impression he made abroad was decisive. England 
 had had no minister since Palmerston who was so much 
 respected. By the friends of England — she has none 
 too many — ^he was liked and trusted. By her enemies 
 he was dreaded. By both he was regarded as a strong, 
 patient, adroit, inflexible Minister. 
 
 In the English Foreign Office Lord Rosebery made 
 his mark from the beginning of his first tenure of office 
 in 1886. He mastered the business. He grasped the 
 points. He inspired the permanent chiefs with respect. 
 Men who had grown grey in the service said that his 
 minutes on the despatches were such as the oldest and 
 ablest Minister might have penned. He took command 
 of his department. The rule is that the department 
 takes command of the Minister. I will add one other 
 thing, based on the testimony of half-a-dozen men in 
 the Foreign Office in various positions. They agreed in 
 saying that from the heads of the great departments 
 into which the Foreign Office is divided down to the 
 porters and messenger boys, there was no one who did 
 not deplore Lord Ilosebery 's departure. There as else- 
 where he made himself something more than liked : the 
 feeling for him was and is one of affection. 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 
 
 [LONDON, MARCH 1894] 
 
 The second figure in an administration of which some 
 think he ought to be the head must be, for that reason 
 alone, a considerable personage. But there are many 
 other reasons why Sir William Harcourt must be 
 deemed a considerable personage. I do not know — how 
 am I to know ? — whether the greatness of his position 
 is understood in America, or the extraordinary energy 
 of his character. It is not time, happily, to write his 
 biography. It may be permissible to attempt a study 
 of the man, or of some of the many sides of a very 
 versatile individuality, and to look at some of the in- 
 cidents of his political life. 
 
 About one thing there was no dispute, the leadership 
 of the House of Commons. Sir William simply had 
 no competitor for that great post. That of itself 
 means much. For what is the House of Commons ? 
 Is it not dinned day by day into the ears of all man- 
 kind that the House of Commons is the one really 
 representative legislative body in the United Kingdom ? 
 It is, at any rate, the most popular body. It contains, 
 or is supposed to contain, the cream of the two, or 
 perhaps three, great parties into which the political 
 forces of the kingdom are for the present divided. I 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 213 
 
 imagine that the American who has not lived in 
 England may have some difficulty in making clear to 
 himself the difference — the immense difference — in 
 authority and in influence, and above all, in social 
 position — between the House of Commons at West- 
 minster and the House of Representatives at Washing- 
 ton. It may be worth while to go into that matter 
 more fully some day. All I wish to do now is to point 
 out that the difference does exist. The English do 
 think of their House of Commons with more respect 
 than we are wont to think of our House of Repre- 
 sentatives. To enter it is a higher ambition. To lead 
 it gives a man a far more distinguished position. To 
 lead either party in the House of Commons is a dis- 
 tinction than which there are few higher in England. 
 Covdd the same thing be said of America ? To be 
 chosen chief of the Commons after a competition would 
 be an honour. To be accepted as the leader to whom 
 there is no rival is a higher honour. 
 
 There are, of course, other able men on the Treasury 
 Bench. There would have been more but for the party 
 split in 1886. If Mr. Chamberlain had remained a 
 follower of Mr. Gladstone when Mr. Gladstone became 
 a follower of Mr. Pamell, the political fortunes of the 
 Liberals would have been certainly altered and probably 
 improved. But Mr. Chamberlain went, as so many 
 other of Mr. Gladstone's best colleagues went. It was 
 supposed at one time that Mr. John Morley might 
 succeed him. Mr. John Morley has become an im- 
 portant member of the party. He has probably had a 
 greater indirect and secondary influence on the course 
 of events than anybody. He has had access to Mr. 
 Gladstone's mind. He is credited with no small part 
 of that missionary effort which brought his great leader 
 
214 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 round to Home Rule. He has governed Ireland. He 
 has won the respect of the House. He has even won 
 its attention ; which is more rarely given. He can 
 speak, and speak well. He is red hot with convictions 
 and impulses and with emotions of the kind which often 
 sway an assembly, popular or parliamentary. He has 
 an important following in the country, and a conspicuous 
 place in the regard and esteem of his fellow-countrymen. 
 And he was never so much as mentioned as a possible 
 competitor with Sir William Harcourt for the leadership. 
 If he was not mentioned, who else could be ? Not 
 Mr. Fowler, whose conduct of the Parish Councils bill, 
 though marked by ability and resource, lacked the 
 sympathetic and flexible qualities which are essential to 
 leadership ; both which Mr. Gladstone had in a supreme 
 degree. Not Sir George Trevelyan, whose political 
 position has been seriously impaired by his instability 
 and by his failure to keep in touch with his party. 
 Not Mr. Mundella, whose excellence as the head of the 
 Board of Trade is recognised. Not Mr. Asquith, who 
 in sheer intellectual force, and especially in argumenta- 
 tive force, and perhaps most of all in force of character 
 and rectitude, has made a place for himself apart. Mr. 
 Asquith, however, has yet to learn some things about 
 the House of Commons ; about its temper and idio- 
 syncrasies, as well as about its procedure. Certainly 
 not Mr. Bryce, who is respected as a mine of historical 
 lore, but who has an unlucky knack of irritating the 
 House by a manner and by methods in debate both 
 more pragmatic than the House will stand. Not even 
 Mr. Campbell Bannerman, for Mr. Bannerman, though 
 a favourite with the House, and a cool speaker with a 
 power of presenting his views in a dry light, seems to 
 lack the specific talent of command, and of that gentle 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 215 
 
 yet firm guidance which is indispensable to him who 
 would conduct this unruly body along the straight and 
 narrow paths it is so often compelled to follow. 
 
 As so often happens, this long string of negatives 
 results in an affirmative, and the affirmative is Sir 
 William Harcourt. I set aside the comparison which 
 might suggest itself to the indiscreet between him and 
 his immediate predecessor. Mr. Gladstone stood alone. 
 Nor is his former chief the model Sir William is com- 
 monly believed to have studied most closely at that 
 period when his style was still to form. Not Mr. 
 Gladstone but Mr. Disraeli was his model. It is not 
 to be understood that Mr. Vernon Harcourt, as he then 
 was, set himself consciously to imitate Mr. Disraeli or 
 anybody else. Imitation is the foible of weak men, and 
 Sir William, whatever else he may have been, was never 
 weak. But most men have an ideal, or most men see in 
 some other one man certain qualities and methods which 
 attract them strongly and influence them strongly. 
 Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Harcourt were friends, or at 
 least were on terms of easy if not of intimate acquaint- 
 ance. It might be profitable, were it permissible, to 
 restate in a different way some of the terms of com- 
 parison or of contrast between Mr. Disraeli and Mr. 
 Gladstone. But such a statement, to have any value, 
 would require to be drawn with entire frankness, and it 
 may be doubted whether American public opinion is, 
 on this subject, in a state to welcome entire frankness. 
 At any rate, this is not the moment for such a study, 
 nor the place. I content myself with saying that the 
 two great members of Parliament who, since Sir Robert 
 Peel's death, have divided the suffrages of the English 
 people, were the complements of each other, and 
 perhaps the counterparts. I imagine that one of the 
 
216 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 qualities which made Mr. Disraeli interesting to Mr. 
 Harcourt was his complete exemption from these 
 enthusiasms which disturb the judgment in public 
 affairs. It was not his method to envelop the House 
 in a whirlwind of lofty emotions. If he elevated the 
 tone of its debates, the elevation was intellectual, not 
 moral nor passionate. He led it by knowledge of men 
 and of the world, by tact, by extraordinary quickness 
 of perception, and by an estimate of each crisis as it 
 arose which was seldom other than exact. 
 
 A similar account may be given, in rather less sweep- 
 ing terms, of Sir William Harcourt. He is a most 
 accomplished and capable parliamentarian. He knows, 
 of course, the procedure. Anybody may master that, 
 though the degree of mastery is important. It was one 
 secret of Mr. Parnell's early influence — ^influence is not 
 the word, but of his early success in bending the House 
 to his will against its own. He had brooded over the 
 rules and standing orders till they became instruments 
 of policy, fashioned to his hand, and often serving uses 
 totally irreconcilable with the purposes of their framers. 
 Only now and then does such a man appear. Sir 
 William Harcourt is not of the Pamell pattern. He 
 knows the rules, of course ; the game could not be played 
 at all without them. But to twist them to his purpose 
 is not one of his usual resources. He prefers to use 
 men. He has a knowledge of the weaknesses of men. 
 He has a whole armoury of fallacies which he can gird 
 on when they are wanted, and brandish in the face of a 
 House very apt to take them as the syllogisms of an 
 invincible logic. 
 
 They are not, however, his chief weapons of debate, 
 nor is it often safe to assume that a strong man habitu- 
 ally resorts to weak or cheap devices. The value of a 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 217 
 
 stratagem is in its novelty, its unexpectedness, its rarity. 
 For daily use he relies on clear statement, on an ener- 
 getic diction, on that familiarity with his opponents' 
 weak points, and also their strong points, which comes 
 from long study pursued patiently with a definite 
 purpose; on repartee, in which he is expert; on his 
 mastery of the subject and power of making others 
 master it ; on wide experience. He knows the moods 
 of the House even if he does not create them, as Mr. 
 Gladstone often did in order to fall in with them and 
 to leave members under the impression that he was but 
 giving voice to their own convictions and wishes. It was 
 a very fine piece of art. But it is much to know them 
 and to know how to yield to them gracefully, and above 
 all quickly. The House must be agreed with while it 
 is in the way, if at all. It is the more creditable to its 
 present leader since he is believed to be, like its late 
 leader, the possessor of a somewhat imperious temper. 
 Both have learnt how to command by obeying. 
 
 II 
 
 Sir William Harcourt's strength lies in the House of 
 Commons rather than in the country. His reputation 
 is a House of Commons reputation, as he probably 
 prefers it should be. To enter the House he gave up 
 what promised to be a great career at the parliamentary 
 bar. Both he could not follow. Etiquette does not 
 permit a member of the House to practise before a com- 
 mittee of the House, or of either House, in private bill 
 cases. It was a question between a political career and 
 an income. The income was a sure thing ; the career 
 had at one time elements of uncertainty. The fees at 
 the parliamentary bar exceed all others, and Sir William 
 
218 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 had got both feet on the ladder. He had attained a 
 position very rapidly, and a large practice was already 
 his when he decided to renounce it. We sometimes 
 hear of a lawyer giving up the bar when it is the bar 
 which gives up the lawyer. That was not the case with 
 Sir William Harcourt, then still Mr. Vernon Harcourt. 
 
 He has since had occasion to deal pretty often with 
 legal matters and with constitutional matters. His 
 enemies — ^for enemies he had — used to sneer at his want 
 of learning. The want existed, for the most part, in 
 their own imaginations. A black-letter lawyer he never 
 was, nor a very learned lawyer in the sense in which 
 some great judges like Baron Parke have been learned 
 lawyers, or some great advocates like Sir Horace Davey, 
 now himself a judge. But he had a grasp of principles ; 
 and that is worth more, even at the bar, and certainly 
 more in public life. He was and is a jurist, and he has 
 always had a power of mastering a subject, legal or 
 other. He was professor of international law at Oxford, 
 a post which implies some legal knowledge on the part 
 of him who has filled it, and filled it well. He has been 
 in the running for the Lord Chancellorship — perhaps 
 stiU is, should the moment arrive when he no longer 
 cared to lead the House of Commons. He was, as we 
 all know, the author of the ' Historicus ^ letters, and the 
 ' Historicus ' letters, though of course not to the taste of 
 Americans at the time, were no mean contribution to 
 the literature of perplexed international questions. 
 Have they left a prejudice behind them against their 
 writer in the American breast.? It was a long time 
 ago, and I do not quite see why we should owe Sir 
 William a grudge because he took the side of his own 
 country on disputed points of law and of diplomacy. 
 
 Yet, Mr. Stead, who has recently returned, I will not 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 219 
 
 say from America, but from the World's Fair, has an- 
 nounced to a bewildered English public that Sir William 
 Hareourt is not popular in the United States. We are, 
 I suppose, for United States to read Chicago, which 
 seems to have been the spot Mr. Stead thought best 
 worthy of his attention. Chicago was not prepared to 
 allow Sir William to be made Prime Minister, and had 
 a candidate ready to beat him; none other than Mr. 
 William Waldorf Astor. Such are the invaluable infor- 
 mations most lately imparted to the British public. Mr. 
 Stead is often bewildering, and when he explains be- 
 comes more bewildering still. None the less might it 
 be interesting to be told in detail the secret of Sir 
 William's imaginary unpopularity in America. It can 
 hardly be because he married an American wife, or 
 because his father-in-law was an American Minister in 
 Vienna and London, or because Sir William's liking for 
 what is American, and his goodwill to America, extend 
 beyond his own family. 
 
 A similar reproach has been flung at Sir William 
 since he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. They 
 say he is not a financier. It is true he was not a finan- 
 cier. He never had a business training, was never in a 
 financial house in the city, like Mr. Goschen, his pre- 
 decessor in the Treasury, nor ever that I heard of a 
 bank director. The same thing may be said of Mr. 
 Gladstone, yet Mr. Gladstone has a considerable repu- 
 tation as a financier. There have been critics even of 
 Mr. Gladstone. A Bank of England director has been 
 heard to say that the late Prime Minister did not really 
 understand finance or business. He survived that 
 criticism, as well as some others. Sir William Hareourt, 
 I imagine, went into the Chancellorship of the Exchequer 
 much as he went into a great engineering case at the 
 
220 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 parliamentary bar. He was not an engineer, but he 
 could get up a case. The other day I asked one of the 
 counsel in the great cordite action how much he had to 
 know about cordite and balistite and nitro-glycerine in 
 order to try that cause. ^Enough to cross-examine 
 eiFectively the best expert,' was his answer; and he 
 presently added : ' By the time the trial was over, we 
 knew as much about the subject matter as any of them.' 
 And he told me of the visits he made to Nobel's 
 work, where you have a fair chance of being blown 
 up at any moment, and his study of the processes on 
 the spot. 
 
 In the same way, the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 has help, all the help he wants, from bankers and other 
 experts of the city, not to speak of the Treasury staff; 
 men who are trained in figures and finance from their 
 youth upward. Every Minister new to the work has 
 to learn the business of his Department, whether it be 
 finance or war or diplomacy, or whatever else. He may 
 not be a Turgot or a Sir Robert Peel, but he learns his 
 trade. The Chancellorship of the Exchequer is, in fact, 
 considered a rather easy berth ; easy in ordinary times 
 mth a surplus ; not easy in hard times when a deficit 
 has to be made good, and new taxes imposed, and new 
 sources of revenue invented or enlarged. The present 
 is such a time, and the real extent of Sir William 
 Harcourt's financial abilities will be guageable after he 
 has produced his Budget next month. 
 
 There are those who say that the real complaint 
 against the present Chancellor is not that he is too 
 little of a financier, but too much. The complaint is 
 probably true of all Chancellors, as Chancellors. They 
 are guardians of the public purse, and they tighten the 
 strings of it against all comers. The demand for money 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 221 
 
 to build new ships of war was supposed to have found 
 its firmest opponent in Sir William. He has never 
 been reckoned a very staunch Imperialist, and he 
 thought it hard that he should be called upon to find 
 three millions sterling in addition to the usual provision 
 for the Navy at a time when a big deficit of perhaps two 
 millions more stared him in the face. He rather 
 astonished the House yesterday by declaring that he 
 had always been a strong advocate of the supremacy of 
 the British Navy. That may be an individual opinion, 
 or it may be an expression of loyalty to his chief and 
 to the settled policy of the Cabinet. Lord Spencer 
 carried the Cabinet with him even before Mr. Gladstone 
 ceased to be the head of it, and Sir William is the 
 exponent of the ascertained determination of the whole 
 body of which he is so important a member. 
 
 Why he should not be a greater power in the country 
 outside of the House of Commons, is one of those 
 problems, half personal, half otherwise, for which no 
 very complete solution can readily be found. But I 
 will indicate one which is not often suggested. The 
 majority of the people of this country seem to care very 
 little about House of Commons reputations. Perhaps, 
 if the whole truth were known, they care less about 
 the House itself than they are supposed to. A great 
 personality, Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Bright or Mr. Glad- 
 stone, makes the House interesting to people in general. 
 When he is gone, the interest goes, or a great part of 
 it goes. We often hear Sir Robert Peel and Mr. 
 Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone each of them described as 
 the greatest member of Parliament who ever lived. 
 They were all great ; Mr. Gladstone, probably, on the 
 whole, the greatest parliamentarian of the three, even 
 when all due allowance is made for the note of enthu- 
 
222 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 siasm, which is naturally loudest just after his retire- 
 ment. 
 
 Sir William Harcourt does not belong in that rank, 
 but he is great enough in the House to make one 
 wonder why he is not greater in the minds of the 
 multitude. It is not from lack of either general or 
 special capacity. When he was being pressed for 
 Prime Minister it was said, and said truly, that he had 
 done far more party work up and down the country 
 than Lord Rosebery had. He had spoken much oftener 
 from the platform than Lord Rosebery. Sir William 
 is, moreover, an exceedingly effective speaker. If he is 
 not, in the high sense of the words, a great orator, he 
 has an energy of mind and a rhetorical art which make 
 him easily the master of most audiences. I once heard 
 him in the hall which is indelibly associated with the 
 memory of Bright ; the great Town Hall of Birming- 
 ham. The audience is the most critical in England. 
 They have all the natural acuteness and hard sense of 
 the best type of artisan, and their education in oratory 
 and in the criticism of oratory was the work of Bright 
 himself. They gave Sir William on this occasion no 
 ordinary welcome, and he made them no ordinary speech. 
 I remember thinking at the time that the test might 
 be taken as decisive, and that Sir William and his 
 oratory both came well out of the ordeal. There never 
 was a doubt of his success, from beginning to end. 
 A month since, he spoke at Portsmouth before the 
 National Liberal Federation ; an audience of hardened 
 politicians who look upon a speech as a political instru- 
 ment ; as one part, and not the most important part, 
 of the machine which they have invented and con- 
 structed to tiurn out majorities. There also, and before 
 these highly practical critics, his success was complete. 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 223 
 
 The occasions may be taken as the two extremes of 
 requirement, and the speaker who can satisfy both has 
 very little to learn in the matter of political oratory 
 with a definite purpose. Yet with all these accom- 
 plishments and achievements, Sir William's influence in 
 the country is not quite what might be expected. 
 
 I am reminded of the late Mr. Bradlaugh, and of his 
 account of his own relation to the public. He was 
 telling me that whenever he preached the Republic, he 
 carried the audience with him, and he was ready to 
 infer that Republican ideas had a foothold among the 
 English people. 'But suppose, Mr. Bradlaugh, that 
 instead of making them a speech you sent them a letter 
 or a message in favour of the Republic ; what then .'' ' 
 He reflected a moment, and admitted that it would be 
 without effect. There is an analogy between his case 
 and Sir WiUiam Harcourt's. The influence of each 
 with the country depends in no small measure upon the 
 goodness of their speaking ; and in a less degree upon 
 their general reputation or authority. It certainly is 
 not, in Sir William's case, the absence of convictions. 
 He is never without convictions, and the unflagging 
 sincerity with which he accepts and upholds each new 
 set is a very striking proof of the robustness of his 
 nature, and of moral vigour. 
 
 The least sketch of Sir William Harcourt would be 
 misleading if it did not deal with some of those personal 
 traits which, after all, are more interesting and more 
 descriptive of the man than any number of political 
 characteristics. It is these personal traits which have 
 made him a delightful personage to the House of 
 Commons. The largeness of his nature fills that large 
 chamber. He fills a good deal of it with his large 
 frame and stature and manner. The stranger who 
 
224 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 beheld him for the first time would be in no doubt that 
 the legislator to whom this imposing physique belonged 
 was somebody. It is a massive and powerful face which 
 surmounts the powerful body. You expect him to be 
 massive in speech, and sometimes he is, sometimes 
 even ponderous, but only when he thinks the occasion 
 demands this method. His obvious preference is for 
 light comedy. His intellectual exuberance manifests 
 itself in a stream of sparkling sentences. He has 
 humour and good-humour, tact and sympathy, and 
 these are qualities which are invaluable. Of old time 
 he was thought to have a temper which blazed some- 
 what fiercely when stirred. If he ever had it he pro- 
 bably still has it, but it is under control, and nothing 
 is more useful than a temper under control. He is 
 not merciful in debate. Perhaps he enjoys seeing his 
 opponent go down under his swashing blow. Most 
 combatants do. 
 
 Even in private, ebullitions of this energy may be 
 noted. Neither in public nor in private do they 
 diminish his popularity. Of malice there is never a 
 trace; it is all honest, hearty, outspoken, and manly. 
 No one is more genial, no one has more surprises, no 
 one more varied conversation, and no one asserts a more 
 just supremacy amid a company of his fellow-men. He 
 has that calmness which goes with strength ; no need 
 of effort if you are conscious of being equal to the 
 occasion. And he is equal. There is hardly a more 
 interesting social spectacle than to see him take pos- 
 session of a dinner-table and keep it. The smooth 
 strong flow of talk is fed from many springs. He has 
 authority but is never didactic ; learning which escapes 
 the reproach of pedantry ; wit that is too genial to 
 scorch ; and he uses, if need be, all the resources of 
 
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 226 
 
 the accomplished debater at critical moments of con- 
 versation. 
 
 Never was a better opportunity to judge Sir William 
 Harcourt than during these recent weeks. He had 
 undergone a bitter mortification ; the ambition of his 
 political life baffled as it seemed within his grasp. But 
 if you had met him in the first days of this chagrin, 
 you would have found him in his most admirable mood, 
 cordial and sunny to all the world, and in his very best 
 form, as society says. Society watched him curiously 
 in these circumstances, and paid him the honourable 
 tribute due to an undisturbed demeanour, to faculties 
 which shone their brightest in this hour of lasting 
 disappointment, and to a cheerful heroism of which only 
 a fine character is capable. 
 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 
 
 [lONDONj APRIL 1894] 
 
 Mes. Humphry Waed's new novel, Marcella, appears 
 with all the honours. It is announced long in advance, 
 and on the day fixed for publication, April 3, the lead- 
 ing papers review it at length. The public is under- 
 stood to be impatient ; it must have an account of 
 this book at the earliest possible moment, and must be 
 told with authority what to think of it. There is, no 
 doubt, a sense in which the public is impatient. Mrs. 
 Ward has created for herself such a position in litera- 
 ture that few dare confess themselves uninterested in 
 anything she does ; few with a social reputation to lose. 
 At the same time I imagine — and the fact is creditable 
 to her — that the circulating-library public is not pre- 
 cisely her public. The average man is not her man. 
 The average men and women who devour the average 
 three-volume novel are not those who read Mrs. Ward 
 with the greatest eagerness, nor those whom she has 
 chiefly in view when she writes. 
 
 It is an audience of the best, or, at any rate, of the 
 most serious, to whom this gifted author appeals. She 
 is herself serious ; in one sense too serious or too strenu- 
 ous. She has the seriousness which comes of eiFort. 
 Her books — and Marcella is no exception to the rule 
 — impress the reader as the result of conscientious and 
 
 228 
 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 227 
 
 long-continued toil; — too long continued, perhaps. 
 The lighter aspects of life interest her but little. She 
 must have a problem, and to the solution of it she 
 applies with unremitting industry all the energies of 
 her soul. Her first book, Robert Elsmere, was a hostage 
 to fortune. A novelist, and above all a woman-novelist, 
 who makes her bow to the public with three volumes 
 of religious scepticism is thenceforward under an obliga- 
 tion from which neither readers nor critics can release 
 her. She can only release herself. David Grieve 
 seemed to some of her admirers and friends — she has 
 legions of both — a step toward emancipation. It was 
 not a sequel to Robert Elsmere. There were signs in 
 it that Mrs. Ward had served her apprenticeship to 
 the exclusively solemn, and that she might venture next 
 time into more open fields where the flowers blossomed 
 and the zephyrs sported. There were hopes that she 
 might at least be more brief. 
 
 These hopes are not dispelled by Marcella, but they 
 are postponed. She has entered upon a new task, and 
 it is still a task ; annexed, perhaps, a new domain, but 
 here also there is more of the air of the hothouse than 
 of the breath of heaven; applied herself to a fresh 
 subject, but to one hardly less oppressive; and still in 
 the same spirit of doing her best all the time. Religion 
 has given place to Socialism. She has allowed the poli- 
 tics of the period — there is no other phrase for it — to 
 determine what might have been a purely literary choice. 
 Socialism or social reform in some shape has taken pos- 
 session of the European mind, and perhaps lately of 
 the English mind most of all. It is the problem which 
 presents itself daily and hourly. Mrs. Ward seems to 
 have chosen it because it presents itself daily and hourly. 
 Diffident, perhaps, though surely without reason, of her 
 
228 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 own authority, and of her power to fix the attention of 
 others upon any topic which interested herself, she con- 
 forms to the fashion and interests herself in the topic 
 which interests others. She is an opportunist in litera- 
 ture. The result is what might have been foreseen. 
 The convert surpasses the teacher in zeal. 
 
 It may be said that the intellectual side is stronger 
 in Mrs. Ward than in most women, relatively to the 
 emotional ; but it is not predominant. The emotional 
 is predominant, and most of all at those critical moments 
 when the dry light of pure reason is most needed to 
 elucidate her perplexities. Her heroine, for example, 
 the girl Marcella, is a Socialist, but she is a Socialist 
 far more from impulse than from conviction. It may 
 be said that Mrs. Ward meant to draw her so. I think 
 not, but whether she did or not, she has left the stamp 
 of her own individuality upon her in this respect. It 
 is not difficult to imagine the writer, or any other writer 
 who is a woman, honestly trying to reach a reasoned 
 conviction or judgment. She puts before herself the 
 facts and the arguments. She weighs the one and 
 balances the other. She is, to all appearance, on the 
 point of coming to something like a judicial decision, 
 and all at once a whiff of irresistible feminine impulse 
 sweeps away all the elaborate apparatus and material 
 for a logical conclusion, and she makes up her mind 
 exactly as she would have done without them ; in 
 obedience to the suggestions of her temperament, and 
 by that incalculably rapid mental process known as 
 intuition. In plain English, her sympathies run away 
 with her. 
 
 The modern men of science — are there any women 
 of science or of this branch of science ? — will allow no 
 opinion to be individual. They trace all mental pro- 
 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 229 
 
 cesses, as they do all acts, to an ancestry more or less 
 remote. They would probably tell Mrs. Ward that 
 even in submitting to the influence of her environment, 
 as she does in dogmatising about Socialism, she could 
 not escape from the limitations which the environment 
 and the mental habits of her progenitors impose upon 
 her. Her mother and grandmothers were little in con- 
 tact with actual life outside the family or the family 
 circle. They never learnt to legislate or to administer 
 the poor-laws, or to adjust the relations of landlord 
 and tenant, or to carry on any kind of business, public 
 or private. They transmitted to their descendants a 
 brain in which there were no formed channels for the 
 flow of the thoughts applicable to aflairs. She has to 
 form them for herself. Is it likely she will set the 
 stream flowing broad and free and true at the first 
 attempt .'' And if not, what is likely to be the practi- 
 cal value of conclusions on a class of subjects with refer- 
 ence to which her opinions must be, to use the mildest 
 word of all, experimental .'' 
 
 Mrs. Ward showed in David Grieve that she was 
 capable of accumulating a mass of material on topics 
 quite alien to the course of her life, and of making a 
 literary use of them. Assimilate them she could not. 
 Her sketch, for example, of the Trois Rats, by which 
 we are to understand the Chat Noir as it existed and 
 still exists in the Rue Victor Masse in Paris, was a tour 
 deforce. It was wonderfully done, but it was done as 
 from the outside. To enter into the spirit of that 
 singular expression of one side of the art and Bohemian 
 life of one set of Parisian eccentrics, was not given to 
 her. It could not be. If she understood it perfectly 
 she would find it too repulsive to her true woman's 
 nature. 
 
230 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 She has made a similar effort in Marcella. The 
 central fact or incident in her present book is the 
 poaching tragedy. It is in its essential details a piece 
 of pure though unwitting misrepresentation. She may 
 say, very plausibly, that she is not bound in a work of 
 fiction by a particular set of facts ; that she is at liberty 
 to tell her story as she likes, and to draw the moral she 
 likes. That is one of those dangerous half-truths which 
 are so much more capable of mischief than unadulterated 
 falsehoods. Mrs. Ward will not, I think, deny that her 
 narrative had a basis in fact. I know that it had ; that 
 she heard the story and was fascinated by it, and thought 
 she saw her way to using it for the purposes of her 
 book and of her new Socialistic gospel. But she has 
 turned it upside down, and drawn from it a moral, or a 
 social protest, which the facts will not support. She 
 must know the real truth, for she lives in the county 
 where the incident happened, and close to the scene. 
 She makes Westall, the gamekeeper, attack Hurd, the 
 poacher — a man employed on the estate — and Hurd 
 shoot the keeper in self-defence. The exact contrary 
 was true. It was the poacher who attacked the keeper, 
 and the killing was as much murder as if no pheasant- 
 had ever been preserved. 
 
 Let us admit that, so far, she was within her rights. 
 But she has told a story which on the face of it is im- 
 probable, and she has so handled it as to create a preju 
 dice against the landlord and a prepossession in favour oi 
 the poacher which the relations between the two justify 
 perhaps nowhere in England. It might possibly be 
 true as an exception. Her readers are asked to accept 
 it as the rule. The conditions necessary to the develop- 
 ment of her facts hardly exist in England, where ground 
 game is no longer protected as it was formerly — the 
 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 231 
 
 occupier now has it — and where a pheasant-preserve 
 differs in little but name from a large poultry-yard. 
 But Mrs. Ward was impressed by the severity, as she 
 thought it, of the penalty the murderer had to pay, 
 and she has made sure of a wider sympathy by improv- 
 ing the facts in his interest. Marcella openly sympa- 
 thises with him. The reader will be apt to think that 
 Marcella is, for this purpose, Mrs. Ward. 
 
 She is herself a more curious and interesting study 
 than any of her characters, or any of her books, or than 
 all of them. An account of Mrs. Humphry Ward 
 which should be perfectly frank, would be instructive, 
 and would, I think, be a helpful criticism on her books. 
 But there are two reasons which forbid one to make the 
 attempt. She is alive, and she is a woman. The pen 
 must stay its course. I have known Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward for many years, and her books, and something 
 about the circumstances of her life. So far as I am 
 concerned, if I gave myself a free hand, my indiscretions 
 would, I feel sure, present her to the craving American 
 public in a more, and not less, attractive light than 
 that which radiates from mere criticism and comment. 
 I mean to say that a more intimate knowledge of the 
 writer, or even such knowledge as comes from acquaint- 
 anceship, would add something to the prestige which 
 her books have brought to her, and make her readers 
 more her friends than ever. But I dare not do her this 
 kind of justice. It might be done in France. It is 
 constantly done in France, where, in some respects, the 
 conditions of life are less morbid than in England ; 
 where artificial restraints upon the relations between a 
 writer and her public are less numerous and strict than 
 here. I do not speak of mere gossip. There is gossip 
 here ; both at dinner-tables and in the press. What I 
 
232 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 mean is that a psychological study, which here, and 
 perhaps in America, would give offence merely because 
 it was psychological, would in France or elsewhere on 
 the Continent give none. But a remark or two may 
 perhaps be made, cautiously. 
 
 It is almost a matter of wonder that Mrs. Ward's 
 success did not come to her earlier in life. She has 
 always lived amid literature and literary influences. 
 Her family was literary ; she was always among books. 
 Her husband is a man both of letters and of art ; a 
 writer, as all the world knows, on The Times ; a writer 
 on art and on many other subjects; certainly with a 
 great knowledge of art, practical and theoretical, and 
 of much beside art. Her uncle was Matthew Arnold, 
 to whom I owe my introduction to her. Other similar 
 influences might be mentioned, yet altogether seem to 
 have moulded her but slowly. True, she wrote a book 
 before Robert Elsmere, but it made no great impression, 
 and is forgotten ; the very name of it is forgotten. 
 There was no lightness of touch in it, and to this day 
 she has hardly gained lightness of touch. Throughout 
 Marcella there is a note, not of seriousness merely, but 
 of intensity. It does at times become fatiguing. The 
 mind of the reader, or of most readers, longs for repose, 
 for variety, for something not too bright or good for 
 human nature's daily food. Whether Mrs. Ward ever 
 consciously tries to be amusing or not, one can only 
 guess. But to try is fatal. Spontaneity is what one 
 longs for ; that she should let herself go, and see what 
 comes of it. At times she does, but not in this direc- 
 tion. The gift of humour does not come to her by 
 nature. She does not even seem aware of the literary 
 value of such a gift, or of the incomparable charm of 
 that birdUke carolling which to many women is natural. 
 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 233 
 
 Mme. de Sevigne, for example, whose place in French 
 literature is perfectly secure, even in an age which tries 
 to neglect the classics of the seventeenth century — Mme. 
 de Sevigne always seems to write as if she could not 
 help it. Her letters write themselves. Whether she 
 suspected that the outpourings of her soul to her 
 daughter would ever be read by others is disputed. 
 It hardly matters. She would have been a bold woman 
 had she set herself deliberately to address to the public 
 some of the very letters in which the public most 
 delights. It is because of the buoyancy and fresh sim- 
 plicity of her nature, and of her writing, that one is 
 disposed to choose Mme. de Sevigne as, I do not say a 
 contrast, but a counterpart, to Mrs. Ward. Even in 
 her most elaborate and most celebrated letters, the 
 engagement of La Grande Mademoiselle or the death 
 of Vatel, for instance, the art is wholly invisible. In 
 Mrs. Ward it is never invisible, or seldom. And the 
 highest art — ^but the proverb is musty. But the less 
 celebrated letters, the mass of them, those which all 
 but Sevignists read once and no more, are hardly less 
 admirable. The expression of a mother's affection for 
 a daughter might be considered a monotonous theme. 
 It is monotonous, and the variety of the diction is such 
 that the theme is inexhaustible. Never were so many 
 sparkling tunes played on a single string. Nor is the 
 expression often rhetorical. It is simple and inevitable, 
 and it never palls. The letters might be set as a test 
 of literary feeling and of critical perception. Do you 
 like them, and go on reading them all your hfe ? Then 
 you have a taste for what is best in the written bio- 
 graphy of the most beautiful of all emotions, and if you 
 have that, you have the equipment of a critic. 
 
 It is the want in Mrs. Ward of what is so universal 
 
& 
 
 234 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 with Mme. de Sevigne which makes her incomplete and 
 sometimes disappointing. You wish she had less con- 
 science and a simpler intellectual endowment. A book 
 by Mrs. Ward is a work of engineering ; the result of 
 great resources, great energy, great courage and perti- 
 nacity. The mass of waters which are to irrigate a 
 province or supply the wants of a great city has been 
 collected into an artificial lake and will be dispersed by 
 equally artificial channels. It is extremely welcome in 
 your house, and you are glad to be able to turn it on 
 for drinking and all other useful household purposes. 
 But it never has quite the flavour of the fountain which 
 wells from the soil, and which tempts the wayfarer to 
 moisten his lips whether he be thirsty or not. 
 
 If I were reviewing Marcella, which I am not, 1 
 should have put these general inquiries on one side, 
 and there would have been less criticism, in the popular 
 meaning of that much misunderstood word, and much 
 cordial acknowledgment of the extraordinary merits of 
 the book. It is at any rate due to Mrs. Ward, since 
 her novel is my text, to say that she has made great 
 advances on her former work. She is a better novelist 
 and a better writer. There is no necessary connection 
 between the two. There is, for example, a sense in 
 which Mr. George Meredith is a novelist, and there is 
 no sense in which he is a writer unless you put a dis- 
 paraging adjective before the noun. 
 
 As a novelist, Mrs. Ward has more insight into 
 character than before, and a better knowledge of the 
 structure of a book. She still wants, I infer, confidence 
 in herself. It may seem a strange thing to say. The 
 evidence of it is to be found in the over-elaboration of 
 all the early part — nearly all the first volume — of Mar- 
 cella. It is as if she had not felt quite sure of having 
 
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 235 
 
 adequate material to fill the large measure which pro- 
 bably her publisher, and certainly the public, require 
 of her. Every writer knows the doubt which besets 
 him at the beginning, and how, as he goes on, he finds 
 himself richer than he thought, and at last overflows 
 his banks. At first he puts in everything; then he 
 excludes much. It is in exclusion that Mrs. Ward 
 fails ; and at the end, as in the beginning, though for 
 a contrary reason. Her story, or the essential part of 
 it, comes to an end with the poaching tragedy, but she 
 has by that time become aware how copious her mate- 
 rial is, and how much she still has to say, and she takes 
 a fresh start. 
 
 Such is one of the perils which encompass the novelist 
 with a mission, or with a desire for the development of 
 an idea in the course of a story. The Socialism which 
 inspired her book has spoilt it as a work of art : spoilt 
 is too strong a word — has put it out of drawing. In 
 its present form it lacks symmetry and proportion. 
 Where it is best it is very fine. Wharton, as a piece 
 of character-drawing, is a creation. Marcella herself 
 has noble moments, but there are other and many 
 moments when Mrs. Ward has chosen to present her to 
 the public as a prig. A heroine ought to be sympa- 
 thetic, but a heroine who accepts a lover whom she 
 does not love, from a notion that his position and 
 income will be of use in her propaganda — what is she ? 
 Not sympathetic, I hope, to most people. Let us keep 
 things apart. Let a girl be a girl, and let no hand, 
 not even that of a woman with all Mrs. Ward's genius, 
 attempt to substitute a sense of duty for the move- 
 ments of the heart. She teaches a false lesson in love. 
 
 In style, also, Mrs. Ward has gained, and perhaps 
 would have gained more had she been less in earnest 
 
236 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 about her own improvement. She is so determined to 
 write well that she sometimes writes badly for that 
 reason only. It was the constant fault of the late 
 George Eliot. She is still too emphatic, and emphasis 
 is a thing to be avoided as you would the devil. Of 
 the seven deadly rhetorical sins, this is most deadly 
 of all. Perhaps it includes them all. There are 
 pedantries, also, which one would like to weed out. But, 
 as I said, I am not reviewing this book, and I end with 
 a profession, which is sincere, of profound homage to the 
 gifts and qualities of the writer who, by the resolute 
 use of them all, has secured for herself a permanent 
 place in the literature of to-day, and perhaps also of 
 to-morrow. 
 
LORD BOWEN 
 
 [LONDON, APRIL 1 894] 
 
 ' He was so great a lawyer because he was so much else,' 
 says one of the eulogists of Lord Bowen, who dies at 
 fifty-eight years of age. That is not the professional 
 view. Most great lawyers still hold that the law is a 
 jealous mistress. Yet Lord Bowen was a great lawyer 
 who touched life on many other sides. It is doubtful 
 whether, on the whole, he had his equal on the Bench. 
 He had, said one of the ablest of his colleagues, a ' vast ' 
 knowledge of the law. He had a mind which delighted 
 in the subtlest discriminations and yet was capable of 
 taking broad views, with a grasp of principles which does 
 not always go with a capacity for detail. Lord Esher, 
 Master of the Rolls, has pronounced his eulogy in words 
 which, from a man of his stamp, mean a great deal : 
 
 ' His knowledge of the whole law was so perfect, 
 and was so accurate, and was so entirely at his com- 
 mand, that I myself have no doubt that he had studied 
 every proposition of law minutely, accurately, and 
 carefully, in order to learn it, long before he was 
 called upon to bring it into practice. . . . His reasoning 
 was so extremely accurate and so beautifully fine that 
 what he said sometimes escaped my mind, which is not 
 so finely edged. . . . His mind was so beautfuUy and 
 finely edged, and so subtle in its nature, that he went 
 
238 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 further and gave us perfect essays in the form of his 
 judgments^ which can be handed down to our successors 
 as models of absolute perfection.' 
 
 Lord Esher is a judge of remarkable powers, but not, 
 as you perceive on reading this extract, with a very 
 great power of that finished expression which he justly 
 commends in his late colleague. His testimony has 
 perhaps all the more value. He lifts himself to acknow- 
 ledge in Bowen those particular qualities and gifts which 
 are least common to the most learned lawyers. The 
 profession think that, as a lawyer, he has not had his 
 equal since Mr. Justice Willes died. There . is some- 
 thing pathetic in the mention of the name. How many 
 Americans, how many Englishmen, not lawyers, ever 
 heard of Mr. Justice Willes .'^ It is right that the prizes 
 of the Bar and Bench should be splendid in life. Im- 
 mortality is not one of them, nor that general fame 
 which seems to attend only upon those who were great 
 lawyers and something more. 
 
 Lord Bowen's success at the Bar was by no means 
 instantaneous. He had to wait, as so many legal cele- 
 brities have had to wait. It was while expecting, and 
 vainly expecting, briefs that he laid the broad and deep 
 foundations of his knowledge of the law, and began 
 the building up on them of that edifice to which the 
 crowning stone was not fitted till his death. Then it 
 was, also, that he wrote for the periodical press — of 
 which in a moment. His legal career may be briefly 
 summed up. It will always be one of Lord Coleridge's 
 claims on public gratitude that he gave Bowen his 
 chance. When the present Lord Chief Justice of Eng- 
 land was Attorney - General, in 1870, he appointed 
 Charles Bowen his devil. The official name of the legal 
 devil is Junior Counsel to the Treasury. It was the 
 
LORD BOWEN 23^ 
 
 Tichborne period. Into that memorable trial Bowen 
 threw himself heart and soul ; and body also. A great 
 part of the real work was his. Tough as he was, it 
 nearly killed him. In 1879 he got that promotion to 
 the Bench to which devilling for the Attorney-General 
 is a regular preliminary — or rather a sure pathway, 
 though there are many others. Three years later he 
 became a Lord Justice of Appeal, and last year, upon 
 Lord Hannen's retirement, a Law Lord, or Lord Ordi- 
 nary of Appeal, to give him his official designation. 
 
 From 1870 to the end, there never was a time when 
 his claim to a foremost place was disputed, nor ever 
 a place which he filled with other than consummate 
 ability. His judicial career has partly eclipsed his 
 early successes at the Bar, but they were many. As the 
 papers refer to the Birmingham Screw Arbitration, I may 
 perhaps mention what Bowen once told me of that case 
 — I suppose it to be the same case — which has a bearing 
 on an old calumny against another very distinguished 
 man, Mr. Chamberlain. Some Radical journal had just 
 revived the story that Mr. Chamberlain's fortune was 
 due to or was greatly augmented by a certain scheme 
 for crushing out the minor manufacturers of wood 
 screws. 'So far is that from the truth,' said Bowen, 
 ' that Chamberlain came near losing a great part of his 
 fortune in the very transactions for which he was re- 
 proached.' He went into details which it is right to omit. 
 It is enough to say that the matter went to arbitration, 
 and that it was largely to Bowen that Mr. Chamberlain 
 was indebted for his escape from the heavy loss which 
 threatened him. 
 
 There will be, no doubt, an adequate account from 
 some competent hand of Lord Bowen's judicial life and 
 of his immense services to English jurisprudence. Here 
 
240 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 it is impossible to do more than refer to them, and 
 to say that Lord Esher expresses no more than the 
 general opinion of Bar and Bench. Lord Bowen has 
 himself explained the secret of his method. He said 
 in a public address : ' The only reasonable and the only 
 satisfactory way of dealing with English law, is to bring 
 to bear upon it the historical method. Mere legal ter- 
 minology may seem a dead thing. Mix history with it, 
 and it clothes itself with life.' 
 
 Upon this canon he based his decisions, and he treated 
 law and legal history with a breadth and acuteness and 
 with a sympathetic grasp which revivified its driest 
 bones, and clothed them with the living flesh. 
 
 We owe him — I mean to say that we journalists owe 
 him — a particular tribute, because he was at one time 
 one of us. He was a contributor to the Spectator, to 
 the Saturday Review, and I presume to other journals. 
 I do not suppose he had ever the least notion of adopt- 
 ing journalism as a profession. If he had he abandoned 
 it, and he had the good sense to get out of journalism 
 while it was yet time, and before his life had been 
 thrown away He wrote for the Saturday Review 
 while that periodical still had the power and position 
 it afterwards lost. He left it, as Mr. Prothero has told 
 us in his Life of Stanley, because of an attack on 
 Stanley so bitter that he felt himself and his friendship 
 to Stanley compromised by it. He was in no way re- 
 sponsible for the attack. He had nothing to do with 
 the editing of the paper. But his loyalty to his friends 
 had that scrupulous delicacy which was characteristic 
 of him in everything. He washed his hands when his 
 colleagues had touched pitch. The defilement was not 
 his. He was incapable of rancour, and he had an ac- 
 curacy of mind which forbade him to confound personal 
 
LORD BOWEN 241 
 
 character with religious or other opinions, or to revile 
 the individual because he differed from him on points 
 of doctrine or of church discipline. 
 
 The distinction is as broad as noonday, but how 
 many are they to whom it is never visible ! It is a 
 distinction which the Saturday never understood ; or 
 never applied, which is worse. I cannot remember ever 
 to have heard Lord Bowen refer to this incident. 
 When he had shaken off the dust of his feet against 
 the offending journal, he probably forgot all about it. 
 Nor did he ever say anything to me about his connec- 
 tion with journalism. He was 'one of the most brilliant 
 contributors to this journal,' says the Spectator. I 
 should think he was. Seldom has any journal had so 
 fine a mind put at its service. The Spectator is one 
 of the most intellectual of periodicals, and many great 
 names have adorned its pages, or would have adorned 
 them had not the rule of the anonymous prevailed. 
 But I imagine that to Bowen his connection with these 
 periodicals had no great importance or significance. He 
 was not the type of man to give himself up to work 
 which, if, as Sir Francis Jeune has lately said, literary 
 in some degree, is ephemeral. He had work to do 
 which was not only serious, but of lasting value. During 
 the years that I knew him, he was from the first the 
 lawyer. He had won great fame as a lawyer; his 
 career was settled ; his life ordered as he wished it. 
 He had what he loved best and could do best. He 
 might naturally enough have talked to me of jour- 
 nalism. He never mentioned the subject ; or never but 
 once. His memories of it may not have been pleasant, 
 though he certainly would not have taken dismal views 
 of that or any other subject. The nearest approach to 
 a reference to the matter was a question whether I did 
 
 a 
 
242 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 not regret having left the Bar. I cannot' recollect what 
 answer I made. I know what I should say now. 
 
 It is possible that Lord Bowen had journalism more 
 or less in mind when he delivered, a year ago, at the 
 Working Men's College, a remarkable lecture on Popular 
 Education. It was a bold thing to put before such 
 an audience such views of the only kind of education 
 available to them. But he never lacked courage, and 
 this is what he said : 
 
 ' The noise of newly emancipated tongues drowns the 
 still small voice of culture ; high standards are not recog- 
 nised or cease to be impressive ; the quality of the supply 
 is affected by the quantity of the demand, since cheap 
 thought, like light claret, can be produced on an exten- 
 sive scale. Instruction grows apace, knowledge comes, as 
 the poets say, but wisdom lingers; intellectual modesty 
 and reserve, the sense of proportion, and wholesome mental 
 habits of discrimination all have yet to be acquired. The 
 world seems to have so little power of discerning between 
 the best and the second rate. Sense and good taste are 
 overlooked or slighted, and crowds hasten to worship the 
 beauty of ugliness under the impression that it is art.' 
 
 Whether that passage related to journalism or not, 
 there can be little doubt as to what the following im- 
 plies ; and to what it applies : 
 
 ' The highways and byways are given up, so to speak, 
 to the literary bicyclist. He travels in a costume peculiar 
 to himself, and he considers the landscape all his own. 
 Expressions of violence are employed to describe common- 
 place emotions. Toward individuals we practise the same 
 indistinctness of judgment, the same indifference to pro- 
 portion. We pursue successful men and women to their 
 down-sitting and up-rising, we enjoy the descriptions of 
 their household furniture. Memorials are erected to every 
 
LORD BOWEN 243 
 
 one who will only die in the odour of respectability. We 
 write long biographies of Nobody and we celebrate the 
 centenaries of Nothing.' 
 
 The ' literary bicyclist ' would have been adopted as 
 a commonplace of journalism, or as a stock newspaper 
 quotation, had not the English journalist believed, 
 rightly or wrongly, that the nickname would have 
 fastened upon himself. And as the journalist is human 
 he does not like nicknames, and so Lord Bowen's wit 
 failed of what the French call its just good fortune. 
 It was not, however, wholly forgotten. Death brings 
 to the surface many a treasure trove. They float the 
 more easily when not weighed down by that bitterness 
 of which in Bowen there was never a trace. 
 
 II 
 
 I imagine that Lord Bowen would have been not a 
 little surprised had he known that the two periodicals 
 for which, in his lean days at the Bar, he wrote articles, 
 would have dwelt after his death on this episodical and, 
 on the whole, unimportant part of his career. But 
 whatever may be said of journalism, which may be con- 
 tent with coarser tools, there can be no doubt that 
 Law robbed Literature of a master when Bowen took 
 to the Bar. He had great scholarship and great read- 
 ing, and he had with these — what is incomparably more 
 rare — a sense of literary form. It is a thing which most 
 English writers, a few of the greatest excepted, get on 
 comfortably without. A lofty reputation — perhaps 
 ephemeral but still lofty — may be built up without it. 
 The supreme instance at the present moment is Mr. 
 George Meredith, who has many fine intellectual en- 
 dowments, and either absolutely no notion of what is 
 meant by form and style, or else a complete indifference 
 
244 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 to them, and perhaps a hatred of them. The deficiency 
 does not prevent him from gaining an audience and a 
 kind of pious respect from large companies of persons 
 who, till quite recently, knew him not, or heard of him 
 only as an example of eccentricity. 
 
 Such a reputation on such a basis as Mr. George 
 Meredith's would be impossible in France. It is not 
 impossible here. Bowen would have — I will not say 
 despised it, since to despise a thing is the cheapest of 
 critical attitudes, but — rejected it for himself. He 
 had the right nature and the right training. He 
 was bom with a sense of proportion, a love of symmetry, 
 of balance ; with an instinctive preference for the right 
 way of saying a thing. A faulty sentence jarred on 
 him ; of an illogical statement he was incapable. He 
 had that literary conscientiousness which impelled him 
 to seek for the best expression of his thought. He was 
 of La Bruyere's opinion, that among all the different 
 ways in which we may express our thought there is one, 
 and one only, which is true and good. Whether he 
 studied French literature carefully I know not, but his 
 writing was of the kind which implied either such 
 studies or the possession of those qualities of mind 
 which, in the Frenchman, make his style what it is. 
 
 Bowen was a student of classical literature, and a 
 student on whom Greece and Rome had the same kind 
 of influence which their own literatures had each on 
 their own race. He has left a name at Balliol never to 
 be forgotten. There was hardly a distinction to be 
 won at Oxford which Bowen did not win. The same 
 may be said of others, though not of very many others, 
 and it is unhappily true that some of these gifted and 
 laborious beings squander the energies of a life on what 
 is, after all, or ought to be, but the mere training for 
 
LORD BOWEN 246 
 
 the serious work of life. Not so Bowen. Both at 
 Rugby and at Oxford he became famous for the ease 
 and rapidity with which he acquired knowledge ; and 
 not only acquired, but retained it for use. I have been 
 told by one who was with him in those days that Bowen 
 never knew what regular hours were. He gave himself 
 little rest. He hardly slept. For days and weeks he 
 used not to go to bed at all, but would lie down for an 
 hour after many hours of work, wake without effort 
 and resume his task. He was at the same time an 
 athlete, took his full share in athletic sports, and so 
 tried his constitution in two ways at once. 
 
 Probably he overrated his strength and undermined 
 it. But constant cerebral activity was to him a con- 
 dition of existence. Hard work never seemed to stale 
 the freshness of his mind, nor impair its elasticity. The 
 bow was always bent, yet it was always Apollo's. Philo- 
 sophy and the most abstruse metaphysics were the 
 atmosphere in which he hved. The problems of science 
 were his diversion ; he seemed never so much at his ease 
 as when he was working out difficulties from which other 
 men shrunk, or to which they applied themselves by an 
 effort of the will. The same was true in after life of 
 his handling of the law. He dehghted in complica- 
 tions and subtleties. He never lost his way among 
 them. Lord Bramwell used to try to puzzle him; 
 for the pleasure of seeing him extricate himself from 
 entanglements which would have kept most men fast 
 bound. 
 
 With all this, what left the deepest and most per- 
 manent impress on Bowen's mind was the beauty of the 
 literature to which he devoted himself The beauty 
 sunk into his soul. He was above all else a Virgillian, 
 and the note of Virgil is above all else the note of 
 
246 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 beauty. It coloured his whole life. It flowed along 
 the years in one unfailing stream, between banks 
 sparkling with flowers; a stream which took a new 
 colour from the rich foliage which it nourished. The 
 beauty, the stateliness of diction, the elevation of 
 thought, the serenity, the even views of life which he 
 found on every page of the Mantuan poet, charmed 
 and fascinated Bowen. When he tried to reproduce 
 all this in English verse he was not wholly successful, 
 though perhaps more successful than others. He tried 
 to achieve the impossible, which he knew to be the 
 impossible. Virgil in English ceases to be Virgil. He 
 was, however, so far from being discouraged by his 
 rendering of a part of the ^neid that he applied him- 
 self to a version of the Georgics ; a poem which is, in 
 one sense, even more untranslatable than the ^neid. 
 He said of Dryden's Virgil that the silver note of the 
 Latin had been breathed through bronze by the great 
 Englishman. It is an apt metaphor. Perhaps it might 
 be said of his own translation that while it preserved 
 the clear softness of the silver, it had lost some of the 
 ringing harmony and something of the imperial dignity 
 of the original. 
 
 During all his life Bowen had the friendship of some 
 of the best men of his time. The relation between him 
 and the late Master of Balliol was of the most intimate 
 kind. The present Home Secretary was his pupil. 
 Mr. Gladstone was his friend, and Lord Bowen was 
 perhaps one of the few friends to whom Mr. Gladstone 
 did not at times seem cold after they had declined to 
 follow him round the sharp curve where the Home 
 Rule signal was first displayed. Lord Rosebery's 
 attachment to him was warm. Those two minds had 
 much in common; the two natures also, and fore- 
 
LORD BOWEN 247 
 
 most among the mourners at the Memorial Service in 
 London was the Prime Minister. Mr. Justice Wright, 
 one of the coolest and best heads on the Bench, was 
 with him just before he died, and so was the Lord Chief 
 Justice. The list would be endless, but I must not 
 omit Mr. Lowell and Mr. Phelps. 
 
 Wherever he was known — and he was, of course, very 
 widely known — ^he was a favourite. Women gathered 
 about him; his manner to them, his knightly soft 
 courtesy, was a thing to see. His conversation varied 
 with his company ; its versatility quite as astonishing 
 as its brilliancy. Mr. Lowell — and there was no more 
 exacting judge — used to rank him among the first two 
 or three talkers in London. Often — or as often as he 
 could forget the diplomatic reserve which it was some- 
 times an effort for him to remember — he put him first. 
 It would be hard to say what was wanting to Bowen's 
 conversation. He had every material ready to his 
 hand — immense stores of knowledge, mother wit, light- 
 ness, variety, tact, aptness. And he had charm. His 
 manner was fascinating to others than to women. He 
 had the luminous eye which seemed to be the interpreter 
 of his thoughts and sympathies ; a little restless, but 
 never furtive. His self-possession was proof against 
 every experiment. 
 
 Withal, he had a manner which did not at all times 
 do justice to the essential firm manliness of his nature. 
 Mrs. Ward in Marcella has a description of a pheasant : 
 ' There he was, fine fellow, with his silly, mincing run, 
 redeemed all at once by the sudden whirr of towering 
 flight.' Mincing, perhaps. Bo wen could be, but if he 
 ever were it was redeemed by intellectual distinction. 
 None towered higher or more suddenly on the wing. 
 He chose, I thought, this manner as an occasional mask. 
 
248 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 More often he laid it aside. But it lent point to the 
 sarcasm of a judge who hated him, and who, to a 
 question about Bowen, made answer that he was ' the 
 most ladylike judge on the Bench.' It matters not. 
 The best lawyer and the best talker of his time must 
 be a target for envious archers. The papers are full of 
 his sayings — most of them genuine. Some of them I 
 heard ; but they were so felicitous, so novel, so spark- 
 ling, that everybody repeated them and so at last they 
 appear in print. I cannot recall a single one in which 
 I have any private property left. 
 
 He was never more delightful than at Homburg. 
 That crowded little German spa is a good ordeal. 
 Many of the ordinary social restraints are relaxed. 
 Etiquette is more flexible. A man is permitted to be, 
 and inevitably is, whether he knows it or not, more 
 himself than in the more starched atmosphere of London. 
 The best or the worst comes out. With Bowen it was 
 the best. His wit and vivacity bubbled and welled out 
 like the Elizabeth Brunnen ; as copious and inexhaust- 
 ible, and with a much more delicate and piquant flavour. 
 He was one of the attractions of the place ; it will 
 never be quite the same again. 
 
 There are talkers — many of them with a celebrity 
 often deserved — who are talkers and nothing else ; just 
 as there are shops in which all the goods are in the 
 front windows. There is no reserve in their bank ; they 
 can draw a cheque for just so much and make it go far, 
 but you feel all the while that they are distressingly 
 near the end of their resources. There are others, men 
 of the world or men of letters, or men of anything you 
 please, who have a great sum to their credit which they 
 never use. For all the world benefits by it, they might 
 as well be beggars. Bowen had both. You knew that 
 
LORD BOWEN 249 
 
 his draft would be honoured for any amount, and that 
 no miserliness, no thrift, no impulse of mere frugality, 
 no starving of nature, ever made him hesitate to use 
 what he had freely, and to bestow it freely on others. 
 He never dreamed of hoarding his vast intellectual 
 wealth, or of hiding his talents in a napkin ; albeit, in 
 a way, the most modest of men and utterly averse to 
 display. It was this feeling of solidity beneath the 
 polish and the vivid reflections of the surface which 
 made him such a wonderful companion, whether you 
 had him to yourself or shared him with a company. His 
 gaiety was lightsome and buoyant; never frivolous. 
 There was a substance of mind and a substance of 
 character; both elemental and immovable. His vast 
 learning, the riches of his mind, and the lifelong 
 accumulations of the student, were there if you chose 
 to call them forth. If you preferred society gossip, he 
 had that also. But in every circumstance, and through 
 all his flashing and various life, he was the staimch 
 friend, the man of honour and truth, of sweetness and 
 light; and he had a nobility of character only less 
 remarkable than its charm. 
 
WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS 
 
 [lONDONj JUNE 1894] 
 
 It seems but the other day that I saw Mr. William 
 Walter Phelps in Berlin, and said something in these 
 columns about his diplomatic work as American Minister 
 to Germany. In truth, it was a year ago, but what is a 
 year ? And this morning comes the news that we are 
 never to see him again, in Berlin or elsewhere in that 
 Europe in which, American as he was to the finger tips, 
 he so much delighted and which delighted in him. He 
 is a loss to his country in her relations with Europe, a 
 loss although, had he lived, he might never again have 
 represented her at a European court. For he was one 
 of that none too numerous band of Americans who have 
 a real insight into the affairs and life of this somewhat 
 older continent. 
 
 He had lived abroad long enough to comprehend two 
 or three countries ; one of them being his own. I will 
 take the liberty of saying that there are certain par- 
 ticulars in which an American's knowledge of his own 
 country is the better and surer for a residence elsewhere. 
 Whether that will be disputed by the untravelled Ame- 
 rican I know not. He sometimes disputes propositions 
 on which I should have thought most men of sense were 
 agreed. But Mr. Phelps would not have disputed it. I 
 know what his opinions were. That and many other 
 subjects we have discussed in Berlin, Homburg, and 
 
 250 
 
WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS 251 
 
 elsewhere. You know well how strongly he held his 
 opinions and with what tenacity he defended them. It 
 was, I always thought, because they matured slowly in 
 his mind. When he first came abroad he was not quite 
 the same man whom we knew in the later years of his 
 life. He brought with him the usual stock of American 
 prepossessions, and he relinquished his hold on one or 
 another with obvious reluctance. But he had far too 
 much intelligence, and a balance of character much too 
 even, to allow him to remain amid new experiences the 
 victim of old prejudices. His mind opened perhaps in 
 a rather leisurely way, but it opened, and the door once 
 ajar the light poured in in floods. 
 
 He came early to see that a patriotism based on com- 
 parisons of his own country with others was a broader 
 and purer patriotism than that which closed its eyes as 
 if in terror lest a knowledge of other countries might 
 shake one's allegiance to one's own. To shrink from 
 acknowledging a quality because it was not American, 
 or not exclusively American, seemed to him but a poor 
 tribute to the Republic he loved, and a poor evidence 
 of faith in her institutions. He had within him, more- 
 over, a sense of justice and of honour such as forbade 
 him to deny to Germany what was due to Germany. 
 
 It may be said of every able and open-minded Ameri- 
 can who comes to Europe that Europe is to him an 
 education. If he comes as Minister it is perhaps best 
 of all, for as Minister he has constantly to uphold the 
 interests of his own people while he is learning in the 
 quickest and surest way the distinguishing character- 
 istics among the people to whose Government he is 
 accredited. Most interesting was it to watch the pro- 
 cess going on in such a mind as Mr. Phelps's. His 
 Americanism was not one whit less pronounced and 
 
262 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 positive at the end of his European career than at the 
 heginning, but it was more enlightened and far more 
 effectual from the missionary point of view ; which was 
 his point of view pretty frequently. I mean that he 
 understood far better after a few years' experience how 
 to appeal to the European mind which he wanted to 
 reach, and which it was his official duty to reach. He 
 was a better Minister as well as a better American. 
 
 The truth is so obvious that it may seem needless to 
 insist on it, but it is well, nevertheless, to insist on it 
 and to drive it home. Mr. Phelps himself, in the intensity 
 of his passion for his own people and his loyalty to the 
 ideas which were his and our inheritance, used to dis- 
 pute this. To dispute it seemed to him a kind of 
 homage which he owed to the flag. It served no other 
 important purpose. He never misled his hearers, nor 
 misled himself for more than a moment. 
 
 Indeed, I will venture to say that though he had a 
 trained mind, argument was never his strong point, un- 
 less confined to those matters of business or matters 
 of law in which he was an expert. His perceptions 
 were keen ; and he had a power of absorbing as well as 
 of acquiring knowledge. The delicacy of his perception 
 was almost feminine ; a word which, with reference to 
 this subject, I use as a superlative. You cannot praise 
 any man's perceptions more highly than by saying they 
 are feminine. He had that intuitive sense of the truth 
 of things which a clever woman has — perhaps the ad- 
 jective is needless, for who ever knew a woman who was 
 not clever ? A love of paradox sometimes goes with 
 those shining qualities of mind, and that also Mr. Phelps 
 had. They are perhaps less frequently accompanied by 
 a logical precision in handling the topics of everyday 
 life, such as politics. Not only the imagination but the 
 
WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS 263 
 
 emotions affect those strict and strictly intellectual pro- 
 cesses which we call logical. Seldom are the two natures 
 combined. The woman may be, for example, a mathe- 
 matician and a very thorough one. It does not follow 
 that she will apply her mathematics to the affairs of 
 practical life. 
 
 So Mr. Phelps, who managed a great property with 
 judgment and success, who was an excellent lawyer, and 
 who went home to take his seat upon the judicial bench 
 to which a Governor of opposite politics had appointed 
 him, used to allow himself in his idler moments the 
 privilege of drawing conclusions for which his premises 
 supplied no logical warrant. He had the most lively 
 sensibilities. Arouse them and argument was thrown 
 away on him. He preferred to be true not only to his 
 convictions but to his feelings ; which I for one think a 
 beautiful trait of character. 
 
 Had he ever an enemy ? I know not ; but he had 
 opponents who thought it fair politics — and for aught 
 I know it may have been ' practical ' politics — to find 
 matter for rather feeble pleasantries in what they thought 
 Mr. Phelps's personal peculiarities. He did not cut his 
 hair to suit these critics, and he so far swerved from his 
 fidelity to the principles of the American Constitution 
 as to wear a red necktie. They were not satisfied 
 with his manner. He lacked something of the genial 
 ruffianism of the Bowery bar-rooms, and never had it 
 occurred to him that refinement was inconsistent with 
 Republicanism. It must be conceded that he had a 
 true refinement of manner, which was but the outward 
 expression of his refinement of nature and of thought. 
 If he was fastidious in dress it was because he was indi- 
 vidual ; he wore what pleased him, and did not refrain 
 from wearing it because it did not come up to the 
 
254 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 standard set by a New York hack-driver. His personal 
 taste departed from some of the conventional standards 
 commonly accepted in Europe, as well as from those of 
 America. But I never heard that in Europe it was 
 matter of comment. The best society of the best Euro- 
 pean capitals is less exacting than that of New York ; 
 takes more liberties and allows more; and does not 
 deeply concern itself about the colour of a man's scarf, 
 or the material of his jackets. Still less would it be 
 likely to infer that freedom of choice in such details 
 implied any want of strength of character. 
 
 Mr. Phelps's memory is in no need of testimonies, 
 and I do not mean what I am going to say as a testi- 
 mony. But I may remark, for more reasons than one, 
 that the Bowery estimate can hardly be correct in the 
 case of a man who early won and retained to the end 
 the regard of Prince Bismarck. He, if anybody, knew 
 a man when he saw him. No small part of the success 
 of his life's work has been due to his knowledge of men. 
 His judgment of them came as near as anybody's to the 
 unerring. If you asked him to-day whether Mr. Phelps's 
 trousers were designed according to the prevailing pattern 
 in Berlin, he certainly could not tell you. But he would 
 tell you that he was a strong man and a capable Minister, 
 with whom he had transacted much business on a basis 
 satisfactory to both parties ; who had served his own 
 country and been respected and loved by the people 
 among whom he lived ; and by none more than by the 
 Iron Chancellor himself. All this and more is known in 
 Berlin, but I do not take it at second-hand. I know on 
 what terms of intimacy Mr. Phelps lived, not with Prince 
 Bismarck only but with the whole family. I have seen 
 them in Berlin and in Homburg, where our Minister 
 spent one season while Princess Bismarck was there. 
 
WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS 256 
 
 Then, as before and since, Mr. Phelps was an invahd, 
 and it added to the affectionate regard we all bore him 
 to see the courage and sweetness with which he endured 
 the bitter physical trials which beset him. Fortitude is 
 an admirable thing ; most admirable of all in a delicate 
 frame with a supersensitive nervous organisation. There 
 were times when his surgeons and physicians gave 
 him little hope; never that I saw or ever heard of 
 did they disturb the cheerful serenity with which he 
 faced pain and exhaustion and the prospect of near 
 death. 
 
 I have said much more than I intended about the 
 personal qualities and character of this admirable 
 American but I let it stand though it obliges me to 
 pass over in a sentence or two the really distinguished 
 diplomatic career by which he has left a name in Exu-ope. 
 That is known ; the results of it are known ; they are 
 recorded in the archives of the State Department at 
 Washington, and also in Berlin, where the memory of 
 his tact, his mastery of his subjects, his flexibility of 
 method, coupled with an unflinching firmness of pur- 
 pose, is not confined to the German Ministers and the 
 official world generally with whom he was so much in 
 contact. It is remembered of him also that when he 
 had an end to gain he sometimes stepped outside of 
 the diplomatic groove. He was adventurous, inventive, 
 ready for emergencies, and capable of dealing with them 
 in unexpected ways. The biu-eaucrat perhaps shook his 
 head ; — he keeps a head in order to shake it, and he is 
 always shocked by a neglect of the conventional. Not 
 so Prince Bismarck or Count Herbert Bismarck, both 
 of whom in their time have done startling things, 
 with but slight deference to humdrum conceptions of 
 etiquette. They liked Mr. Phelps the better for his 
 
266 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 occasional independence of the artificial restraints by 
 which weaker men allowed themselves to be fettered. 
 
 Altogether, he has left his mark in Berlin ; in many 
 worlds of that huge, active, multifarious capital toward 
 which all Germany converges. In some respects it is 
 for a Minister or Ambassador one of the most trying 
 of all European posts. To have spent four years there 
 and to leave behind him a reputation for probity, for 
 force of character, for social ascendency, for the special 
 kind of ability which a diplomatist usually acquires by 
 the long training and traditions which are wanting and 
 must be wanting to an American — this is a high achieve- 
 ment. All this and more is to be said of Mr. Phelps, and 
 when it has been said there remains a tribute of a 
 different and more personal kind which all who knew 
 him would offer still more gladly. It is not permissible 
 to say in print all one would like to say, but I do not 
 conceive how any writer who knew him could suppress 
 altogether the avowal of the deep personal attachment 
 he inspired. Even a journalist may lay his wreath on 
 the grave of a lamented and honoured friend. 
 
PRESIDENT CARNOT 
 
 [LONDON, JUNE 1894] 
 
 With the halo of martyrdom about his head, the mur- 
 dered President of the French Republic attains an 
 immortality to which mere criticism has little to say. 
 It is difficult even to attempt a cool judgment of his 
 real character — either of the President or of the man. 
 We have only to remember the emotion which the 
 death of President Garfield caused ; an emotion honour- 
 able to him and to his country. Some of the more 
 c)mical journalists say that little deep feeling is dis- 
 cernible in Paris. It is incredible. One's respect and 
 liking for the French nation make it impossible to 
 believe such an assertion. They owe a tribute to their 
 dead chief. The civilised world owes one, and pays it. 
 Europe knows very well that M. Carnot was a good 
 President ; honest, honourable, often wise ; a lover of 
 France, but also a lover of peace and of European con- 
 cord, and doing in the perplexing circumstances of 
 many difficult hours much to secure both, and to put 
 or to keep international relations on a safe footing. A 
 just homage to his memory comes from every quarter 
 of the globe. His name stands, and will always stand, 
 so high that he can well afford to endure a more critical 
 estimate than anybody would yet undertake. 
 
 If we look at President Carnot apart from his ser- 
 vices to France and his official position he will appear 
 
268 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 rather a respectable than an interesting figure. He was 
 not picturesque, not impressive, not even sympathetic, 
 in presence of any great company of people. I have 
 seen him in various circumstances ; at the opening of 
 the French Exhibition of 1889, at a military review in 
 Versailles, at the Elysee on a great reception night, and 
 elsewhere. You have to imagine to yourself a man 
 rather below medium height, rather well-made, rather 
 good-looking, with a face and head of which the lines 
 were regular enough, the eyes and hair and full beard 
 dark, and the prevailing expression or effect of the 
 whole one of immobility. There seemed to be nothing 
 spontaneous about him. Everything was considered 
 and correct. He was correctly dressed, his hair and 
 beard were correctly cut, so were his clothes ; and he 
 moved, though there was nothing miUtary about him, 
 with the precision and something of the stiffness of a 
 soldier on parade. There was always a suggestion that 
 he had been taught, or had taught himself, to do the 
 particular thing he was doing. Evidently, he set great 
 store by deportment. He had a high idea of what 
 became the Chief Magistrate of France, and he lived 
 laboriously up to his ideal. 
 
 Nobody who ever met him or talked with him, or 
 who came in contact with him in any way, would doubt 
 that he had a perfectly honest character. Rectitude 
 was stamped on his face, every line of it, and his look 
 and bearing testified beyond mistake to his entire 
 uprightness of purpose and of act. He was an honest 
 man in a post which demanded honesty first of all. 
 He would have been perfectly incapable of saying as 
 Disraeli said when a new-comer in the House of 
 Commons was described to him as, among other things, 
 honest: 'Oh, damn his honesty. We've very little 
 
PRESIDENT CARNOT 259 
 
 use for that sort of thing here.' He valued this trait 
 of character in himself and in others. It had, however, 
 one effect on him, and on his tenue, which is not so 
 uncommon as might be supposed. It led him to think 
 certain things of less consequence than they really were. 
 The executive of a great nation does not live by honesty 
 alone. He needs other great qualities — force of charac- 
 ter, authority, commanding qualities, and the power of 
 impressing himself on others and bending them to his 
 will. It can hardly be said of Carnot that he possessed 
 these. He had, however, firmness, and was extremely 
 difficult to persuade or convince. His mind was not an 
 open one ; not flexible, not readily apprehensive of new 
 conditions under which he was sometimes called on 
 rather suddenly to take grave decisions. 
 
 He has had, for example, some eight or nine parlia- 
 mentary crises to deal with. It was not thought in 
 France or here that he always took the constitutional 
 view of his duties. Statesmen familiar with the theory 
 of parliamentary Government as practised in most Euro- 
 pean countries hold it to be the duty of the head of 
 the State, when a Ministry is overthrown, to send for 
 the leader of the party by whom it is overthrown and 
 ask him to form a new Ministry. M. Carnot did this 
 sometimes, and sometimes did not. He would never 
 send for M. Clemenceau. It is hard to blame him. 
 Perhaps it is not necessary to blame him. He felt, 
 and I think rightly felt, that M. Clemenceau was a 
 danger to the State, and he preferred to disregard strict 
 theories of constitutional and parliamentary law rather 
 than make a Socialistic Radical President of the Council. 
 It was quite useless to tell him that the surest way to 
 use up M. Clemenceau was to ask him to form a 
 Ministry ; to explain that it was doubtful whether he 
 
260 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 would succeed, and to assure him that if he succeeded it 
 was certain his Ministry would be short-hved. That 
 was not M. Carnot's way of looking at things. It 
 seemed to him safer to keep the extremist outside. 
 He did not care to recognise the Reds as a party in the 
 country, or their leader as within the pale of Ministerial 
 politics. And so, while M. Clemenceau was the greatest 
 figure in the Chamber, the unmaker if not the maker of 
 Ministry after Ministry, the portfolio of President of 
 the Council remained beyond his grasp. 
 
 The result was to alter the balance of powers in the 
 Constitution. Parliamentary Government, as under- 
 stood elsewhere in Europe, was superseded at times by 
 Presidential Government ; or, if not superseded, modi- 
 fied. The Chamber of Deputies became a less power 
 and the President a greater power than was intended. 
 It was a slight, though only a slight, approach to the 
 American system. But the American system is one 
 thing and the parhamentary system another, and the 
 two cannot be worked together. M. Carnot never 
 made an attempt to carry on with a Ministry which 
 had lost the confidence of the Chamber. He regarded 
 a hostile vote of the Chamber as a sentence of death 
 upon the Ministry at which it had been aimed. He 
 could not do otherwise. But he shrank from the logical 
 consequence when the logical consequence was M. 
 Clemenceau. After a time, Panama and M. Cornelius 
 Herz saved him all further trouble with the rather too 
 enterprising leader of the Left. 
 
 Equally narrow was M. Carnofs view in another 
 direction. He conceived of the Republic as a govern- 
 ment of the people by a part of the people. No doubt 
 there was a period, and a long period, in the history of 
 the Republican party in France when this was a neces- 
 
PRESIDENT CARNOT 261 
 
 sary view. ' A Republic without Republicans,'' was at 
 one moment a true enough description of France, or as 
 true as an epigram ever is. It was long true that the 
 Republicans were in a minority, and true long after 
 Thiers had recommended the Republic as ' the form of 
 government which divides us the least.' The Republic 
 seemed to exist more by help of the inherent vitality of 
 its principle than by support from without, or than by 
 the loyalty of the French people — and especially French 
 politicians — to the idea. It was a long time before the 
 danger of a recrudescence of a Legitimist or Bonapartist 
 majority vanished. Boulangism was its last sputter, 
 and Boulangism excepted it may be doubted whether 
 at any time after M. Carnot's election to the Presidency, 
 in December 1887, the danger was very great. But it 
 remained real to him. Among the watchwords or 
 catchwords which took the strongest hold on his mind 
 was ' concentration.'' What that meant was an electoral 
 union of all the Republican groups against all the 
 Legitimist, Orleanist, and Bonapartist groups. That 
 policy was steadily carried out, and was successful. 
 The Republican majority in the Chamber grew steadily 
 greater at successive elections until finally it became 
 overwhelming, and the Monarchists themselves saw that 
 the game was up. 
 
 Then began the so-called 'rallying' movement, a name 
 which almost sounds as if borrowed from American 
 politics. A strong section of the Monarchists ' rallied ' 
 to the Republic. The Catholics were helped on by the 
 Pope ; the Royalists by the absence of a leader, and all 
 by the conviction that the Republic was established 
 and that men who wished to serve their country or 
 cared for a political future had no choice but to accept 
 the Republic. Moreover, it was still to be determined 
 
262 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 whether the Republic was to be conservative and 
 lasting, or Socialistic, and so go the way of other 
 experiments in anarchy, and the rallied Royalists were 
 of course conservative. They were ready to join hands 
 with the Opportunists or Moderates; the body of 
 which M. Carnot himself was in a sense the leader. 
 
 But to all this he was blind, or, if not blind, his pre- 
 judices were too inveterate to be overcome. He would 
 have nothing to say to the rallied. He clung to con- 
 centration. He seemed really to believe that it was 
 not only possible but for the interest of the Republic 
 that it should be run by a party. He repelled the men 
 who were ready to support it. Nobody was more alive 
 than he was, as he showed again and again, to the 
 dangers of Radicalism ; of Socialistic Radicalism above 
 all. But he was haunted by the spectre of Royalism. 
 He had seen it looking over his shoulder, and to him, 
 long after most men perceived that it had been laid to 
 rest, it remained a living and terrible thing, with in- 
 finite capacity for mischief. The decrease of the 
 Royalist minority of deputies and the very marked and 
 alarming increase of Socialist deputies at the last elec- 
 tion may have taught him a lesson, but if so, too late 
 to be of use. He had, no doubt, a kind of patient 
 sagacity, but not much foresight, not much statesman- 
 ship save of that negative kind for which timidity is 
 another name, and which, by force of clinging to what 
 is in dread of what may be, comes to be known as 
 Conservatism. 
 
 If ever President Carnot's character served him in 
 good stead it was during the Panama crisis. There can 
 be no doubt that he was struck at through Panama, and 
 that a concerted attempt to discredit the Republic by 
 discrediting the chief pillar of the Republic was then 
 
PRESIDENT CARNOT 263 
 
 made. Intriguers of more parties than one were con- 
 cerned in that ignoble cabal. There was a moment 
 when it looked as if it might succeed, and when, if the 
 attack on the President had come to anything, the 
 whole fabric of government might have crumbled. 
 Then, not for the first time but more clearly than ever, 
 the value of M. Carnot's spotless integrity became clear. 
 It is often the case in France — it has been so for more 
 than a hundred years — that suspicion does the work of 
 proof. The readiness of the French to believe ill of 
 each other is a stain upon their national character and 
 upon the race, but it is a trait which ever since the 
 Revolution has passed from the atmosphere of courts, 
 where it was bred, into the life of the people. Let 
 loose a calumny and it will run its course. Few are 
 the men who can stand against it. M. Camot was one. 
 He had been already for five years a target for the 
 poisonous malevolence of the most licentious press in 
 the world. Yet so complete was the conviction of his 
 uprightness that scandal was a useless weapon against 
 him, and Messrs. Drumont and Detaille and their con- 
 federates perceived that they must allege something in 
 the nature of evidence if they were to shake the popular 
 belief in the President. They produced what they had 
 and it was nothing. It was instantly confuted, though 
 it needed no confuting, and when this had collapsed 
 Paris stood waiting breathless for what was to foUow. 
 People could not believe the danger over, or that a 
 conspiracy so infamous had been hatched out of such 
 rotten eggs as these. But there was nothing more. 
 The Republic was safe, and it was the stainless and 
 unstainable name of its Chief Magistrate which had 
 been the salvation of the State. He has rendered 
 many other services to France, great services which 
 
264 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 will live in his memory. But this was greatest 
 of all. 
 
 What the French liked in President Carnot was what 
 the English like in the Queen ; the domestic side of his 
 life. He was a good husband and a good father. The 
 domestic circle at the Elysee was known to be a happy 
 one. The English will probably continue to believe to 
 the end of time that the French have no homes and 
 that family ties are weaker in France than here. The 
 contrary is nevertheless true, and it was pre-eminently 
 true in the case of the Carnot family. His household 
 was well ordered. His servants liked him. He was 
 considerate to his staff, to the officials with whom he 
 came in contact, to everybody. 
 
 His immense elevation never turned his head, and I 
 do not know that there is a better proof of his solidity 
 of character than that. Human nature is but too sus- 
 ceptible to these uplifting influences. Nothing is more 
 common than to see a man raised, and especially if he 
 be suddenly raised, to a great post, intoxicated by pro- 
 motion. To the occupants of all such posts there 
 comes necessarily a certain amount of deference ; often 
 of adulation. It is openly shown. The man has not 
 been accustomed to it. He forgets to compute how 
 large a part of it is shown to the office and how little 
 is meant for the man. His predecessor had it, and 
 much the same sort of homage will be ofifered with the 
 same outward marks of respect to his successor, and to 
 the successor who shall come after him, and so on. Yet 
 the individual who for the time being happens to bear 
 the title is flattered and apt to think some exceptional 
 honour is shown to him individually. 
 
 Not so M. Carnot, although his election to the Presi- 
 dency of the Republic, beyond question one of the 
 
PRESIDENT CARNOT 266 
 
 most splendid positions in the world, lifted him out of 
 something very like obscurity. He was a compromise 
 candidate. He owed his election on that memorable 
 afternoon of the 3rd of December at Versailles to the 
 irreconcilable rivalry between M. Jules Ferry and M. 
 de Freycinet, each of whom succeeded in making the 
 success of the other impossible. True, M. Carnot had 
 been twice Minister, but almost everybody in France 
 has been Minister. He was the Franklin Pierce of 
 French politics. The Radicals, however, were the im- 
 mediate instruments of his elevation. They not only 
 hated but dreaded Jules Ferry. They saw in him, and 
 rightly, the incarnation of the principle of authority. 
 He would have been King Stork ; they wanted King 
 Log, and they picked out M. Carnot for that part. 
 They wanted a weak President whom they could mould 
 to their own purposes, or, failing that, cajole or bully. 
 Bitterly were they disappointed when they found that 
 they had mistaken their man, and that Carnot, though 
 he might lack initiative and many other things, had an 
 abundance of that quiet courage and imbending sense 
 of duty which were so well fitted to baffle the enemies 
 of the Government. 
 
 Neither abroad nor at home did President Carnot 
 excite enthusiasm. It was not his mission in life to set 
 pulses beating at fever-heat. Nobody thought of him 
 as a gTcat President or a great popular leader, or as 
 one of those men who sometimes gather up a great State 
 in the hollow of the hand and launch it at some other 
 power, or take the lead in a crusade. If he had been a 
 man of any one of those types, he would still have found 
 himself curiously hampered by the constitution under 
 which he held office. A President of the French Re- 
 public has but a little of the power of a President of the 
 
266 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 United States. He is, to a very large extent, ornamen- 
 tal. He has to represent the Republic. It is an odd 
 variation upon official duties, but it is quite true that one 
 part of his business was to make progresses from time to 
 time through the country, and to visit great cities or 
 important political centres. It was upon such an errand 
 as this that he met his death ; dying, as the German 
 Emperor said, like a soldier on the battlefield. The 
 German Emperor is somewhat too prone to flourish his 
 sword in the faces of mankind, and the military meta- 
 phor has its dangers, but on this occasion the Emperor 
 said well and the military metaphor was apt. 
 
 President Camofs life at the Elysee has been much 
 and deservedlypraised. He had the good fortune to suc- 
 ceed M. Grevy, whose parsimony had become a byword 
 long before the Wilson scandal drove him from office. 
 M. Grevy, already a rich man, became richer by his 
 meanness. He had a large sum allotted him for hos- 
 pitalities and social ceremonies and other expenses of 
 what the French call ' representation,' much of which he 
 put into his own well-filled pocket. M. Carnot reformed 
 that. He entertained freely and gave freely. It has 
 been said rather loosely since his death that he and 
 Mme. Carnot had succeeded in making the Palace of the 
 Elysee a social headquarters. It was hardly that. The 
 Faubourg St. Germain and the Rue du Faubourg St. 
 Honore remained still a long way apart. If anybody of 
 great position accomplished the journey from the one to 
 the other, the fact was noted and commented on. The 
 tastes of neither the President nor his wife led them to 
 compete with the social exclusiveness of the old aristo- 
 cracy, nor to care very much, perhaps, whether they re- 
 mained exclusive or not. He may have undervalued the 
 political efficacy of social authority. He and his wife 
 
PRESIDENT CARNOT 267 
 
 belonged to the upper middle class ; the class out of 
 which comes most that is best and most fruitful in 
 modem life. 
 
 There was, indeed, something democratic about the 
 hospitalities of the Elysee. When the wife of an 
 English Foreign Minister issues 2500 invitations to a 
 reception on the Queen's Birthday, the limits of the 
 gregarious are thought to have been reached. But the 
 invitations to a reception at the Elysee have been known 
 to exceed 6000. It is a spacious palace, though the 
 corridors are rather narrow, but hardly spacious enough 
 to give 6000 guests ample room for circulation ; or for 
 the dance which follows. In one point it was not 
 democratic. Certain rooms were set apart for diplo- 
 matists and other distinguished personages. Into these 
 the democracy might not penetrate, and there were 
 occasionally signs that they resented their exclusion. 
 They need not have resented it. The diplomatists 
 were packed almost as tightly as the rest. Diploma- 
 tists and democracy had, moreover, the same recep- 
 tion from the President and Mme. Camot. The 
 patience of the Presidential host and hostess was ad- 
 mirable, and so was their evident effort to convey to each 
 imit of these thronging thousands, personally unknown 
 most of them, the impression that he or she was wel- 
 come, and that their coming on such an occasion was a 
 personal favour. The French passion for equality was 
 gratified to the full. It was impossible that these huge 
 crushes should be what was called brilliant. They had 
 a better use. They gave pleasure to those whom they 
 were intended to please. And they afforded an excellent 
 opportunity to the American on her travels to see 
 how badly Frenchwomen of the middle class can dress 
 when they try. 
 
268 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 What has been said in England of the murder and 
 of the victim of this latest Anarchist outrage has been, 
 for the most part, well said. The indignation is genuine, 
 the respect for President Carnot is general and profound, 
 the sympathy with France is genuine. On the whole, 
 one might hope that it would promote a better feeling 
 on the part of France toward England, and lessen the 
 animosity which the French cherish, and which of late 
 has been growing more bitter, more explosive, more 
 dangerous. The demonstration of English goodwill 
 does seem to make am impression. One can only hope 
 it will be lasting. 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 
 
 [LONDON, AUGUST 1 894] 
 
 When Sieyes was asked what he had done during the 
 Reign of Terror, he made answer : ' Tai vecu.'' If the 
 Prime Minister were asked a similar question about his 
 Ministry during the session of Parliament just ended, he 
 might make a similar answer. It would not be a com- 
 plete answer, for he and his Ministry have done some 
 very considerable things. But they entered upon their 
 career amid the most sinister and general predictions 
 of disaster. Their opponents — and conspicuously Mr. 
 Chamberlain, whose knowledge of practical politics is 
 equal to anybody's — made no secret of their belief 
 that they should be able within a very short time 
 to force the Government to dissolve or to resign and, 
 if they dissolved, to beat them at the polls. 
 
 It is the fact that all these anticipations, numerous 
 as they were, have come to nought which makes the 
 continued existence of Lord Rosebery's Ministry the 
 most remarkable circumstance in its history. I can 
 imagine there may have been a moment when Lord 
 Rosebery might well have dreaded lest some historian 
 in the future should apply to him and his tenure of 
 office the stinging epigram of Disraeli upon the 
 'transient and embarrassed phantom of Lord Gode- 
 rich.'' Lord Goderich was crushed, as it were, between 
 Canning whom he succeeded in August 1827, and the 
 
270 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Duke of Wellington who became Prime Minister in 
 January 1828. Lord Rosebery succeeds to a greater 
 than Canning, but there is no Duke of Wellington to 
 follow him nor does he in the least resemble Lord 
 Goderich. The peril of the epigram, at any rate, 
 which turned in part upon the shortness of Lord 
 Goderich's Ministry, is over. Parliament is out of the 
 way till next January, and there is no perceptible 
 reason why the Rosebery Government should not 
 remain in office till it has reached and passed the 
 anniversary of its accession. 
 
 You have heard a good deal about the decay of 
 Lord Rosebery's prestige. There are plenty of critics 
 to tell you he has lost the confidence of the country 
 which was shown in such a striking way when he 
 succeeded Mr. Gladstone, that he has disappointed 
 expectation, that his party is dissatisfied with him, 
 and that Sir William Harcourt has become the most 
 commanding figure in the Ministry of which Lord 
 Rosebery is the nominal head. These and many other 
 solemnities are repeated by the opponents till the 
 frequency of the repetition has its usual eifect. People 
 believe the assertions because they have heard them so 
 often. They hardly stop to ask themselves whether 
 they are made by interested witnesses ; still less do 
 they take the trouble to examine the facts for them- 
 selves. If there be a shred or scrap of truth as founda- 
 tion for this towering superstructure of inference and 
 allegation, they hardly think of disputing the inference 
 or denying the allegation. Scraps and shreds of truth 
 there certainly are, and it is worth while to separate 
 them and look at them by themselves and see how 
 much they are worth and what they amount to when 
 sifted. 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 271 
 
 No man ever became Prime Minister of England in 
 circumstances quite similar to thosewhich prevailed when 
 the mantle of Mr. Gladstone fell upon Lord Rosebery. 
 I remarked at the time that he inherited a Parliament, 
 a Cabinet, and a policy. It has now to be added that 
 he inherited Sir William Harcourt; a fact extremely 
 necessary to be kept in mind. It was obvious that he 
 came into office fettered. He had neither a free hand 
 nor the full authority essential, if not to the discharge 
 of his duties, to do justice to himself. His majority in 
 Parliament, such as it was, had been elected upon issues 
 which he did not frame. His Cabinet had been formed 
 by his predecessor, and the policy which he was under 
 a moral obligation to carry out was largely personal ; 
 that is to say, it had been imposed upon what was left 
 of the Liberal party by the most masterful and auto- 
 cratic political leader known to modem English history. 
 I know nothing of any private compacts nor whether 
 any such existed, but it is obvious that the resignation 
 of Mr. Gladstone, his nomination — for that is what it 
 came to — of Lord Rosebery as his successor, and Lord 
 Rosebery's acceptance both of the office and of the 
 colleagues bequeathed to him, left him anything but 
 a free agent in the sense in which most Prime Ministers 
 are free agents in pubUc affairs. 
 
 Note further that there have been from the begin- 
 ning at least four separate sets of critics all of whom 
 had a direct interest in disparaging Lord Rosebery 
 and his administration. First, the Opposition ; that is 
 what evnry Prime Minister has to meet. Second, the 
 partisans of his defeated competitor, if competitor 
 he can be called, Sir William Harcourt. That is in 
 English politics unusual. It has been usual in this 
 country for a man either to accept defeat inside his 
 
272 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 own party loyally, or go outside and carry on a 
 campaign with flags flying. Third, the Radicals, some 
 of them in the Cabinet, who desire before all things to 
 end the House of Lords and who have never ceased 
 their eSbrts to compel Lord Rosebery to do their 
 will, or their attacks on him when they found he would 
 not. Fourth and lastly, the Irish Nationalists. It is 
 not the least significant fact in the situation that the 
 session should have begun and ended with an Irish 
 revolt ; and we may as well look fairly at the first of 
 these two outbreaks, for the key of the parliamentary 
 position is, and always has been and is likely long to be, 
 on the Irish Nationalist benches. 
 
 When Lord Rosebery uttered in the House of Lords, 
 on his first appearance as Prime Minister, his memorable 
 sentence about the predominant partner, he undoubtedly 
 put the parliamentary life of his new-born Ministry at 
 issue. He made the future of Home Rule dependent 
 upon the conversion of England, the predominant 
 partner, to the doctrine of self-government in Ireland. 
 The Irish knew very well that England was against 
 them ; that they had a hostile majority of seventy-one in 
 the House of Commons to overcome, and they saw no pro- 
 spect of overcoming it. They therefore thought, and they 
 were right in thinking, that for the Prime Minister to say 
 there could be no Home Rule in Ireland till England was 
 willing, was equivalent to saying there would be no Home 
 Rule so long as Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister. They 
 thereupon naturally gave notice that, if this view were 
 adhered to, the Irish vote in the House of Commons 
 was no longer at the disposal of the Ministry. They 
 are not to be blamed for that. The matter hung in 
 suspense till Lord Rosebery went down to Edinburgh 
 and explained his House of Lords declaration in a sense 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 273 
 
 which satisfied the Irish, or which, to be more accurate, 
 induced them to continue, or to renew, their alliance 
 for parliamentary purposes with the Rosebery Ministry. 
 They then had, and perhaps stiU have, a hope that 
 this alliance may prove fruitful of good works — that is, 
 of works fruitful from the Irish point of view. But as 
 the session drew on, they saw that all the important 
 bills which the Lords had allowed to pass since the 
 beginning of the Gladstone Ministry were English bills, 
 such as Parish Councils and Equalisation of Rates, or 
 Scotch, like the Scotch Local Government Bill. They 
 seem then to have made up their minds that no legisla- 
 tion such as the Irish Nationalists desired could be had 
 until one of two things had happened. Either the 
 Government must dissolve Parliament, and come back 
 with a clear mandate from the people to which the 
 Lords would yield, or the Lords themselves must be 
 got out of the way. They knew that the Government, 
 on the very end of a session through which they had 
 lived from hand to mouth, and just as a peaceful six 
 months lay before them, would not dissolve, and that 
 the result would be very doubtful if they did. They 
 therefore summoned the Ministry to take up the man- 
 date of the Leeds Conference, for want of a better, and 
 open fire on the Upper House. And they themselves, 
 by way of a beginning, or perhaps a signal, suddenly 
 blazed out against the clerks of the Upper House, 
 whose salaries they came within nine votes of inducing 
 the House of Commons to refuse. Between the unhappy 
 clerks and their Irish tormentors stood the Ministry, 
 but the Irish guns belched forth flame and smoke just 
 the same, and even let fly a shell or two which biurst 
 over the heads of the astounded occupants of the 
 Treasury bench and put them to flight. They rallied, 
 
274 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 and the Irish ceased firing, but the second Irish revolt 
 had occurred, and had produced a deep impression ; a 
 phrase which may stand as a polite circumlocution for 
 panic. 
 
 Such were the circumstances in which Lord Rosebery's 
 Ministry began life, and such the circumstances in 
 which it was able to prorogue Parliament. They might 
 of themselves explain a great part of the diminution of 
 authority which is thought to have occurred between 
 the two dates. But there is a great deal more than 
 that. Lord Rosebery is chief of a party — I do not 
 now include the Irish, who strictly are not members of 
 his party, but allies — which is composed of a dozen 
 different factions. As a party it does not know its 
 own mind. Each of its factions is quarrelling for 
 legislative precedence. Each wants its own bill put 
 first, and each tries to exact from the Government a 
 pledge that at the head of the Government programme 
 shall be installed the particular measure most dear to 
 each. The Welsh have succeeded. Disestablishment 
 is to come first next session. The Labour men, who 
 want eight hours and many other things ; the machine 
 men, who want a vast caucus measure carried; the 
 temperance men, who want a local veto bill — these and 
 many more are more or less discontented. Do you 
 think it a slight matter to keep the peace between aU 
 these contending sections .'' If you do, you may be sure 
 that Lord Rosebery does not, and that no Prime 
 Minister who ever lived would think so. 
 
 Behind all else lies the same question which the Irish 
 pressed, the House of Lords question, and the general 
 position is still more singular than the particular one 
 which most concerned the partisans of Home Rule. For, 
 in the first place, the Cabinet is notoriously divided on 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 275 
 
 the method of dealing with the question, if not on the 
 question itself. Secondly, the most ardent supporters 
 of Lord Rosebery in the Press, and to some extent in 
 the party, are precisely those who differ from him most 
 widely. The matter is discussed here, and also in 
 America, as if it were a simple problem of politics ; as 
 if the Liberal party had only to make up its mind in 
 order to have its way. Ministers know better. They 
 know that if they once resolve to embark upon this 
 voyage, a long and perilous journey lies before them, 
 with rocks and shallows at every turn, and head winds 
 and seas day and night. They know very well that a 
 mistake at starting might be fatal to the adventure, 
 and might wreck them and their ship. 
 
 The more ardent souls whose responsibility is less and 
 whose knowledge is less, make light of all these dangers 
 and difficulties. They are so sure of success in an enter- 
 prise of which they have never counted the cost nor 
 determined the course, that they are almost ready to 
 fly at the throat of the more prudent captain who 
 knows perfectly well that if he yields to their clamour 
 and makes a false move, they will equally fly at his 
 throat at the first check. He knows, and they know, 
 that the mandate he asked for from the country has 
 never been given ; and know how hollow was the 
 imposture of the Leeds Conference which tried to pre- 
 tend it was the country. What the caucus-mongers 
 really rely upon is the appeal to prejudice and passion 
 and to party interest and class interest which they 
 mean to make if they can once force their leaders to 
 take this leap in the dark. 
 
 Any American who has considered Lord Rosebery's 
 position in the light of these facts, must have said to 
 himself that it was natural, if not inevitable, that he 
 
276 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 should fail to deal with them all in a way to satisfy 
 everybody. The facts, the pohtical situation, the irre- 
 concilable antagonisms by which he is surrounded, are 
 quite enough to account for a certain falling-off in the 
 enthusiasm which welcomed him to ofBce. He foresaw 
 it, and it is no secret — at any rate it is true — that he 
 took office with reluctance and not till after more than 
 one refusal had been overruled. No doubt, a great 
 statesman, a man of real political genius with courage 
 and good fortune and some of the spirit of Montrose, 
 might have met these difficulties in a mood and by 
 methods different from Lord Rosebery's, but only on 
 one condition. I will illustrate what I mean by a 
 hypothesis. 
 
 In America you all accept Mr. Gladstone as a states- 
 man and a man of real political genius, and neither 
 there nor here was his courage ever doubted. But let 
 us suppose that Mr. Gladstone had been in the House 
 of Lords and not in the House of Commons. Let us 
 suppose further that he had been compelled to confide 
 the leadership of his party in the Commons, the true 
 centre of political authority in this country so far as 
 authority is governmental, to a defeated rival who 
 remained a candidate for the office he had missed and 
 had behind him a considerable and an extremely bitter 
 and unscrupulous personal following. What do you 
 think would have become of Mr. Gladstone's authority 
 in these circumstances.? Remember that by far the 
 largest part of Mr. Gladstone's ascendancy in his party 
 was due to his unrivalled parliamentary ability — due, 
 in other words, to his power of managing the House of 
 Commons — and that if he had been in the House of 
 Lords he could not have managed the House of Com- 
 mons. That body can only be led from within. Lord 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 277 
 
 Rosebery is without. He has never had for one single 
 moment the chance which Mr. Gladstone had through- 
 out every one of his four administrations. And Mr. 
 Gladstone never had at any moment of his career the 
 difficulties which have confronted Lord Rosebery. If 
 you are going to draw a comparison between the elder 
 and the yoimger statesman, those points must he taken 
 into accoimt. A comparison which omits the essential 
 facts is of no value. Nor is any comparison of much 
 value, nor do I for my part make one. I only suggest 
 considerations to those who do. 
 
 Lord Salisbury may be alleged as an instance to the 
 contrary. But the instance is of no analogy, for two 
 reasons. First, when Lord Salisbury is in power the 
 majority of the House of Commons and the majority 
 of the House of Lords are of the same mind, instead of 
 being utterly hostile to each other, as now. Second, 
 the Conservative majority in the Commons is led by 
 Lord Salisbury's most intimate and trusted personal 
 and political friend. Mr. Balfour and Lord Salisbury 
 are, for political purposes, almost as one man ; at any 
 rate, they have entire confidence in each other, and 
 there is no party in the Commons caballing to replace 
 Lord Salisbury by Mr. Balfour. But the Liberal 
 majority in the Commons is led by Sir William Har- 
 court. I impute nothing to him, but the personal 
 estrangement between him and Lord Rosebery is only 
 too well known, and among Sir William's followers are 
 men who would stick at nothing to do Lord Rosebery 
 an ill turn. His compulsory absence from the House 
 of Commons is of itself, therefore, a sufficient explana- 
 tion of many of the troubles which have beset his 
 Ministry. 
 
278 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 II 
 
 To the list of disadvantages with which Lord Rose- 
 bery set out on his career as Prime Minister may be 
 added another. He had a reputation hard to live up 
 to. He was known to be Mr. Gladstone's choice. He 
 was known to be the Queen's choice. He was known 
 to be the choice of a great majority of his colleagues in 
 the Cabinet, and of the Liberal party in the House of 
 Commons. And he was borne into office not merely 
 by these concurring influences, but by the breath of 
 popular applause and the general agreement of the 
 people of England that he was, among all possible 
 Liberals, the man for this great post. Two of these 
 suffrages may be called permanent. There is no reason 
 to doubt that the Queen and Mr. Gladstone are of the 
 same mind now as when the present Government was 
 formed. So, probably, are the majority of the Cabinet 
 and of the Liberal party in the House of Commons. 
 If there be any doubt about the latter it arises from 
 the circumstances I explained in a recent letter, — cabals, 
 competition between cliques, conflicting claims for 
 priority for particular bills, and the like. But these 
 are not sufficient reasons for doubting the substantial 
 loyalty of the majority to their leader. If they were, 
 many of them would operate as strongly against Sir 
 William Harcourt as against Lord Rosebery. 
 
 But Lord Rosebery's popular prestige was no doubt, 
 and is, an embarrassment, because prestige of that kind 
 is always subject to reaction, and peculiarly so in the 
 case of a young and, in one sense, unknown man. 
 Youth might, in the beginning, add to his prestige. 
 Later would come, and did come, the demand that it 
 should be sustained, not merely by ability and compet- 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 279 
 
 ence but by a series of brilliant political successes. 
 Now brilliant political successes depend in part on 
 fortune, and in very great part on conditions over which 
 no individual has control. If I use the word unknown 
 with reference to Lord Rosebery, it is in the sense that 
 he has never been fully understood, and that some of 
 his great reputation rested, so to speak, on hearsay 
 evidence. That part of it which was most solid and 
 demonstrable did rest mainly on hearsay — I mean his 
 conduct of the Foreign Affairs of this country. 
 
 This it was which first attracted the regard of the 
 Queen; probably the best judge in the kingdom on 
 this point and some others. Mr. Gladstone would 
 know less and care less about the work of the Foreign 
 Minister. The majority of the Cabinet less again. The 
 majority in the House of Commons next to nothing. It 
 is a parochial majority. The general public can only 
 judge by what I called hearsay evidence, and by accom- 
 plished results. They may or may not have heard of 
 the Queen's high opinion of Lord Rosebery as Foreign 
 Minister. They are still less likely to have known of 
 the impression he made on the permanent chiefs of the 
 Foreign Office itself, who, next to the Queen, are the 
 best judges in England, while the great reputation he 
 had won abroad would either never reach or not greatly 
 afiect Englishmen at home — average Englishmen. They 
 came to know somehow or other that they were well 
 served, but they would have been puzzled to say how 
 they knew it, or to give a sufficient reason for the faith 
 that was in them. They were, nevertheless, perfectly 
 right. 
 
 Among other foundations of Lord Rosebery's great 
 renown were his speeches and his work in the London 
 County Council. His oratory had made an impression, 
 
280 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 especially in Scotland, where he is always at his best. 
 He has made many good speeches ; some that were 
 excellent ; one or two of surpassing excellence. But he 
 has never yet done himself full justice. He has in him 
 the true oratorical gift. He relies on it too much, and 
 relies too much on his quickness of mind and power of 
 improvisation. Of course he has always had many 
 things to do besides making speeches, and sometimes 
 things of more real practical importance than speech- 
 making. But this is an age of talk, an age of debate, 
 an age of speechmaking in and out of Parliament, and 
 there is perhaps nothing which more surely or speedily 
 fixes a man's place in public life — I mean his popular 
 reputation — than his power to debate or power on the 
 platform. It is worth a Minister's while to sacrifice, if 
 need be, something else in order bo secure this kind of 
 celebrity. Lord Rosebery has it, but not in the highest 
 degree, and not in the degree to which he would be 
 entitled if he resolutely devoted his best faculties and 
 enough of his undivided energies to the preparation of 
 his most important public orations. As for the chair- 
 manship of the London County Council, it is already a 
 thing of the past. It was more effective in London 
 than elsewhere, and even in London it was a municipal 
 reputation ; of the highest order, but still municipal. 
 As chairman, Lord Rosebery showed tact in controlling 
 and coaxing a very unruly and half-broken team ; great 
 mastery of business and power of work ; and he governed 
 London. But London is not the Empire, and so, when 
 the people who had acclaimed him on his entrance upon 
 the business of governing a great Empire, asked them- 
 selves a little later what his titles to their confidence 
 were, they could not rely wholly on London. 
 
 Besides all this. Lord Rosebery has always been 
 
TPIE PRIME MINISTER 281 
 
 surrounded with a certain mystery. He is, in serious 
 matters, one of the most reserved men who ever Hved. 
 He is a thinker, and with all his power of quick 
 decision he broods long over the graver problems of 
 politics which present themselves to him. He takes 
 few men into his confidence ; perhaps none completely. 
 He has long been the intimate associate of Mr. Glad- 
 stone, whose mind is an unexplored labyrinth to which 
 no man ever yet found the clue. Mr. Gladstone's 
 influence on his younger friend has therefore been, at 
 times, of doubtful advantage. It has confirmed him in 
 some mental habits which were already quite strong 
 enough. The hold which the late Liberal leader 
 acquired on the minds, and still more on the imagina- 
 tions, of his followers and of the country, was acquired 
 not because of, but in spite of, his taste for mystifica- 
 tion and hedging. I do not mean that Lord Rosebery 
 has imitated his mentor in these particulars. Imita- 
 tion is a conscious act. But he has, consciously or 
 unconsciously, come vmder the spell which none of 
 Mr. Gladstone's constant or frequent associates ever 
 escaped. 
 
 Yet I think Mr. Gladstone should be treated as the 
 exception ; as a being apart, not as a model, and not 
 as a good guide to public life. There is another type. 
 There are men of simple natures who speak out, whether 
 from an irresistible shicerity of mind or from the com- 
 manding character which has confidence in itself and in 
 its rectitude, and a beslief that things wiU come right if 
 you follow a straight line. Chatham was such a man. 
 The Duke of Wellington was another. If a young 
 politician has to go to school, either of them is a good 
 master. Washington is a third. Mr. Gladstone is, in- 
 tellectually speaking, more a Greek or an Italian than 
 
283 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 an Englishman. Nor is he an Englishman. He has 
 told us himself he is pure Scotch. Lord Rosebery also 
 is a Scot — reason the more why he should emancipate 
 himself from Scottish influences. He has all the Scottish 
 traits he needs ; subtlety of mind, shrewdness, caution, 
 patience, and a certain distrustfulness of nature to which 
 perhaps is attributable that habit of reserve which I 
 mentioned above. In politics, as in literature and 
 other matters, a man will do well to submit himself 
 to authority of a kind as unlike as possible to that 
 which he himself wields, and to influences which supply 
 his own deficiencies, not to those which augment his 
 natural bias. 
 
 Lord Rosebery is the soul of honour. No man could 
 better aflbrd to take his countrymen into his confidence. 
 He has clear views. No man could better afibrd to 
 state them clearly. He has a 'good judgment of cir- 
 cumstances and tendencies. No man would be more 
 likely to hit upon the right moment for announcing 
 a policy. With all this, he is a diplomatist by train- 
 ing as well as by birth — for I take it that all Scots are 
 born diplomatists and born with a dose of distrust of 
 other men. He has therefore, by no will of his own 
 and perhaps to his own surprise, come to be looked upon 
 as reluctant to disclose himself fully. The country re- 
 cognises his directness of purpose and strength of will ; 
 knows very well that it is being led somewhere, and is 
 not quite sure where. 
 
 No more was it under Mr. Gladstone, but Mr. Glad- 
 stone was eighty-four and Lord Rosebery is forty-seven. 
 There is a difference. The elder had behind him sixty 
 years of public life, with all their accustomed titles to 
 confidence. The younger, because he is younger, has 
 most of his yet to earn. Mr. Gladstone was not Prime 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 283 
 
 Minister till he was fifty-nine, and he had been a 
 Cabinet Minister twenty-three years before that. Lord 
 Rosebery's first acquaintance with the Cabinet is hardly 
 more than ten years old. The mere intervals of time 
 and spaces of experience are enormous if you look at 
 the careers of the two men. The country is quite 
 aware that it has a young Prime Minister. I think 
 the people of England are disposed to be fair to him, 
 and beyond doubt well disposed to him, in spite of their 
 disappointments in some particulars of exaggerated ex- 
 pectation. But people do take account of the dis- 
 crepancies I have noted, and they do think themselves 
 entitled to more openness of speech, and to be assured 
 that the policy of the present Ministry shall be, in so 
 far as the Prime Minister has the direction of it, 
 definite and frankly put before the coimtry for accept- 
 ance or rejection. 
 
 The entire direction of policy he has not. Few Prime 
 Ministers ever had; perhaps none for any length of 
 time. How Lord Rosebery is hampered I have ex- 
 plained pretty fully before — not quite fully, for reasons 
 which have some reference to the personal relations 
 between himself and one or two of his colleagues. 
 Some things are better left unsaid, even in a distant 
 land. Nothing can be gained by dwelling on the want 
 of harmony between him and the leader of the House 
 of Commons. So far as it exists it is a serious obstacle 
 to the smooth working of the Ministry and to the suc- 
 cessful development of a considered policy. But when 
 all allowances have been made for that and for the other 
 hindrances on which I dwelt, there remains the fact 
 that Lord Rosebery is Prime Minister. He is judged 
 as such, and will be judged as such hereafter. He has, 
 in my belief, a great part to play. If you hold him 
 
284 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 responsible for the hesitations and uncertainties of the 
 last six months, no doubt he must accept it. Every- 
 thing rests ultimately on him. At the same time, 
 neither contemporary chronicles nor the history which 
 passes its verdict upon a period can be written without 
 taking account of circumstances. It will not be history 
 if it is written in that way. Neither will history limit 
 herself to the last six months. If Lord Rosebery has 
 made mistakes, he has plenty of time before him in 
 which to retrieve them, and to recover all and more 
 than all the prestige with which he had set out. 
 
 My own view is that, excepting the predominant 
 partner passage in the House of Lords and the attempt 
 to explain it away at Edinburgh, there is very little in 
 the confusions of the period which need be attributed 
 to the Prime Minister, or in which he was a free agent. 
 But if there were much more I should still look to 
 the future just as hopefully. I say hopefully, because, 
 though I probably diifer from Lord Rosebery on most 
 public questions, I do think and have always thought, 
 that what a country, any country, most needs is a man 
 capable of governing — not a Bismarck, necessarily, nor 
 a Lincoln — they are the two most sharply contrasted 
 types — but a Minister, or President, or party leader, or 
 whatever he may be, who has mastered the fundamental 
 principle that the business of a Government is to govern, 
 and of a leader to lead. If his lot be cast in a democ- 
 racy, he must no doubt contrive to govern by and 
 through the democracy, but he will still govern and 
 still lead. I think Lord Rosebery such a man. If he 
 were a Minister who believed in letting things drift, 
 who had no settled purpose or policy, who was a mere 
 opportunist and nothing more, he would cease to in- 
 terest me as Minister. He would hold, inevitably, 
 
THE PRIME MINISTER 285 
 
 a subordinate place, whether you called him Prime 
 Minister or not. 
 
 He may seem to have been subordinate and not pre- 
 dominant at certain rather critical moments of late. 
 The whole truth is not known, and any judgment is 
 premature. But, if you like, I will make you a present 
 of these few months. They are no long time in the 
 history of a man and stiU less of a State. Let them 
 go. The interesting period is the future ; perhaps the 
 near future during which more than one momentous 
 decision may have to be taken. But the futtn-e stretches 
 on. There will come a period when Lord Rosebery will 
 have a fair trial and a free hand; when he will have 
 made his appeal to the coimtry, when he will have his 
 own Cabinet, his own majority, and an opportunity to 
 enforce his own pohcy. The other policy, the inherited 
 policy, may have to work itself out meantime. Whether 
 it succeeds or fails — and I believe it will fail — it will be 
 out of the way. Then we shall be able to see whether 
 Lord Rosebery has the constructive genius and the 
 political authority which some of us believe are his. 
 Till then he may remain an enigma, his career may be 
 clouded, his true character or his real force of govern- 
 ment and leadership be left doubtful. It is idle to 
 predict. All I mean to say is that my conception of 
 Lord Rosebery as a statesman, and my belief in his 
 capacity for leadership, are what they were when he 
 became Prime Minister. 
 
MR FROUDE 
 
 [LONDON, OCTOBER 1 894] 
 
 Me. Fuoude had been so long and so often assailed in 
 the English Press that it is a pleasure to see the best 
 papers lift themselves above the controversies and ani- 
 mosities which beset his life, and do him some justice. 
 They could hardly refuse to recognise the fact that a 
 great writer and a great ornament of English literature 
 has gone. That would remain true even if his title to 
 the name of great historian were disputed. I do not 
 know that it is disputed except by the Dryasdusts, who 
 filled the air with clamour against him while he lived. 
 
 Mr. Freeman was at the head of these. He, no 
 doubt, was something more than a Dryasdust ; a man 
 of some force of mind, with a power of seeing some 
 historical truths broadly. But Mr. Freeman was a 
 drudge, and he could tolerate no one who was less a 
 drudge than himself. He was, moreover, a man of 
 unfortunate temper and unfortunate manners, and he 
 wrote for a periodical which had at that time the least 
 amiable temper and the least polite manners of all 
 modern serials, the Saturday Review. In its genial 
 columns Mr. Freeman poured out calumny on the writer 
 whose conceptions of historical truth and of the right 
 historical method diflPered from his own. 
 
 Mr. Froude's offences, if any, were critical and 
 
 286 
 
MR. FROUDE 287 
 
 literary. Mr. Freeman treated them as if they were 
 offences of morals, violations of the Divine law, and as 
 if he (Freeman) had been appointed by the Almighty 
 to execute justice upon this miserable sinner. Such at 
 least was Freeman's own notion of his duty and of his 
 attitude. To the bystander it seemed as if more 
 private motives actuated him, and as if nothing but 
 personal hatred could explain the ferocity of these per- 
 sonal attacks. That Freeman did hate Mr. Froude is, 
 I fear, but too true. His hatred, however, had probably 
 no oth^r source than history. I never heard that there 
 was any purely personal resentment. Mr. Freeman's 
 evident delight in the infliction of torture was the 
 delight of the inquisitor, not due primarily to the 
 enjoyment of human suffering but to the conviction 
 that the wretch ought to be tortured, and that it is he 
 on whom the duty of torturing him devolves. The rest 
 is habit. When he had once grown used to this form 
 of excitement he could not live without it, nor was his 
 a nature peculiarly aUve to the agonies of others. 
 
 It is the fashion to say that Mr. Froude did not 
 belong to the modern historical school. Of this school 
 Bishop Stubbs, Mr. Freeman, and other eminent persons 
 of the last generation, were the founders. It was both 
 critical and constructive, and proceeded upon sound 
 notions of what history ought to be like, or how it 
 ought to be written. But in so far as it was original 
 the true origin of it is to be sought in the scientific 
 spirit which, about that time, began to permeate the 
 minds of men and to modify their views on the true 
 method of dealing not with history merely but with all 
 the problems of life and of Uterature. The historian 
 went to the original documents for his account of a 
 reign or of a revolution, just as the palaeontologist 
 
288 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 betook himself to the fossiliferous rocks for the record 
 of the world's construction, or of the varying forms of 
 life which during one or another period of millions of 
 years had peopled it. The historians, however, applied 
 their canon with a strictness which the physicist knows 
 to be excessive and often misleading, and the pupils 
 showed themselves more exacting and exclusive than 
 the masters. 
 
 They had alleged Mr. Froude as an example of evil, 
 and ever since the first two volumes of his History of 
 England appeared, in 1856, they have denounced him 
 and his history in terms which, if less violent than Mr. 
 Freeman's diatribes, belong nevertheless to the contro- 
 versial style of the seventeenth rather than of the nine- 
 teenth century. Mr. Froude's Henry Eighth was in 
 their view a ridiculous caricature. It differed from the 
 accepted estimate, and the evidence for the new Henry 
 was wanting or, which comes to the same thing, was not 
 sufficient to satisfy the critics. They fastened on certain 
 errors of detail, and an error of detail was to their 
 minds sufficient to prove the falseness of the whole pic- 
 ture. And there were State Papers which Mr. Froude 
 had not read, and not to have read all the State Papers 
 was of itself enough to condemn a writer who should 
 presume to treat of the period covered by these Papers. 
 
 The gentlemen who framed this indictment were 
 destined, some of them, to live long enough to see a 
 curious thing. They were destined to see Mr. Froude's 
 view of Henry prevail, and to accept it in great part 
 themselves on the express ground that it had been 
 sustained and confirmed by the very documents to which 
 they had appealed. The documents were not accessible 
 when Mr. Froude wrote. He had divined the real 
 Henry without them, basing himself, as he expressly 
 
MR. FROUDE 289 
 
 declared, upon the statute-book as the true mu-ror of 
 the time and of the great King. He said — I forget 
 whether he said it in print, but I have heard him discuss 
 the matter with the Imninous eloquence which charac- 
 terised his talk — ^he said that the popular notion of 
 Henry made the people whom he ruled a nation of 
 incapables and cowards. It is certain they were not. 
 Their deeds are there to speak for them. They were a 
 wise, vahant, patient people, heroic in act, far-sighted 
 in their political views, deeply religious. It is incon- 
 ceivable, said Mr. Froude, that such a people should 
 allow themselves to be ruled for near fifty years by a 
 sovereign who was a mere selfish debauchee and brigand. 
 And he put aside that theory of Henry's character, and 
 reconstructed the true Henry, so that he lived once 
 more and had a new being, with the blood throbbing 
 in his veins and his mind once more grasping the secrets 
 of the statesmanship of his time. 
 
 There is probably no finer example of the right use 
 of the historic imagination. There is certainly none 
 which has put the pedants more completely to shame. 
 
 Did they ever make honourable amends to the great 
 writer whom they had held up to contempt as a charlatan 
 and an impostor ? Not they. It remained with them 
 an article of faith to revile Mr. Froude. They had 
 reviled him honestly enough at first, when they honestly 
 thought him wrong. Then he committed the inexpiable 
 offence of being in the right ; proved to be right by the 
 very witnesses they had summoned to convict him ; and 
 they continued to revile him because he ought not to 
 have been right ; because he had not been right in the 
 right way ; because the genius of the man had done for 
 him and for his subject what their laborious industry 
 had failed to do for them. 
 
290 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 Yet from the beginning Mr. Froude's History had 
 been a popular book. The intelligent reader felt at 
 once that this was true history ; that in these pages and 
 along the course of this glowing narrative there moved 
 not the wax figures of Madame Tussaud's show but 
 men and women. He breathed the air they breathed 
 and lived the life they led. The sixteenth century 
 became to him as conceivable and actual as the nine- 
 teenth. He might or might not agree with the point 
 of view, or accept the historian's own theory of causes 
 or of the connection of events. But he was aware that 
 his eyes had been opened and that he was allowed to 
 see for himself, to form his own opinions and, so to 
 speak, to write his own history. The materials were 
 provided for him. The curtain was drawn up. The 
 scene lay before him and the scene was Henry's Eng- 
 land and Elizabeth's England, and no less a drama than 
 the Great Reformation was enacted before him. He 
 felt, moreover, that though a costume might be wrong 
 or a piece of furniture out of date the representation 
 was as a whole truthful. 
 
 That it was picturesque no one ever disputed. I will 
 not enter here into the question of Froude's style, on 
 which it is hard to say too much. But there can be 
 no doubt that for the purposes of history it has the 
 supreme merit of transparency. Of course it fascinated 
 people ; often without their knowing it. They might 
 not be quite sure why they read on and on, but they 
 were quite sure they did not want to stop. They felt 
 also that they were in the hands of a master. The 
 secret of simplicity was his, and also of sincerity. And 
 if there never was any such flourish of trumpets 
 about Froude as about his contemporary Macaulay, 
 he won his way silently to the hearts of his readers, 
 
MR. FROUDE 291 
 
 and if you once made friends with him, friends you 
 remained. 
 
 It need not be denied that a catalogue of curious 
 errors of detail might be compiled out of Mr. Proude's 
 writings. I am not concerned to deny it. In fact, 
 catalogues of that kind can be drawn up by anybody, 
 and are drawn up now ; though rather for the curiosity 
 of them than because sensible persons now think them 
 of importance. The newspapers reproduce some of them 
 out of their inexhaustible pigeon-holes, and dwell once 
 more for a moment on his carelessness about minute 
 research or his superficial handling of important docu- 
 ments. 
 
 I will take two specimens. He wrote, says one critic, 
 an account of an Australian sunset landscape and made 
 the sun go down in the east. Did he? I do not 
 remember, but if he did I should make the only answer 
 I think worth making, namely, that from the coast of 
 Yorkshire in England I have myself seen the sun set 
 in the North German Ocean. The critic will probably 
 think that impossible, but it is true, and there is a per- 
 fectly simple explanation of it ; which I leave him to 
 guess. One instance is as good as the other, and either 
 is of equal consequence with the other, and neither is of 
 the slightest. 
 
 The second is also illustrative of the critic's proneness 
 to mistake the meaning of what he has heard. We are 
 told rather solemnly that Mr. Froude did not study 
 the archives at Simancas thoroughly, — which may 
 depend on whether you think the archives more vital 
 than the events they record ; that when he was invited 
 to Hatfield to inspect the Cecil papers he stayed but a 
 day ; and finally, that when he was writing the Life of 
 Lord Beaconsfield the executors of the deceased states- 
 
292 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 man offered him the opportunity of examining ' masses ' 
 of papers in their possession, and that he was satisfied 
 with a glance at them during a Saturday to Monday 
 visit. The probable truth of the other stories may be 
 judged by what I know to be the truth of this last. 
 The allusion is to the papers in possession of Lord 
 Rothschild at Tring Park. These ' masses ' of papers 
 are contained in a single despatch-box. They consist 
 entirely of letters which passed between him and the 
 amiable but otherwise obscure lady who at her death 
 left him a large sum of money. I read them all in 
 manuscript. They have since been type-written, and 
 lie on a table in the smoking-room at Tring Park. 
 They relate to a single episode in Lord Beaconsfield's 
 life, and anybody could master them in a few hours at 
 most. To the political biographer their value is slight. 
 Yet Mr. Froude is reproached because he disposed of 
 them between Saturday and Monday. It is probable 
 that his memory will survive that reproach. 
 
 There are two facts in connection with Froude's 
 retirement from the Church which have never been 
 stated in print, nor ever, I think, been known to many 
 of those who knew him best. I learned them from him, 
 nor shall I soon forget the circumstances in which they 
 were told. It was some three years ago. I had been 
 rather ill, and as I grew better Froude came to see me. 
 His coming was as balm, for he brought into the room 
 the gentle influences of kindly friendship and of that 
 rare sweetness of nature and charm which he possessed 
 in a very high degree. He brought sunlight with him, 
 sympathy and tenderness. He sat long and talked of 
 
MR. FROUDE 293 
 
 many subjects, and finally about himself and his earlier 
 life. Presently he asked me if I had known Emerson 
 intimately, and whether I could tell him much about 
 Emerson the man. He listened to such reminiscences 
 as I had of my visits to him in Concord many years 
 before, and of Emerson's visits to London with his 
 daughter. Then he said — 
 
 ' I do not ask you about Emerson's writings. They 
 are known to me better than you think. It was Emer- 
 son more than any other one influence who convinced 
 me that inside the Church of England there was no 
 place for me. He broke the fetters. I owe my freedom 
 to him.' 
 
 I asked whether he had ever told Emerson. 'No,' 
 answered Froude, in his soft way, 'why should he care?' 
 I protested, but he went on : ' You know very well 
 that Emerson never wished to make proselytes. His 
 was no missionary spirit. I do not think the idea 
 of converting anybody ever came to him. What he 
 said and wrote he did, like Luther, because he could 
 not otherwise. Nature spoke through him. He was 
 her servant. And his freedom from all desire to in- 
 fluence others directly was one secret of his influence on 
 others — at any rate on me. I had grown distrustful 
 of preachers and zealots. The truth which most easily 
 reached my mind was the truth which came like the 
 dew from heaven. Of course I had thought much, and 
 doubt had got possession of my soul before I turned to 
 Emerson, but it left me doubting. Emerson taught 
 me to decide ; perhaps because he did not care to decide 
 for me, or for anybody. But I felt, after reading him 
 and after his spirit had, as it were, passed into mine, 
 that the reign of dogmatic theology over me had come 
 to an end. I must be free to think and feel for myself. 
 
294 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 No bondage was any longer tolerable. And I saw that 
 Emerson had just as firm a hold on morals as anybody 
 had. Without that, he would have had little on me. 
 For me as for him, the moral law of the universe is the 
 one which remains binding. But what has ecclesi- 
 asticism to do with moral laws? It puts them all 
 aside and puts its own creed and catechism in their 
 place.' 
 
 Whoever has read Froude to any purpose knows well 
 that, to the last, this faith in morals never forsook him. 
 His books are full of it, as his life was. It was the 
 dividing line between him and Newman. Each of these 
 two remarkable men, each perhaps spiritually-minded 
 in an equal degree, made his choice. To Newman the 
 choice was between Rome and unbelief. He had begun 
 by leaning on reason. He had a mind so subtle and a 
 perception so clear that in him the free use of the 
 reason led, as he practically admitted, straight to scep- 
 ticism. From that he shrunk, but his sole refuge from 
 scepticism lay in renouncing the reason and accepting 
 the principle of authority. And no doubt he was logi- 
 cally and historically right in his conviction that of 
 authority Rome had a monopoly, both historical and 
 dogmatic. And never, I suppose, was a more signal 
 example of the profound truth of the much questioned 
 saying of Pascal that faith is an act of will ; to which 
 there is a corollary in Emerson's, ' The will, that is the 
 man.' Newman resolved to believe what Rome told 
 him to believe, and the act was just as clearly an act of 
 will as when a man resolves to turn to the left rather 
 than to the right. He closed his mind to all other 
 influences, he suspended the very processes of thought 
 by which he had so long guided his life ; he deter- 
 mined to exert for the future the full force of his 
 
MR. FROUDE 296 
 
 intellect up to a fixed point and never again beyond 
 that point. 
 
 Froude did the exact contrary. It may well enough 
 be said that he cannot be fully understood without 
 Newman, nor Newman without Froude. For both were 
 in the very centre of the Oxford movement ; Newman 
 the elder and already a commanding figure — already, 
 to use a more apt word, a fascinating figure — in the 
 Counter-Reformation. Oxford, or so much of it as was 
 concerned in this movement, lay already under Newman's 
 spell. Froude's elder brother was one of Newman's 
 lieutenants. Froude himself was at Oriel College, 
 where Newman's influence was strongest. He was 
 chosen by Newman to write one of his series of Lives 
 of the Saints, and did actually write the life of St. 
 Vivian. I always fancied that such a task might well 
 have hurried Froude along the road he was afterwards 
 to travel. For to write the life of a saint, and write 
 it in the orthodox way, a man must forgo all satis- 
 faction of that spirit of inquiry which leads to the 
 discovery of truth. He must give up all notion of sift- 
 ing stories or testing evidence. He must take the 
 facts — heaven save the mark — as they are reported to 
 him, as they come down to him in tradition, as they 
 are fabricated for him by the dull and devout imagination 
 of an ignorant monk or an ecclesiastical historian of 
 any sort. And his duty is to make the dull narrative 
 readable and the fantastic legend once more credible — 
 credible to readers of the nineteenth century. Against 
 such a task as that Froude's soul may well have revolted. 
 
 Whether it did or not, Froude soon saw that he 
 was approaching the parting of the ways. He had to 
 give himself body and soul to Newman or break with 
 him utterly and with all for which he then stood. 
 He did break the bond. It need not be thought 
 
296 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 that in his case, or so glaringly as in Newman's, there 
 was any act of will. For in Froude, with all his 
 strong bent to purely religious belief and to the spiritual 
 side of life, there was one thing stronger still, and 
 that, as I said, was his loyalty to moral law. He 
 could conceive of morals without religion, or at any 
 rate without theology. For religion, or anything that 
 called itself such, without morals, or of which morals 
 did not form an integral part, he had a just abhorrence. 
 The man who wrote the sentence about the will of God 
 as evident in the whole history of the world — ' a voice 
 for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right 
 and wrong ' — that man cannot have been other than 
 deeply religious in the best sense of the word, and that 
 man was Froude. The silver thread runs throughout 
 all his writings. There is none of them in which he does 
 not stand out as the ethical teacher. When he passed 
 under the influence of Carlyle, it remained. Carlyle 
 himself could not convert him to the ' might is right ' 
 doctrine, except in so far as he was allowed to use the 
 word ' might ' in the sense of moral force. 
 
 It was not cei-tain that Carlyle himself did not so 
 intend it. He did certainly use it with that meaning 
 at times, and he has more than hinted that in his mouth 
 the phrase was never atheistical nor ever immoral. 
 ' How do they know they know what I meant ? ' asked 
 the grim old sage. Froude was remote enough from 
 Carlyle at the time of his revolt against Tactarianism, 
 and near to Emerson, nor ought his relation to Emerson 
 ever to be forgotten when his relation to Carlyle is dis- 
 cussed. The purity and fervour of Emerson would 
 have kept him far from Tactarianism, and the fact that 
 Froude renounced it while Emerson was his prophet is 
 a new testimony to the inspiration of the thinker of 
 Concord. There was in Tactarianism an element of 
 
MR. FROUDE 297 
 
 immorality, or of what Mr. Gladstone might call non- 
 morality, which of itself would suffice to repel both 
 Emerson and his English disciple. 
 
 With or without Emerson's help, Froude must ulti- 
 mately have freed himself from Newman. What Emer- 
 son did for him was to hasten the dawn. Thereafter, 
 he took pretty much his own way and did his own 
 thinking. When he turned to history, the sixteenth 
 century imposed itself upon him as a subject. The 
 Reformation in England was to him, as he said, the 
 greatest incident in English history, and he has treated 
 it as what it is, a revolution in morals as well as a 
 revolution against authority and the abuse of authority. 
 It was to him ' the root and source of the expansive 
 force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the 
 globe and imprinted the English character and genius 
 on the constitutions of mankind.' Again you hear the 
 ethical note. It is everywhere in the book. Catholics 
 of course attacked the historian who came to glorify 
 Protestantism. Some Protestants attacked the book 
 on different grounds. But the public read and con- 
 tinued to read not only for the reasons I indicated 
 yesterday, but because the conscience of this Protestant 
 nation was touched. If Froude had remained in the 
 grip of the Coimter-Reformation, no such book would 
 have been possible. But then, on the other hand, it 
 was not possible for him to remain in the grip of the 
 Counter-Reformation. The one authority which he 
 recognised first and last and all the time was, I repeat, 
 the moral law of the Universe, nor did his scepticism 
 prevent him from calling it God's law. 
 
 The second fact to which I referred at the beginning 
 may be told in a few words, but I apprehend that to 
 those in the habit of testing character by acts it will 
 
298 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 seem decisive on the question of Fronde's sincerity. 
 When he began to feel that he was drifting away from 
 the Church, he told his father. His father was the 
 Venerable Archdeacon Froude, not only a Churchman 
 but a dignitary of the Church and something of a 
 devotee. The father naturally sought to dissuade the 
 son. Presently he added the weight of paternal autho- 
 rity to his entreaties. Finding this also ineffectual, he 
 told young Froude plainly that if he renounced the 
 Church he must renounce his expectations of fortune. 
 The father was rich ; wealth lay within the son's grasp, 
 poverty was the price of resistance. Froude told the 
 story very simply. He never said whether he hesitated. 
 He only said, 'I gave up the fortune. I thought I 
 could earn my own living, and I have.' Yet when he 
 threw off the frock he resigned his fellowship and 
 resigned the headmastership of a school which had just 
 been offered and accepted, and began life over again as 
 a man of letters. He had no income and no certainty 
 of employment or of pay for his writings. Success was 
 not indeed long in coming, but few will think that 
 detracts from the homage due to the loyal courage with 
 which he faced poverty for conscience' sake. 
 
 in 
 
 Froude was something more than the most accom- 
 plished prose writer of his time. He was a man of the 
 world, who lived a full and various life. There was no 
 trace of the bookworm in him, nothing of that awkward- 
 ness which the mere student often betrays in the com- 
 pany of his fellow-men and of women. He had the 
 manner of one who had always associated with the best 
 people ; a manner which seldom comes except from 
 
MB, FROUDE 299 
 
 associating with the best people, though it may perhaps 
 be inherited, if acquired aptitudes can be inherited; 
 a point on which the experts differ. He had also the 
 qualities of decision and of active life which no living in 
 libraries would ever have brought to him. He liked 
 outdoors, loved nature, loved certain outdoor sports, 
 and practised them. When he chose he could be a 
 man of affairs, and had a practical business-like sagacity 
 which did not fail him when the occasion arose. As he 
 had to deal much with publishers, this was of use to 
 him. I once asked him how he got on in such matters. 
 
 'Oh, at first there were many difficulties, and a 
 publisher, as you know, is not eager to give more than 
 he must for a book. But now it is all plain sailing. 
 Longmans and I understand each other very well. 
 When a new book is to be brought out we both know 
 just about how much it is worth, and as they know 
 that I know, it is easy to come to terms.' 
 
 His sagacity stood him in equal stead in public 
 affairs. When Lord Carnarvon sent him to South 
 Africa, the energetic and ingenious politicians in that 
 part of the world found him a match for the best of 
 them. He understood high politics equally well, and 
 the true meaning of that much abused or rather much 
 misused word, statesmanship. Why should he not.'' 
 He had to deal with statesmen in his books, and to pass 
 judgment on their acts ; to grasp great policies, to 
 consider the causes as well as the course of events, to 
 fathom motives, to calculate political forces. Whether 
 this kind of ability be applied to the affairs of the 
 nineteenth century or of the sixteenth matters little. 
 The ability required is the same. 
 
 He showed a singular mastery of the Irish question, 
 or of Irish questions, since the plural has always to 
 
300 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 be applied to Ireland. Into the merits of his view, 
 whether of past history or of present problems, I will 
 not venture. There are quicksands on every side. I 
 do not forget his visit to America or the animosities 
 he aroused there among a portion of her naturalised 
 citizens, and among some who had not taken the trouble 
 to go through the formalities of naturalisation or 
 to perform their full period of probation. Let us 
 admit, for argument's sake, that he took the wrong 
 view. He took it nevertheless with consummate ability. 
 If he had not, and if he had not had behind him a great 
 and just renown for dealing with such matters, the 
 attack on him in America need never have been so 
 bitter as it was, nor would Father Burke have invoked 
 the thunders of the Church against him. 
 
 So of his book. The English in Ireland. There and 
 in his American lectures alike he spoke as one having 
 authority. Cromwell's is a hated name in Ireland, but 
 it has not occurred to those who denounce him most 
 savagely to belittle his genius. I never heard of any- 
 body in these days — never since Carlyle's book on the 
 great Protector — who did that except Mr. Gladstone. 
 Fronde's estimate of Irish history may bring down upon 
 his head every censure except that of being deficient in 
 largeness of view, and in the large handling of the issues 
 with which he deals. Mr. Lecky, in the disproportionate 
 Irish sections of his History of England in the Eigh- 
 teenth Centwry, permits himself some very harsh criti- 
 cisms on Froude. They are conceived in the Freeman 
 vein, and sometimes almost in the Freeman manner. 
 Mr. Lecky, that is to say, imputes motives. It is not 
 enough for him that Froude is wrong in his facts, he 
 insists that he was consciously and wilfully wrong. 
 Censures of that sort upon such a writer as Froude 
 
MR. FROUDE 301 
 
 injure him who makes them ; not him to whom they 
 are addressed. 
 
 It has, unhappily, been Froude's fate to be in the 
 thick of controversies all his life long ; religious, politi- 
 cal, personal, and many more. His own share in them 
 has for the most part consisted in stating his own view 
 once for all, and leaving his enemies without reply. 
 That is the method of a man persuaded that he is 
 right, and conscious, to say the least, of right motives. 
 He answered Freeman once ; Lecky, I think, not at 
 all. He had, nevertheless, a sensitive nature. Beyond 
 doubt the calumnies heaped on him, and perhaps most 
 of all in the Carlyle business, distressed him. But he 
 was not the man to ask sympathy from the public, nor 
 would he stoop to defend himself against charges which 
 implied dishonesty, either personal or literary. He 
 preferred to suffer in silence. 
 
 Nor did the injustice of his critics sour his nature. 
 To the last he preserved his cheerful serenity and his 
 faith in human nature. He had the faith in others 
 which a man has who knows his own motives to be 
 piure. With all that, he was capable of revenge, had 
 he cared to take it. 
 
 He had a power of retort which his enemies may 
 thank him — though they will not — for so seldom using 
 at their expense. His published writings do not show 
 the full extent of it, nor often show it at all. Nor did 
 his talk, except with those whom he trusted. But 
 when he chose he had wit, raillery, sarcasm, at the 
 service of his censors ; a wit which cut to the bone, 
 raillery which easily made others ridiculous, and a gift 
 of sarcasm which shrivelled and blighted its victim. It 
 was intellectual, not vindictive. He saw the weak 
 points, and knew how to lay them bare. But it was 
 
302 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 done with a placid good-humour, remote indeed from 
 anything like malevolence. Almost never, I think, did 
 Froude put forth this strength of sarcasm against an 
 antagonist who sought to meet him in argument. He 
 argued, but he would not wound. I never heard him 
 say a thing meant to give pain. He respected the 
 opinions, the sentiments, even the prejudices of all men 
 with whom he conversed. He would let nonsense go 
 unanswered rather than expose the folly of the speaker. 
 
 It was when he was in congenial company that he 
 spoke out. If roused, as he often was, by what he 
 thought insincerity in a public man, the lightnings 
 flashed, and he had a power of summing up character 
 in a condensed phrase which you remembered for ever 
 after. He did not like Mr. Gladstone, especially in 
 his later years. He did not like his monastic turn of 
 mind, nor his long coquetry with the Anglican move- 
 ment. He liked just as little the steadily growing 
 bent of his later years toward opportunism, and his 
 readiness to adopt any policy which promised him a 
 majority. On these topics he discoursed one afternoon 
 as we crossed the Park together, and as we parted at 
 the Alexandra Gate he said, ' Mr. Gladstone combines 
 the two most dangerous tendencies in modern English 
 life. He is a Puseyite Radical.' 
 
 The charm of Froude's conversation, like that of his 
 style, resists analysis, and I don't know that one need 
 distinguish between them, nor between them and the 
 whole man. For he was all of a piece. His style was, 
 in one sense, natural to him, so was his talk, and he 
 lived his life and went about the world and accom- 
 plished many great and beautiful things, all as if they 
 were but the inevitable expression of a large and 
 beautiful nature. The eyes told the story. They had 
 
MR. FROUDE 303 
 
 but one fault. They were too beautiful for a man ; as 
 if nature in one of her innumerable caprices had de- 
 frauded some beautiful woman and given to Froude the 
 eyes meant for her. It was said of him that he could 
 fascinate anybody whom he chose. I doubt if he chose, 
 or often chose. The spell he laid on those who came 
 in contact with him sprang from no effort of will, any 
 more than the perfume of a flower. The eyes had 
 much to do with it, not all. The soul of the man 
 looked out thi'ough the eyes as it spoke from his 
 lips, the true man, simple, genuine, convinced, and in 
 nothing without a touch of genius. 
 
 To resist analysis is one test of style. Gibbon, 
 Macaulay, and many another writer famed for his way 
 of writing, may be taken to pieces. By a little study, 
 and with some chemical skill also, you may see how 
 they got their effects, how their sentences were con- 
 structed, how the movement of their prose is ordered. 
 There is something mechanical and something wilful in 
 their art. Not so Froude. No process of chemistry 
 and no anatomical research will arrive at the elements 
 of his style or reveal his method. One reason is that 
 he had so many methods. He had no tricks and no 
 stereotyped phrases. He did not run in grooves. His 
 style adapted itself to his subject, and was simple or 
 splendid, familiar or heroic, colloquial or scholarly, as 
 the case required. This felicitous variety explains in 
 part the magic of his writing, but only in part. Age 
 brought with it not less, but greater, flexibility. His 
 Erasmus, the last work of his life, is equal to anything 
 he ever wrote. 
 
 Necessarily, I suppose, much has been said since 
 Froude's death of his conduct as Carlyle's biographer. 
 Nothing new has been said, and the whole subject was 
 
304 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 in fact long since thrashed out. A torrent of obloquy 
 burst upon him when Carlyle's friends, and perhaps still 
 more those who in life had never been his friends, per- 
 ceived that Froude had resolved that the real man 
 should be made known to the world. Treachery to his 
 master was imputed to him. Froude was incapable of 
 treachery, whether to Carlyle or another, and least of 
 all to Carlyle. If he erred — I do not think he did — it 
 was from a devotion to Carlyle and a belief in him 
 which others did not fully share. Possibly he did not 
 make allowance enough for the natural tendency of men 
 to think the worst of each other and to mistrust motives. 
 He himself had such an opinion of Carlyle as to think 
 that his memory would be best served by telling the 
 whole truth. It is not at all certain that he did not 
 judge rightly. The immediate effect of the disclosures 
 was to send Carlyle stock down in the market. What 
 the ultimate effect will be is another matter. 
 
 Exactly the same thing happened when Boswell pub- 
 lished his life of Johnson. The idolaters of Johnson 
 were furious. They said Boswell had made him ridi- 
 culous and left a permanent blemish on his fame. Who 
 says so now ? Who does not admit that Boswell's book 
 has made the old moralist and dusty lexicographer im- 
 mortal .'* Who would blot a page of Boswell ? It is 
 easy to imagine a similar revulsion of feeling about 
 Carlyle as he is seen in the pages of Froude's biography, 
 in the Jane Welsh Carlyle letters, and the rest. 
 
 Froude has nothing of Boswell in him except BoswelPs 
 power of reproducing the features of his hero in the 
 clearest light and making the man visible and conceiv- 
 able. But he has wrought on the same lines in this 
 sense, that each believed that the man he loved could 
 bear the full light of day on his life and acts and 
 
MR. FROUDE 305 
 
 motives. Much of Carlyle's written work will perish, 
 as much of Johnson's has perished. Each toiled for his 
 own time chiefly; and a little for all time to come. 
 But when the Latter Day Pamphlets and Past and 
 Present and much else have ceased to be read, the 
 figure of the stem old Scottish peasant will live in 
 Froude's pages, in his own letters, in his wife's letters, 
 and stand out as a figure which, whether you like him 
 or not, you cannot forget and cannot resist. His very 
 faults and defects have a fascination — those very faults 
 and defects and rugged traits which Froude was most 
 blamed for revealing. 
 
 I will end, though there is a great deal more to be 
 said than can be said in a newspaper, with a story of 
 Froude which I heard the day after his death from an 
 admirable lady in whose house in the country we had 
 met often — one of the two where he was most at home. 
 She asked him to define cleverness. Froude thought an 
 instant and answered : ' Perfect truthfulness.' I com- 
 mend the answer to those who think he sometimes sacri- 
 ficed truth to effect in his historical pictures. I am 
 certain he never consciously did, and hardly less certain 
 that he never did at all if the whole picture is looked 
 at. For what Froude aimed at in history was first to 
 form to himself a true impression of the times and the 
 men he had to describe, and then to transfer that im- 
 pression to the mind of his reader. It was the truth of 
 the picture as a whole that he sought. He might make 
 as many mistakes as Shakespeare did in his historical 
 plays, yet the historical plays of Shakespeare and the 
 historical writings of Froude will none the less remain 
 among the most vivid and among the most truthful of 
 all extant narratives. 
 
MR. WINTHROP 
 
 [LONDON, NOVEMBER 1 894] 
 
 Mr. Winthrop's death can leave nobody untouched 
 who remembers the Massachusetts of a generation ago, 
 and what the name of Winthrop has meant to the Old 
 Bay State for many generations before him, and above 
 all at its very beginning. He was the last, I suppose, 
 of the men whom we all thought of when the word 
 Massachusetts was uttered, and there is none other 
 which has meant more to her sons. Webster, Everett, 
 Sumner, Andrew, Emerson, Phillips, Lowell, Holmes — 
 these and many more were the idols of their time ; not 
 all with the same worshippers, but each with a group of 
 admirers and followers. Winthrop, perhaps, never for 
 his own sake was put quite so high, but for the sake of 
 his family, his great ancestor who was the first and 
 greatest of the Winthrops of the Puritan Common- 
 wealth which is Puritan no more. 
 
 He was, nevertheless, always an amiable and interest- 
 ing figure. He had the old traditions. He had scholar- 
 ship, and dignity of character, and a social position 
 which Boston, at any rate, did not undervalue. He 
 had a capacity for public life, especially while public 
 life was more simple, and perhaps more honourable, 
 than it always is now. The leisurely movement of his 
 mind was well suited to that period ; ill suited to the 
 one which has succeeded it. If he never had the force 
 
 806 
 
MR. WINTHROP 307 
 
 and fluency and the Ciceronian elegance of Everett, 
 he had a diction into which there entered nothing 
 of vulgarity. He was sonorous and impressive and 
 scholarly, and he lifted himself to the level of a high 
 subject. The best models were known to him. There 
 was often an elevation of style and sometimes an eleva- 
 tion of thought such as early and long familiarity with 
 classic literature gives and nothing else gives in quite 
 the same way. The merits of his orations were many, 
 and they seem the more since there is now no orator 
 who practises the same method. 
 
 Once it would have been permissible to speak of him 
 as a gentleman ; permissible and descriptive. I do not 
 know whether it is permissible now, nor whether the 
 word would convey to everybody the meaning he him- 
 self attached to it. You could not imagine him doing 
 an unworthy act. Distinguished as was his political 
 position at one time, there never was a time when he 
 could be called necessary to the State ; nor never a time 
 when he was not ornamental. The State, any State, 
 can ill spare the services of a man who had high ideals 
 and a high sense of her dignity, and who was himself a 
 kind of impersonation of his ideal. On an occasion of 
 ceremony he spoke well. He understood the value of 
 whatever is stately in public life, and of whatever is 
 remote from the bustle and competition of politics. 
 There was in his very appearance on a platform some- 
 thing that spoke to you of the past ; not his white hairs 
 merely nor his venerable air, but his grave courtesy of 
 manner and the remoteness from the common which his 
 speech and thought alike denoted. I can hardly re- 
 member him when his hair was not white, so vivid are 
 the impressions of later years. Yet I heard him when 
 I W£is a boy at school and he in the prime of life. 
 
308 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 There was always, I thought, a marked likeness 
 between him and the late Mr. John Jay. Both held 
 aloof in their later years from the strife that went on 
 about them. Each had, as it were, inherited his con- 
 ception of the State and of public duty, and each was a 
 man of such purity and uprightness of mind that the 
 ideas which prevailed a century ago with reference to 
 public duty were natural to them, congenial, essential, 
 indispensable. I think it a misfortune when such men 
 disappear, and not less a misfortune because they have 
 ceased to take an active part in affairs. Their influence 
 was felt. Each of them had a habit of writing 
 pamphlets on matters which interested them. That 
 of itself was old-fashioned. A century ago the 
 pamphlet was a recognised weapon which almost 
 everybody used. As the newspaper grew the pamphlet 
 waned, and what was left of its prestige passed to the 
 platform. But Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Jay and a few 
 others kept to the instrument they were familiar with. 
 Often they published a speech and distributed it in 
 pamphlet form. The most modern politicians have 
 been known to do as much. 
 
 Yet the influence they exerted, of which I was speak- 
 ing, did not depend on speeches or leaflets, and I should 
 think neither of the two ever in his life was interviewed. 
 The influence was personal ; the influence which recti- 
 tude and a character known to be free from every stain 
 always exerts. There are still in every community men 
 who possess that kind of influence, and also those who 
 accept it from others. If you saw Mr. Winthrop's name 
 or Mr. Jay's name on a committee, you knew at once 
 that the cause which that committee sought to promote 
 was an honourable one. 
 
 The days when these men were Whigs were, of 
 
MR. WINTHROP 309 
 
 course, long ago, and there are no more Whigs. I 
 should think Mr. Winthrop might be the last of 
 a once powerful party ; the party which those who 
 were brought up in its faith used ever to think of as 
 the party of good citizens. How many Democratic 
 Governors has Massachusetts had since Republicans 
 succeeded to the Whig heritage .'' Before the transfer 
 she had had one, and he was the offspring of an accident. 
 Was General Benjamin F. Butler the first of the Demo- 
 cratic intruders ? I forget, but I know he was one who 
 in the old times would have been impossible. 
 
 An Irish Roman Catholic Mayor of Boston would 
 have been equally impossible. We have since seen an 
 Irish Roman Catholic elected twice or thrice in succes- 
 sion Chief Magistrate of that ancient city, and only 
 beaten at last because the women of Boston, alarmed 
 lest their schools should pass into the hands of the 
 priests, turned out and canvassed the town, ward by 
 ward and street by street, and chose an American 
 Protestant to rule in his place. 
 
 All this marks the difference between the time when 
 Webster and Everett and Choate and Winthrop were 
 the guides and philosophers of the people of Boston 
 and of Massachusetts. If Mr. Winthrop was not the 
 greatest of these he was the last, and to me it is im- 
 possible to see him pass away without a word of regret, 
 not for him only, but for what he represented. I was 
 bom a Whig. I sat at Webster's feet. Winthrop was 
 a name which every one then held in honour, and I 
 hope still does. If the young men of 1850 and 1854 
 parted company with the Whigs, they never lost their 
 loyalty to the old leaders whom they could no longer 
 follow. 
 
 I wonder whether those dates, 1850 and 1854, say 
 
SIO STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 anything to the generation that is growing up ? To us 
 1850 meant, and has ever since meant, the Fugitive Slave 
 Law and the Seventh of March speech in the Senate, the 
 apostasy of Webster and the abasement of his party — 
 yes, and of the State which still followed him. Who 
 now cares to remember that 1854 was the year which 
 saw the Court House in chains, the Chief-Justice of the 
 Supreme Court stooping to pass beneath them, and the 
 surrender of Anthony Burns back to slavery ? I do not 
 know that Mr. Winthrop had any part for good or evil 
 in those events. Perhaps he could not have had, any 
 more than Webster. He, at any rate, did not come to 
 the front for freedom as Richard H. Dana did. I name 
 Dana because he belonged to the same party and the 
 same class as Winthrop ; a Whig, an aristocrat, a 
 lawyer; he, too, with all the Whig traditions in his 
 heart, and with the heart to put them all aside for the 
 hunted slave whom few cared to champion. I saw as 
 much of what happened at that time as most men, or 
 boys. The whole history has never been written. I 
 cannot write the whole, but when I think of the new 
 persecution of the negro by a new South fired with the 
 hateful spirit of the old, I imagine it might be a good 
 occasion to revive some of the memories of the slavery 
 and anti-slavery agitation which preceded the war by 
 no great number of years. It has little or nothing to 
 do with Mr. Winthrop, for Mr. Winthrop had little to 
 do with it. I heartily wish he had had more. 
 
 He had, nevertheless, fought according to his lights, 
 and in the good Whig way, a good anti-slavery fight. 
 We who look back upon the Abolitionists as the true 
 anti-slavery leaders, are apt to underrate the services of 
 those who were not Abolitionists, or who became so at 
 the eleventh hour only. Mr. Winthrop and his asso- 
 
MR. WINTHROP Sll 
 
 dates led no forlorn hope, it is true, and it must also 
 be said that, at a very critical moment of the contest, 
 they retired in good order to the rear ; obeying their 
 commander like the disciplined soldiers they were. But 
 they had been for years — the Abolitionists, whom no 
 man regarded, alone excepted — the only force arrayed 
 against the enemy. They were the enemies of slavery, 
 Mr. Winthrop one of the foremost. His speeches, his 
 votes, his whole pubUc life, down to 1851, are there to 
 prove it. Their faintheartedness at the end ought not 
 to obliterate the gratitude which all America owed 
 them, and owes them still, for a long struggle against 
 heavy odds and against very potent influences. 
 
 We are bound to remember how long Webster and 
 Everett and Winthrop held the merchants of Boston 
 true to so much anti-slavery faith as was embodied in 
 the Whig platform. State Street and Milk Street, finance 
 and commerce, the cotton clerks of Boston, as Wendell 
 Phillips on one memorable occasion contemptuously 
 called them, would have bent the knee and hauled down 
 the pine-tree flag long before they did, if these men, 
 Winthrop included, had not shamed them into a show 
 of loyalty to freedom. Capital and Commerce are 
 always timid. They were timid then. They wanted 
 peace with the South at almost any price. It will be 
 the everlasting renown of the Whig party of Massa- 
 chusetts, with Winthrop as one of its orators, that 
 it stayed the movement for surrender — stayed it till 
 Webster himself went plunging down the abyss at the 
 bottom of which his best fame lies for ever buried. 
 
 Let Webster bear, as he must bear, the shame of 
 that great treason to his own principles and his own 
 past. Let the earlier Webster, nevertheless, be re- 
 membered. He is not the only public man whose life 
 
312 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 divides in two, with a great chasm between his wise and 
 generous manhood in its prime, and an old age clouded, 
 whether by failing courage or failing judgment. Win- 
 throp, of course, must bear what blame belongs to him. 
 When that has been assigned to him in full, there will 
 be still an amiable and beautiful memory. The long 
 line of the Winthrops loses its last famous, or once 
 famous, descendant. He may sleep in peace with his 
 fathers. Among all of them, though there were greater 
 careers, and perhaps more sturdy stuff, there was none 
 kindlier, none more loyal than the loyal gentleman who 
 has just left us, none whose private virtues were of 
 finer temper. 
 
 He was known in London, but rather to the last 
 generation than to this. Some of us remember his last 
 visit here, and thought him delightful. Age had given 
 him a manner even more softly elaborate than he had 
 as I knew him in Boston. But wherever he was, and at 
 whatever age, he moved among men as one who expected 
 himself, and gave to others, a full measure of courtesy. 
 He had a manly deference to men, a chivalrous de- 
 meanour to women, and with children he was fascinating. 
 He was at home in the Speaker's chair at Washington, 
 and at home in the Senate. Of course he ought to 
 have been Governor of Massachusetts. That would 
 have completed a long and always high-minded career. 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 
 [lONDONj NOVEMBER 1 894] 
 
 Dk. Holmes has told the story of his Hundred Days 
 in Europe with the genial simplicity and frankness 
 which were characteristic of him. The book will remain 
 an example of the freedom which may be used without 
 oflfence in social chronicles, if there be good feeling and 
 tact as well as freedom. Nobody on this side ever did 
 take offence, although names were freely used and Dr. 
 Holmes set down his opinions of places and sometimes 
 of persons, and recorded without any foolish shame his 
 social triumphs. Whether anybody took offence in 
 America I never heard, nor whether the admirable old 
 man was told that he 'loved a lord.' That discrimi- 
 nating remark is often made touching any American 
 who is supposed to be on speaking terms with anybody 
 unhappy enough to have inherited a title. 
 
 It would not have troubled Holmes, even had it been 
 made about him. He was a man of the world who 
 accepted the social conditions amid which he found 
 himself, and never suspected it to be his duty to try to 
 alter them, or to hold himself sourly aloof from the 
 titled classes because they happened to be titled, or 
 to declaim against them and their coronets and other 
 distinctions. There never was a truer American, and 
 yet there never was an American who, during a period 
 
 ai8 
 
314 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 so brief, was on better terms with the aristocracy of Eng- 
 land, or liked them better, and they him. He has put 
 it all into his book. His pleasure bubbles up on every 
 page. ' There are,' he says, ' twenty different Englands, 
 every one of which it would be a delight to visit ; and 
 I should hardly know with which of them to begin.' 
 
 He has set down his impressions of several of the 
 twenty, one just as openly as the other. It seems never 
 to have occurred to him that there was any reason why 
 he should conceal his intercourse with one set of people 
 rather than another. He mentions all sorts of persons 
 in the same tone and with the same ease, as if he were 
 on a level with all ; as he was, except when he was 
 above them. Mr. Galton and Mr. Locker, Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke and Morell Mackenzie, Lord Rothschild and 
 Lady Rosebery, Mr. Gladstone and the Prince of Wales, 
 Mr. Tyndall, Mrs. Phelps, the Princess Louise, the 
 Austrian Ambassador, and hundreds more of every rank 
 and position, form part of the procession which the 
 good Doctor marshals before us. In private he observed, 
 as every well-bred man does, the rules of social pre- 
 cedence. In print, the sentiment of human equality is 
 the one which asserts itself. 
 
 When he goes to the Derby he finds himself ' in the 
 midst of the great people, who were all very natural, 
 and as much at their ease as the rest of the world. The 
 Prince (of Wales) is of a lively temperament and a very 
 cheerful aspect — a young girl would call him "jolly," 
 as well as " nice." ' And he has a compliment always 
 ready for the Princess, 'the lovely, youthful-looking, 
 gracious Alexandra,' and another for ' the always affable 
 and amiable Princess Louise,' who probably had more 
 real sympathy with the man of letters and of books 
 than any of her brothers and sisters. He did not dis- 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 315 
 
 dajn to make — ^though he does not say so in his book 
 — a courtier-like speech to the Prince of Wales, who 
 asked him whether he had ever seen the Derby before. 
 ' Sir,' answered the youthful septuagenarian, ' I saw the 
 Derby just seven years before your Royal Highness 
 was bom.' And he sums up by saying: 'All these 
 grand personages, not being on exhibition, but off en- 
 joying themselves, just as I was and as other people 
 were, seemed very much like their fellow-mortals. It 
 is reaUy easier to feel at home with the highest people 
 in the land than with the awkward commoner who was 
 knighted yesterday. When " My Lord " and " Sir 
 Paul" came into the club which Goldsmith tells us 
 of, the hilarity of the evening was instantly checked. 
 The entrance of a dignitary like the present Prince of 
 Wales would not have spoiled the fun of the evening. 
 If there is any one accomplishment specially belonging 
 to princes, it is that of making the persons they meet 
 feel at their ease.' 
 
 It was this feeling of ease and this sentiment of 
 equality, subject only to certain conventional rules and 
 usages, which made his welcome in England so general 
 and so cordial. To say that he cringed to nobody 
 and that he patronised nobody is almost to imply that 
 he was capable of either, which most assuredly he was 
 not. Equally incapable was he of the notion, wherein 
 lies the essence of vulgarism, that a man or woman, 
 because he or she belongs to ' the classes,' is less a man 
 or woman, or less one of the great human family ; of 
 which even the classes are members. If he had ever 
 used the word ' snobbishness ' he would have used it of 
 the critic who took or who implied that view. The 
 only thing of which Holmes was intolerant was intoler- 
 ance ; and of that variety of intolerance which thinks 
 
316 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 itself democratic not less than of others. He says : 
 " I hesitated at first about printing names in full ; 
 but when I remembered that we received nothing but 
 the most overflowing hospitality and the most con- 
 siderate kindness from all we met, I felt sure that I 
 could not offend by telling my readers who the friends 
 were that made England a second home to us.' 
 
 Not even though the friends bore some of the greatest 
 names in England. It was not a part of England but 
 all England which our American Puritan thought of as 
 a second home. He had a belief, I am sure a just one, 
 that his visit might draw England and America a little 
 nearer • together. He spoke of it as a source of happi- 
 ness to him during his remaining days. He found in 
 it also what he calls a higher source of satisfaction. 
 'If the kindness shown me strengthens the slenderest 
 link that binds us in affection to that ancestral country 
 which is, and I trust always will be to her descendants, 
 " dear Mother England," that alone justifies my record 
 of it, and to think it is so is more than reward enough.' 
 
 There also he has struck a true note — perhaps no- 
 body knows how true who was not here at the time of 
 his visit, and so able to see day by day the very re- 
 markable effect he had upon the public opinion of 
 those classes which were once supposed to be, and at 
 one time really were, anti-American in feeling. A 
 great change had occurred long before Holmes came. 
 We had had Mr. Lowell as Minister. We had, at the 
 time of Holmes's visit, Mr. Phelps and Mrs. Phelps. 
 Some of the most brilliant of the Anglo-American 
 marriages had been made, and the American girl had 
 become known, and many of the best American men 
 and women had become known in London. All these 
 influences had been felt. Old animosities had melted 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 817 
 
 in all this sunlight, or many of them had. There re- 
 mained, however, the memory of them, and I suppose 
 an uneasy consciousness on the part of those who had 
 cherished them that they were unworthy and out of 
 date. And there was, of course, still a little of the 
 resentment which he who has been in the wrong always 
 feels toward him who has been the object of his unjust 
 dislike. 
 
 Holmes came at the right moment, just when a 
 breath of fresh air was enough to clear away what was 
 left of these mists and fogs of pfejudice. He had long 
 had a great renown in England, where his readers were 
 numbered by hundreds of thousands. He was, of all 
 American writers, the one whose books brought him 
 closest to the greatest number of readers ; the one 
 whose personal acquaintance they were most eager to 
 make. Hardly anybody had put so much of himself 
 into his books, or so agreeably. 
 
 He himself felt this strongly, and expresses it strongly. 
 His book on Europe is addressed to his friends; to 
 personal friends, and to those to whom he had become 
 a friend through his writings. ' I have,' he says, ' daily 
 assurances that I have a constituency of known and 
 unknown personal friends whose indulgence I have no 
 need of asking. I know there are readers enough who 
 will be pleased to follow me in my brief excursion 
 because I am myself, and will demand no better 
 reason.' He italicises the words 'because I am my- 
 self,' the printers' rules in the Riverside Press of Messrs. 
 Houghton being less strict than yours. And he adds : 
 ' If I choose to write for them I do no injury to those 
 for whom my personality is an object of indifference. 
 For them there are other books.' There need be no 
 better rule. An author may choose his own public. 
 
318 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 He appeals to that public, and to that only. Sure of 
 their sympathetic appreciation, he can aiford to neglect, 
 as the Autocrat did, the hostility or the indifference of 
 those who read him only in search of something to 
 censure. 
 
 On every page of the Autocrat the author stands out, 
 and everywhere with a smile on his face and an out- 
 stretched hand. He was so sympathetic that the rela- 
 tion of author to reader became surprisingly intimate, 
 and the wish to verify the impression was universal. 
 It sometimes happens that there is a disappointment. 
 In Holmes there was none. His readers found him 
 more delightful than his books. Those who knew him 
 only by hearsay used to declare that they must read 
 what so charming a man had written, and some of them 
 did. He was looked upon as a' kind of social pheno- 
 menon; this youthful and cheerful activity in a man 
 nearing the eighties. To a phenomenon of another 
 kind, also nearing the eighties, London had long been 
 used. But Mr. Gladstone impressed people by his 
 commanding qualities and his tremendous energy, while 
 Holmes enchanted them. It was the difference between 
 the whirlwind and the vernal breeze, or between the 
 torrent and the brook which sparkles and flows serenely 
 on between smiling banks. Nor, in Holmes' case, were 
 there any of those animosities to be overcome which 
 have more or less embittered Mr. Gladstone's later days. 
 An American ? Yes, and because he was an American, 
 I say once more, he had such a welcome in London as 
 would have been given to no writer of another nationality. 
 
 II 
 With such a fame as his and in such circumstances, 
 it was of course inevitable that the dear old man 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 319 
 
 should be lionised. The process has its pleasures but 
 is apt to be exhausting. At first, he seemed not to be 
 aware that there were limits to his strength. He accepted 
 everything, or everything was eiccepted for him ; includ- 
 ing some invitations which he might just as well have 
 refused, from people who had no claims on him and 
 nothing to offer him. His good-nature was inex- 
 haustible though his strength was not. He has 
 recorded in his book some of the occasions on which 
 his strength was unduly tried. He might have told 
 much more had his good-nature permitted. There are 
 always people who try to attach themselves to a celebrity. 
 They think of themselves, not of him, and they make 
 the most unreasonable demands. He suffered from 
 these and the fatigue showed itself early. Nor did 
 he always realise how readily in London he might 
 refuse to submit himself to the burdens imposed on him. 
 And when he was told of it he still preferred to think 
 that the motives of his tormentors were good. He 
 would not allow them to be called tormentors. His 
 faith in htiman nature and his disbelief in the selfishness 
 of others survived every trial simply because he was 
 himself never selfish, and perhaps never thought of 
 himself as a lion at all. 
 
 I used to call on him in the afternoons in the rather 
 dingy rooms he occupied at No. 17 Dover Street, 
 Piccadilly, on the ground floor. Not a ray of sun 
 found its way into them. They were conveniently 
 situated and tolerably clean and comfortable ; that was 
 all that could be said for them. After a week or two, 
 London and the lionising so told on him that his friends 
 became anxious. To dine out and after dinner go to 
 two or three parties was no light tax on a man of his 
 age, used to the simpler pleasures and much earlier 
 
320 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 hours of Boston and its much less complicated social 
 arrangements. He felt the loss of sleep more than the 
 fatigue, and used to have naps in the afternoon. The 
 people in the hotel thought nothing of disturbing him 
 or of brinffing in cards and letters while he was slumber- 
 ing. I asked him why he did not give orders not to be 
 woke up. ' Oh,' answered the kindly doctor, ' nobody 
 likes being turned away from the door, and you know 
 people are so nice to me.' I have known him go off 
 into a doze while he was talking, and in the middle of 
 a sentence. He knew he was overworked, but finally 
 he knew also that it was not altogether for his own 
 sake, and he submitted with that amiable consideration 
 for others which he never forgot. 
 
 AVhat Holmes did not record and could not record in 
 his book was the impression he made on this weary 
 world of London ; a world ever grateful to any one who 
 will provide it with a new sensation. The mere list of 
 his engagements would show in what request he was 
 and what the best people tried to do for him. He 
 speaks of a concert at Lady Rothschild's. Probably he 
 did not know quite how much his presence at that concert 
 signified. He knew that it was a very brilliant occasion 
 He speaks of the Prince and Princess of Wales, of Patti's 
 singing, of the royal table at supper, and other incidents 
 which struck him. There had been a dinner to the 
 Prince and Princess of Wales, and to the concert which 
 followed about ninety people had been asked. Nine 
 hundred others had, as sometimes happens in a society 
 which exists in order to be seen at the right place at 
 the right moment, asked to be asked. The only addi- 
 tion which Lady Rothschild made to her original list 
 was that of Holmes and his daughter, who had lately 
 arrived in London. The nine hundred who were on 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 321 
 
 their knees for invitations were left on their knees ; not 
 one of them saw the inside of the marble palace at 
 No. 148 Piccadilly on that evening. If Holmes had 
 been told of the exception made in his favour it might 
 have pleased him, and would have stirred his sympathies 
 in behalf of those left out. It is the ambition of many 
 a London hostess that her entertainments shall be 
 ' small and smai-t.' If they are really smart, nothing is 
 more difficult than to keep them really small. Lady 
 Rothschild's position is such that she need give herself 
 no concern about such a matter, but many people do 
 concern themselves. 
 
 What Holmes saw on that rather memorable evening 
 was one of the most brilliant companies ever collected ; 
 remarkable for beauty, for rank, for distinction of many 
 kinds, including that which attaches to the wearing of 
 well-made gowns and of priceless jewels ; including also 
 the distinction which was lent by the presence of some 
 of the foremost men in the public life of England, 
 eminent not by rank merely or mainly, but by abilities, 
 character, great services, and the confidence of a jealous 
 people. Amid that glittering company Holmes was 
 the lion. That is to say, he was the stranger, the one 
 unknown or little-known celebrity. He was the centre 
 of many a group during the evening. The prettiest 
 women in the room clustered about the little man, and 
 some of them looked down on him by a head, one in 
 particular, whom, since he names her, I will name, the 
 Countess de Grey. Some of his countrywomen who for 
 years before had lighted up London with their beauty 
 and animation were there. Lady Randolph Churchill was 
 one, and a girl, then I think in her first London season. 
 Miss Langdon, now Mrs. Royal Phelps Carroll, the 
 more remarked because she sat with a few other ladies 
 
322 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 at the end of the drawing-room facing the audience. 
 For the benefit of the virtuous Republican who thinks 
 it impossible to mention the Prince of Wales without 
 grovelling before him, I will quote what Holmes says — 
 
 ' How we two Americans came to be in so favoured a 
 position I do not know ; all I do know is that we were 
 shown to oiu- places and found them very agreeable 
 ones. In the same row of seats was the Prince of 
 
 Wales, two chairs off from A 's seat. Directly in 
 
 front of A was the Princess of Wales, in ruby 
 
 velvet, with six rows of pearls encircling her throat and 
 two more strings falling quite low.' 
 
 Well, it is evident that Holmes took pleasure in 
 finding himself in this great house and in royal com- 
 pany, as he did when he went to the Derby with the 
 Prince of Wales. He speaks of being among the 
 grandest of the grandees. Why not .'' He was one 
 himself, in a different way, and quite aware of it. But 
 was he a worse Republican or a less loyal American, or 
 less American ? Does anybody think his head was 
 turned ? No one who saw him would have thought so. 
 He had in the presence of his ' grandees ' exactly the 
 same manner and bearing he had in Boston. He knew 
 his own value as well as the value of those among 
 whom he now moved. It was fifty years since he had 
 been in Europe. Many things had changed. He was 
 the same. He had grown older in years and in wisdom ; 
 not otherwise. He had ripened and perhaps mellowed, 
 but his was the same beautiful nature, unspoilt by 
 prosperity and fame ; incapable of being spoilt. 
 
 He used to say, half laughingly, that Lady Rosebery's 
 Foreign Office party half finished him. It was a tre- 
 mendous crush. His progress up the great staircase 
 was slow and difficult, and sometimes there came one of 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 323 
 
 those inexplicable movements of a great crowd which 
 threatened to sweep him oflF his feet, and perhaps down- 
 stairs. He faced this peril gallantly. It may not 
 seem a great peril. But the surge of a throng is not 
 always controllable, nor was Holmes used to such multi- 
 tudes, nor had he the physique for them. He enjoyed 
 all the same the brilliancy of the scene and the novelty 
 of it. Probably nowhere in the world is there any- 
 thing quite like a Foreign Office party, and this was 
 one of the best that had ever been given. Again 
 royalties abounded, and again there were scores of the 
 loveliest and best-dressed women in London and people 
 of distinction by the hundred. And again with perfect 
 frankness Holmes confides to his public of friends how 
 delighted he was with the party and the people. Far 
 more delighted was he with his degree and his recep- 
 tion at Cambridge University, where the students 
 clamoured for a speech which they did not get, and 
 consoled themselves by singing 'Holmes, Sweet Holmes,' 
 in those thunder tones of which only the collective 
 undergraduate voice is capable. 
 
 As he says. Holmes hoped he might be doing his 
 coimtry some sei-vice by his London visit, and fostering 
 kindly feelings by the kindness shown him. He did 
 that service, and also another. He was accepted from 
 the start as an Ambassador from America. It came to 
 be considered in London that he impersonated his own 
 country, and that the country which produced Holmes 
 and sent him abroad had other titles to the respect of 
 Europe than those dependent on the bigness of its 
 territory or the rapid growth of its cities, and of its 
 material prosperity ; other even than intellectual titles. 
 The respect became aifectionate when it was centred 
 upon him. He met the European demand for an 
 
324 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 American who should be American, and not European. 
 If it was not supposed — and it certainly was not — that 
 there were sixty-five millions of Autocrats in the United 
 States, it was felt to be much that there should be one. 
 The judgment is a fair one which judges a country by 
 the best it produces, or one of the best. The doctrine 
 of averages is here of no application. 
 
 He was never ashamed to let it be seen that he was 
 pleased, or even surprised, by the marvellous attractions 
 of England, and he did not think it necessary to affirm 
 that the State House at Boston, even with its gilded 
 dome, was superior to St. Paul's. He preferred to claim 
 for his own country what she was entitled to. He was 
 content with her as she is, and thought it a poor com- 
 pliment to her to pretend that she was something else. 
 The patriotism which bases itself upon imaginary excel- 
 lences was not his, nor did he think it patriotism. The 
 realities were what he loved to talk to the English 
 about ; the solid facts ; those parts of the social and 
 political fabric in which America is essentially and per- 
 manently superior to Europe. His English friends saw 
 how sincere he was and how genuine his Americanism 
 was. They never dreamed of doubting him or of dis- 
 puting with him when he discoursed, as he often did, 
 on what he liked best in his own country. They 
 accepted in the same spirit his frank tributes to the 
 ease and splendour of social life here. His book is full 
 of them, and they were not absent from his talk. No 
 people have a surer instinct for sincerity than the 
 English. There are few things they respect more, and 
 few persons they like better than those who tell them 
 the truth, varnished or unvarnished. And they cer- 
 tainly liked Holmes the better because he allowed them 
 all to see that he was aware of his country's merits and 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 325 
 
 of his own. He had too much genuine modesty to 
 have any that was false. He found his way through 
 the intricacies of London etiquette — which are, indeed, 
 less difficult to disentangle than those of New York — 
 by his graceful intuitions and by quickness of percep- 
 tion. The habit of observation was his. And so he 
 moved about in all sorts of social worlds, smiling and 
 smiled upon, the spoiled darling of the best sets, had it 
 been possible to spoil him ; and since it was not, winning 
 affection and respect in equal measure. 
 
 Ill 
 
 My memories of Holmes go back a great many years, 
 and to times and places which have nothing to do with 
 his visit to England. But as I may not find another 
 opportunity, I will set down one or two of them here. 
 They connect themselves almost at first with boating. 
 I am old enough to remember the very beginning of 
 that American enthusiasm for rowing which has since 
 spread over the land, and still young enough to rejoice 
 in it, and in having rowed in the first University race 
 between Yale and Harvard, on Lake Winipiseogee — I 
 hope I spell it right — in New Hampshire, in 1852 ; the 
 first race and the first defeat of Yale ; long after to be 
 so brilliantly redeemed. A little later, in the Law 
 School at Harvard, and after that when at the bar in 
 Boston, I spent many an hour in boats on Charles 
 River, and there it was that I used to meet Holmes. 
 He lived then in a house in Charles Street looking on 
 the river, as did the larger house in Beacon Street to 
 which he afterwards removed. 
 
 As his acquaintance with boats began late in life he 
 never aspired to distinction in rowing, nor had anything 
 to do with racing except to take a keen interest in it. 
 
326 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 K he ever took interest in anything it was a keen in- 
 terest. If he did not pull a racing oar himself he liked 
 that others should. For himself he was content with 
 his little outrigger — not quite what is now called an 
 outrigger — in which he scuUed himself up and down 
 the river in a leisurely way. Without pretensions to 
 science or -to pace he rowed nevertheless very well and 
 was very much at home in his cockleshell ; as a man 
 had need to be who wandered about on this stream, for 
 it broadens as it nears the red brick houses, and the 
 expanse of water between the Mill Dam and the Cam- 
 bridge shore and bridges is enough to allow of a sea 
 getting up in which an outrigger might easily upset ; 
 and sometimes did. I never heard that this catastrophe 
 befell Holmes, but he risked it. 
 
 His boat was kept at Braman's Baths, which were 
 also the headquarters of the Union Rowing Club of 
 those days ; the Club before which on one memorable 
 day the red banner of Harvard went down, when a 
 Union six beat the Harvard eight and, as one of the 
 Union six, I thought my mishaps on Lake Winipiseogee 
 avenged. Holmes looked on. As he was a Harvard 
 man he took less pleasure in this event than we did, 
 but he manfully congratulated us all the same. His 
 sympathies were always broad enough for such occa- 
 sions. He thought rivalries ought to be generous, and 
 looked upon a defeat as only a preparation for a victory. 
 In a sense, he was a pioneer in that great athletic 
 movement in America of which the beginnings may be 
 assigned to that period. As a man of science and of 
 medicine he knew the need of it. And as a student of 
 human nature he knew the moral value of outdoor 
 sports and of physical training. It is so well under- 
 stood now that the present generation may wonder 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 327 
 
 that, within a time so recent, it should have been 
 thought of no consequence or ridiculed. But it was 
 ridiculed and resisted. What is called the practical 
 mind set itself against any form of exertion which was 
 not productive. On a walk one summer's day from 
 Troy to Schenectady, I overtook a farmer jogging com- 
 fortably on in his wagon at a foot's pace. He very 
 good-naturedly asked me to get up for a ride. I 
 thanked him, and said I was walking for exercise. 
 ' What ! ' retorted this practical man, ' is there no hay 
 to be mown ? ' His was at that time a typical view, 
 and he was himself a type. Perhaps he was not wrong 
 in thinking that there was work enough in the fields to 
 keep all the spare muscle of all the young men em- 
 ployed. 
 
 But Holmes knew best. He knew very well that 
 there was muscle which would not swing the scjrthe 
 and would the oar, and he wanted to provide occupa- 
 tion for all of it. My farmer friend would have had 
 you idle unless your work was useful; or what he 
 thought useful. Everybody in Boston knew that the 
 Harvard professor, the man of letters, the social orna- 
 ment of the city, the friend of Lowell, of Emerson, of 
 Phillips, of everybody who was eminent, could be seen 
 daily in his boat toiling with the oars. Everybody 
 heard him extol the exercise. He taught by example 
 and by precept, and by both gave an impetus to a 
 young movement which then was in need of all the 
 help it could get. Not only rowing, but baseball, foot- 
 ball, and every other manly game now practised in 
 America owes a debt to Wendell Holmes. 
 
 In his own house the Autocrat was at his best. He 
 loved it ; loved I think best of all his library and the 
 view from the library windows over the Charles, and 
 
328 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 the sunshine that streamed in with the fresh breezes. 
 The large, confortable, airy, well-lighted room, with 
 books all round the walls, was a good frame for the 
 slight, alert figure and for the face on which time had 
 left a hundred wrinkles but no mark of failing strength 
 or diminished cheerfulness. The face sparkled in the 
 sunlight. The eyes rested lovingly on the books, and 
 beyond them wandered to the river as if after all his 
 ample house could not contain the restless spirit. His 
 joyous manner filled the room as the simshine did. 
 
 The books were those of a man who cared more for 
 reading than for books ; unlike the collector who some- 
 times seems to care more for books than for reading — 
 not always but sometimes. He had few rarities, few 
 treasures, or what the book-lover would have reckoned 
 such, and from the dandyism of fine bindings his col- 
 lection was entirely free. Yet I remember how de- 
 lighted the dear Doctor was when I came upon a book 
 in old French red morocco, and told him I thought it 
 might be by Derome. Whether he had ever heard of 
 Derome I doubt, but I suppose I pronounced the name 
 as one does that of a great man, and he caught at it. 
 'Was he a great binder .J* ' 'Yes, one of the best.' 
 ' And you really think he bound this book .? ''—with an 
 emphasis on the demonstrative pronoun, and a glance 
 of scrutinising interest at the newly discovered treasure. 
 It was quite safe to say yes. For there were a dozen 
 Deromes; a whole family or clan of binders in the 
 eighteenth century, and it has long been the custom of 
 the enterprising — sometimes too enterprising — second- 
 hand bookseller to attribute to Derome any specimen 
 of old morocco which he thinks fairly good. Nor does 
 he deem it necessary to warn his client that the Deromes 
 were a numerous folk, nor to say which of them, if any. 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 329 
 
 was the real author of the binding he commends to the 
 confiding buyer. 
 
 He showed me more than once, as he has shown 
 many others, the desk at which he sat, the drawers 
 neatly divided into convenient compartments for dif- 
 ferent kinds of paper and envelopes ; and the gold pen 
 with which he wrote. Like Goethe, he dwelt on the 
 importance of stationery, and of a good pen, and good 
 ink to the writer, especially the imaginative writer. 
 Between him and the due expression of his thought in 
 black and white, there ought to be as few obstacles as 
 possible ; no friction that can be avoided. Many a fine 
 thought, he declared, had perished ere it was fairly 
 bom, strangled in the birth by a hair on the nib of the 
 pen, or choked out of life by muddy ink. His paper 
 was ruled and glazed ; his ink a thin black ; not blue- 
 black as is much of the best writing fluid in this 
 country. He had written I know not how many books 
 with the same pen. And he looked at the pen as if it 
 were part of himself. 
 
 Long before this, in the old days of the Charles 
 Street house, there were associations which seem even 
 more remote than those of the river and his boat. 
 Paul Morphy had come to Boston and set us all aflame 
 about chess. We already had a flourishing chess club 
 of which Dr. Richardson was president, meeting in a 
 large upper room on Washington Street. We resolved 
 to give Morphy a dinner. Never I should think since 
 chess was invented had quite so much homage been 
 offered to any of its champions as was then bestowed on 
 the young genius from New Orleans, nor ever so many 
 celebrities assembled in his honour. Holmes was asked 
 to preside, and assented joyfully. When he did a 
 thing, he did it from his heart. There came to the 
 
330 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 dinner the president of Harvard University, the Chief- 
 Justice of the State, Professor Agassiz, and a score of 
 others hardly less famous and dignified. The scene of 
 it was the Revere House, and the incident has passed 
 permanently into history because it seemed necessary 
 to Wendell Phillips, then as ever an enthusiast in the 
 cause of extreme temperance, to address a public rebuke 
 to all these grave and reverend signiors. Their offence 
 was not in paying a compliment to Morphy but in 
 dining at the Revere House and allowing wine to be 
 put on the table. The philippic did not deeply disturb 
 Holmes. ' Wendell,' he said, ' holds a brief for the 
 fanatics.' The two men each spoke of the other as 
 ' Wendell.' They were cousins more or less near, and 
 liked each other — it was more than liking, an affection 
 on each side. 
 
 At the dinner Holmes acquitted himself perfectly, 
 spite of his protest, at first rather pathetic, that pre- 
 siding over dinners was no part of his function in life. 
 He did it as if to the manner bom ; gracefully, with 
 sufficient authority, and with an unfailing flow of 
 buoyant humour. His preparation for it had been to 
 me even more interesting. It was then for the first 
 time that I came to see much of him, for I was in 
 charge of the arrangements by virtue of being secretary 
 of the club, and many were the conversations we had 
 together. He was fascinating, and I remember think- 
 ing I had never met anybody so young — that is to say, 
 with so much freshness of mind and freshness of interest, 
 mellowed by literature and converse with life, and all 
 upon a basis of sound, scientific learning. He had the 
 art of attaching the young to him : art it was not, but 
 a natural gift ; spontaneous, not consciously exercised. 
 It was another sort of experience to see him at the 
 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 331 
 
 Saturday Club, as I did several times ; he as one of the 
 patriarchs of that celebrated company, I as a stranger 
 and a guest. There he met his equals, and there was 
 always, consciously or unconsciously, a rivalry between 
 them and as it were a contest for victory. They were 
 all victorious, and Holmes enjoyed the victories of 
 others quite as much as his own. 
 
 The years that he lived were as so many friends to 
 him. They had brought him almost everything a man 
 could wish, and he took pleasure in the mere number 
 of them. He took pleasure in recalling also his early 
 anticipations of long life. They had become a fulfilled 
 prophecy. In the copy of Over the Teacups which he 
 sent me, he has appended to his friendly inscription on 
 the fly-leaf, with the dates, a copy in his own hand- 
 writing of these well-known verses — 
 
 'And if I should live to be 
 The last leaf upon the tree 
 
 In the spring. 
 Let them smUe as I do now 
 At the old forsaken bough 
 
 Where I cling.' 
 1831. 1890. 
 
 ' It is something,' he says, ' to have climbed the 
 white summit, the Mont Blanc of fourscore.' And he 
 prefaces the story of his journey to Europe with the 
 remark that ' Mr. Gladstone, a strong man for his years, 
 is reported as sa)ring that he is too old to travel, at least 
 to cross the ocean, and he is younger than I am — just 
 four months to a day younger.' The pride of the 
 older man in his fresh vigour is evident, a just pride 
 with something beautiful in it. Mr. Gladstone, I hear, 
 was moved by the death of his senior ; partly from a 
 liking for the man, partly as if a warning had reached 
 
332 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 him. But neither in the life or death of Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes was there a warning, but an encouragement, a 
 charm that filled his own sphere and many another; 
 and to everybody who loves beauty of nature and 
 beautiful gifts, an inspiration. 
 
MR JOHN WALTER 
 
 [LONDON, NOVEMBER 1 894] 
 
 Of the two losses which within the last week have be- 
 fallen two great dynasties, the death of the late head of 
 the Walter family concerns England more nearly than 
 that of the Emperor of Russia. For there is probably 
 no single influence so potent in English public life as 
 The Times, and the death of the man who for near 
 fifty years has been the autocrat of that very autocratic 
 journal, is a matter of national concern in a very large 
 sense. Mr. John Walter shared his responsibilities with 
 others, as every great despotic ruler does. The Czar 
 himself had his administration and bureaucracy, and 
 they were often stronger than he was. Mr. Walter had 
 Mr. Delane, and the two men measured swords more 
 than once. Mr. Delane's hand was more constantly on 
 the helm, but when the course of the ship had to be 
 determined Mr. Walter's was the deciding voice. In 
 the last resort he was TTie Times, and it must therefore 
 be said of him that he has been on the whole for 
 more than forty years the most powerful individual 
 in England. Prime Ministers come and go. The great 
 journal of which Mr. Walter was the head remained. 
 I do not see how it can be seriously questioned that the 
 smn of all the influences he wielded day by day and year 
 
 333 
 
334 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 by year was greater than the sum of the influence of any 
 other Englishman who has lived during that period. 
 
 Of course he was a journalist — a mere journalist. 
 He belonged to a profession which it is the fashion to 
 despise, and the profession, it must be said, in too many 
 instances lends itself to this temper on the part of the 
 public, and does its best to justify that attitude of con- 
 temptuous dislike which the public assumes or affects. I 
 speak of English journalism and of the English public. 
 Mr. Walter, however, belonged to that branch of the 
 profession which wins respect by making money. If he 
 was a mere journalist he was not a mere writer or a 
 mere editor. He was a proprietor. Journalism was to 
 him, among other things, an enterprise of commerce. 
 He inherited a fortune and his position on The Times. 
 He was a hereditary journalist, as other men in this 
 country are hereditary legislators. He strengthened 
 his position and increased his fortune by business 
 sagacity. If he had not been a strong man he could 
 have done neither. 
 
 But it is also to be said of him that he did not use 
 the superiorities of his position to the detriment of the 
 inferior persons who helped to make his paper. He 
 was just [and considerate. A writer, or whatever he 
 might be, who served the paper faithfully was held to 
 have a claim on it by mere length of service. There is 
 not a case on record where an old servant of TJie Times 
 has been turned into the street, or dismissed with either 
 abruptness or violence, still less with ignominy. If it 
 became necessary to dismiss, it was the rule of the 
 office that the dismissal should be considerate, and a 
 pension was awarded as of right. 
 
 The men on the paper have always felt their position 
 secure, and this is true of compositors and printers 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 336 
 
 and employees of all kinds, as well as of those con- 
 cerned in intellectual or editorial work. Mr. Walter 
 might seem to the outsider hard or austere. Every- 
 body in his employment knew that he was just and 
 more than just. His liberalities and generosities were 
 constant. I have known something of the history of 
 the office for some years past — ^perhaps more than 
 most outsiders — and I know how Mr. Walter showered 
 benefits on those about him, and I think no man under 
 him ever had to complain of an injustice. He was 
 the arbiter of every man's fate, and every man knew 
 that his fate was in safe and honourable hands. 
 
 There is much to say about Mr. Walter personally, 
 but it is impossible to separate him from the journal 
 with which he was identified and which was identified 
 with him. He must be judged very largely by what 
 he did as journalist. When his father died the aims 
 which had governed him were described in The Times, 
 as follows : 
 
 ' To recognise commerce and industry as the true source 
 of the greatness of England; to uphold the cause of 
 humanity and freedom ; to spare no efforts in the collec- 
 tion of intelligence and no pains in securing its accuracy 
 and authenticity ; to discuss public affairs with moderation, 
 good sense, and a single-minded regard for the welfare of 
 the country, the stability of its institutions and the main- 
 tenance of its position among the great Powers of the 
 world — in a word, to look at all public affairs, and all 
 matters which concern or interest the public, with the 
 eyes of an English citizen of virtue, good sense, and intelli- 
 gence, and to express judgments upon them in a style not 
 unworthy of our noble English tongue ; these were the 
 principles which Mr. John Walter, the founder of The 
 Times, impressed upon his journal, and these are the prin- 
 ciples which have made The Times what it is.' 
 
336 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 I do not think that too strongly stated. It is, 
 with the exception of the first phrase, an adequate 
 statement of a high ideal. If anybody cares to judge 
 for himself how high it is, let him consider how many 
 journals there are to which it would apply, or of which 
 it could be truly affirmed that they do in the main 
 live up to that ideal, and act on those high principles. 
 It is true also to say that they were inherited by the 
 third Mr. John Walter who has just died, and that, 
 while he abated nothing of their substance, he strove 
 steadily to improve the form in which they were em- 
 bodied. The measure of his success in that effort is 
 the measure of his success in life. There are, of course, 
 qualifications to be made, and many a just criticism 
 upon the conduct of this great paper must be taken into 
 account. It none the less remains true that Mr. Walter''s 
 life was a success, and that of few men in great place 
 is it to be said that they more nearly attained to the 
 ideal they set before them. 
 
 So far as honesty of purpose is concerned there is a 
 simple test. I do not think it can be alleged of Mr. 
 Walter that he ever did a public act except from a 
 public motive. That covers his connection with the 
 journal he controlled; and often as he and his paper 
 have been wrong, grievous as is the injury they have at 
 times done to America, appalling as were some of their 
 mistakes, I believe it to be true of both the man and 
 the journal that their motives were high public motives 
 and never personal or selfish or passionate. 
 
 But motive is not everything. It is not even much 
 unless it lead to wise and prudent conduct, and the test 
 must therefore be broadened. Was the conduct of the 
 paper as a whole and on the whole wise and prudent 
 under Mr. Walter ? Perhaps the best answer is that if 
 
MR, JOHN WALTER 337 
 
 it had been on the whole otherwise, The Times would 
 long since have ceased to be what it beyond question 
 has long been and still is, the leading journal of the 
 world. A career of folly and recklessness would have 
 been a short career. 
 
 There is a better answer still, in the result and 
 effect of the greatest mistake it ever made in domestic 
 matters. I mean the so-called Parnell letters. There 
 is no reference to that gigantic blunder in the four 
 columns which the paper to-day devotes to the memory 
 of its late chief. The subject is discreetly avoided — 
 discreetly, if it be best to pass over in silence an error 
 for which there is nothing to be said. It is a sore 
 subject in the office. I certainly do not refer to it in 
 order to fasten a reproach upon Mr. Walter, who, with 
 the late Mr. Macdonald, the manager, was understood 
 to be chiefly responsible for the purchase and use of the 
 forged letters. The most violent partisans on the other 
 side, whatever they may have said, never really supposed 
 that Mr. Walter or Mr. Macdonald, or anybody else 
 on the paper, knew or dreamed that the letters were 
 forged. They bought them heedlessly and credulously, 
 and without any such inquiry into their history as they 
 might have been expected to make. That is a suffi- 
 ciently grave reflection upon their sagacity, and no 
 doubt people said when the facts came out : ' What 
 will they do next .'' If they could do that, they might 
 do anything, and what will become of the paper in 
 such hands ? ' And they predicted — many good judges 
 predicted — that the authority and prestige of The 
 Times, especially abroad, would never recover from the 
 blow. 
 
 In point of fact, its authority and prestige never 
 suffered appreciably. Why ? Because there was behind 
 
338 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 this one melancholy incident a long history of wise 
 and prudent conduct ; of good sense, of moderation, of 
 almost unbroken success. The mistake Mr. Walter 
 made in the Pamell letters threw into relief the high 
 qualities of his previous management and of his char- 
 acter. Europe saw that this one great error was the 
 exception. It did not shake men's faith in the general 
 prudence of the editing. Could there be a more striking 
 testimony to the ability and intelligence with which it 
 had been conducted ? 
 
 Nor do I think we need try to adjust the proportions 
 in which credit for this general ability and intelligence 
 is due on the one hand to Mr. Walter, and on the other 
 to those associated with him in editing and managing 
 the paper. It is the case of the general commanding-in- 
 chief who is well served by subordinate generals and 
 his staff. The public bestows its applause mainly upon 
 the general, and justly. Admit all that is claimed for 
 the staiF and the subordinate generals. It was the 
 general-in-chief who chose them all, and to know how 
 to choose good men is one of the arts of generalship, 
 whether in the field or the newspaper office. Mr. Delane 
 was a man of genius, if the word genius may be used in 
 connection with journalism. He was the ablest editor 
 in Europe — incomparably the ablest. Mr. Walter, the 
 father of him whom we are all regretting, chose him 
 and appointed him, and the late Mr. Walter maintained 
 him in his place, and maintained him in spite of some 
 collisions, and of the masterful temper which Mr. Delane 
 showed alike to his one superior and to his subordinates. 
 Both of them knew well that a great newspaper office 
 must be a great dictatorship, or, if you like, despotism. 
 There must be one rule. 
 
 In the ordinary editorial routine of the ofSce it was 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 339 
 
 Mr. Delane's rule. He was supposed to express the will 
 of Mr. Walter. If the two minds differed, and Mr. 
 Delane could not convince Mr. Walter, it was Mr. 
 Walter's will which prevailed. There is in the well- 
 organised journal, or great journal, no more room for 
 caucuses and town meetings than there is on the deck 
 of a ship. Nor does the existence of what in some 
 offices is called a council militate against the efficiency 
 of this principle. A council is, at the best, advisory. 
 It can no more control the conductor of the paper than 
 the Cabinet Council at Washington can control the 
 President. The President can turn them all out, and 
 weak indeed must be the Chief Executive which suffers 
 itself to be controlled by advisers whom it may at any 
 moment remit to private life. 
 
 Mr. Delane was however editor, and Mr. Walter had 
 too clear a perception of circumstances to interfere 
 unnecessarily. Mr. Delane was one dictator and Mr. 
 Walter another. Mr. Delane's control was daily and 
 hourly. Mr. Walter was more or less in the background, 
 but his intervention, when it was called for, was decisive. 
 He was the real Jupiter. It is enough to say that 
 without Mr. Delane or without Mr. Walter the paper 
 would have become something unlike what it grew to 
 be under their two hands. The public did not hear 
 very much about either. Neither was a man who cared 
 to advertise himself, or to use his great position for any 
 other than the most strictly legitimate purposes. The 
 governing men of the kingdom knew both and knew 
 that both belonged to the governing class. 
 
 n 
 
 It was Mr. Walter's conservatism which made The 
 Times so slow to come into line with modem ideas and 
 
340 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 modem improvements in journalism. When I speak 
 of improvements in journalism, I certainly do not mean 
 what is called by some professors of it the New Jour- 
 nalism. I mean, first of all, improvements in the 
 methods of collecting news. He was not quick to 
 adopt those, and he was not quick to detect the new 
 currents in journalism which were to make so great a 
 change in the conditions of journalistic life. 
 
 It is forty-seven years since, upon the death of his 
 father, he assumed control of The Times. At that 
 date, and for long afterward, the paper was supreme in 
 a sense in which it is no longer, and never will be again. 
 It was prior to the development of the penny press. 
 The growth of that amazing phenomenon in England 
 was not rapid, its origin not sudden ; there was no sur- 
 prise. Before its day the leading journal was something 
 more than a leader ; it had hardly a competitor. It 
 certainly had none in the provinces. There came, 
 moreover, a period of great good-fortune to Mr. Walter 
 and his paper, the Crimean War. Mr. W. H. Russell's 
 correspondence from the Crimea brought the paper a 
 great accession of fame and influence. At the end of 
 that war it had distanced everybody, perhaps more 
 completely than ever before. Its position was its own 
 to maintain or to lose. Its authority in commerce and 
 finance was greater than ever, and much greater than it 
 is now. A merchant at Manchester or Liverpool never 
 dreamed of making an important bargain till he had had 
 the market news of The Times. If he did not actually 
 wait for the paper, he waited for a despatch from 
 London with a summary of its news. The local press 
 gave him little, and that little he did not trust. All 
 over England it was the same. The news of politics, of 
 diplomacy, of finance, of all the great transactions of 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 341 
 
 the world, was given fully and well in The Times, and it 
 was hardly given in any other journal. 
 
 But the pace increased. The conductors of the pro- 
 vincial press, and in Manchester soonest of all, began 
 to perceive how irksome it was to depend on London. 
 London itself began to struggle in its bonds and to 
 consider whether a monopoly of news and influence was 
 any better than any other monopoly. The stir in both 
 places occurred at the same time. Neither the penny 
 papers of London nor the provincial papers grew to 
 their present stature overnight. But there was a new 
 birth, and the growth was to follow. 
 
 Mr. Walter had, I think, ample opportunity to pro- 
 tect himself against competition. He had energy, but 
 he had not in any marked degree alertness of mind. 
 He allowed himself not to be passed but to be ap- 
 proached in the race. He would not admit that there 
 was a race. He disdained the idea of competition. 
 The position to which his paper had attained had be- 
 come, in his mind, a part of the order of the universe. 
 It was astronomical, and revolved in obedience to fixed 
 laws. Once he was asked whether he was aware how 
 much The Daily Telegra/ph was gaining in circulation 
 and popularity. ' Sir,' was Mr. Walter's answer, ' I do 
 not know of the existence of The Daily Telegraph? 
 It was magnificent, but it was not journalism. 
 
 He might have said a very different thing. He 
 might well at that time have said to himself, 'I will 
 allow no paper but The Times to print the news.' He 
 could almost have made that good, if not quite. In 
 prestige, in resources, in wealth, in opportunities, in the 
 goodwill and in the interest of those who had news to 
 give, he stood alone. To this day a correspondent of 
 The Times has an advantage. It is worth far more to a 
 
342 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 statesman or a financier that the intelligence of which 
 he wishes the public to be in possession should appear 
 in the leading journal than in all others put together. 
 
 This is true all over the Continent. I have seen 
 something of it in the great capitals; especially in 
 Berlin and in Paris. The renowned representative of 
 TTie Times in Paris, M. de Blowitz, ranks with an 
 Ambassador — he is an Ambassador, and there are few 
 diplomatists so able as he in the business of diplomacy, 
 and in the multifarious affairs with which an Ambas- 
 sador has to concern himself. His supremacy is due 
 partly to his extraordinary abilities and experience, 
 partly to the prestige of the journal he serves. He has 
 done immense service to that journal, and he at least is 
 modem and does not shrink from the methods of the 
 New Journalism. In Berlin the whole arrangements 
 for the non-German press of the whole world were left 
 in the hands of The Times representative. In neither 
 capital could either man have been and done what he 
 was and what he did except for The Times. 
 
 Judge then, by what survives, of what has gone and 
 what Mr. Walter allowed to slip through his fingers. 
 K he had started the early newspaper-train to the 
 provinces in time, he would have retarded, if he had 
 not paralysed, the growth of the provincial press. Tlie 
 Manchester Guardian, as it is to-day, might never have 
 come into being, — and it is the ablest penny paper in 
 England, not excepting any one of those in London. 
 The one nearest to it is The Standard. I am not 
 saying that it would have been for the interest of the 
 public, and especially of the provinces, that this and 
 the half-dozen other leading provincial journals should 
 have been stifled or overshadowed. It is the interest 
 of The Times only that I am considering. So of the 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 343 
 
 London penny papers. It might be a public mis- 
 fortune were they less powerful than they are. They 
 remain one and all inferior to The Times, but they 
 have been allowed to improve opportunities which their 
 great predecessor neglected, and to present themselves 
 as competitors where competition there was aforetime 
 none. 
 
 Probably the very completeness of the triumph in 
 the Crimea brought disaster to T%e Times in the 
 Franco-German war of 1870. Mr. Russell's success had 
 been won not so much by rapidity in transmitting news 
 as by his masterly handling of the questions growing 
 out of the maladministration of the British army in the 
 Crimea, and at the War Office and Horse Guards in 
 London. Mr. Russell and his chiefs between them 
 reformed, not to say revolutionised, the Quartermaster's 
 department and other departments also. Nor was there 
 any narrative of military movements and of battles 
 comparable to Mr. Russell's. In 1870 all was changed. 
 No British army was in the field. The struggle was 
 Continental ; on a scale and at a pace before unknown. 
 The English public watched it breathless. What they 
 wanted was news, early, full, trustworthy. They got, 
 in the course of events, pretty full and trustworthy 
 news in Mr. Walter's journal, but almost never early 
 news. He was outstripped from the start and he never 
 caught up. I have told elsewhere the story of the 
 alliance between The Daily News and The Tribune, and 
 how it was that this alliance put The Daily News for a 
 time, and so far as war news was concerned, at the head 
 of the English press. The Times was beaten and all 
 other English papers were beaten by American enter- 
 prise. It was America which showed them the way, 
 and an American journal which first in Europe used the 
 
344 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 telegraph on a great scale, and for the transmission not 
 of brief despatches merely but of war correspondence in 
 bulk. The Times was driven to copy from The Daily 
 News the very despatches which The Tribune supplied. 
 The primacy of the leading journal in the collection of 
 war news was challenged and overthrown. 
 
 For these failures Mr. Walter must be held respon- 
 sible, as must the final authority in all cases where 
 organisation fails to defeat a rival organisation. Yet 
 Mr. Walter had this excuse and this justification. 
 He continued to supply as good intelligence as the 
 majority of the public, or of his public, cared for. 
 The appetite for early news had to be created as well 
 as supplied, nor is there to this day in England that 
 feverish thirst for mere novelty which prevails in 
 America and has had so singular an influence upon 
 American journalism. The leading journal, after its 
 defeat in 1870, remained the leading journal, just as it 
 did years later, after its Pamell catastrophe. Its editors 
 are perfectly right in saying that it is still the leading 
 journal. Mr. Walter's contributions to its prosperity 
 and to the continuousness of its authority were of the 
 very highest importance. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that he neglected its material 
 improvement. He built the spacious offices which it 
 now occupies. He adopted the press which is called 
 after him ; a much better press than those which pre- 
 ceded it ; and so well satisfied with it was he that he 
 clung to it long after other presses had surpassed it. 
 He perfected the organisation of the office. Morally 
 and intellectually he kept the standard high. The one 
 point in which he allowed his prejudices, or I will say 
 his personal predilections, to outweigh public considera- 
 tions was with reference to the Church of England. He 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 345 
 
 was pre-eminently a Churchman — as pre-eminently as 
 Mr. Gladstone himself. He put the Church before all ; 
 perhaps before religion itself. You saw it in the volu- 
 minousness of the reports of Church Congresses and of 
 Convocations, and in the editorial treatment of ques- 
 tions touching the Establishment. You saw it also in 
 his imsympathetic demeanour to Nonconformists, and 
 still more to the Jews. If I had time there were much 
 to be said on the Jewish side of journalism and of great 
 affairs, and on the detriment which Mr. Walter's atti- 
 tude to the Hebrew race caused to his paper. But I 
 pass from that. 
 
 I must pass also with but a word over Mr. Walter's 
 life outside journalism. Except on the personal side it 
 is not very important. He was long in Parliament, and 
 was a good member of Parliament. But his influence as 
 a legislator could not be dissociated from his influence 
 as a journalist, except by refusing, as he steadfastly did, 
 to allow the conductor of The Times to be identified 
 with the representative in the House of Commons. He 
 was in other respects a fine example of what it is still 
 thought permissible in this country to describe as an 
 English gentleman. He was simple, upright, unbend- 
 ing in matters of principle and of duty ; a good land- 
 lord, a good neighbour, a good member of the great 
 community in which he was so great a personage. 
 
 Men thought him cold. He was not cold, but he was 
 extremely reserved, except among those with whom he 
 was intimate. That is not a point on which I can 
 speak personally. My acquaintance with him was never 
 intimate. But I know those who knew him intimately. 
 I was staying not long since in a house where he had 
 often been a guest, and where he felt at home. He was, 
 in such circumstances, dehghtful. He did unbend. He 
 
346 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 delighted in children and in dogs. He had a playful- 
 ness of nature, repressed but genuine and charming; 
 and a heart of gold for his friends. He had learning 
 and refinement and a love of art; while for nature 
 he had an affection which expressed itself in his park 
 and gardens ; and both art and nature together in the 
 splendours of the place he created. There, at Bear- 
 wood, he died, and he leaves few men behind him who 
 had a loftier conception of duty, or a character moulded 
 of elements more solid or more indissolubly essential to 
 the substance of a manly nature. 
 
 ' His one most striking characteristic,' writes a friend 
 who knew Mr. John Walter intimately, ' was his abso- 
 lute rectitude. It was no rule of life with him, but 
 something that was as ingrained in his nature as the 
 necessity of breathing.' 
 
 When you consider that this was true of a man who 
 all his life long had the absolute control of a great 
 paper, it becomes still more striking. He was, of course, 
 beset by the usual temptations of journalism. The 
 possession of absolute power, whether in journalism or 
 otherwise, begets in most men the temptation to use it. 
 It is one thing to use it for its own sake or for the 
 pleasure of using it ; another to use it for the gratifi- 
 cation of ambitious desires, or in any selfish way. That 
 was not Mr. Walter's way. 
 
 ' I do not think,' continues his friend, ' that he ever 
 asked himself what is right and what is wrong, any 
 more than we ask ourselves which foot we shall put 
 forward first when we start for a walk.' That is an 
 estimate of character which would have delighted Emer- 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 347 
 
 son. It was ever Emerson's view that beauty of nature 
 is a more admirable thing than that virtue which comes 
 from effort. It is better for a man to be himself than 
 to conquer himself ; provided that the love of virtue, 
 or of truth, or of the spiritual life, or of charity towards 
 others, be natural to him. Effort implies a struggle 
 with the natural man, and is necessary only when he 
 goes naturally wrong and not right 
 
 'Some people,' he goes on, 'show a contempt for 
 meanness. He never did, for he seemed never to see it. 
 That a man should act from a low motive seemed never 
 to occur to him, and when he came across such a man 
 he called him a " victim of immeasurable folly," or de- 
 scribed him as insane.' The eulogy is so sweeping that 
 again one has to remember that it is bestowed on a man 
 who had to face the facts of daily life all his life long ; 
 whose intercourse with others was constant and active ; 
 and who was concerned with the practical realities of a 
 profession which more than any other perhaps is thought 
 to foster cjmical views of men and things. He must 
 have been brought often in contact with people who 
 wanted to use him and his paper. He had to repel 
 such attempts. So frequent are they on every great 
 journal, and I suppose on The Times most of all, that 
 he who is exposed to them may be excused if such 
 experiences lower his estimate of human nature. If, on 
 the other hand, they do not lower it, how high must be 
 his ideal and how firm his faith ! 
 
 The fortunes of the Walter family were, of course, 
 bound up with The Times, yet his attitude to the 
 paper was never that of a man who regarded it merely 
 as a source of income. He never even thought of it as 
 a money-making machine, primarily. His main interest 
 in the paper was of a different kind. In the world of 
 
348 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 business, and especially in America, where business fills 
 a larger part of life than anywhere else in the world, 
 such statements may provoke scepticism. I have nothing 
 to say to the sceptics. They must take their own views. 
 All I can say is that I know what I am telling you to 
 be true. It was said of him in the office that he was 
 never known to make an inquiry as to financial results. 
 His dividends were paid into his bankers. He knew, 
 of course, what they were, and whether they were above 
 or below the average. But he was never known to 
 express the least satisfaction over a good year, or the 
 least disappointment when the yield was less than usual. 
 If he showed an interest in details, it would be as a 
 recognition of the energy of those about him, though, 
 as you will see presently, it was not his way to praise 
 freely, or hardly to praise at all. He might see signs 
 of prosperity — for instance, a great number of columns 
 of advertising or a whole page advertisement. If he 
 commented on it, he did it out of kindliness. The 
 price he never asked. Everybody who knows anything 
 of London journalism knows that of recent years there 
 have been very sweeping changes and reforms in the 
 administration of the paper. At the end of the first 
 year of this new administration, an elaborate compara- 
 tive table was drawn up, showing large economies and 
 other agreeable results which he might have been ex- 
 pected to study closely. He glanced at it, said, ' Yes, 
 very creditable,' handed it back, and began talking of 
 something else. 
 
 The staiF might be supposed to think they got scant 
 recognition, but they knew the contrary. If they 
 missed the direct commendation which men who have 
 done their best sometimes like and occasionally get, 
 they were perfectly aware what he thought. The men 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 349 
 
 who earned his confidence knew they had earned it. 
 To^ him praise was unnecessary. He was ready to 
 believe that every man did his best. He gave others 
 credit for the motives which actuated himself. He 
 expected no praise; he hardly felt that others might 
 expect it or like it. The doing one's whole duty was, in 
 his mind, a matter of absolute obligation, and of general 
 custom. Why should it be mentioned ? Perhaps there 
 are reasons for mentioning it, but they are fewer when, 
 with a man like Mr. Walter, the thing is understood 
 without words. His attitude was, at any rate, sufficient 
 to win him the absolute devotion of those who worked 
 with him on the paper. The devotion extended to all 
 departments, mechanical as well as editorial. The 
 compositors were devoted to him, and the pressmen; 
 the very classes of working-men whom the trade-unions 
 represent as victims of a huge tyranny. But the whole 
 printing trade knew that printers were better oiF in this 
 than in any other office in the country. 
 
 Of Mr. Walter's extreme simplicity of character I 
 believe I said something in a former letter. It did not 
 prevent him from living with magnificence. Bear- 
 wood, which he built, used to be called the second place 
 in point of splendour in Berkshire ; Windsor Castle 
 being the first. That, of itself, would have given him 
 importance, since in England to be the possessor of a 
 great house and estate in the country is to be a con- 
 siderable personage. A great fortime in the City or 
 in business of any kind confers no similar distinction. 
 Yet Mr. Walter never could understand why, either as 
 owner of Bearwood or as owner of The Times or as 
 both, he should be an object of interest to the public, 
 or why anybody should want to know more of his 
 opinions than they could collect from the columns of his 
 
350 STUDIES OP MEN 
 
 paper. He was amused by the fuss people made about 
 his influence. That any one should try to interview 
 him struck him as comical, though he never let it 
 appear in that light to the would-be interviewer who 
 probably went away with the feeling that he had been 
 dismissed unsatisfied by a very dignified old gentleman. 
 The very dignified old gentleman was, meantime, dis- 
 coursing to his friends on the absurdity of interviewing 
 ' every Tom, Dick, or Harry.' Probably he did not 
 like interviewing as a practice. It belongs to the New 
 Journalism ; to which he steadfastly preferred the old. 
 There are others still of his mind. 
 
 Americans who have a great regard for the Queen — 
 all Americans, that is — may be surprised to hear that 
 one of Mr. Walter's unsatisfied ambitions, perhaps the 
 only one, was to be received by the Queen. He said : 
 ' I have known nearly all her Ministers, I have a very 
 profound respect for her as a good woman, and I should 
 like before I die to have five minutes' talk with her.' I 
 cannot understand why he should not have had unless 
 he were unwilling to take the necessary steps. Was 
 it because he was regarded at Windsor as a newspaper 
 man.f" 
 
 There is, or was, an idea in America that The Times 
 keeps a strict watch on its goodwill to the United 
 States, and strictly represses all unguarded and expres- 
 sive expressions of it. That may have been true enough 
 in other days. Yet Mr. Walter, personally, had an 
 unmistakable liking for America and Americans. He 
 cherished the memory of his visits to the United States, 
 There, as here, he refrained from showing how much 
 he felt. I remember meeting him for the first time 
 in Washington, I think in 1866, and coming away with 
 the impression that he was extremely reserved, or even 
 
MR JOHN WALTER 361 
 
 frigid, in manner. A good many Americans had been 
 asked to meet him at Mr. Forney's one evening. Some 
 of them were men of distinction. Mr. Schuyler Colfax 
 was one. He was at that time a person of distinc- 
 tion, and Speaker of the House, and it was thought 
 necessary he should make a speech. The speech was 
 of the kind then, and perhaps still, known as spread- 
 eagle; had, I thought, already done duty on some 
 Indiana platform for the delectation of Mr. Colfax's 
 constituents. Mr. Walter's face was not, as a rule, 
 remarkable for flexibility of expression, but nobody 
 could doubt what it expressed on that occasion. This 
 sudden ebullition of campaign oratory stiffened the 
 Englishman ; he became still more reserved in manner, 
 as if aware that his face had already betrayed him, 
 and the evening ended in constraint. Yet his friends 
 thought he always unbent to Americans more than to 
 his own countrymen. There was at one time a notion 
 in Printing House Square — I mean the London one — 
 that an American could get anything out of him, and 
 that even some of those awful mysteries of The Times 
 oflBce which in London are impenetrable had somehow 
 become matter of gossip in ' the States.' If there ever 
 were revelations they certainly do not seem to have 
 done much harm. 
 
 Mr. Walter's generosity was proverbial in his life- 
 time ; his death has made it still better known. I hear 
 of scores of letters from men whom he had befriended. 
 None knew of it but the men themselves, and now that 
 he is gone they unburden themselves of tributes to him. 
 He gave money, he gave advice, he gave time, and he 
 gave sympathy ; outside as well as inside the oflice 
 where, during generations, the wise liberality of the 
 Walter family has been stereotyped into a custom. 
 
352 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 He did not always know when to stop giving, any 
 more than does the United States Government in the 
 matter of pensions to its soldiers even unto the third 
 and fourth generation, and for service not always 
 soldierly or military. There was once made to him 
 what he called a most impertinent request to continue 
 to a son a pension which had been paid for twenty- 
 three years to the widow of a man who had himself 
 been a pensioner for seven years before. He showed at 
 length, as he told the story, how it would be contrary 
 to all economical laws, and almost contrary to morality, 
 to continue it. ' Of course you refused,' said his friend. 
 He might have said nothing, but he was incapable of 
 compromising with the truth even by silence. Blush- 
 ing as if he were confessing a crime, he said in his 
 sternest tones, 'Most improperly I acceded to his 
 request.' 
 
 With a glimpse of one other side of Mr. Walter's 
 character, I end these desultory reminiscences. There 
 was a question about a certain appointment on the 
 staff of the paper, and he was consulted. The appli- 
 cants numbered over seventy. Three names out of the 
 seventy were submitted to him. One had the best 
 certificates, but it appeared that he was of near kin to 
 a man who had done Mr. Walter some wrong. He was 
 asked which of the other two he preferred. He could 
 not understand why his choice should be limited to the 
 others. ' The best man must of course be appointed,' 
 he said, and he was. That his relationship to an enemy 
 should prevent this candidate's appointment never 
 entered Mr. Walter's mind. There was no connection 
 between the two things. He was incapable of visiting 
 upon the children the sins of the fathers. It was 
 thought in the office rather creditable that private 
 
MR. JOHN WALTER 363 
 
 reasons should not be allowed to influence him against 
 the selection of the best man. That, again, would pro- 
 bably have been to Mr. Walter an unintelligible idea. 
 If these are not traits of a high character, what are ? 
 He may or may not have been a great man, but on his 
 tombstone might be inscribed the testimony of one who 
 was intimate with him : ' He was the best man I ever 
 knew.' It is an ample eulogy, and one that may well 
 endear his memory to those who care for loyalty of 
 nature. 
 
FRANCIS MAGNARD 
 
 [LONDON, NOVEMBER 1 894] 
 
 M. Francis Magnard who died on Sunday was, on 
 the whole, the first journalist of France. He was 
 editor of the Figaro, which must be called, on the 
 whole, the first journal of France, though that descrip- 
 tion of it requires a world of explanation in order to 
 make it intelligible abroad and not misleading. The 
 man and the newspaper have to be considered together. 
 He was a journalist and nothing else, but he was one 
 of the few journalists who may be said to contradict 
 the rather C)Tiical eulogy of Thiers upon journalism : 
 that it was a very good profession if you got out of it 
 in time. Magnard, who began life in some small civil 
 service bureau, drifted early into newspaper writing. 
 He was born in 1837. His connection with the Figaro 
 dates from 1863 ; preceded, as usual, by experiments 
 on other papers. But his relations of one kind or 
 another with the journal of M. de Villemessant were 
 never broken after they had once begun ; they lasted 
 thirty-one years. Nominally, he was since 1879 joint 
 editor with M. de Rodays and M. Perivier who survive 
 him. Actually, he controlled the paper. His was the 
 guiding and deciding mind. His death may or may 
 not mark a crisis in the fortunes of the journal. Men 
 come and go. The great enterprises which they direct 
 
 354 
 
FRANCIS MAGNARD 365 
 
 do not necessarily go with them, nor suffer so much as 
 might be expected by their departure. 
 
 Magnard was one of those rare journalists who 
 could both edit and write, and do both supremely well. 
 How many such are there in any country at any time ? 
 Even in New York they are not numerous. Mr. Dana 
 is one, and it might not be difficult to draw a parallel 
 between Mr. Dana and M. Magnard. The two men 
 had a great deal in common ; including the cool 
 cynicism which enabled Mr. Dana to support Mr. Hill, 
 and M. Magnard to be successively the advocate of 
 Imperialism, of the Legitimists, of the Orleanists, and 
 finally of the Republic. Both were scholars, both had 
 that large foundation of knowledge which again, if not 
 absolutely rare, is not held to be an indispensable con- 
 dition of success at the editor's desk, or the writer's. 
 Of the two great newspaper editors of the last genera- 
 tion, one in Europe, one in America, it might not be 
 safe to affirm that either had the all-round excellence 
 of M. Magnard. Mr. Delane, incomparably the first 
 editor in all Europe, never wrote an editorial article. 
 Mr. Horace Greeley, whose pen ran on a level with 
 more minds than that of any other man in America, 
 had less executive and administrative ability than many 
 editors far inferior to him in other respects. It is 
 therefore no light eulogy to say of M. Magnard that in 
 both the two great departments of what we should 
 like to consider a great profession he was excellent, 
 and that, taking the two together, he had no rival in 
 his own country. 
 
 His genius as a writer was of a very unusual kind. 
 It was in truth unique, and the best proof of it is that 
 a word had to be coined to express it ; or two words. 
 His proper name was turned into a common noun, and 
 
356 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ''faire un magnard ' meant to do an article like his. And 
 the verb ' magnarder '' meant the same thing. It de- 
 noted more often the attempt to do it than any marked 
 success on the part of his disciples or imitators. He 
 was the inventor of the article, and though he did not 
 patent it he kept the secret to himself. A ' magnard ' 
 was a short editorial on the topic of the day. His 
 genius shone equally in his choice of his topic and in 
 his method of treating it. He wrote never more than 
 one daily, and never a long one. I have read hundreds 
 of them, or thousands. I cannot recall one which ex- 
 ceeded half a column, printed in very large type and 
 signed F. M. 
 
 He had the gift, again a rare gift, of concision ; and 
 not merely of concision. It is easy to be brief, but to 
 be brief and yet to say all that needs saying on a large 
 subject, and to say it so that everybody will read, and 
 perhaps even remember, — that is not easy. There was 
 not in all France any writing read daily by so many 
 people as M. Magnard's ten lines or half-column on 
 politics, or social topics, or on whatever was the one 
 subject about which he well knew everybody would 
 want to read something next morning. There are 
 always in the Debats, in the Temps, and in many 
 another Paris paper, articles written with extraordinary 
 ability, and in admirable literary form. So were there 
 by other writers in the Figaro ; articles de Jbrvd, as 
 they are called. On the whole, they surpass, as mere 
 pieces of literature, the best writing in the best journals 
 of all other countries. And M. Magnard's few lines 
 surpassed all these. 
 
 In shrewdness, in good sense, in pithiness, often in 
 wit, and almost always in that quality which the French 
 call spirituel, and for which the languages of England 
 
FRANCIS MAGNARD 367 
 
 and America have no adequate word, these articles were 
 the best in the French press. M. Magnard thought 
 Avith precision, and expressed himself in that symmetri- 
 cal and balanced prose of which the French are the 
 greatest masters in the world. He divined what others 
 thought, and he held it to be his business as a journalist 
 to express what others thought rather than what he 
 himself thought. Whether he had any very settled 
 principles or profound convictions may be a question. 
 If he had, they were, to say the least, opportunist. 
 The stuff of a martyr was not in him, nor is there much 
 call for that high trait in the daily practice of news- 
 paper-making. He had to write what people would 
 read, and to put into this brief and telling form 
 opinions which they would recognise as their own. 
 
 That was his business as both editor and editorial 
 writer. He wrote as if at his ease and on good terms 
 with his readers and with the world in general. He 
 knew what men were saying on the boulevards and in 
 the cafes. It may seem an easy kind of knowledge to 
 acquire. It is in truth very difficult to acquire or to 
 use. Many an editor has the raw material of such 
 knowledge brought him by his reporters, and through 
 the thousand channels which lead to his sanctum, and 
 when he has got it does not know how to use it. 
 Magnard did. That was what made the Figaro in- 
 valuable to the student of French affairs and of French 
 public opinion. Magnard presented you each morning 
 with the requisite quantity of political pemmican. 
 Read twenty other papers and you did not know so well 
 the direction and force of the currents of opinion on 
 which for that day depended the fate of a Ministry, or 
 the success of a loan, or the result of an election. 
 
 Probably M. Magnard was, in fact, a Conservative, 
 
358 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 but a Conservative with a mind wide open to new ideas, 
 and with no constitutional dislike to them, or at least to 
 consider them. Hence it was that though, under M. de 
 Villemessant's control and then under his, the Figaro 
 was long Conservative under one flag or another, he 
 was all the while preparing the way for its frank accept- 
 ance of the Republic. Of the Republic he liked 
 neither the men nor the ideas, but he conquered what 
 repugnance he had and accepted both, or accepted 
 them without conquering his repugnance. He fought 
 for Conservatism in the royalist sense so long as it had 
 a chance. He certainly was one of the first on that 
 side to see that its chance was gone. Then he made 
 it his business to prepare the minds of his readers for 
 the Conservative Republic. Beyond that he never 
 went. He took no plunge into Radicalism, still less 
 into Socialism. He was content to survey those seismic 
 phenomena from the brink, or from the edge of the 
 crater. 
 
 But when he had convinced himself that the day of 
 mere reaction and mere sulking and mere dreaming was 
 past, he entered, probably for the first time in his life, 
 upon a missionary task. He set about converting his 
 readers. To have preached at them would have been 
 neither to his taste nor to theirs, and would have injured 
 his paper without advancing his cause. But he gently 
 instilled into the minds of his public certain ideas of 
 politics not remote from those to which they had been 
 accustomed, nor apparently hostile. He left these 
 ideas to fertilise. There was no hurry, no forcing. 
 The process went on for years. Each year the idea 
 became a little more definite. With infinite tact and 
 address and patience and with the most charming air 
 of indifference, of scepticism, of expressing others' 
 
FRANCIS MAGNARD 359 
 
 opinions and not his own, of accepting only the inevit- 
 able, and even that not under compulsion, he brought 
 round his journal to the point where he had long per- 
 ceived it could alone find safe footing and keep its hold 
 permanently on the public. Thus it was that the 
 Figaro became Republican, and softly drew its public 
 along the same difficult road to this end. He ren- 
 dered immense service to the Republic, and he proved 
 himself the most consummate French diplomatist of 
 his day. 
 
 The journal which M. de Villemessant founded as a 
 weekly, transformed into a daily, and handed on to M. 
 Magnard, would not seem a good newspaper to the able 
 editors of Chicago or Denver ; perhaps not even in New 
 York. It never had much of what in America is under- 
 stood by news. That is because the Frenchman and 
 the American mean difierent things by the word news. 
 What the American means we know. What the 
 Frenchman means may be seen by a glance at the 
 columns of the Figaro. A column or two of ' Echos,' 
 mostly personal and other local news of Paris ; a column 
 of ' NouveUes Diverses f half a column, often less, of 
 telegrams from abroad ; a money article, scraps of news 
 from the provinces, a ' Courier des Theatres,' from one 
 to two columns, a racing chronicle of nearly the same 
 length, scraps of other sport, sometimes an analysis of 
 other papers, which was a specialty with M. Magnard. 
 These are pretty much all the contents that relate to 
 news. Add to them the leading article, often on art 
 or a book, or a sketch of a celebrity, or an interview ; 
 other occasional articles, sometimes a leader on foreign 
 aiFairs, and always a feuilleton, and you have the Figaro. 
 There would be on great occasions, like the death of 
 the Czar, a long telegram from some foreign capital. 
 
360 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Chicago or Denver would not, as I said, think much of 
 this, yet they might look more respectfully upon it if 
 they knew that M. Magnard had the skill to make the 
 paper which contained it pay $300,000 a year to its 
 shareholders. That is, I presume, . a sufficient testi- 
 mony to his merits as editor, the more so as he rigidly 
 kept down the advertising ; making up by high prices 
 for the narrowness of the space he would grant. I 
 presume $1 25 a line would be considered high even in 
 New York. 
 
 Personally, M. Magnard was amiable, quiet, agree- 
 able, cultivated, kindly, popular. He was a great 
 reader, and his reading consisted mostly of the classics. 
 Perhaps Chicago and Denver will reflect a moment on 
 that. The most successful and competent French 
 journalist of his time really thought that a constant 
 perusal of the great classics was the best preparation 
 for his work in journalism. From them he drew his 
 inspiration ; they taught him to write ; they were his 
 companions by day and by night. He had application 
 and a prodigious memory ; courage also, and a kind of 
 quality which made men loyal to him ; probably because 
 he was loyal to them. 
 
 Since his death he has been praised for many quali- 
 ties which he did not possess. It is a kindly feeling 
 which leads men into vague panegyrics upon the dead, 
 but of little avail. The man as he was — that is always 
 attractive. Heroism he had in the endurance of great 
 pain, but of heroism in the conduct of his journal little 
 or none. Nor is journalism as a rule a heroic business. 
 One of his colleagues extols his love of truth, his 
 probity, his passion for justice, his independence, his 
 loftiness of character. These must be taken as personal 
 tributes. M. Magnard may have had all these traits 
 
FRANCIS MAGNARD 361 
 
 in private life and in his personal relations. They were 
 not those which he found it useful to display most 
 frequently in the paper he edited. It is better to say 
 frankly that he lifted that paper to as high a level as its 
 public would permit ; and there remained. 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 [new YORK, JANUARY 1 895] 
 
 Lord Randolph's sun goes down in a sky all clouds and 
 gloom ; the brilliancy of his noonday obscured, perhaps 
 half forgotten. It is likely in such circumstances that 
 less than justice will be done him, far less. He may 
 be classed among the men who have failed, and to 
 those contemporaneous opinion is apt to be pitiless. 
 The more reason why an attempt should be made by 
 those who knew him and knew his rare qualities to 
 speak of him as he really was — to do him that justice 
 which the majority may deny him. He is almost 
 equally interesting on the political and personal sides. 
 His public career has been unique, and there was 
 nobody like him in private life. I can but touch on 
 the salient features. There is more to be said about 
 Lord Randolph than can be said in the crowded columns 
 of a newspaper. I will waste no space on well-known 
 facts or on matters likely to come out otherwise. And 
 first a word or two on some incidents of his public life. 
 Those who call his public life a failure judge by 
 results merely ; seldom a scientific method. K we 
 study a man, the real question is what kind of a man 
 was he, not merely what did circumstances permit him 
 to accomplish. They say he was unbalanced. It is 
 
LORB RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 363 
 
 true enough in a sense, and its truth makes his success 
 the more wonderful. Let us take the House of 
 Commons. If there be a Legislative body in the 
 world where balance, judgment, tact, discretion, and 
 many other such endowments are essential to success, 
 the House of Commons is that body. Lord Randolph 
 was a member of it for twenty years. He was one of 
 its foremost members for more than half that time. 
 He was its leader for the last six months of 1886. The 
 oldest member of that House is Mr. Charles Villiers, 
 who has sat in it without a break since 1835 and is 
 known as its Father ; one of the Anti-Corn Law leaders 
 in company with Cobden and Bright ; a man of singu- 
 larly acute, penetrating, judicial mind. Nobody's 
 opinion is worth more, and nobody has had more 
 experience of the House. He said of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill — I am quoting what he said to me — ^that 
 during his acquaintance with the House, then of more 
 than half a century, he had known no man who, in 
 the qualities essential to leadership of the House, had 
 surpassed Lord Randolph. Think what that means. 
 Mr. Villiers's observation includes Peel, Palmerston, 
 Lord John Russell, Disraeli, Mr. Gladstone. All these 
 were leaders of the House. Each was regarded in his 
 own day as the greatest of its leaders. They are names 
 which ring in the ear of the world. They were 
 tremendous forces in English parliamentary life. And 
 the most competent parliamentary observer puts Lord 
 Randolph as leader on a level with the best of them. 
 
 I once quoted Mr. Villiers to a Liberal member, now 
 living, a Radical Liberal ; he too a man of penetration 
 and judgment. ' It is perfectly true,' he said. ' No- 
 body knows it better than we who sat opposite him, 
 opposed him, lay in wait for him, and would have upset 
 
364 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 him if we could. There never, probably, was a House 
 more difficult to lead than the House as it was from July 
 to December 1886. Randolph led it without a mistake. 
 His own party was divided. He asserted and established 
 his authority. The political situation was full of pit- 
 falls. He walked unerringly amid them all.' And he 
 went on at great length to explain how it was that 
 Lord Randolph showed himself master of his party and 
 of the House, and of the art of guiding it whitherso- 
 ever he would. 
 
 And yet, at the end of the period illuminated by his 
 consummate ability, came the mistake which closed his 
 public career. If you put the two together, you may 
 begin to have some notion how and why it was that all 
 these brilliant gifts were doomed to be of so little last- 
 ing service to their possessor and to the public. It was 
 in December 1886 that he wrote the letter to Lord 
 Salisbury which has always been called a letter of 
 resignation. Some day it will be published in full 
 and the full history of it will be known ; and of the 
 causes which led to the writing of it. I think I know 
 the story pretty well but it is much too long to tell 
 here, and the details of it belong to that English 
 political history which the American public reads with 
 interest when they have long ceased to be of immediate 
 importance. The Greville of the future will give them 
 — perhaps Sir Henry Calcraft. But there are two or 
 three things to be said. That letter, written and dated 
 from Windsor Castle, was not meant as a letter of re- 
 signation. It was meant as a hint, perhaps as a menace, 
 of resignation. But the old Obadiah — perhaps you 
 remember the music-hall song of that day — was a more 
 cunning hand than the young Obadiah. He saw that 
 the young Obadiah had given himself away ; that the 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 366 
 
 letter could be construed as one of absolute withdrawal 
 from the Ministry. Personally, Lord Salisbury was 
 fond of his young rival. His reply began, ' My dear 
 Randolph.' Politically, he thought him a mistake or 
 a danger. Their relations as Leader of the Party and 
 Leader of the House of Commons had long been 
 strained. Their conceptions of public duty were differ- 
 ent. They did not get on together. Lord Salisbury, to 
 tell the plain truth, jumped at the chance which his Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer gave him, and gravely accepted 
 a resignation which had never been offered. When Lord 
 Randolph saw his error it was too late to repair it. 
 
 How came he to make it ? Some of the causes are 
 on the surface, some lie deep in his character. Lord 
 Randolph took, rightly, a high view of his duties as 
 Leader of the House of Commons. He held that the 
 House could only be well led by a Minister in full 
 possession of the policy of his chief, and with full 
 knowledge of what the Prime Minister was doing out- 
 side the House. Lord Salisbury was not only Prime 
 Minister. He really directed the Foreign Office, of 
 which, not long after, he became titular head while 
 retaining his place as Prime Minister. He cared more 
 for Foreign Affairs than for anything else. He did 
 not see why Lord Randolph should also care. He 
 hated interference or inquiry. He thought it the 
 duty of the Leader of the House of Commons to lead 
 and have done with it, and not to be always asking 
 for interviews with his chief, and wanting to know 
 things, and advising, and explaining to the Prime 
 Minister in the Lords what could and what could not 
 be done in the Commons. Randolph, he said, got on 
 his nerves. He recognised his value but wanted him 
 out of the way. 
 
366 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Besides, the contentions in the Cabinet vexed the 
 head of that august body. Lord Randolph, there as 
 elsewhere, was bent on having his own way and not 
 always over-particular how he got it. A Cabinet con- 
 flict was the immediate occasion of the resignation 
 crisis ; a dispute between Lord Randolph as Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer and Lord George Hamilton as First 
 Lord of the Admiralty. Lord George drew the Naval 
 Estimates in a form to which Lord Randolph would 
 not agree. Like all Chancellors of the Exchequer he 
 was in his official capacity stingy ; curiously unlike the 
 Lord Randolph of private life. Ultimately, the sum 
 in dispute between them did not exceed ^£"600,000, 
 but on this the Chancellor wrote his letter. That 
 was the pretext. Really, it was a struggle who was 
 to be master in the Cabinet, Lord Randolph or 
 Lord Salisbury. 
 
 That was a point which had to be settled, and there 
 it is that the question of character comes in. The 
 young Leader of the House could ill brook any master. 
 He knew his own worth. He was by nature a little 
 arbitrary, sometimes arrogant, always wilful, and per- 
 haps prone to violent courses. He believed himself 
 indispensable. That was matter of calculation, not of 
 temperament merely. He was very capable of calcula- 
 tion and of estimating political forces accurately. He 
 had surveyed the field. There was not in the Conser- 
 vative party any man then able to replace him in both 
 the offices he held. He looked upon Mr. W. H. Smith 
 as a joke. Smith and Cross were Marshall and Snel- 
 grove — a firm of Oxford Street drapers — and the only 
 thing, said the young aristocrat in his biting way, 
 which had ever puzzled him was to determine which was 
 Marshall and, which was Snelgrove. It was possible 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 367 
 
 Smith might be made Leader, though he would be le- 
 ceived with derision, but who would be Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer ? 
 
 There was but one mistake in this calculation, but it 
 was fatal. Lord Randolph forgot to look outside the 
 ranks of his own party. He forgot Mr. Goschen, then 
 a Liberal Unionist ; one of the eminent men whom Mr. 
 Gladstone had driven out of the party in order to take 
 up Home Rule. Forgetting Mr. Goschen and despising 
 Mr. Smith, he counted on the refusal of his suggestion 
 of resignation, on remaining in the Cabinet, on having 
 his own way about Naval Estimates and other things, 
 on becoming the real dictator of the Cabinet while 
 leaving Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. Mr.Goschen's 
 acceptance of office brought this well-thought-out 
 scheme to grief and utter wreck. Lord Randolph 
 went into political exile, and in political exile he re- 
 mained till his death. Among his friends and with 
 the public, the question of his return to office was 
 often mooted. Lord Salisbury was inflexible. The 
 rumour of the day imputed to him a savage remark 
 when one of his late colleague's friends opened negotia- 
 tions for his recall. ' If I have had a wen cut out of 
 my arm, do you think I want it to grow again ? ' We 
 may be permitted to hope that he never said this. He 
 was commonly believed to have said it ; and the more 
 readily believed because it happened that he did in fact 
 submit to such an operation about that time ; in the 
 literal and physical, not metaphorical, sense. 
 
 Lord Randolph's friends always talked of his resigna- 
 tion as one of those impulsive indiscretions which he 
 might have avoided, and but for which he would surely 
 have reached the height of his ambition. I fear not. 
 It was a lesson he had to learn, and the learning of it 
 
368 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 cost him his political life, and perhaps in the end his 
 life in this world. He was not born to go well in 
 harness. The conflict with Lord Salisbury had to come. 
 K it had not come then, it would have come later. It 
 was, politically speaking, a life and death struggle. 
 The older man was the stronger and the more sagacious, 
 and had more of the confidence of the party and of 
 the country. Between two such men in such circum- 
 stances the result which actually befell in December 
 '86 would have been inevitable had the duel been post- 
 poned. Lord Salisbury is often called rash. In some 
 respects he is, and there are forces which he under- 
 values and tendencies of which he fails to take account ; 
 prejudices also, and convictions, against which he sets 
 himself wantonly. But the country knows, and his 
 opponents know, that he is a serious politician ; a 
 statesman in the high sense. 
 
 They were never quite sure whether Lord Randolph 
 was. They gave him but a guarded confidence. They 
 thought him brilliant, but erratic ; very able, but 
 sometimes impulsive ; and many doubted whether the 
 convictions which he held, and which he expressed with 
 transcendent force, were permanent or perhaps only 
 transitory. He did not know how to win that trust 
 which is given to men of far less ability ; a trust which 
 comes from the belief in stability of character and of 
 principle. Some of the colleagues on whom he poured 
 out his contempt were more trusted than he was. Some 
 of the men least like him in history were trusted. He 
 was not of the stamp of Lord Althorp, of the present 
 Duke of Devonshire, a man wholly devoid of Lord 
 Randolph's sparkling traits, though his equal and per- 
 haps superior in solid capacity ; in whom the country 
 does believe profoundly, though to read his speeches is 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 369 
 
 not commonly thought an exhilarating pastime. The 
 Duke's speeches are read for instruction, not for epigram 
 or for their imaginative splendour. 
 
 Lord Randolph deserved, I think, more confidence 
 than was given him. He was his own worst enemy 
 in some things. His course through the political heavens 
 was meteoric, not planetary. He puzzled not only the 
 political astronomers, but the ordinary gazer who looks 
 at things as they are. The ordinary person could not 
 feel quite sure where this luminary would next appear. 
 Such are some of the reasons which explain the political 
 eclipse of a man who had held and adorned some of 
 the greatest posts in public life, who had won the 
 admiration of the best judges, who had capacities and 
 qualities possessed by few of his contemporaries, who 
 had in truth a very high order of political genius, who 
 was almost equally admirable in the House and on the 
 platform, who was long the idol of a great public, 
 the champion of a party, the leader of a great Legis- 
 lature, and once the probable Prime Minister of 
 England. 
 
 n 
 While Lord Randolph was a member of the Fourth 
 Party, it was one of his favourite occupations to 'draw' 
 Mr. Gladstone. Others have possessed that power. 
 The Fourth Party had four members in all : the other 
 three being Mr. Arthur Balfour, Sir Henry Drummond 
 Wolff, and Sir John Gorst. Widely different have 
 been their fates. Sir John Gorst has retained some- 
 thing of the guerilla, and, though he held office as 
 Financial Secretary to the Treasury toward the end of 
 the Salisbury Ministry, he has taken excursions into 
 the misty regions of Socialism, and at times played a 
 
 2 a 
 
370 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 lone hand. Sir Henry WolfF is Ambassador at Madrid 
 and out of politics : a great post honourably and 
 brilliantly filled. Mr. Balfour is what we all know; 
 leader of his party in the Commons in succession to 
 his old comrade, and one of the foremost figures in the 
 public life of England. It was Lord Randolph's fate 
 to see himself passed in the race by his most intimate 
 friends ; perhaps as bitter a drop as any in the cup. 
 
 But, as I was saying, it was Lord Randolph who, out 
 of this select band, had the gift, or privilege, or both, 
 of bringing Mr. Gladstone to his feet most often. The 
 young man had studied the old. He knew where to 
 aim his shafts. So impulsive was the Old Parlia- 
 mentary Hand that he had need of all his wariness in 
 debate once he was on his legs. The impulse spent 
 itself in rising. Often he had better have sat still ; but 
 the mistake, if there was one, was never in what he 
 said but in saying anything at all. The spirit of mis- 
 chief was, in Lord Randolph, judiciously kept in check 
 by an exact sense of what was profitable to the party, 
 or to that particular section of it with which he was 
 identified. He had with him, to a certain extent, the 
 sympathies of the House, which was always grateful to 
 anybody who would provide it with sport, and most 
 grateful of all when Mr. Gladstone could be entangled 
 in controversy. The younger and elder men were alike 
 masters of debate, of repartee, and of that dignified 
 courtesy which makes retort most damaging. Mr. 
 Gladstone's manner was his own and none other ever 
 equalled it. Lord Randolph, rude in speech though 
 he might sometimes be, was ever mindful of what was 
 due to himself. He had the bearing of the patrician 
 he was. He was an aristocrat in the good sense. The 
 memory of the many brief encounters between the 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 371 
 
 two wiU live long in the House. It is a cherished 
 tradition. 
 
 I owe to Lord Randolph himself an account of his 
 one personal interview with Mr. Gladstone on public 
 business. It was while he was Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer. Mr. Gladstone was then at DoUis Hill, 
 the Kilburn villa which Lord Aberdeen put at his dis- 
 posal as often and as long as he cared to use it ; half 
 an hour's drive from Connaught Place, where Lord 
 Randolph then lived. Finance is one of the two or 
 three subjects which have always had a permanent 
 interest for the great Liberal, and he had asked the 
 young Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer to 
 come out and talk with him on some points then at 
 issue with respect to the public accounts. He went the 
 next afternoon, and was received by Mr. Gladstone 
 under an apple-tree in the garden. You may be 
 certain that on neither side was there a thought of the 
 political antagonism between them, or of their contests 
 in the House. Such contests in England seldom leave 
 any bitterness behind. They met as two English 
 gentlemen who had something to discuss. They had a 
 long talk. Mr. Gladstone stated his views with that 
 tremendous energy so characteristic of him ; putting 
 aU his force of character as well as all his force of 
 intellect into the argument. ' For the first time in my 
 life,' said Lord Randolph, ' I felt myself in the presence 
 of a superior being.' That always seemed to me a re- 
 markable confession. It became more so when he went 
 on to draw a kind of contrast between Mr. Gladstone 
 and Lord Salisbury. 'I have known Lord Salisbury 
 all my life intimately. I was his friend and colleague. 
 He was my chief. ; He is a great man and a great 
 leader, with the mental range and force of charactei' 
 
372 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 you know. It never occurred to me to be afraid of 
 him, or to think of myself with reference to him as 
 other than an equal. A better man than I, no doubt, 
 and an older, but still of the same clay. Mr. Glad- 
 stone is a being apart. You know how the royalties 
 regard themselves, as if they were of another race and 
 the meanest royalty far above the highest of other than 
 royal blood. That is the impression Gladstone made 
 on me. He was not merely greater, but dissimilar. I 
 had to discuss finance with him. I did the best I could 
 with the discussion and argument, as I do in the House, 
 where I never hesitated to face him, as you know. In 
 private it is another matter. I could argue, but before 
 the man himself I bent.' 
 
 Hard things, I see, are said about Lord Randolph's 
 hard hitting in his House of Commons controversies 
 with Mr. Gladstone. He himself admitted, with the 
 generous frankness that was in him, that he sometimes 
 struck too heavily. You commented the other day on 
 his description of his great opponent in 1886 as an old 
 man in a hurry. It was the one thing which Lord 
 Randolph himself most regretted. 'But,' I said, 'it 
 was a perfectly true and picturesque account of the 
 matter.' He would not admit that the truth of it 
 atoned for the severity. ' Of course it was true,' he 
 admitted. ' It summed up the situation. Never would 
 Gladstone have taken the line he did, or dealt with 
 Home Rule in the way he did, or tyrannised over his 
 party as he did, had he been twenty years younger. 
 But I ought not to have said it.' Perhaps you will 
 accept that as a kind of atonement for the phrase 
 which so wounded the sensibilities of Mr. Gladstone's 
 American idolaters. As for the sharp things said in 
 debate, they were said on both sides ; and seldom in 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 373 
 
 England do political opponents bear malice for such 
 reasons. 
 
 Lord Randolph, be it remembered, was in a position 
 where he had to make himself felt. He stood for a 
 long time almost alone. Mr. Gladstone stood alone 
 also, but on an eminence almost inaccessible, with a 
 great multitude encamped about him. It has been 
 said, and truly said, that since the translation of 
 Disraeli to the House of Lords, but two men have 
 really faced Mr. Gladstone in the Commons ; first 
 Lord Randolph and then Mr. Arthur Balfour. The 
 two had very different methods, and a parallel between 
 them would be instructive were there time, or were it 
 my business to be instructive. Briefly, the difference 
 was this : Lord Randolph preferred invective ; Mr. 
 Balfour a cool, cynical, purely intellectual and humor- 
 ous, sometimes even contemptuous, manner. Of debate 
 and of argument each was a master. But Mr. Balfour 
 was never, and is never, ' so deadly as when in his 
 hghtest tone ; and he thrusts home with a smile on 
 his lips, almost without an effort. Lord Randolph 
 sometimes blustered and often felt, or assumed, a 
 passion. But he never lost sight of his audience or of 
 his purpose. 
 
 When he spoke of Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues 
 as men who had on their souls the blood of the 
 massacres of Maiwand, and of Laing's Neck, and of 
 Phoenix Park, he had no more in mind than had 
 Gordon when he sent from Khartoum the memorable 
 despatch about Iiis abandonment by the Gladstone 
 Ministry, and the ' indelible disgrace ' stamped on that 
 Ministry and its leader. You may agree or condemn 
 — that is not the point — but of Gordon's sincerity of 
 resentment and of Lord Randolph's sincerity of pur- 
 
374 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 pose there can be no doubt. Thus it was that he led 
 up to the overstrung climax of the Moloch of Mid- 
 lothian. That, of course, gave offence, as did Disraeli's 
 Bath letter, with its ' plundering and blundering ' in- 
 dictment of Mr. Gladstone. To the Gladstone wor- 
 shipper even civil dissent is an offence. Yet they are a 
 plain-spoken people, these English, with, nevertheless, 
 a general moderation of phrase quite as remarkable as 
 their overflow of rhetoric when passion sets in. And 
 which do you think, on the whole, most abstemious in 
 print, the English or ourselves ? The English press or 
 the American ? Let us not pursue that inquiry too 
 far. 
 
 Lord Randolph spent a long apprenticeship. When 
 he came to the front, he came decisively. He took the 
 lead of his party and of all the Conservative forces of 
 the country. Strictly speaking, of course, he never was 
 leader of his party. Lord Salisbury was leader. But 
 there are more kinds of leadership than one, and Lord 
 Randolph's was the leadership of ideas. I have written 
 so much about him of late years that it is difficult not 
 to repeat what has been said at various times as he 
 stood on the summit of political life. But it is safe to 
 assume that what is said in a newspaper is forgotten 
 before the next number appears, and I must once more 
 give Lord Randolph his due as the man, the one man 
 next after Disraeli, who set the Conservatives on the 
 right path. Under Disraeli took place the transforma- 
 tion from Tories to Conservatives. Under Lord Ran- 
 dolph the Conservatives became for the first time, in 
 a measure, democratic. If he had had his way the 
 measure would have been full, and perhaps Conserva- 
 tism would have given way far more completely to 
 Democracy. 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 375 
 
 The new departure dates from the Dartford speech. 
 It was followed by many other speeches similar in tone 
 and in aim. In the true meaning of the phrase he was 
 a great moral force in politics. He had something 
 more than political insight and courage. He took 
 large and broad views. He saw that the commanding 
 authority had passed once for all in 1884 with the 
 new franchise to the Democracy. The upper and 
 middle classes had become a minority. They could no 
 longer control the masses, but they could still lead 
 them. He set himself to lead them ; to ally his party 
 with them ; to bring them into the party ranks ; to 
 use his own party in their interests. The Conservative 
 party, in his judgment, had no future unless broad- 
 based upon the people's will. 
 
 Amid all his vacillations and inconsistencies, to this 
 he adhered. I do not think a passage could be quoted 
 later than 1884 in which he ever swerved from this 
 fundamental conviction. Lord Salisbury never had it. 
 Mr. Balfour did not come in time to announce it, even 
 if he had accepted it. To Lord Randolph belongs, 
 and will for ever belong, the imperishable renown of 
 democratising the party which some of you still think 
 of as the party of reaction in England. There is no 
 reaction, no party of reaction, no Tory party, and even 
 Lord Salisbury is perforce the pupil and, in no slight 
 degree, the disciple of the young lieutenant whom he 
 drove from public life. 
 
 There is no recent instance of political ingratitude 
 comparable to that which sent Lord Randolph at 
 thirty-seven into private life, banished him from the 
 councils of his party, ruined his career in more senses 
 than one, and gave into other hands the inheritance 
 rightfully his. The Conservatives have cast lots for 
 
376 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 his raiment, or if that must not be applied, let us 
 borrow a more modern yet still celebrated image, and 
 say that they have stolen his clothes while he was 
 bathing, — out of his depth it may be, but who pushed 
 him in ? No such view is likely to be expressed in 
 England by his old associates. They are not likely to 
 choose this occasion to confess their sins, or to sit on 
 the stool of repentance. Why should they ? Do we 
 expect generosity in politics ? Do we expect justice ? 
 Are we just to him even here.? Yet between Lord 
 Randolph and America there are ties. There are close 
 personal ties, but of these I do not speak. It cannot 
 be needful to remind anybody that his American wife 
 has long been one of the most brilliant figures in the 
 social life of England, or to dwell on her devotion to 
 him during all this last illness and the journey which 
 certainly hastened the end. I speak of political ties. 
 There was not at one time any Englishman whose 
 political ideas were so closely akin as his to those ideas 
 which are essentially and vitally American. Let us at 
 least keep that in mind while we undertake to pass 
 judgment. 
 
 Ill 
 
 To write of Lord Randolph on the personal side, or 
 to confide one's impressions of his character to the 
 public, is no easy matter. To write quite freely is out 
 of the question. It is a case of the truth but not the 
 whole truth. He would, in my judgment, gain if the 
 whole truth about him were known ; still,, it is im- 
 possible. How can I tell whether the mere written 
 narrative of certain facts or traits would impress the 
 public as he himself impressed those who knew him ? 
 There must be a selection. Everything cannot be 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 377 
 
 told. It is never easy to give a true summary of a 
 character. In Lord Randolph's case it is less easy than 
 in most. He was so many sided, so complex, often, at 
 least on the surface, so contradictory or inconsistent, 
 sometimes so unjust to himself, and during the greater 
 part of his life so beset by circumstances, that nothing 
 less than a full biography could be adequate. I hope 
 a biography will be written. It must be done by some 
 one who knew him or it will be of little avail ; must be 
 sympathetic yet critical, and discreet while it is free. 
 No easy task. I do not attempt it. As memories 
 crowd upon me — they commonly do with a pen in 
 hand — one feels the perplexity the more, and it be- 
 comes simpler to touch on a few points which may 
 disclose to the reader who cares for him some of the 
 salient traits of this strenous nature. The reader 
 who does not already care may pass by on the other 
 side. 
 
 I begin with a topic which is perhaps the most 
 delicate of all, or of all but one — Lord Randolph's 
 relations with his mother, the Duchess Dowager of 
 Marlborough. She idolised him. She talked of him 
 often to those whom she knew to be his friends, and 
 she thought of him continuously. She made sacrifices 
 for him ; to her they were none because they were for 
 him. In him her life centred, wide as were her other 
 interests, domestic and general. Can it have been 
 other than a lovable nature which inspired such a love 
 as this ; an affection which was both spontaneous and 
 considered, reasoned, critical even ? It is perhaps the 
 best kind of affection which takes account of all defects, 
 remains in spite of them a deep and engrossing 
 affection. 
 
 So of the regard which springs up between men. 
 
378 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 Lord Randolph had troops of friends, and retained 
 them to the last, friends among the best. Birth and 
 position gave him a start, gave him the opportunity 
 of knowing and being known ; the rest depended on 
 himself. He attached to him men of the most vari- 
 ous kinds. I sometimes thought he had too wide a 
 tolerance. Boulanger was an instance both of his 
 cosmopolitanism of sympathy and of his extreme lenity 
 of judgment. Whether because of his carelessness 
 about foreign politics, or for other reasons, he really 
 believed that Boulanger would be the ruler of France. 
 His royalist friends in Paris misled him. He ought 
 not to have been misled, but he was. The Comte de 
 Paris, M. De Breteuil, and many more were among his 
 associates and intimates. They were deceived about 
 this cheap Pretender, and they deceived others. 
 
 Lord Randolph, believing what he did, thought it 
 desirable that Boulanger should be known in London 
 by the right people. He did his best to make his 
 reception cordial, and to get him into relations with 
 those who might influence opinion in his favour. At 
 this time he had long outlived the social disfavour into 
 which, on account of a quarrel with the Prince of 
 Wales, he had fallen. He was in a position to do as 
 much as almost anybody. He tried his best. The 
 Prince of Wales, to the consternation of his political 
 friends, met Boulanger at dinner at Lord Randolph's 
 house. The Prince and some of his set excepted, 
 hardly anybody would meet him. Military men, and 
 a few men about town, and a few women who visited 
 Paris often, and were friends with the Faubourg St. 
 Germain, were present at these dinners. The serious 
 and judicious stayed away. I asked Lord Randolph 
 while Boulanger was still in London whether he thought 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 379 
 
 it worth while to persevere in view of the evident 
 coldness of London toward him and, as I thought, the 
 certainty of his failure in Paris. ' Failure ! ' cried 
 Lord Randolph, ' I shall be his guest at the Elysee 
 next November.'' It was near June. Long before 
 November Boulanger was a fugitive, and he ended as 
 we all know. But Lord Randolph was never prone to 
 take too much account of the opinion of others. 
 
 There you have one of the keys to his character, and 
 to such measure of success and also of failure as was 
 his in life. He was a born leader of men ; not a 
 follower. Of his own powers he was fully conscious ; 
 in them and in himself he had an undoubting 
 confidence ; not overweening, but complete. Once, 
 when he was on the point of taking a step which 
 promised to be disastrous, I said to him that the judg- 
 ment of everybody whose opinion was worth having was 
 against him. He tui-ned sharply : ' Do you think,' he 
 asked, ' that I should be where I am if I had gone 
 according to the judgment of other people ? ' He was 
 then at the height of his fame and authority. ' I have 
 had against me,' he went on, ' at every step the judgment 
 of those whose opinion, as you say, is worth having. 
 I have uniformly disregarded it. I have led my own 
 life, taken my own views, acted on them, and here 
 I am.' 
 
 It was perfectly true — true in public life ; true also 
 in private, where the results were more doubtful. He 
 never seemed to shrink from any conflict, or to hesitate 
 about any cause because others thought it unwise. Of 
 course, he often did hesitate. Impulsive as he was he 
 reflected long. He used the opinions of other men as 
 materials for forming a judgment of his own. It might 
 coincide with the judgment of others or, far more 
 
380 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 often, conflict with it, but in both cases it was his 
 judgment and not theirs by which he guided his course. 
 
 He has often been discussed as if he were flippant in 
 thought or the slave of his caprices. He was nothing 
 of the kind. No man gave a more serious considera- 
 tion to any serious subject. His mind, it is true, 
 worked rapidly, and the slow men thought him frivol- 
 ous because he was neither slow nor solemn. 
 
 In fact, he mastered his subjects. Ask the permanent 
 officials at the India Office, where he was Secretary of 
 State in 1885. Ask the magnates of the Treasury 
 what they thought of him as Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer in 1886. Of India he had some knowledge 
 before he undertook to rule it, but of Indian business 
 little or none. In finance he was reckoned at the start 
 an amateur. But in both these great offices he soon 
 showed himself more than the equal of the experts, and 
 over both he bore sway. It is seldom that a parlia- 
 mentary chief does more than reign over a great de- 
 partment. Lord Randolph reigned and governed. I 
 will not recur to politics. This has to do with politics 
 indirectly, but it is the personal trait on which I am 
 dwelling; and a vital element in Lord Randolph's 
 character. Analyse it and you see that it was made 
 up in part of intellectual independence and in part of 
 courage. Nobody ever thought Lord Randolph deficient 
 in courage ; needless, therefore, to dwell on that. But 
 of courage there are several kinds, and in him there 
 was a fearlessness and gallantry which were heroic, and 
 of an earlier time. 
 
 There was no neutral side to his character. He 
 either repelled or fascinated you, and most men, and 
 also women, were fascinated. He never seemed to care 
 about it one way or the other. He took no pains to 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 381 
 
 conciliate or to win over people. He was himself. He 
 talked on a great variety of matters but chose the 
 topic because it interested him, not in order to interest 
 others. In that he resembled Mr. Gladstone, who was 
 never known to make the least attempt to adapt him- 
 self to the company but expected the company to 
 adapt itself to him ; as it generally did. His talk — 
 Lord Randolph's, not Mr. Gladstone's — was a series of 
 scintillations. I have heard him in aU sorts of com- 
 panies and circumstances. If it were mere politics, he 
 was content sometimes with mere precision and author- 
 ity; keeping his mind, as it were, in harness and 
 strictly considering the question before him, or the 
 point on which he sought to convert others. If he was 
 opposed he sometimes became impatient, though more 
 often the impatience seemed to be intellectual. He 
 had a scorn of sluggish minds, nor did he always give 
 himself the trouble to conceal it. Conventionalities 
 never meant much to him. He simply put them aside, 
 yet such was his natural dignity and such his aristo- 
 cratic training that his outbursts seldom gave oiFence. 
 Careless of giving offence he might be, but he did not 
 give it wilfully unless provoked ; unless in the manner 
 or tone of his opponent he detected a sneer, or an 
 affectation of superiority. 
 
 For example, he was once known to discuss the 
 question of Civil Service appointments in a little group 
 of men which included the eminent Liberal Unionist 
 sometimes known as the Autocrat of the Midlands, of 
 which Birmingham is the political if not the geographi- 
 cal centre. Lord Randolph had lately returned from 
 his tour in India. He inveighed against the state of 
 the Indian Civil Service. Mr. Chamberlain defended 
 it from that Radical and perhaps pedantic point of 
 
382 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 view to which a knowledge of logarithms seems a suf- 
 ficient proof of capacity for public life. ' You must see 
 the men at work,' retorted Lord Randolph. ' I have 
 seen them. There are good men, but the average is 
 not good. The old system was better.' ' The old 
 system.?' queried Mr. Chamberlain, — 'a system of jobs 
 and nepotism ? ' ' Well,' answered this descendant of 
 the great Duke of Marlborough, ' I suppose they did 
 job, but the men they put in were gentlemen. Whereas 
 now ' — and there came a brief pause — ' now we get men 
 from Birmingham and God knows where.' 
 
 That illustrates one of his moods, and not the most 
 attractive. Like most Englishmen, he was at his best 
 either as host in his London house or — and this is the 
 more frequent — in a house in the country, whether his 
 own or another's. His London dinners were celebrated ; 
 even his dinners of men ; a form of entertainment for 
 which most men care less than for those which are 
 mixed. But Lord Randolph was no ordinary host, nor 
 were his guests ordinary. Dull men he would not have ; 
 not, at any rate, those whom he himself found dull. 
 There was a time when at the house in Comiaught 
 Place Mr. Balfour was the most constant guest, coming 
 and going as he liked as if he were one of the family. 
 Sir Henry Drummond WolfF was another intimate, and 
 never ceased to be an intimate except from absence. 
 To attempt a catalogue would be to make a roll-call of 
 the men and women most illustrious in England, I 
 mentioned one of these festivals above. There was 
 ■Another which became celebrated as the dinner of deadly 
 enemies. It pleased Lord Randolph and his American 
 wife to pair off the deadly enemies, so to speak, at 
 table. The experiment was a wonderful success. It 
 was almost literally true that each man or woman 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 383 
 
 found himself or herself confronted with some other 
 between whom and themselves there was a feud. I 
 abstain from indicating these hostilities, but I may say 
 that among the guests were the Prince and Princess of 
 Wales, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, and Mr. and Mrs. 
 Chauncey Depew. No animosities between these, at 
 any rate. If the situation had been far more perilous, 
 the host and hostess would have saved it. But these 
 adventures can never be frequent. 
 
 I pass from such topics. The last years are those 
 which leave, if not the deepest, the most recent im- 
 pressions ; — the years when the light was failing and 
 the end near. His journey round the world was begun 
 in defiance of his physicians' orders. They wanted him 
 to go to Norway. He was implacable to medical 
 opinion and came to New York, whence Mr. Depew, 
 by some kindly diplomacy and with much railway con- 
 trivance for his comfort and an uninterrupted journey, 
 despatched him to Bar Harbour. From the time he 
 left that spot the record of his life was one of annoy- 
 ance, rapidly failing power, increasing mental disturb- 
 ances, and incessant anxiety to his admirable wife. No 
 need to dwell on that, any more than on the part of his 
 career which was spent on the Turf, or on other distrac- 
 tions from the weariness of inactivity. The Randolph 
 of his prime is the one his friends will always prefer to 
 remember ; the gifted, gallant, generous soul, with his 
 high notions of life, his irrepressible individuality, his 
 great services, and the incomparable interest which 
 attended him. You might like or dislike him ; indif- 
 ferent you could not be. You had often to criticise 
 and dissent ; you had almost always to admire, and you 
 could never forget. 
 
 For many years I used to pass his door most morn- 
 
384 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ings, and sometimes went in. He sat in a large room 
 on the ground floor, a library, plainly a working room, 
 elegant withal, and furnished with a luxurious conveni- 
 ence which most working men might envy. There were 
 bookcases, writing-tables — one on which might be spread 
 out at once the material for a dozen speeches or topics. 
 He always had a secretary with him, sometimes two ; 
 often a friend who had looked in on his way to the 
 city; most probably a financial magnate. There he 
 read and thought and wrote, with the ordered land- 
 scape of Hyde Park stretching away before his windows ; 
 a view of singular loveliness and extent in the heart of 
 a great city. He worked liked a slave. I know the 
 popular notion is otherwise, but it is untrue and 
 unjust. Such political authority and prestige as he 
 had acquired do not come to an idle man. I spoke 
 of his rapidity. A distinguished lawyer has an anec- 
 dote on that point. Lord Randolph was asked to 
 appear as a witness against Mr. Shaw Lefevre's mad 
 scheme of a tunnel railway beneath Hyde Park, start- 
 ing from the Marble Arch, which Lord Randolph's 
 house faced. He attended at the hour named. ' Of 
 course, I am against the scheme,' he said to this lawyer, 
 ' but I know nothing about the plan or the details. If 
 I am to be a good witness you must give me the points.' 
 So, for ten minutes or a little more, the lawyer laid the 
 case before him ; then the witness was called. The 
 lawyer described the result : ' Randolph was asked but 
 a question. Starting from that, he delivered an argu- 
 ment against the bill, so close, so full, so cogent, so 
 complete in its mastery of the facts and of the whole 
 case against the bill, that when he had finished there 
 remained nothing to be said. The project was dead. 
 I asked him when it was over why he pretended to 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 385 
 
 know nothing of the matter. «I give you my word of 
 honour," answered he, " that I was absolutely ignorant 
 of the whole subject when I began my talk with you." 
 Such was his power of grasping a subject. I thought 
 It a more astonishing power than I had myself ever 
 known at the Bar.' 
 
 When all hope of return to the Salisbury Ministry 
 had vanished, it was still thought likely that some high 
 post abroad would be found for Lord Randolph. India 
 was talked of, but Lord Salisbury shook his head. The 
 notion of his ex-colleague as the ruler of 200,000,000 
 of Mussulmans and Hindoos gave him a cold fit. The 
 old question, 'What Randolph would do.?' recurred. 
 He would have been a supremely able Viceroy; not 
 always a safe one. And a Viceroy may commit the 
 Empire to a new departure before he could be stopped 
 by a telegram from Whitehall. When the Embassy 
 at Paris fell vacant Lord Randolph was in South 
 Africa. He wired home that he would accept it if 
 offered. I could give you the name of the friend to 
 whom the despatch was sent. Every influence was 
 brought to bear on Lord Salisbury. He so far yielded 
 as to sound the Foreign Office at Paris, or perhaps 
 the Elysee, in order, as the custom is, to make sure 
 that Lord Randolph would be acceptable to the Govern- 
 ment to which he was to be accredited. 
 
 A peremptory No came back. This was the Nemesis 
 which his political coquetries with Boulanger and the 
 Royalists brought upon him. To Lord Randolph per- 
 sonally the French Government offered no objection. 
 To the friend and ally of that ignoble adventurer who 
 had aimed at the life of the French Republic they had 
 a rooted objection. He was in their eyes compromised 
 past redemption by his intrigues — or what they thought 
 
 2b 
 
386 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 such — with Boulanger and the Orleanist aiders and 
 abettors of that very contemptible yet at one time 
 undoubtedly very dangerous conspirator. And so 
 slipped hopelessly away from Lord Randolph the one 
 real opportunity of his later years. 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 
 
 [white star steamship 'majestic/ FEBRUARY iSgs] 
 
 In a parcel of books which a friend sent me for the 
 voyage was a copy of George William Curtis's Literary 
 and Social Essays, published — or at any rate dated— 
 this year in New York by Messrs. Harper. I had not 
 seen it in England, nor had I for a long time read any- 
 thing of Curtis's except an occasional address, or except 
 his ever-admirable and graceful work in the Editor's 
 Easy Chair of Harper''s Magazine. But I knew Curtis 
 a little and knew something about his life, which was a 
 life of high ideals, and knew of course his public fame. 
 I had, moreover, lately learned from Mr. Laurence 
 Hutton, whom I read with pleasure, that when he died 
 Curtis was the first American citizen. Nor was I 
 disposed to quarrel with that apotheosis of a good 
 American, whose goodness and whose good Americanism 
 by no means prevented him from being individual or 
 from cherishing some views of public affairs which were 
 those of the minority and not of the majority. 
 
 Only I did not see why Mr. Laurence Hutton need 
 use Curtis's name to beat Carlyle with, or invoke his 
 memory in order to emphasise a personal protest against 
 the memorial to Carlyle which some of us are trying to 
 accomplish. Nor do I think Curtis would have liked 
 this use of his name, or have joined in such a protest. 
 
 387 
 
388 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 For, with all his intense Americanism, he had none of 
 the narrowness which some Americans — I do not mean 
 Mr. Hutton — would make a badge of Americanism. 
 Curtis — and this book shows it on many a page — 
 whether he was the first American citizen or not, was 
 a citizen of the world of letters. If Patriotism is writ 
 large on all his work, perhaps Humanity is writ larger 
 still. I do not forget his public services when I say 
 that literature was to him as the breath of the air 
 which he breathed. A great writer, be he American or 
 English, was to him a great writer. If honour were to 
 be done to the memory of a great writer, Curtis was 
 not, I think, the man to stop to ask under what flag he 
 gave to the world the books which are a world's in- 
 heritance. From Carlyle he certainly was far apart, 
 and of the social philosophy which he of Chelsea taught 
 for half a century Curtis was no disciple. That, I 
 am sure, would never have kept his hand out of his 
 pocket had he been asked to subscribe to a Carlyle 
 Memorial. He could not but recognise the greatness 
 of the writer, the greatness of the force in literature 
 for which Carlyle's name stands, and will ever stand. 
 I was told in New York that there is in America a 
 reaction against Carlyle. I do not know whether that 
 is so, or what the extent of the reaction is, if reaction 
 there be. But I should admit no man's right to con- 
 nect George William Curtis with it, or to use to the 
 prejudice of his fellow-author the just regard which 
 Americans have for the friend of Carlyle's friend 
 Emerson. 
 
 It is what Curtis wrote forty years ago of Emerson 
 which has led me to say thus much on a point not 
 directly connected with the book on which I wish to 
 write briefly. The book as a whole has left a deep 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 389 
 
 impression, and a still deeper of the man who wrote it. 
 With two exceptions, the subjects of these Literary 
 and Social Essays are American. In the best sense the 
 treatment of them is also American. In the narrow 
 sense it is not American at all. There is no limitation 
 of view by latitude and longitude. There is no attempt 
 to set up a new standard or a new canon of literature 
 which shall be geographical. Not a page of the book 
 could have been written by a man 
 
 ' Who had narrowed his mind. 
 And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.' 
 
 That was not Curtis's way. When he has to judge 
 an American he gets outside of America.' His critical 
 standpoint is not American, nor English, nor French. 
 It has nothing to do with locality. It is universal. 
 Even when he writes of Emerson and of Hawthorne, 
 his foot is not more firmly planted on Plymouth Rock 
 than on the Rock of Ages. He has in him the note of 
 universality with respect both to place and time. Who 
 is there who thinks him the less American for that ? 
 What is America but an amalgam of nationalities, and 
 the final result of ages of civilisations, outworn some of 
 them before she was discovered, living some of them 
 side by side with her ? Curtis is an expression of much 
 of what is best in these. He has the ripeness of 
 mind which is of long descent. He has the vigour 
 which belongs to his own country and his own time. 
 He has the charm to which culture and character have 
 alike contributed. 'That country is fairest,' said 
 Emerson, 'which is inhabited by the noblest minds.' 
 Of that country Curtis was a citizen. Neither Atlantic 
 nor Pacific bounds it. America is not enough. The 
 nineteenth century is not enough. To make acquaint- 
 
 2b2 
 
390 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ance with all the noblest you must explore the surface 
 of the globe and the atinals of all time. 
 
 The essay upon Emerson is not so much a criticism 
 as a picture, and the picture is mostly landscape. This 
 is what Emerson would have liked. The date of it is 
 1854, and the descriptive character of the sketch is 
 partly explained by its appearance in a publication 
 entitled Homes of American Authors. The paper on 
 Hawthorne saw the light in the same publication and 
 is of similar character. But it was impossible for Curtis 
 while describing Concord and Emerson's House and the 
 Old Manse, not to express some part of his opinion on 
 the men themselves. In both you get a vivid notion 
 of Curtis's genius and of his literary method. He 
 paints like an artist ; but like an artist who sees some- 
 thing more than the surface of things. There can 
 hardly be an American whose blood the mere name of 
 Concord does not stir. Curtis, at any rate, was not 
 that American. The quiet tone in which he writes will 
 deceive nobody. The plain, the sluggish river, the 
 river meadows 'whose coarse grass glitters apt for 
 mowing in the early June morning,' the slumbering spell 
 upon the place, the town with its stately sycamores and 
 elms, the house where Emerson lived — all these are 
 described as if for themselves, and then all at once you 
 hear the ring of musketry and you see the 'panic- 
 stricken retreat of the regulars, blackened and bloody.' 
 It is only a sentence, but the 19th of April 1775 lives 
 over again for you, because all the time it has been 
 living and burning in Curtis himself. It is remarkable 
 that so late as 1854 he still found himself able to 
 quote, as if perchance to some readers they might still 
 be new, Emerson's incomparable and immortal verses 
 written when the little monument to commemorate the 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 391 
 
 Concord fight was set up in 1836. It is one of the 
 half-dozen or so battle hymns we possess which are 
 sure to live, including Holmes's lines which saved the 
 frigate Constitution from being broken up, the John 
 Brown hymn, Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the 
 Republic, Stedman's John Brown of Ossawatomie, and 
 perhaps one or two more. 
 
 It must be remembered that when Curtis wrote in 
 1854! Emerson had not yet attained to that authority 
 or position which has since been conceded him as the 
 first of American thinkers and writers. Curtis himself 
 has no doubt on the matter, but he puts his opinion 
 as it were experimentally before his readers. There is 
 just enough of criticism to indicate his point of view, 
 and there are touches which show how profound was 
 his intellectual and spiritual sympathy with Emerson — 
 
 ' He stands like a sentinel. His look and manner and 
 habit of thought cry, " Who goes there ? " and if he does 
 not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to a halt. 
 It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his 
 influence has been so deep and sure and permanent upon 
 the intellectual life of the young men of New England, 
 and of Old England too, where, in Manchester, there were 
 regular weekly meetings at which his works were read.' 
 
 So, only forty years ago so good an American as 
 Curtis thought it desirable to mention to the American 
 public that regular weekly meetings were held in Man- 
 chester at which Emerson's works were read. Yet some 
 thirteen years before that date had appeared in Eng- 
 land the first series of Emerson's Essai/s with a preface 
 by Carlyle. And to-day Emerson is a household word 
 in England, and neither in England nor America needs 
 he any testimony or certificate to his supremacy. It 
 
392 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 is the date of Curtis's essay, I repeat, which makes his 
 testimony so interesting and important. He speaks of 
 Emerson's Nature as ' fair and fascinating as Egeria to 
 Numa wandering in the grove,' then adds — 
 
 'The essays, orations, and poems followed, developing 
 and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy, 
 applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigour 
 and richness so supreme that not only do many account 
 him our truest philosopher, but others acknowledge him 
 as our most characteristic poet.' 
 
 The tentative estimate again appears in that phrase ; 
 the estimate of the period. Yet, on the whole, there 
 are few essays, critical or otherwise, from which the 
 student who cares to understand the nature and sources 
 of Emerson's thought will get more help than from 
 this. Emerson himself must have delighted to find his 
 friend tracing them all, so far as they had any relation 
 to physical influences, to ' the underived sweetness of 
 the open Concord sky and the spacious breadth of the 
 Concord horizon.' 
 
 Curtis represents, no doubt, what may prove to be a 
 transitory phase of American literature. Even now, in 
 the latest as well as in the earliest essays in this delight- 
 ful volume, there is a flavour as of something that is 
 passing away. The leisureliness, the dignity, the marked 
 and sometimes almost elaborate courtesy of manner, 
 the style in which the absence of all impatience is only 
 one mark of its invariable distinction — are those of 
 to-day ? The style flows on with the smoothness of the 
 Concord River itself, but without its shallows or 
 sluggishness. There are flowers upon its surface and 
 it mirrors the heavens above. In the latest paper, 
 that on Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1891, the style has 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 393 
 
 gained in rapidity and in concision while losing nothing 
 of its grace. He leaves out a good deal which earlier 
 he put in, and every excision adds force to his expres- 
 sion. What a knowledge of American literature there 
 is in this essay, and what ease of allusion to people and 
 facts already more than half forgotten. Curtis grew 
 up while they were still fresh, and he has refreshed his 
 memory, if need were, at the fullest fountain. 
 
 ' Turning over the noble volumes of Stedman and Miss 
 Hutchinson in which, as on a vast plain, the whole line of 
 American literature is drawn up for inspection and review, 
 and marches past like the ghostly midnight columns of 
 Napoleon's grand army, we cannot quarrel with the verdict 
 of time nor feel that injustice has been done to Glamis 
 or Cawdor.' 
 
 That is a iine tribute to the monumental Library of 
 American Literature of which Mr. Stedman and Miss 
 Hutchinson were the editors ; an invaluable work which 
 but for them might have waited long to get itself done, 
 nor ever have been done equally well. 'There are 
 singers of a day,' says Curtis, ' but not less singers 
 because they are of a day.' It is true, and true also of 
 writers who are not singers, and both have found an 
 honourable resting-place in this capacious Library. 
 
 Criticism in these days gives itself some airs, and in 
 its mimicry of scientific methods forgets sometimes its 
 kinship to literature. Curtis might be a good adviser 
 for critics of this pattern. To his eloquence or insight 
 not many of them can pretend but at least they are 
 human as he is human, and they cannot but feel the 
 touches of nature and of human nature which abound 
 in his pages. I quote but one concluding passage from 
 the essay on Holmes — ■ 
 
394 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 ' The kindly Master takes the reader by the button or 
 lays his hand upon his shoulder, not with the rude fami- 
 liarity of the bully or the boor, but with the courtesy of 
 Montaigne, the friendliness of John Aubrey, or the wise 
 cheer of Selden. The reader glows with the pleasure of 
 an individual greeting, and a wide diocese of those whom 
 the Autocrat never saw plume themselves proudly upon 
 his personal acquaintance. . . . For just sixty years since 
 his first gay and tender note was heard. Holmes has been 
 fulfilling the promise of his matin song. He has become 
 , a patriarch of our literature, and all his countrymen are 
 his lovers.' 
 
 The essay on Sir Philip Sidney is, perhaps, even 
 more autobiographical than that on Emerson. Sidney 
 was a hero after Curtis's own heart. What he has 
 written of the Elizabethan Knight is among the 
 most exquisite of his achievements as mere litera- 
 ture, and one of the best studies of one of the 
 most beautiful human natures in history. Yet he 
 seems to have doubted whether it could be published. 
 It was written in 1857. It appears for the first time 
 in this volume. If there were nothing else in it, the 
 lover of the beautiful and of the heroic would enshrine 
 the book among his treasures. The life of Sir Philip 
 Sidney is here, the romance of his letters to Elizabeth 
 dissuading her from the marriage with the Duke of 
 Anjou ; the Defence of Poesy ; the fatal skirmish at 
 Zutphen. 
 
 ' This is the story of Philip Sidney. A letter, a book, 
 a battle. How little to justify his unique fame ! How 
 invisible his performance among the illustrious events of 
 his prodigious age ! Yet is not the instinct of the human 
 heart true ; and in the stately society of his time, if 
 Bacon were the philosopher, Shakespeare the noet. 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 396 
 
 Burleigh the counsellor, Raleigh the soldier, Drake the 
 sailor. Hooker the theologian, Essex the courtier, Gresham 
 the merchant, was not Philip Sidney as distinctively a 
 gentleman ? ' 
 
 And was that why Curtis thought it discreet to let 
 his essay remain in manuscript ? Is it too late to say 
 of Curtis himself what he says of Sidney ? I hope not. 
 There is still an audience which will welcome such an 
 account of this excellent American, and recognise him 
 most easily as having ' that happy harmony of mind 
 and temper, of enthusiasm and good sense, of accom- 
 plishment and capacity, which is described by that 
 most exquisite and most abused word, gentleman.' 
 
 There follow some pages which if I could I would 
 put into the hands of every young American. ' Philip 
 Sidney was not a gentleman because his grandfather 
 was Duke of Northumberland and his father Lord 
 Deputy of Ireland, but because he was himself generous, 
 simple, truthful, noble, refined.' Is that the true note, 
 or is it not ? Is there anything more American than 
 his homage to youth as the mainspring of the world, 
 or than his proud assertion that ' there is no youth in 
 history so romantic and beloved that in a thousand 
 American homes you may not find his peer to-day'.? 
 It is evident that the later part of this essay was written 
 long after 1857. We hear of Sherman ' piercing the 
 heart of the Rebellion,' and of Grant's ' perfect victory ' ; 
 and ' we live in a country which has been saved by its 
 young men.' And the patriot tried as by fire speaks 
 out in more than one other passage; sometimes of 
 reproach to the sordid spirit which stains some sections 
 of society, and of rebuke to the carelessness about 
 honesty and honour which is the mark of base politics ; 
 
396 STUDIES OF MEN 
 
 sometimes in honourable tribute to ' that human love 
 and faith and fidelity which, like day and night, like 
 seedtime and harvest, shall never, never fail.' Such 
 was the faith in which Curtis lived and died, and this 
 it is which in this book he hands on to those who 
 come after him ; to those who shall be, like him, 
 true Americans, and true citizens of a city greater 
 than the great Republic. 
 
 FINIS 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
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