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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of London Days, by Arthur Warren
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: London Days
+       A Book of Reminiscences
+
+Author: Arthur Warren
+
+Release Date: January 1, 2011 [EBook #34812]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: Arthur Warren]
+
+
+
+
+
+LONDON DAYS
+
+A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES
+
+
+BY
+
+ARTHUR WARREN
+
+
+
+
+BOSTON
+
+LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright, 1920_,
+
+BY ARTHUR WARREN.
+
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+Published September, 1920
+
+
+
+Norwood Press
+
+Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.
+
+Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                        PAGE
+
+    I  First Glimpses of London  . . . . . . .    1
+   II  London in the Late Seventies  . . . . .    9
+  III  A Norman Interlude  . . . . . . . . . .   18
+   IV  I Take the Plunge . . . . . . . . . . .   28
+    V  Browning and Moscheles  . . . . . . . .   42
+   VI  Patti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   57
+  VII  John Stuart Blackie . . . . . . . . . .   79
+ VIII  Lord Kelvin . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   96
+   IX  Tennyson  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  114
+    X  Gladstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  138
+   XI  Whistler  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  157
+  XII  Henry Drummond  . . . . . . . . . . . .  170
+ XIII  Sir Henry Irving  . . . . . . . . . . .  185
+  XIV  Henry M. Stanley  . . . . . . . . . . .  205
+   XV  George Meredith . . . . . . . . . . . .  222
+  XVI  Parnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  240
+ XVII  "Le Brav' Général"  . . . . . . . . . .  260
+       Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  275
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+LONDON DAYS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON
+
+One day at dusk, in the autumn of 1878, when I was eighteen, I arrived
+at the heart of the world.
+
+I was fresh from New England, and had left Boston, my native city,
+seventeen days before, embarking at New York on the Anchor liner
+_Alsatia_ three days later; disembarking at Tilbury after a turbulent
+voyage that lasted two weeks to the hour.  What was left of me passed
+from the Fenchurch Street Station into Leadenhall Street, the least of
+three passengers in a four-wheeled cab.  Through the cab windows, and
+the ghost of fog which simmered over gas lamps, flashed glimpses of the
+city, splashes of light on the pavements illuminated windows bound in
+brass, cumbrous drays and 'busses, and great grey horses, and
+glistening pubs.  The air was heavy with smoke.  I heard the tramp of
+thousands and thousands of persons, all homeward bound, and all wearing
+top hats.  And, of all names, there at the right on a clothier's sign,
+the enamelled legend: "Dombey and Son!"  My head was packed with
+Dickens, and in a pocket was a linen-backed map.
+
+{2}
+
+In one way and another, by books and maps and imagination, I was
+already on familiar terms with the world-city which I had never seen.
+I had read it up, studied it, knew intricate maps of it, and stories of
+its traditions.  At a time when the youth of my country and generation
+were expected to follow Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West and grow up
+with the country" or, as interpreted by the cynics, "Go West and start
+a graveyard"--I made a chance to go East across the Atlantic.  And I
+went.  So I beheld the Old World.  But I had chances enough, that is, I
+made them, to see the New World later.  And I saw it.  History in the
+making is interesting,--sometimes, and if you survive.  History already
+made and rounded and woven into legend, the scenes among which men have
+lived and wrought through centuries, shaping the rich past on which we
+build the present, hold a fascination which did not seem to come to me
+from regions where man was pioneering.  London was the magnet that
+first drew me.  And as the cab turned south from Leadenhall Street and
+moved slowly along the noisy streams of traffic, I exclaimed presently,
+to the disappointment of my companions who knew the town and were
+prepared to point out its places of celebrity:
+
+"London Bridge at last!"
+
+"At last?" said they.  "Why, this is quick work for the time of day.
+How many minutes?"
+
+"But I've been eighteen years on the way," said I.
+
+I managed to keep awake and hungry till we got to the Wiltshire Road in
+Brixton, where my guides {3} from Fenchurch Street were staying.  The
+stagger and strain of the sea voyage had left me stupidly weary, so
+that as soon as possible after dinner I went to bed.  Although I stayed
+three weeks in that house, all recollection of a dining room has
+vanished.  That may be attributed to the zeal of youth and its
+indifference to the art of dining, an art acquired speedily enough
+later on.  But never in the subsequent years have I been able to revive
+a single memory of that Brixton house.  And the only recollection of
+the first three weeks in England is that on the first morning, at an
+office in the City, I was violently seasick.
+
+Atlantic passengers who begin their voyaging nowadays in luxuriously
+fitted vessels of fifty thousand tons, and coddled within an inch of
+their lives, lack the remotest notion of the sea travel of forty years
+ago.  The _Alsatia_, of the Anchor Line, was one of the largest and
+finest ships afloat in 1878.  She had a single smokestack and a single
+screw, no covered deck for passengers, no barber shop, no electric
+lights, not even an electric bell.  Deck chairs were unknown, but later
+you could buy them ashore and store them in the Company's baggage room
+against your return.  No meal could be served on deck without the
+permission of the captain.  The first mate was a surly ass who
+threatened passengers with irons if he caught them infringing some
+stupid rule, long since abolished; and although the steamer was fairly
+new she belonged to the age when seamen hated fresh air in a hull, and
+the smells from her bilges would have asphyxiated an ox.  She was one
+{4} tenth the size of the big liners of to-day, five thousand tons
+being registered to her credit in the advertisements where she was
+described as "a giant."  She was a worthy sea craft, but she hopped,
+skipped, and jumped all the way from New York to London, used fourteen
+days in getting there, ten being made against head gales and heavy
+seas, one of which threw a sailor from the maintop to the deck, killing
+him, and sweeping overboard two hundred sheep which we carried on the
+foredeck.  Nearly all liners in those days carried sail and were
+square-rigged.  Their canvas was stained with soot and smoke, but it
+had a steadying effect on the ship when spread to a favouring quarter.
+Whether the _Alsatia_ carried sail I never knew for I was ten days
+helpless and agonised in my cabin, and for three days more the
+mastheads seemed to scrape the scudding clouds with a fore-and-aft
+motion that tore your eyes if you looked skyward.  It was only after we
+had passed well up Channel, near Dover, that the wind eased and we
+could venture on deck without clinging to life lines.
+
+This horror of seasickness was as unexpected as it was distressing,
+for, if I had not been brought up on the sea, I had been accustomed to
+it long enough, and had sailed an eighteen-foot catboat up and down
+Massachusetts Bay, where there is rough water much of the time and
+scope for seamanlike work all the time.  Whether on long rollers, or on
+choppy water, I had never been troubled by the sea's motion until the
+_Alsatia_ tumbled across the Atlantic, and then it was my head that
+bore distress, and not my {5} centreboard.  It seemed as if the
+fragment of brain still remaining in me broke loose and rattled from
+skull to toes, bounding back with a hideous roar and horrid pressure
+which found no relief till we got into quiet water.  I vowed never to
+go to sea again.  Since then I have made more than fifty voyages on the
+North Atlantic alone.
+
+There was a man aboard who had a salty sailor's fondness for a howling
+sea, and we became amazing friendly.  And he was amazing fat, so that
+he took very short steps.  As I was no thicker than a lath, and
+six-feet-an-inch-and-a-half tall, there was contrast enough as he
+paddled alongside me.  Creeping from the hated stateroom where ten
+nearly foodless and acutely torturing days had been passed in a damp
+melancholy, I saw a dozen or fifteen passengers--our full
+strength--seated at a long table on the starboard side of the saloon,
+listening to Mr. Pickwick reading "Othello."  He was as round as
+Pickwick, not quite so cherubic as Phiz's immortal drawing, and minus
+the spectacles.  In the tossing night, when we had forgotten that any
+portion of the universe was ever still, he was declaiming Othello's
+speech to the Senate.
+
+The figure and the fact were incongruous, but the effect of the
+declamation was not.  He read all the tragedy, barring a few cuts.  I
+supposed him a comic actor with an ambition for tragic parts.  Some
+sailors staring through a deck light took him for a "sky pilot" reading
+the burial service for their fellow, but thought him over-long about
+it.  His name was Henry Murray.  He was a Scotsman {6} retired from the
+Chinese trade.  He was also a Free Mason, Past District Grand Master
+for China.  He was returning to England with the intention of becoming
+a public reader.  He intended even to become an actor of Falstaff and
+he had long been a capable amateur.  His father had been a famous actor
+in Edinburgh; his brother commanded the Guion liner _Arizona_, and
+later, the _Alaska_.
+
+Henry Murray was a good judge of acting.  But his fondness for acting
+was fatal to his fortunes and his life.  The first he spent in efforts
+to establish himself; the second he wore out in disappointment over the
+failure of his plans.  I remember him with genuine affection, because
+he was the first to open to me any door in the mighty and mysterious
+world of London.
+
+Plans had no place in my baggage, at least no plans requiring space.  I
+had practically worked my way to London where I was to join the staff
+of an American engineering concern who were introducing an invention.
+Though lacking years I had sufficient application, and I had learned
+enough of the business to justify my appointment.  That, in fact, had
+been my purpose, and I worked hard to achieve it and uphold it.  But I
+wanted to write.  And, being in London, why not write about London?  I
+knew that Mrs. Glasse's recipe for cooking hare had begun, "First catch
+your hare", and so the prescription for my own case ran, "First learn
+your London."  Meantime I had my vocation to lean on.  During the
+business hours of four years I ran with my vocation, and, out of
+business hours, followed my hobby.
+
+{7}
+
+Old Mother London gave me the key to her streets, and diligently I used
+it.  Into every old church I wandered, and into every old building that
+had given shelter to Fame when she touched a poet, a philosopher, a
+painter, a literary man, a tragedian, a soldier, sailor, or a king.
+And I knew the burial places of those she cherished, and those she
+flouted, or those she flirted with, no less than the living places of
+those who still pursued her on any of the grey mornings in which I
+rambled.  They became as familiar to me as any 'bus line, and I became
+a walking directory to the odd corners where she had preened her
+feathers for an hour or for a space of years.  I became saturated with
+her legends, and occasionally an arbiter in cases of suspected masonry
+whose identity rumour and record had disputed or concealed.  That was
+one form of amusement.  The play was another.
+
+I was at home in London from the moment of my arrival at Fenchurch
+Street.  It had been a far cry to Fenchurch Street, and when a lad made
+it in company with a rotund gentleman of Pickwickian build, the chances
+were sure to be amusing.  After trying two or three boarding houses, I
+settled in chambers just out of Queen Square in Bloomsbury.  Murray was
+in apartments half a mile away, in Marchmont Street.  Marchmont Street
+was shabby in those days, whatever it may be now.  On the west side of
+it, over a tailor's shop kept by her husband, was the shabby, but clean
+and shining house of Mrs. Floyth, a melancholy woman who had been maid
+or housekeeper to John Stuart Mill when {8} the manuscript of Carlyle's
+"French Revolution" was burned to light the fires!  I have always
+wondered if the old lady herself were responsible for that
+conflagration.  It might have accounted for her settled melancholy.
+
+My chambers near Queen Square were in a spacious old house which was
+panelled and carved from roof to entrance hall.  There soon began to
+meet here, once or twice a month, a congenial group, smoking
+churchwarden pipes.  It called itself the "Quill Club", talked
+politics, the drama, and books, and the members disagreed as heartily
+as any human beings could on all the topics of life.
+
+There would have been no interest in listening to another fellow's talk
+had you been in agreement with him.  There were but two rules in the
+Club: the first that a man should say what he thought; the second--give
+his reasons for thinking so.  When a man failed to sustain his opinion
+by his reasons he paid for the tobacco.  The Quills, as may be
+supposed, were chiefly of a trade, quill drivers.  But they were not
+entirely so: one was "by way of being" an artist, another was a
+solicitor, a third was inclined to surgery, a fourth made musical
+boxes, the fifth was a dentist, and the others pursued literature, at
+greater or smaller distances, and incidentally contributed small feed
+to the presses in Fleet Street, or elsewhere.  Of a dozen, ten are
+dead.  Some made goals, some fell by the way.  But they all enjoyed
+life and work, for all were young.  And sometimes they could pay their
+bills.
+
+
+
+
+{9}
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES
+
+London was a more livable place in the late seventies than it is now,
+or so it seems to me, as it seems to many others who knew the town in
+that earlier time.  There were not so many means for getting everywhere
+as there are now, and yet we got everywhere,--everywhere, that is, that
+we wished to go.  We were not in a hurry then, and there was more
+consideration for the old and the lame than there is now.  Now there is
+none at all in the streets or under them.  The electric age was
+prophesied, but nothing more.  Nobody in England believed in
+prophecies.  There were arc lights on Holborn Viaduct and the Thames
+Embankment, nowhere else, but the incandescent lamp had not appeared.
+There was nothing electrical, in our modern sense, except the
+telegraph.  The telephone was unknown.  It is almost unknown to-day, if
+London's use of it be compared with New York's.  There was no electric
+traction, and the petrol age was nearly a quarter of a century distant.
+But for all these drawbacks, as I daresay they may be regarded by the
+youth of the present hour, London was the most livable place in the
+world, if you loved cities; it had a charm, a fascination all its own.
+
+{10}
+
+That charm is not to be described.  How can it be described, any more
+than the charm of a charming woman?  You are conscious of it, you know
+that there is nothing like it, you are sorry for those who must live
+elsewhere and cannot come under its spell; they have missed that much
+out of life.  You experience a certain largeness of heart, and would
+like to give everybody a June in London, but reluctantly acknowledge
+that every one must take the will for the deed.
+
+But if you attempt to analyse London it will baffle your effort.  It is
+at once so splendid and so mean, so spacious and so meagre, so
+beautiful and so ugly, so noisy and so quiet, so restless and restful,
+that the farther you go the more puzzled you become, unless having
+begun by questioning it you end by accepting.  Take it in its own way
+and you will see that it is in itself a problem that cannot be solved
+by a study of weeks or months; it is a study for a lifetime, for many
+lifetimes.  For instance: architecturally it is too often saddening and
+mean.
+
+Some one will fly into a rage when he reads the preceding sentence.  He
+will ask resentfully if I think Westminster Abbey, the Parliament
+Buildings, St. Paul's Cathedral sad, or mean, or shabby.  Of course I
+do not.  Their nobility and beauty almost redeem the hundreds of square
+miles of common-place and melancholy builders' work that encumbers
+London.  Yet how the mean shops press upon St. Paul's and shut it in!
+Could anything be uglier than the National Gallery?  Could any
+important thoroughfare be more conducive to depression of {11} spirits
+than Victoria Street?  It's not the old London that is architecturally
+ugly and mean; it is the modern London, and usually the more modern the
+greater the affliction to the eye.  Somebody said, I think it was
+Schelling, "Architecture is frozen music."  Would not anybody say that
+the Methodist mountain in Westminster is frozen pudding?
+
+London in the late seventies was architecturally less saddening than
+now, because less that was pretentious and defiant of good taste had
+been undertaken.  Its public buildings of later date are the worst in
+Europe, excepting those that have arisen in Germany.  Squat, heavy, out
+of proportion, lacking in dignity, in beauty, they seem to have been
+erected for the purpose of proving that in architecture the modern
+Briton will neither imitate nor aspire.  "The finest site in Europe" is
+almost the meanest sight.  The marvel is that a capital and a country
+having so many fine models of earlier date do not repeat them, improve
+upon them, or attempt even a finer taste.  The opportunities have been
+unrivalled, but about the achievements the less said the better.  Acres
+of slums have been swept away to be superseded by miles of masonry
+which serve mainly to prevent an acquaintance with good taste.  What
+public "improvement" could be shabbier than Shaftsbury Avenue, meaner
+than newer Whitehall, or more commonplace than Kingsway and Aldwych?
+What department of a Government could have blocked a vista so
+remorselessly as the Admiralty has done, or have betrayed a contempt
+for beauty more disheartening than the County {12} Council has shown in
+its latest horror at Westminster Bridge?
+
+The majestic beauties of London seem to have developed by accident
+rather than by design.  The view down Waterloo Place to the Abbey and
+the Victoria Tower and the view eastward from the Serpentine Bridge in
+Hyde Park have certainly done so.  The view down the river from
+Waterloo Bridge, or Westminster, was never planned; it grew slowly,
+being first blessed by every natural advantage that a patient
+Providence could bestow.  In its buildings of a private character, its
+domestic architecture, London still has much to seek; monotony has been
+the rule, but the style has not deteriorated.  In some respects and
+localities it has much improved; there is evidence that imagination has
+been allowed to exercise itself, that all house owners do not, in these
+times, think alike, and are not content with dwellings which, outwardly
+at least, seem, class by class, to have been run from one mould.
+Individuality begins to express itself as if, at last, some Londoners
+were beginning to lose their fear of becoming conspicuous.  An advance
+in taste has run concurrently with the decline of the top hat and frock
+coat.
+
+But the interiors of English buildings of all kinds, public as well as
+private, churches as well as theatres, offices no less than railway
+stations, clubs, homes, hotels, all are draughty, as lacking in warmth
+as they were when I first knew them.  The exceptions are so few that
+they are advertised.  Central heating is still regarded as a fad,
+constant hot water is a {13} novelty; there is a superstitious regard
+for cold air as pure air, and a fear of warm air as impure.  But the
+worst cold is that of dampness, and many houses are never dry.  Mildew
+is common in their closets, chill in the bedrooms, and their halls are
+rheumatic.  Rheumatism, and its allies lumbago, influenza, pneumonia,
+and consumption are the customary ills.  When the Briton is cold
+indoors he goes out for a walk and warms his blood.  The theory is that
+artificial warmth is unhealthful; the truth is that it is an expense to
+which the Briton objects, and that he has not learned how to warm his
+house.  The tough survive.  The delicate, the aged, the invalid, or the
+sedentary take their chances, and while they live do so with an
+unbelievable lack of comfort.  Consequently the English complain of
+cold when the American would think the temperature moderate; but the
+American uses heat to keep his house dry as well as warm.  He often
+overdoes it; he often goes as far in one direction as the Briton in the
+other.  But an English house warmed in the American way, not
+necessarily to the usual American degree, is always appreciated by the
+Briton, although he may be far from understanding the reason of his
+content.  London had a charm in the late seventies that it lost when
+the Twentieth Century was still young,--the charm of leisure.  The
+internal-combustion engine drove leisure from the land.  The old
+two-horse 'bus was a leisurely thing.  Even the four-horse express
+'busses that plied between the Swan at Clapham to Gracechurch Street,
+and similar urban and suburban centres, were leisurely enough, {14}
+compared with the electric trains and motor 'busses that now rush the
+city man to and fro.  They were not comfortable, those horse-drawn
+caravans with their knifeboard roofs and perilous scaling ladders, that
+is, they were not comfortable excepting on the box seats to which every
+man's ambition soared.  There, sheltered by great leathery aprons, the
+lucky passenger braved the weather, beheld the passing world, and
+exchanged small talk with the driver who condescended affably to
+discourse, with his "regulars", the news of the day.  The smart hansom
+disappeared long ago.  Smart as it was it was leisurely compared with
+the flashing taxi and motor which have superseded "London's gondola",
+as Disraeli called it.  And, Heaven knows, the sulphurous underground
+was leisurely beyond words.
+
+Everybody rushes now.  London has no more time to spare than New York
+has.  It seems a dream that, when I first entered an English train, the
+custom was for the railway guards to call, "Take your time, take your
+time!"  But that was their call forty years ago.
+
+Gradually the street cries have lessened in variety, in character, and
+in interest.  The simple trades that announced their wares by a snatch
+of something that passed for song have disappeared one by one.  Even
+the muffin man is vocal no longer, and his bell is silent.  Whatever
+may have caused the other merchants of the curb to vanish, the war and
+short rations removed the muffin man.  He was almost the last, perhaps
+actually the last of the creatures who gave to London streets an
+old-world sound or savour.
+
+{15}
+
+When the late seventies were still on the calendar, and for long after,
+the silk hat was an unrelenting tyrant, and in the City, among
+stockbrokers, it bore a special gloss.  Every male above the age and
+status of an office boy or a labouring man wore a silk hat.  Without
+that ugly and inconvenient headgear you would not call upon your
+solicitor, or appear at your banker's, or negotiate a contract, much
+less intrude upon an official person.  The silk hat was a sign of
+respectability.  In the House of Commons it seemed a symbol of the
+majesty of the British Constitution.  There, to this day, the head must
+be covered, as if the members were in a synagogue.  In summer time
+straw hats were unknown, excepting for the sex that was gentler then,
+and invariably the sex wore furs with its straws.  A man who ventured
+in a straw hat incurred the risk of obloquy.  At any rate, he was as
+marked and ridiculous an object as Jonas Hanway when, in an earlier
+century, he raised an umbrella in Oxford Street.
+
+Temple Bar was standing where Fleet Street joins the Strand; the new
+Law Courts which now overlook its site were in process of construction;
+the Griffin was undreamed of.  Northumberland Avenue had been opened
+but was incomplete.  The modern hotels had yet to be promoted.  The
+Grand was the first of these, but its fortunes were thought hazardous.
+There was no Metropole, or Victoria, although their walls were going
+up.  Rimmel's perfumery warehouse stood where the Savoy is now, and
+that sordid adventurer Hobbs (or was it Jabez Balfour?) had not
+preëmpted the site of the Cecil which was {16} then covered with
+lodging houses, chambers, and private hotels.  There was no Carlton, no
+Ritz, no Waldorf; even the Great Central was not in being, and the only
+restaurants of consequence were the Criterion, St. James', Gatti's old
+Adelaide Gallery, half its present size, the Café Royal, Very's, and
+the stuffy predecessor of the present Holborn.
+
+The first run of "Pinafore" had not ended, the revival of Old Drury's
+prosperous days had not begun; "Our Boys" had been running for nearly
+five thousand nights at the Vaudeville; Sothern was making his last
+appearances in the last season of the unremodelled Haymarket; there was
+the Alhambra but no Empire, no Hippodrome, no Coliseum; St. James'
+Hall, but no Queen's Hall; the Albert Hall was mostly empty, the
+old-style music halls were mostly full; Mr. Pinero was acting small
+parts in Irving's company and had not written so much as the scenario
+of a one-act play; Henry Arthur Jones had not been heard of; Bernard
+Shaw was unknown, Adelaide Neilson was at the height of her brief
+career, Forbes Robertson had begun his, and Buckstone's days were
+ending.  The era of the Kendals and John Hare at the St. James' was yet
+to come, but the happy reign of the Bancrofts, at the old Prince of
+Wales', behind the Tottenham Court Road, where the Scala now stands,
+had yet to close.
+
+George Meredith was not only "caviare to the general" but "the general"
+were a little shocked when they learned that he was still a reader for
+a publishing house and a writer when he had the time.  "The general"
+found delight in the fiction of Miss {17} Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood,
+and, of course, Ouida, as they would delight now if these ladies were
+spinning copy; Kipling was at school, and Barrie dreaming in the north.
+We had William Black and Walter Besant and James Rice, but no Society
+of Authors, and no literary knights.  If the world is small now it was
+very large then, but "sausage and mashed" were cheap at the top of
+London Bridge, threepence for a pair of hulking sausages and a liberal
+plate of mashed potato, a penny more for a great hunk of bread, and
+tu'ppence more for half a tankard of beer.
+
+A certain splendid swagger departed from London Streets when the
+regiments quartered in town abandoned their gorgeous uniforms and
+dressed less like magnificos and more like fighting men.  They were
+fighting men though, they and their successors who held back the
+outnumbering German rush from the Channel ports of France in 1914, as
+all the world knows, and none know better than the Huns.  But they were
+dandies too, those earlier men, and they filled the eye.  Their saucy
+scarlet, short-waisted jackets, their jaunty fatigue caps, their tight
+trousers with broad red stripes, on shapely legs which seemed
+tremendous in length, were at once the admiration of nursemaids and the
+envy of small boys, lending, as they did, colour and form to these dun
+streets.  Will the glorious colossi who strode thus habited be seen
+again this side of Charon's ferry; or will their successors lead the
+simple life in khaki and puttees?
+
+
+
+
+{18}
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A NORMAN INTERLUDE
+
+After a winter in London I went to Paris for a part of the spring,
+stopping on the way a day in Rochester (I had the Dickens fever then),
+and another day in Canterbury for the Cathedral's sake.  A night boat,
+the ancient Wave, or the antediluvian Foam, took me to Calais, and
+through some delay on the line there was a wait of hours.  But the
+night was fine, and I spent it roaming through and beyond the old town,
+getting forty winks afterward in the station, and a breakfast of hot
+chocolate and bread at a place facing the harbour where I watched the
+fishing boats put out on a convenient tide.  In Paris I knew only one
+person, an American friend who was studying art, taking his lessons at
+Julian's, and slowly, yet certainly, learning that art was not for him.
+He introduced me to a lot of men who knew their way about, and soon I
+knew my way about as well as they did, possibly, in some directions, a
+little better, for, with one or two exceptions, I cannot remember any
+who were gifted with a faculty for anything but good-fellowship and for
+spending their allowances from home.  They knew the jargon of the
+studios, but as Paris seemed full {19} of men who could paint as well
+as they and were threatening to do it, the charming group dissolved in
+a year or two, one after another, returning to their homes in various
+parts of the world.  Not one that I know of is living now, and nearly
+all whom I could trace in later years had gone into trade, and
+flourished there.
+
+But my acquaintance with Paris had begun.  It was to be extended in
+subsequent years.  What chiefly remains in my recollection concerning
+those early days is that for the first time I had the consciousness of
+being in a foreign country.  I never had that in England, no, not for a
+minute, and no one, then or since, ever tried to make me feel it there.
+Of course, part of the difference was due to language, but not all the
+difference.  There were subtle differences in France, and some plain,
+outstanding ones.  The English are kindly people, hospitable, and, if I
+must say so--and I think I must, having lived through three years of
+the great war with them, to say nothing of many preceding years--they
+are naïve.  The Englishman, if he liked you, took you to his home, but
+he said that the Frenchman did not.  But he did, I found.  And I found
+that the Frenchman, if less kindly, was more polite.  The Frenchman had
+either clearer ideas or none at all about other nationalities; the
+Englishman--but really, these reflections do not belong in this book,
+but in another, if anywhere.  I will not prolong them here, but say
+only that I was in Paris fairly often after that first visit and that I
+liked it the more the more I knew it.
+
+{20}
+
+But I am forgetting my friend Monsieur Raoul de St. Ange.  I would not
+willingly forget my friend St. Ange.  In fact, I could not forget him.
+He was a delightful man of fifty or thereabouts, a dear and gracious
+person.  I had met him in London where he was giving lessons in French,
+and trying to make a French weekly paper pay its way and earn him
+something over.  He was of Norman birth, and had lived fairly well in
+Paris up to the time of the Commune, when he had been ruined.  He
+emigrated to London.  He had a wife and two small sons.  The boys were
+about ten and twelve respectively.  This little family lived in a
+little house at Shepherd's Bush.  The house was very simple, but it was
+as neat as wax.  I used to help St. Ange a little with the English
+section of his paper, and in return he gave me lessons in French.
+
+One day he said to me: "I must go to Normandy; a week there.  It will
+give me the greatest pleasure if you come."  And so I arranged to meet
+him at Amiens on my return from Paris.  He had some family affairs to
+settle, something to do with the children, and a bit of property that
+had been left in trust for them.  In Normandy we would see some of his
+people, a bit of France from the inside not the outside.  I jumped at
+the chance.  We met at Amiens, and explored the Cathedral before doing
+anything else.  He knew somebody there, or somebody knew of him, and we
+were taken all over the wonderful Cathedral, from roof to crypt.  We
+were so long at this that we concluded to spend the night in Amiens,
+and push on, next morning, by train to {21} a village some thirty miles
+or more away, which was one of the objectives of his visit.
+
+The name of that village I have clean forgotten.  It has passed like
+many other names that were supposed to be fixed there.  But forgotten
+it is, although the place itself is associated with memories of rustic
+hospitality more generous than anything that has ever come my way.
+Well, we arrived at the village of the forgotten name, and we put up at
+the house of the station master, in the station building itself.  There
+was no inn.  The station master was somehow, somewhere, within St.
+Ange's circle of friends.  He took charge of our kits and showed me to
+what I am sure was the best bedroom.  I had a guilty feeling that the
+occupants must have turned out for my benefit; but one can only defer
+to the custom of the country.
+
+Presently Monsieur Station Master, and Madame Station Master, and
+little Station Master _fils_ appeared, each in best bib and tucker, and
+led the way across the fields, to a little thatched farmhouse two miles
+distant.  The railway contingent evidently were making holiday.  All
+the way we walked through fields of grain, in a wide path which came,
+by and by, to a little bridge over a chattering stream, and then to a
+road, and around a bend in the road to the farmhouse, thatched, moss
+and flowers growing in the thatch, and a family growing in the door,
+for the doorway was filled with humans of ages from eight to eighty, in
+rows and tiers.  As we drew near there was such a display of waving
+handkerchiefs and joyous shouts as would have {22} gratified William
+the Conqueror himself had he been passing.
+
+St. Ange was smothered in embraces, and I was bidden in, not to the
+embraces, but to a seat in the fireside, after salutations all round.
+St. Ange had not been in these parts for twenty years.  He was trustee
+for some of these younkers, and had now come to be relieved of his
+trust, as the younkers were of age in the eyes of the law.  You would
+have thought that I was a benefactor, so generous were their
+attentions.  Food and wine were pressed upon me.  What the good folk
+were saying did not enter my comprehension; the twists of the Norman
+tongue were beyond me.  But smiles are translatable in any language and
+so are hearty courtesies.  Presently what appeared to be the whole
+population of the neighbouring countryside streamed in, and St. Ange
+and his American friend had to meet them all.  We met like old friends.
+Then St. Ange took me to call upon some old folk in a cottage not far
+away.  We must have been a couple of hours calling about.  When we
+returned to the first place a dinner was ready for us, and we for it.
+
+The fat of the land was before us.  There was every kind of good thing
+that grew in Normandy.  And there was wine of the country, and plenty
+of it.  The triumph of the occasion was duck,--duck such as I never ate
+before, and have not eaten since, not even in Paris, where they have a
+subtle skill in cooking these things.  I could write rhapsodies about
+that duck.  When, even nowadays, I am seeking to whet appetite, I think
+of the ducks I ate in Norman {23} cottages.  No one has eaten duck who
+has not eaten it in Normandy where every housewife seemed to me a
+marvel of a cook.  I was in Normandy a week, lunched and dined and
+supped in a different house each day--they were chiefly the homes of
+cottage folk--and, for abundance and good feeding, I still regard it as
+a land of miracle.
+
+How I praised the duck at that first dinner, and extolled Madame's
+skill in cookery!  Madame was pleased.  Have I conveyed the impression
+that these were wealthy folk?  It was not my intention to do so.  They
+were Normandy peasants, which may mean anything or little as far as
+well-being goes.  The room in which we ate was the living room,
+cooking-washing-eating-room.  I daresay that behind a panel, or a
+curtain, there was an alcove with a bed.  Anyhow, there was one in an
+adjoining room.  And over the dining table was a loft to which you
+mounted by a ladder which was slung against the ceiling, when not
+wanted, by rope and pulley.  The dining-room floor was of earth, hard
+packed, hard as nails, clean as the proverbial whistle.  Everything
+shone with cleanliness--windows, napery, brass, pewter, plates,
+kettles--if all the belongings of the room had whistled there would
+have been a bellow as if the siren of a big liner had blown.  Such
+cleanliness and such cooking I have not found in all the years that
+followed in the many English cottages I have known, but I met the
+combination three or four times a day for six or seven days, each time
+beneath a different roof.
+
+St. Ange and I walked back across the fields by {24} moonlight,
+Monsieur, Madame, and Toddlekins Station Master, and two from our
+feasting house, accompanying us.  That night I slept like a top.  At
+noon what was my surprise and joy to find another duck, duly prepared
+and cooked by our hostess of the preceding day, waiting for me on the
+station master's table.  It had been brought by one of her small fry
+with the lady's compliments.  There was a compliment fit for a prince!
+Have I mentioned the wine that graced the basket, and the miraculous
+green peas that were to melt in the mouth?  Ah, well, it was long ago,
+and it was hospitality.
+
+In that way did Normandy receive us at every halt, whether we called at
+farm, or cottage, or château.  Was there ever such a country for eating
+and drinking, I wondered.  At last we arrived at Rouen.  We had driven
+in from the country, and somewhat wearied and dusty with the journey,
+we were hurried by a stout and jolly man, a gigantic person who was in
+waiting on the road, to a delightful dwelling in the town where three
+generations of St. Ange's relatives welcomed us and would have haled us
+forthwith to the seats of honour, but that we pleaded for a wash and a
+change.
+
+It was twelve o'clock when we gathered at table.  It was four when we
+rose.  And when we rose, something else was served in the next room.
+And I was told that we must dine at another house, at seven; I think
+seven was the hour.  And we were to sup at a third party at eleven!
+But I had become accustomed to this splendour of generosity.  St. Ange
+had warned me at Amiens that it was inevitable, {25} and could n't be
+shirked.  And so, after the first heroic occasion, the memorable affair
+of duck at the cottage, I made a great show of eating and drinking, so
+that these valiant Norman trenchermen would not think me rude and
+neglectful, and speedily I learned how to keep up the appearance of
+feasting and of still having a wee-bit appetite at the end.  That was
+doing pretty well, I think, for a novice.  And it required some skill
+in calculation, for at each table there was everything, and abundance
+of everything, that gourmets or gourmands could desire to eat and
+drink.  In seven days there were twenty-one such feasts!
+
+When we reached London, on our homeward journey, I called for sausage
+and mashed, and a tankard of bitter, by way of return to the simple
+life.
+
+But the kindness of it all, the generous hospitality; the opening of
+hearts to a stranger who comes with an old friend or relative,--in
+forty years I have seen nothing to equal it.  The gentleman who killed
+the fatted calf offered but a Barmecide feast in comparison with the
+provender of my Norman friends.
+
+A few days after the return from France a telegram came to me from St.
+Ange, saying that his boy was seriously ill, and asking me to come at
+once.  In the evening I went as quickly as I could to Shepherd's Bush.
+The little chap had taken a chill, pneumonia had supervened.  The
+doctor was in the house when I arrived.  "Can't live through the
+night," he said.  The parents were with the little fellow.  I dozed
+below in an armchair, knowing that there was need {26} of sleep if I
+were to see these good people through the crest of their trouble.  An
+hour after midnight the mother came and said: "It is finished!  Yes,
+dead.  I am anxious for _mon mari_.  He will not move, or speak.  He
+sits staring--_comme ça_.  Please go to him."
+
+I aroused St. Ange and made him come with me.  All night till dawn I
+walked him, through Shepherd's Bush, through Hammersmith, across the
+Bridge, across Barnes Common, through Mortlake and Richmond, and back
+again, making him talk and tiring him out.  That was the object, to
+counter his nervous excitement by physical fatigue and to divert his
+mind.  I brought him home at sunrise, limp, exhausted.  He slept for
+ten hours.
+
+I had to make him see that the world had not come to a standstill, that
+there was no "copy" for his paper, and so on.  I saw his printers, his
+publishers, and some other people he knew who turned out "copy."
+Between them all they saw him through the worst of his problems.  This
+brought me in a practical way into connection with the outer fringes of
+Fleet Street and London journalism, and in my odd hours I learned how
+"copy" was prepared for the compositors, how proofs were corrected, how
+"forms" were made up, and before long was able to assist some of my new
+acquaintances when they were pressed for time at these games.
+
+It was natural enough that in following these lines as a joyous amateur
+I should drift into journalism.  I never intended to stay in it, I
+preferred to write books; but in those days that seemed a mad {27}
+thing to do,--to write books and expect to earn money by them.  In
+journalism, if one got his "stuff" printed, he got paid, and, if one
+knew the ropes, he had n't to wait forever for the payment.  There was
+a certain attractiveness about being paid for work one liked to do, and
+I liked writing better than anything else.  And I liked the rush and
+pressure of journalism as I saw these things manifested in the
+experience of my friends.  They had adventures too; I also would have
+them.  It seemed possible to know everybody, go everywhere, see
+everything, and, if one worked the ropes with skill, he might remain
+his own master.  One saw it all through rose-coloured glasses.  How
+else should youth see anything?
+
+Even to-day I see St. Ange through the rose-coloured glasses of memory.
+It is the only way possible, for except in memory I have not seen him
+in all these years since we returned from Normandy and his boy died.
+Within a month from the funeral Raoul St. Ange and his wife vanished.
+They had returned to France, 't was said, but no one knew.  His pupils
+did not know, his printers did not know, his paper was dying.  I
+suppose he had n't the heart to face the obsequies.  He merely
+vanished.  No inquiry revealed him.  Never a letter, never a wire,
+never a trace of any kind in forty years.
+
+
+
+
+{28}
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I TAKE THE PLUNGE
+
+I have never been so old as I was during my first three or four years
+in London.  It is, or at any rate it used to be, a common delusion of
+youth that the mantle of years has descended upon its shoulders.  In my
+case the shoulders could have carried a large mantle.  I was tall and
+big framed, earning my living in a foreign country, where, by the way,
+I felt completely at home; my habits of thought were far beyond those
+which custom fixes for the 'teens, and all my associates were older
+than myself, most of them much older.  In the work which circumstances
+and I laid out, youth was by others supposed to be a disadvantage, so
+that it might have been natural had I assumed the merit of a maturity
+which I did not possess.  But I was not compelled to assume it.  It was
+attributed to me.  Nobody supposed that I was under nineteen.  I was
+supposed to be at least half a dozen years older.
+
+My first editor was George Parsons Lathrop, of the _Boston Courier_.
+He was a son-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he achieved the honour
+of editing my copy by the alacrity with which he published it for
+nothing.  As the suggestion was {29} my own the acceptance of
+non-compensated work was entirely fair.  If his paper could stand it, I
+could.  I wanted practise, and Lathrop wanted copy.  He was perfectly
+willing that I should practise in his columns.  I did n't know him from
+Adam, but had written to him enclosing a "London Letter" which
+solicited his acceptance on gratuitous terms.  Beneath my generosity
+was a design.  Not only did I need practice but I wanted to be known as
+the London Correspondent of an American paper, in order to have the
+_entrée_ at theatres, concerts, political gatherings, and other public
+functions.  After sufficient practice with Lathrop, I would endeavour
+to sell copy in other quarters.  The plan succeeded.
+
+When the period of gratuitous service had stretched far enough, a
+Boston journal of much interest and overwhelming respectability,
+deigned graciously to pay five dollars a letter for my London "stuff."
+The magnitude of this offer did not shock me, but five dollars meant a
+sovereign, and the addition of twenty shillings to one's weekly income
+suggested wealth to a young scribbler in London.  Three or four letters
+had been despatched when, one evening, an expensive acquaintance who
+had rooms above mine, near Queen Square, dropped in at my snug chambers
+and spun a yarn.  He had "seen Leighton, you know, President of the
+Royal Academy, good sort, dev'lish good fellow.  What do you suppose he
+'s done now?  Taken up a sculptor in Paris, French of course, poor as I
+am, poorer, if it 's possible to be poorer than I am, and has had a
+piece of the chap's work sent over here for exhibit at the {30}
+Academy.  Sculptor could n't send it.  No money.  Not even a studio.
+Devilled for years in other men's studios.  Leighton saw, says fellow
+must become known in London.  Got artist chaps to pay expenses of
+sending over.  Good fellow, Leighton.  Go see it, you!  Press
+Day--Royal Academy--next week.  Forgot French chap's name!"
+
+This brought to my recollection the fact that in Paris, the previous
+Easter, when haunting Bohemia with a pack of student friends, I had
+heard of a needy sculptor who was doing things of strange power, and
+was hard up because he would not work in accepted forms, but persisted
+in carving things that nobody wanted.  And who, in those days, would
+buy sculpture from an "artist unknown"?  My friends promised that I
+should meet the man, but I was called away from Paris before this could
+be arranged.
+
+I went to the Royal Academy on Press Day, and saw the specimen of the
+"new man's" work.  I was quite alone with it.  One is always sure to be
+alone in the Statuary Room of the Royal Academy.  An article came out
+of the silence.  It went to my five-dollar editor.  He responded with
+this note:
+
+
+"Sorry we can't pay for any more of your letters.  We printed the last
+one, but, really, we don't want articles about unknown sculptors,
+especially French ones."
+
+
+The unknown sculptor, whose name, of course, I gave, was Auguste Rodin!
+
+I subsequently heard that the article was the {31} first about Rodin to
+be published in America, and that an artist and fellow townsman of
+mine, Henry Bacon, then in Paris, brought it to his attention.  Months
+afterward, having followed me half around the world, there arrived by
+post a big and battered parcel.  It contained a photograph of the
+sculpture I had seen, the bust of Rodin's "St. John Preaching", and the
+large mount bore Auguste Rodin's autograph with a grateful message to
+me.  I had the trophy framed and hung over the fireplace in my
+chambers, and there, whether the fireplace were in England or America,
+it has hung ever since.  If I were the first to give Auguste Rodin
+public recognition in my country, he was the first anywhere to
+acknowledge my stumbling work.
+
+Vocation was pressing its claims more heavily than usual about that
+time and there was little opportunity to pursue a project I had formed
+for writing a series of articles upon "The London of Disraeli."
+Everybody in pendom had written of "Dickens' London", and "Thackeray's
+London", and after "Endymion" had made its loudly trumpeted appearance,
+it occurred to me that Disraeli had a London which the makers of
+articles had not seized upon and which would yield "material" for
+interesting copy.  This, if well illustrated, might appeal to some
+magazine editor in America and subsequently become a book.  At the same
+time I was gathering notes and impressions for a series of papers which
+might be called "Odd Corners of London."  For things of this kind
+America seemed to promise an especially good market, and I believed
+{32} that I could supply it fairly well.  One thing after another
+delayed this little plan.  Vocation was taking up more time and at
+higher pressure than is compatible with hobby-riding.  It has a habit
+of doing so.  Then a visit to America intervened, for the purpose of
+spending my twenty-first birthday, and the following five or six
+months, at home.  The return to England was followed by a rush of work
+in the City, and this by an illness of some weeks' duration.  All the
+while the Disraeli subject lay untouched until, one day in 1882, I met
+a character in a Disraeli novel, who was much more of a character
+outside it.
+
+It was a day of powerful rain.  The Pullman Company were to run their
+first train in England over the Brighton line from Victoria Station.
+They had invited a regiment of celebrities and a few odd sticks.  Among
+the latter I was included by some official of my acquaintance who
+thought I might write an article for some overseas paper.  Taking a
+place in a smoking car I was solitary for but a minute, when George
+Augustus Sala entered hurriedly and plumped himself down beside me,
+saying: "What a beastly, blowy, wet morning!"
+
+"The worst since Noah's time," said I.
+
+"If this train gets to Brighton and returns through the flood, it will
+be another case not only of pull man, but also of pull devil, pull
+baker," said Sala.
+
+"There 's copy for you," said I.
+
+"Oh, are you a journalist?" asked Sala.
+
+"I 'm hoping to be.  It's an aspiration."
+
+"Desperation, more likely," he said.  "Don't do {33} it, young man, not
+if there 's a good crossing to sweep in your neighbourhood.  Journalism
+is the worst trade in the world."
+
+"Every man says that of his own profession," I replied.
+
+"Profession be hanged!  What do we profess?  We stain paper, and look
+as wise as owls, and know a damned sight more than we ever tell.  Most
+of us bleat in our folds like sheep; few of us have the chance to go
+about the world and see things, and even they work like slaves to
+entertain the public while their owners take the profits.  The worst
+trade in the world, sir; work harder, know more than any other--about
+human nature, anyhow--and get less for it than any other; what we write
+is forgotten the day after it's printed, and when we can't grind out
+any more, when they 've squeezed our brains dry, we 're thrown on the
+dust-heap to be buried by a benevolent association.  Don't go into
+journalism unless you own the paper!  That's where the profits are--big
+circulation and advertising revenue, politics and peerages!  I 'm too
+old for aiming at ownership now; besides, I 'm a writer, not a screw!
+Journalism be hanged.  If I 'd been a _chef_ in a millionaire's palace,
+or a fashionable hotel, I 'd have done better."
+
+Possibly.  At any rate he would have been the prince of _chefs_ as he
+was "the prince of journalists", or was it the king the public called
+him?  He was supposed to earn fabulous sums with his pen.  If he earned
+them he spent them, for he left nothing when he had "gone west."  He
+was an artist in {34} cookery, had a knowing taste in wines; he had
+been everywhere, seen everything, knew everybody, and on the shortest
+possible notice could write an article upon anything or nothing.  He
+had a flaming face, small, glittering eyes, a build and frontage not
+unlike that of Pierpont Morgan of later fame, and a reputation for wit
+and story-telling.  He had also a reputation for geniality.  He was as
+genial as a thunderstorm.  His rumblings and clatters might pass quite
+harmless, or sear you with a flash.  His familiar signature was "G.A.S."
+
+"I see you don't believe it," said he, "but you will.  Don't say I did
+n't warn you."
+
+"Thanks," said I.
+
+"Not in the least," said he.  "Go to your doom!  What's your paper?"
+
+I said I had written for two or three papers at home, in America, and I
+told him the story of the editor who did n't want Rodin.  He laughed
+until his white waistcoat nearly burst its buttons.  "I had an editor
+once," said he, "who didn't know the date of the Battle of Waterloo but
+was certain that Nelson had saved the day.  Journalism a 'profession',
+eh?  And editors are the High Board of Examiners.  But don't mind me.
+I 'm like this on wet mornings."
+
+Just then a wet prelate in a shaggy coat shook himself at the door, as
+if he were a huge dog that had soaked in the rain.  His prelacy was
+revealed by the purple at his throat.
+
+"Monsignor Capel," exclaimed Sala.  "How are you?  And did you come in
+a boat?"
+
+{35}
+
+"The voyage from Kensington was rough," said the prelate, "but this
+seems a snug harbour."
+
+"Make fast to moorings here, and to-morrow the envious will say that
+G.A.S. is travelling Rome-wards with you on an American train."
+
+"Undreamed-of felicity," said the prelate.  "But I think we shall not
+go far toward Rome to-day.  This train has no 'through connection', as
+they say in America.  This is my first experience in an American train,
+but not, of course, your first, Mr. Sala.  Possibly your first, sir,"
+he said, turning to me, as he took a seat beside Sala.
+
+"Oh, no, I 'm an American," said I.
+
+"Then I am doubly fortunate," said the Monsignor.  "Because I am going
+to America and you can tell me how to get about, if you will be so
+good."  This was a pleasant way to break the ice, and as the train
+filled, presently we had a pleasant company and were speedily at
+Brighton, where the Pullman people entertained their trainload at
+luncheon.  On the return journey Monsignor Capel sat opposite me at a
+table built for two, and talked about America.  That is to say, he
+asked questions and I answered them, as we smoked the Pullman cigars.
+As we parted at Victoria, he invited me to dine at his house, making an
+appointment for the following week.
+
+He was not only a clever man and "striking", as they say, in
+appearance, but he had great charm, and being a Jesuit of brilliant and
+varied accomplishments, could adapt himself easily to any company.  As
+a preacher he was eloquent; as a man of the world he was brilliant and
+fascinating; as an {36} ecclesiastic distinguished and influential; as
+a maker of titled, wealthy, and in the worldly sense "important"
+converts to Rome he was famous, but as the administrator of a college
+or university he proved a failure.  He was a prominent figure in London
+life; he was the Monsignor Catesby of "Lothair", as Manning was the
+Cardinal Grandison.  If his fortunes had begun to ebb at the time I
+knew him, the glamour of his successes was still about him.
+
+Disraeli had described Catesby as "a fascinating man who talked upon
+all subjects except high mass, and knew everything that took place at
+Court without being present there himself.  He led the conversation to
+the majestic theme, and while he seemed to be busied in breaking an egg
+with delicate precision, and hardly listening to the frank expression
+of opinions which he carelessly encouraged, obtained a not insufficient
+share of Lothair's views and impressions of human beings and affairs in
+general."
+
+I dined with Monsignor Capel on several occasions at Scarsdale Lodge,
+in Wright's Lane, Kensington.  Scarsdale Lodge has for many years known
+a succession of celebrated tenants, of whom Dundreary Sothern was one.
+Sothern had also lived at Cedar Villa, next door, and Capel had
+succeeded him there.  Now, and for many years, Scarsdale Lodge has been
+the town home of H. Hughes-Stanton, R.A., whom I have known from almost
+the beginning of things.  Up to the year preceding the Pullman
+excursion Monsignor Capel had lived in Cedar Villa.  Sothern had made
+that place famous for breakfasts and suppers and practical jokes.  {37}
+Capel's breakfasts had been quite as famous without the practical
+jokes.  Capel had transformed Sothern's billiard room into a chapel.
+The dining room in which the actor had "exposed" the "feats" of the
+Davenport brothers, and where the lights of Bohemia had twinkled, had,
+under the prelate's tenancy, been noted for its hospitality to pilgrims
+from the polite world who were on the way to Rome.  But the line was
+not drawn at hungry hearts.  Palates that were used to dainty feasts
+were tickled there, and brilliant table talk of politics and art, of
+literature and science and society had rippled there.  Capel's
+hospitality was wide; his guests were, as likely as not,
+non-conformists--if they dared to come--Anglicans who dared
+anything--and political men of all shades of opinion, especially
+anti-Gladstonian opinion.  But disciples of the G.O.M. were welcome if
+they were good talkers.  They might be converted to other politics; at
+any rate they would hear them.
+
+Monsignor Capel at home was in purple-edged cassock, with purple
+buttons and broad purple sash.  If in his shaggy overcoat he had
+suggested bulk, in his cassock and biretta he was a dignified, even an
+imposing figure.  He received me in his study at the twilight hour.
+The fire-glow played over the room, while the papal chamberlain
+submitted to the processes of an interview.  But "submitted" is
+scarcely the right word; it is merely the word that custom applies to
+the extraction of copy from a willing subject.  He had invited the
+interviewer and did not pretend that the interview {38} was torture.
+We sat by the fire and spun.  The room was on the ground floor of the
+house and in the rear, overlooking the garden.  His writing desk was in
+a bay window, and above it a crucifix was suspended.  Near it, on the
+left wall, hung a large photograph of Pope Pius IX and his household.
+The Monsignor himself was not inconspicuous in this.  About the room
+were a dozen or more photographs of celebrities.  Among these was a
+photograph of Gladstone.  "I keep that here as a penance," said Capel,
+to whom the name of the "Grand Old Man" was anathema.
+
+Capel alluded to himself as a "lamb" in politics, but his allusion to
+politicians opposed to his way of thinking were anything but lamblike
+that early evening.  He had published a pamphlet called "Great Britain
+and Rome, or Ought the Queen to Hold Diplomatic Relations with the
+Sovereign Pontiff?"  Of course he held that she ought, and he said so
+to the immense disapproval of the majority of his fellow countrymen.
+He had also produced a pamphlet on the Irish Question which, then as
+now, could be counted on for enraging and puzzling half the population.
+The solution proposed by him, was, I believe, more Roman Catholicism,
+but why and how to get more of what was already in excess one did not
+see then, and sees now even less than before.
+
+But Capel's star was dimming.  His Catholic college, or university, or
+whatever it was, had failed for lack of support and faults of
+administration, and the financial troubles were soon to drive him to
+the {39} bankruptcy court, if they had not already done so.  And His
+Eminence Cardinal Manning had thrown his influence against the
+captivating Monsignor.  The Cardinal had his reasons, and, I suppose,
+they were good reasons.  At any rate, like Shylock's, they were
+sufficient.  When the Cardinal was against a man in his flock, that
+man's chances for preferment, and even for holding his own, were not
+worth discussing.  Capel went to America in 1883.  He sailed on the
+_Arizona_ whose captain was the brother of my friend, Henry Murray.
+The Monsignor made a meteoric flash over the American continent.  I saw
+him there.  And then the continent swallowed him.  He died in
+California, if not unknown then practically forgotten.
+
+The sequel to my visit at Scarsdale Lodge was an article, and the
+article was sent, on chance, to the _Boston Herald_, then the leading
+newspaper in New England and of almost metropolitan importance.  I did
+not know any one connected with the paper, not even the editor's name.
+But the article was printed, although I did not know that until some
+months later, at the end of 1882, when I turned up in Boston, at the
+_Herald_ office, and asked for the editor, sending him my card with a
+message of inquiry about the article which I had posted to him from
+London some months earlier.
+
+I intended to ask him for a job, for I had decided to settle awhile in
+Boston and turn my London experiences to account if the opportunity
+could be made.
+
+A boy came to the room where I had waited on the anxious seat for an
+unhappy quarter of an hour.
+
+{40}
+
+"Mr. Holmes will see you," he said.  "Come this way."
+
+Holmes was the man's name, was it!  Yes, John H.  I had learned that
+much, and I followed the boy to an inner office.  A dark-haired,
+slender, agreeable-mannered man, who looked rather like the Whitelaw
+Reid of that time, rose from his desk.  As he did so I said:
+
+"Mr. Holmes, I believe."
+
+"Yes," said he, "and you are the writer of that article?" naming it.
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+He held out his hand, and smiled.  We shook hands, and I tried to look
+as if it were my daily occupation to be welcomed by the editors of
+powerful journals.  Naturally, I did n't feel that way, and was
+nervously wondering what to say next.  That anxiety vanished as the
+editor asked:
+
+"Are you at liberty to do any more work of that kind, or of any special
+kind, for us?"
+
+"Yes," said I, concealing, I hoped, my eagerness and delight.
+
+"Then I will take as much as you are willing to write," said he, "and
+pay you ten dollars a column, and when you go anywhere for us, your
+expense bill."
+
+This seemed a fair beginning, particularly as I had not been compelled
+to ask for it, as I had expected to do.  When I closed the door behind
+me and descended the stairs, I felt an elation of spirit that was
+natural enough in a young chap who was more than five months short of
+his twenty-third birthday.
+
+{41}
+
+And so, with the beginning of 1883, I took the plunge into journalism.
+There followed five more or less adventurous years which carried me
+from one end of the country to the other and across the Atlantic and
+back again.  Then in 1888, I was appointed London correspondent of the
+same paper, a position which I held for nine years until called
+elsewhere.  It is with memories and impressions of the London Days of
+that time, and of some of their celebrated personages, that the
+following pages are concerned.
+
+
+
+
+{42}
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BROWNING AND MOSCHELES
+
+You will look in vain now for the old brown-brick bungalow that stood,
+for the most part concealed by trees and shrubs, within the railings of
+the park-like enclosure halfway down Sloane Street, on the left-hand
+side, as you go from Knightsbridge.  It stood there till the end of the
+eighties.  If you walked there in the days of my early acquaintance
+with it, or glided through Sloane Street in a hansom, the chances were
+that the bungalow would still escape your glance, sheltered as it was
+by foliage.  But from the top of any 'bus you could make it out
+readily, and you would wonder, as most 'bus fares did, what lucky or
+eccentric fellow lived within the very plain walls and had all that
+Cadogan enclosure as a back garden.  Probably your neighbour on the
+'bus top would tell you, 'bus neighbours being at all times well
+stocked with misinformation, that the favoured dwelling was the home of
+the gardener of the enclosure.  But it was not.  It was the home of my
+delightful friend, Felix Moscheles, and there you could find Robert
+Browning almost any Sunday afternoon when he was in London.
+
+{43}
+
+Felix Stone Moscheles was the son of Ignaz Moscheles, composer and
+pianist, whose intimate friendship with Mendelssohn is revealed in the
+latter's published correspondence.  Felix was born in London February
+8, 1833, at Number 3 Chester Place, Regent's Park, and Mendelssohn
+acted as his godfather at the christening in St. Pancras Church.  Felix
+died at Tunbridge Wells, December 22, 1917.  He was as kind a man as
+ever lived.  He was an artist by profession, fond of music and
+musicians, as you might expect him to be; he spoke several languages
+fluently and with equal charm--English, French, German, Esperanto, and
+I know not what else--and he was passionately attached to movements for
+world peace.  We know that nothing made for the peace of the world down
+to mid-1914; that while Germany had been deceiving it, the world had
+lulled itself to sleep with "drowsy syrups" and ecstatic daydreams.  I
+think the awakening killed my dear old friend.  That is not surprising.
+He was over eighty-one when the war broke out, and almost eighty-five
+when he died.  Down to 1913, when I saw him last, I used to say that he
+was the youngest man of my acquaintance.  He had the optimism of youth,
+its buoyant spirit, its gallant outlook.
+
+When I first knew Moscheles he was only fifty-five or fifty-six, and he
+was passing cakes to the ladies, while his wife poured tea, and a
+stoutish man in a grey checked suit, and with grey moustache and
+chin-beard, was talking something which seemed like philosophy, and was
+certainly not {44} poetry, to a mixed group in a cosy corner.  It was
+one of the happy points about Moscheles' Sunday afternoons that if you
+cared to continue talking with another caller and the other caller
+cared to continue to listen, or to talk with you, you were not routed
+up to exchange commonplaces about the weather with somebody else who
+needed to be assured that it rained, or that the sun was shining.  You
+could flit from group to group, and find a place where you fitted, and
+the host or hostess would contrive, if you were unknown, to make you
+known to some one without interrupting some one else's story, so that
+no one was left adorning the wall.
+
+The stoutish, grey man in the grey checked suit was Robert Browning
+whose afternoon-tea manner was quite simple, as unaffected as that of a
+bank-chairman contemplating dividends or deposits.  He was not in the
+least a posing poet.  He had been a great friend of Moscheles for a
+long time, and the latter spoke of him as "my literary godfather."
+Moscheles, at this time, was preparing for publication "Felix
+Mendelssohn's letters to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles."  I had
+something to do with persuading him to write "In Bohemia with George Du
+Maurier."  I had been looking in his studio through a mass of autograph
+letters and sketches relating to his years in Paris as an art student,
+the "Trilby" years, and, as Du Maurier's book and the play adapted from
+it were the rage of the time, Felix was encouraged to write around the
+letters he had, and Du Maurier's early sketches, and about the
+characters in the romance of the hour, and to {45} send some of the
+chapters to the _Century Magazine_, and afterward to produce the whole
+as a book.
+
+Moscheles was brought up among celebrities, and was surrounded by the
+famous all his life.  Mendelssohn, Joachim, Malibran, Lablache were, in
+his boyhood, family friends.  He attracted distinguished persons as
+long as he lived.  When he was thirteen the family moved from London to
+Leipzig, at Mendelssohn's instigation.  Mendelssohn was eager that his
+friend, Moscheles' father, should become a professor in the
+Conservatoire which he was founding at Leipzig.  And so the move was
+made, Ignaz Moscheles relinquishing his London career and its worldly
+advantages in order to live near his friend.  Felix, who at ten had
+begun his education at King's College, London, had, at thirteen, to
+find it in Germany.  But not for long; when he was seventeen,
+determined to become an artist, he began studying drawing and painting
+in Paris, at the Atelier Gleyre.  Having seen something of the troubles
+of Germany in 1848, he was now to see the troubles of France which led
+to and followed the flight of Louis Philippe, and attended the _coup
+d'état_.
+
+It was during the Atelier Gleyre period that he met George du Maurier
+and had the amusing experiences he described afterwards in the book to
+which I have alluded.  From Paris he went to Antwerp, where he studied
+under Van Lorino at De Keyser's Academy, and where he had as fellow
+students Laurens Alma-Tadema, Maris, and Heyermans.  I don't know when
+he returned to London {46} to settle down, but when he did so he began
+a career that was to be rich in friendships, helpful to all, and
+productive in portraiture.
+
+As a portrait painter he was at his best, I think.  As long ago as
+1862, in his studio at Cadogan Gardens, he painted a portrait of
+Mazzini which, after Mazzini's death, he offered to present to Italy.
+But official Italy at that time was not desiring portraits of Mazzini
+and the offer was declined.  Now, after the painter's death, the
+portrait goes to a museum at Milan.  In 1882, Moscheles visited
+America, accompanying his friends Henry Irving and Ellen Terry on their
+first journey over the Atlantic.  He painted Grover Cleveland, during
+the week when Cleveland was first elected to the Presidency, and talked
+with him of the subjects which absorbed the artist,--International
+Arbitration and Universal Peace.  His portrait of Browning went to the
+Armour Institute, Chicago.  Other portraits of his which were quite
+remarkable, which linger in the memory, were of his mother, Charlotte
+Moscheles, Rubinstein, H. M. Stanley, Gounod, Sarasate, Tom Mann,
+Israels, Stepniak, George Jacob Holyoake (at the age of eighty); he
+made beautiful water colours of Venice, of Spain, of Sicily, of Cairo,
+of Tunis, of Algerian subjects; and later was quite fascinated by his
+scheme of painting a series of "Pictures with a Purpose."
+
+But the "Pictures with a Purpose" did not, I think, attract persons
+less purposeful than the painter.  They were socialistic pictures,
+reforming, philanthropic, propagandist, as if the painter were {47}
+preaching by paint and canvas.  I think his oral preaching was
+preferred.
+
+I have mentioned the old brown-brick bungalow where Moscheles lived in
+Cadogan Gardens, where I first knew him, and first saw Robert Browning.
+Moscheles had lived there for I know not how many years, but when his
+lease expired, in the early nineties, the bungalow expired too.  The
+march of "improvement" was coming down Sloane Street, and the bungalow
+was doomed.  It disappeared from the gaze of surrounding and jealous
+neighbours who might have keys to the gardens but could not live in
+those pleasant demesnes.  In the Elm Park Road, near the borders of
+Chelsea and Fulham, Moscheles found a house with an unusually large
+garden.  He transformed the house and built a studio which he connected
+with it, and there one went to so many melodious evenings and artistic
+afternoons that through the years of recollection I seem to behold him
+hospitably dispensing tea and bread and butter, attended by swarms of
+musicians who were, or were to become, famous; by poets and painters
+who had found, or still were seeking, celebrity; by dreamers who were
+going to free Russia; or zealous gentlemen, like Baron d'Estournelles
+de Constant, who were not only labouring for the Hague Conferences but
+for the Parliament of Man.
+
+It was there that Mark Hambourg first played when he came to London.  I
+remember the occasion well enough, but not the music, for I cannot
+forget that phenomenally ugly youngster.  He was then {48} only a boy.
+But the music rippled and thundered from his fingers, while that
+amazing head with its torrential hair cast shivering shadows over the
+magical keyboard.  The unprepossessing youth was then unknown.  He
+became known soon enough and he ran quickly to the fame that waits upon
+pianists of remarkable gifts.
+
+Moscheles was a citizen of the world, which he regarded as his native
+country, so it was natural enough that he should take a lively interest
+in Esperanto in the days when people thought it a fad, and he became,
+as he remained, President of the London Esperanto Club.  He was
+constantly corresponding with congenial folk in remote countries with
+the object of spreading the merits of Esperanto as an auxiliary
+language for international intercourse.  "Even now," he said a
+generation ago, "I can go anywhere with it, and by its aid find
+somebody who will make me feel at home."  He was a tireless
+propagandist.  I would venture to say that he loved "propaganding" more
+than art.  At any rate he could seldom avoid diluting his painting with
+propaganda in the contented Victorian era when little wars were fought
+every six months and trouble looked for between whiles.  How easy it
+seemed in those days, when most of us were credulous, to achieve
+Liberty by lecturing!
+
+Partly through his zeal for Esperanto and partly through his passion
+for a "Free Russia", he was particularly keen to meet Stepniak.  I had
+known the latter for some years, having as long ago as 1885 or 1886
+written an article about him for the _New {49} York Tribune_.  The
+meeting with Moscheles was brought about one night at a "Smoke Talk" in
+my home in Cheyne Walk, and from that moment the two men became fast
+friends, remaining so until Stepniak's tragic death.  Whether Stepniak
+had or had not killed an official in Russia I don't know, and I do not
+care much.  If he had killed him I dare say the man deserved it, for,
+of all the plundering and oppressive gangs of officialdom, the Russians
+of that era had about the worst; they robbed like desperados and they
+ruled their land with lies, torture, and corruption.  In a country
+capable of producing the "Revolution" of 1917 and the later Bolshevism,
+anything was possible in the mid-eighties,--anything except the shadow
+of freedom.  The tall dark Russian with the thin beard and the thin
+squeaky voice was a striking contrast to Moscheles, who was grey, and
+rather short than tall, and whose quiet geniality was the bloom on a
+trustful, generous character that invited confidence.  Stepniak used to
+say that he never became quite accustomed to the liberty of English
+life.  The opposite character of Russian habits had bitten too deeply
+into him.  I remember that when he first came to London he would look
+around furtively when in the street, and if we stopped at a corner to
+talk he would ask: "Will the police allow this?  In Russia they would
+not after dark."  If he had lived to see London during the Great War he
+might have felt much more at home.
+
+No one was ever bored at the Moscheles' afternoons.  How could one be
+bored when host and {50} hostess gave no thought to themselves but all
+their thought to their guests?  Even the Swami I met there did not
+depress my spirits as many Swamis have done.  I forget his name.  I
+have met regiments of them in one country and another.  Mostly they
+blazed, not with humility but importance.  He, I say, had a worldly
+air, as if he were an Anglican bishop.  He had also a sense of humour
+which was not entirely subdued as he listened to an American lady
+expounding the doctrine of "Votes for Women."  "Madame," said he, "may
+I ask a question?"
+
+The lady looked assent.
+
+"Your husband: does he share these views?"
+
+"Not yet," she replied.
+
+"Ah," said the Swami.  And there were gusts of laughter.
+
+"I may add," said the lady, "that I am not yet married."
+
+Then the laughter came in shrieks, and the Swami smiled.  But this, of
+course, was a generation before the suffragettes were brandishing
+hatchets like the Redmen, and burning churches and slashing paintings
+like the Huns.
+
+But I have alluded to Browning, and have done so because whenever I
+think of Moscheles, I always think of him in association with Browning.
+Their friendship was very intimate, and that is one fact which shows
+the kind of man Moscheles was.  After that glimpse and
+how-d'ye-do-good-bye at the old brown-brick bungalow which the Earl of
+Cadogan was so glad to destroy when the chance arrived to do so, it had
+been arranged by Moscheles and the {51} poet that we should meet again
+with another friend of the three at a little lunch of four.  But fate,
+or, to be precise, politics, which may be another name for fate,
+decided otherwise, and I had to go far afield to chronicle the results.
+Never again did that little company come together unless it were at
+Browning's open grave, on the midday of the dying year.  The reaper
+Death had mown quickly.
+
+When the scene shifted to Westminster Abbey, I waited at the cloister
+doors till I could pass to a seat in the Poets' Corner.  While waiting
+at the door, I heard from the pressing throng behind me the voice of an
+Irish writer whom I had known and had lost from sight five years
+before.  While looking for the familiar face that belonged to the
+delicious brogue, there came the sound of a great key turning an
+ancient lock, and then the door swung open.  "Come," said another
+friend, and we went in, getting separated before we had gone far, but
+taking seats near the draped grave.
+
+Browning's son was chief mourner.  The poet had died in his son's home,
+the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice.  And now, this day at Westminster was
+the last day of 1889.  The great bell of the Abbey began tolling; its
+deep notes floated down from its tower as they sought lodgment in the
+hearts of the assembling throng, and with every stroke some face
+appeared that all England, or the world, knew well.  After thirty years
+I can recall many of the faces that the grey light of the dull day,
+softened by the colouring of the Abbey windows, fell upon.  There were
+tiers of people.  Even the openings in {52} the triforium revealed
+them, and by the great western doors they were packed, though they
+could catch but glimpses of the chancel, and most of them not that.
+Huxley's was the first face I saw.  I had first seen it in the same
+place, almost on the same spot, years before, at Darwin's funeral.  Max
+Muller and George Meredith were near him now.  One thought that England
+sent her celebrated living men that day to meet the famous multitudes
+whose bodies have been laid away beneath the Abbey pavement for
+centuries upon centuries.  There were Lord Wolseley and the Lord Chief
+Justice, Lord (then Professor) Bryce, Frederic Harrison, Holman Hunt,
+Henry Irving, Sidney Colvin, Whistler and Poynter and Alma-Tadema and
+Sir John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury).
+
+London was covered with a thickening fog.  You could scarcely see the
+Abbey from Dean's Yard.  Within the Abbey the arches aloft dissolved in
+mist, a mist of copper and pale gold where the light glanced through
+rose windows.  Slipping into one's memory came Mrs. Browning's lines:
+
+  "--view the city perish in the mist
+  Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,
+  The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host
+  Sucked down and choked to silence."
+
+
+Candles from the choir places, and long-chained lamps, sent their soft,
+yellow gleams eerily through the veil which seemed to hang above us.
+And as the high noon drew near my glances fell upon the historians
+Kinglake, Lecky, and Froude.  Would {53} any one of the three ever
+write of this scene in England's history, I wondered?  Bret Harte,
+Burne-Jones, George du Maurier, Leslie Stephen, William Black,
+Bancroft, and John Hare, and the publishers Blackwood, Macmillan,
+Murray, and Spottiswoode, ambassadors and ministers, the heads of
+universities, of learned societies, were shown to their places, singly
+or in groups, or took positions where they could find them, standing
+against the monuments.  And when no more people could find space, the
+Abbey clock struck twelve, and the great west doors swung open, and
+down the long central aisle came the funeral train.  Then arose the
+choral music which for one hundred and seventy years has risen at every
+burial within the Abbey, the burial office composed and played by Croft
+and Purcell when they were organists at Westminster.
+
+Sir Frederick Bridge is playing it now, as Robert Browning, all there
+is of him on earth, is carried on his bier through the dense throng, to
+pause a while at the foot of the chancel steps beneath the central
+lantern.  Choir and clergy precede him.  On either side of him walk
+Hallam Tennyson, Doctor Butler (of Trinity College, Cambridge), Sir
+James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Theodore Martin, Archdean Farrar,
+Professor Masson, Professor Jowett (master of Balliol), Sir Frederick
+Leighton, Sir James Paget, Sir George Grove, George Murray Smith
+(Browning's publisher), and Professor Knight (of the University of St.
+Andrews).  Then as the service proceeds (the Archbishop of Canterbury
+is here, Dean Vaughan, and others eminent in the {54} Church) the
+choristers sing a "Meditation" which Sir Frederick Bridge has composed
+to Mrs. Browning's poem:
+
+  "What would we give to our beloved?
+  The hero's heart to be unmoved,
+    The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep,
+  The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,
+  The monarch's crown to light the brows?
+    'He giveth His beloved sleep.'
+
+  "O earth, so full of dreary noises!
+  O men, with wailing in your voices!
+    O delved gold, the wailers heap!
+  O strife, O curse that o'er it fall!
+  God strikes a silence through you all,
+    And 'giveth His beloved sleep.'
+
+  "His dews drop mutely on the hill,
+  His cloud above it saileth still,
+    Though on its slopes men sow and reap,
+  More softly than the dew is shed,
+  Or cloud is floated overhead,
+    'He giveth His beloved sleep.'"
+
+
+The organ and the choir paused; all sounds died away.  God struck a
+silence through us all.  It fell upon a throng that faced the world's
+loss as if suddenly confronted by the flight of the soul for whose
+absence all mourned.  And just then there fell a shaft of sunlight,
+golden, magical, touching the bier, and then it faded slowly away.  To
+many, very many among the silent company, the loss by this death was a
+personal one; to all it had more than a touch of that.  It must be so
+when a great poet dies.  What I remember as vividly as all else {55}
+was the great number of young faces in the Abbey, as if the rising
+generation did reverence to him who had passed.
+
+By and by the last hymn had been sung, the Dean had pronounced the
+benediction, and Bridge, at the great organ, made the old Abbey thrill
+to its inmost stones with the vibrating tones of the Dead March from
+"Saul."  Now the coffin had been lowered into its grave at the foot of
+Chaucer's tomb.  Before us and at each hand were monuments, tablets,
+inlaid stones, marking the burial places of Spenser, Dryden, Gay, of
+Butler and Casaubon, Ben Jonson, Addison and Cowley, Prior, Macaulay
+and Grote; of Handel, Campbell, Sheridan, and Garrick.  I stood on the
+grave of Dickens.  And the throng passed slowly, reverently gazing into
+the dark grave where Browning's body had been laid as the old year was
+dying.  Pealing through nave and transepts and the chapels of Kings,
+above the altar and the tombs of soldiers, sailors, statesmen--the
+brood who had made England and sung of her--the rumbling and trumpeting
+of the Dead March.  Might not Shakespeare and Milton, Doctor Johnson,
+and Goldsmith and Gray have come to the Poets' Corner that day at noon
+to join the company, and to greet, from their own memorials, this other
+man who had helped to make England?  It seemed quite probable as we
+passed from that real world into the world of fog, and the closing door
+of the Poets' Corner shut in behind us the now tremulous notes of the
+organ.
+
+How often have I heard Sir Frederick stir the {56} slumbering majesty,
+beauty, and solemnity that lie within the Abbey organ, stir them to
+living wonder on occasions like this?  More times than I can easily
+recall.  In capitals and churches and cathedrals, in many parts of the
+world, that March from "Saul" has awakened memories within me.  My
+earliest memory of music concerns itself with a military band, marching
+slowly, slowly down a hill, troops following with reversed arms, a gun
+carriage carrying something that was not a gun, covered with a flag;
+horses whose riders moved very slowly; coaches that young eyes saw as
+beyond number; and then a hole-in-the-ground.  Men carried something on
+their shoulders from the gun carriage and lowered it into the hole;
+other men fired guns at the sky.  A hawk flew full circle in the blue.
+And some one said, "My boy, take a last look where your father lies."
+Then the Dead March rolled and moaned again, and fixed itself on one of
+the pins of memory.
+
+The solemn notes always bring back those moments, as a vision in which
+a small boy made his first acquaintance with Death.  But they have
+never seemed to humble and exalt, moan and triumph and sob and
+victoriously march to the rhythm of the winds, so charged with majesty,
+as when Sir Frederick touched the heart of his instrument at the Abbey.
+The occasion, the place drenched with memories, the simple ceremony,
+the music's magic, and the mystery of it all make of this tribute to
+Death one of the rich experiences of living.
+
+
+
+
+{57}
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+PATTI
+
+One broiling afternoon--it was in August, 1893--a Great Western train
+from London left me at a wee-bit station on the top of a Welsh
+mountain.  The station was called "Penwylt."  It overlooked the Swansea
+Valley, and stood about halfway between Brecon and the sea.  When a
+traveller alighted at Penwylt there was no need to ask why he did so.
+He could have but one destination, and that was Craig-y-Nos Castle, the
+home of Madame Patti.  She was then Madame Patti-Nicolini; she
+afterward became the Baroness Cederström.  I shall use here the name by
+which, for sixty years, she has been known to an adoring world.  A
+carriage from the castle was awaiting me, and quickly it bore me down
+the steep road to the valley, a sudden turn showing the Patti palace
+there on the banks of the Tawe.  The Castle was two miles distant and a
+thousand feet below the railway.  An American flag was flying on the
+tower.  It flew there through the week of my visit, for was I not an
+ambassador from the American Public to the Queen of Song?
+
+Mr. Gladstone once told Madame Patti that he would like to make her
+Queen of Wales.  But she {58} was that already, and more.  She was
+Queen of Hearts the world over, and every soul with an ear was her
+liege.  And, literally, in Wales Patti was very like a queen.  She
+lived in a palace; people came to her from the ends of the earth; she
+was attended with "love, honour, troops of friends"; and whenever she
+went beyond her own immediate gardens the country folk gathered by the
+roadside, dropping curtseys and throwing kisses to her bonny majesty.
+
+Her greeting of me was characteristic of this most famous and fortunate
+of women, this unspoiled favourite of our whirling planet.  A group of
+her friends stood merrily chatting in the hall, and, as I approached, a
+dainty little woman with big brown eyes came running out from the
+centre of the company, stretched forth her hands, spoke a hearty
+welcome, and accompanied it with the inimitable smile which had made
+slaves of emperors.  She had the figure and vivacity of a girl.  She
+was fifty that year, but, there in broad daylight, looked fifteen or
+twenty years younger.  This is not an illusion of gallantry, but a
+statement of fact.
+
+There was a kind of family party at Craig-y-Nos.  Stiffness and
+dullness, and the usual country-house talk about horses and guns, golf
+and fishing, did not prevail there.  _La Diva's_ guests were intimate
+friends, and chiefly a company of English girls who were passing the
+summer with her.  In the evening, when all assembled in the
+drawing-room before going in to dinner, I found that we represented
+five nationalities,--Italian, Spanish, French, English, {59} and
+American.  While we awaited the appearance of our hostess, the
+gathering seemed like a polyglot congress.
+
+As the chimes in the tower struck the hour of eight, a fairy vision
+appeared at the drawing-room door,--Patti, royally gowned and jewelled.
+The defects of the masculine intellect leave me incapable of describing
+the costume of that radiant little woman.  It belonged to one of her
+operatic characters, I forget which one.  But my forgetfulness does n't
+matter.  The sight brought us to our feet, bowing as if we had been a
+company of court gallants in the "spacious days of great Elizabeth",
+and we added the modern tribute of applause, which our queen
+acknowledged with a silvery laugh.  I remember only that the gown was
+white and of some silky stuff, and that about _La Diva's_ neck were
+loops of pearls, and that above her fluffy chestnut hair were
+glittering jewels.  With women it may be different, but mere man cannot
+give a list of Patti's adornments on any occasion; he can know only
+that they became her, and that he saw only her happy face.  Before our
+murmurs had ceased, Patti, who had not entered the room, but had merely
+stood in the portal, turned, taking the arm of the guest who was to sit
+at her right, and away we marched in her train, as if she were truly
+the queen, through the corridors to the conservatory, where dinner was
+served.
+
+It was my privilege at the Castle table to sit at Madame Patti's left.
+At her right was one whose friendship with her dated from the instant
+of her {60} first European triumph.  Heavens!--How many years ago?  But
+it was a quarter of a century less than it now is at the time of which
+I am writing.  The delight of those luncheons and dinners at
+Craig-y-Nos is unforgettable.  There was a notion abroad that these
+meals were held "in state"; but they were not.  There was merely the
+ordinary dinner custom of an English mansion.  The menu, though, was
+stately enough, for the art of cookery was practised at Craig-y-Nos by
+a master who had earned the right to prepare dinners for Patti.  The
+dining room was seldom used in summer for, handsome though that
+apartment is, Patti, and her guests, too, for that matter, preferred to
+be served in the great glass room which was formerly the conservatory
+and was still called so.  There we sat, as far as outlook goes, out of
+doors; in whatever direction we gazed we looked up or down the Swansea
+Valley, across to the mountains, and along the tumbling course of the
+river Tawe.  I was risking some neglect of my dinner, for I sat gazing
+at the wood-covered cliffs of Craig-y-Nos (Rock-of-the-Night) opposite,
+and listening to the ceaseless prattle of the mountain stream.  Patti,
+noticing my admiration of the view, said, "You see what a dreadful
+place it is in which I bury myself."
+
+"'Bury' yourself!  On the contrary, here you are at the summit of
+Paradise, and you have discovered the fountain of perpetual youth.  A
+'dreadful place', indeed!  It's the nearest thing to fairy-land."
+
+"But one of your countrymen says that I 'hide {61} far from the world
+among the ugly Welsh hills.'  He writes it in an American journal of
+fabulous circulation, and I suppose people believe the tale."
+
+Patti laughed at the thought of a too credulous public, and then she
+added:
+
+"Really, they write the oddest things about my home, as if it were
+either the scene of Jack-the-Giant-Killer's exploits on the top of the
+Beanstalk, or a prison in a desolate land."
+
+After visiting Patti at Craig-y-Nos I wondered no more why this
+enchanting woman sang "Home, Sweet Home" so that she fascinated
+millions.  Her own home was far from being "humble", but it was before
+all things, a home.  And she had earned it.  There is not anywhere a
+lovelier spot, nor was there elsewhere a place so remote and at the
+same time so complete in every resource of civilization.
+
+Dinner passed merrily.  Merrily is exactly the word to describe it.  Up
+and down the table good stories flew, sometimes faster than one could
+catch them.  Nobody liked a good joke better than Patti, and when she
+heard one that particularly pleased her she would interpret it to some
+guest who had not sufficiently mastered the language in which it was
+told.  It was all sheer comedy, and after watching it, and hearing _La
+Diva_ speak in a variety of tongues, I asked:
+
+"I wonder if you have what people call a native tongue, or whether all
+of them came to you as a gift of the gods."
+
+"Oh, I don't know so many languages," she {62} replied, "only--let's
+see--English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian."
+
+"And which do you speak best, or like best?"
+
+"I really don't know.  To me there is no difference, as far as
+readiness goes, and I suppose 'the readiness is all.'"
+
+"Not quite all.  But what is your favourite, if you have a favourite
+among them?"
+
+"Oh, Italian!  Listen!"
+
+And then she recited an Italian poem.  Next to hearing Patti sing, the
+sweetest sound was her Italian speech.  Presently she said:
+
+"Speaking of languages, Mr. Gladstone paid me a pretty compliment a
+little while ago--nearly three years ago.  I will show you his letter
+to-morrow, if you care to see it."
+
+Patti forgot nothing.  The next day she brought me Mr. Gladstone's
+letter.  The Grand Old Man had been among her auditors at Edinburgh,
+and after the performance he went on the stage to thank her for the
+pleasure she had given him.  He complained a little of a cold which had
+been troubling him, and Patti begged him to try some lozenges which she
+found useful.  That night she sent him a little box of them.  The old
+statesman acknowledged the gift with this letter:
+
+
+6, Rothesay Terrace,
+  Edinburgh.
+    October 22, 1890.
+
+Dear Madame Patti:
+
+I do not know how to thank you enough for your charming gift.  I am
+afraid, however, that the use {63} of your lozenges will not make me
+your rival.  _Voce quastata di ottante' anni non si ricupera_.
+
+It was a rare treat to hear from your Italian lips last night the songs
+of my own tongue, rendered with a delicacy of modulation and a fineness
+of utterance such as no native ever in my hearing had reached or even
+approached.  Believe me,
+
+Faithfully yours,
+  W. E. GLADSTONE.
+
+
+This letter, naturally enough, gave conversation a reminiscent turn.
+After some talk of great folk she had known, I asked Madame Patti what
+had been the proudest experience in her career.
+
+"For a great and unexpected honour most gracefully tendered," said she,
+"I have known nothing that has touched me more deeply than a compliment
+paid by the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) and a
+distinguished company, at a dinner given to the Duke of York and the
+Princess May (the present King and Queen), a little while before their
+wedding.  The dinner was given by Mr. Alfred Rothschild, one of my
+oldest and best friends.  There were many royalties present and more
+dukes and duchesses than I can easily remember.  During the ceremonies
+the Prince of Wales arose, and to my astonishment, proposed the health
+of his 'old and valued friend, Madame Patti.'  He made _such_ a pretty
+speech, and in the course of it said that he had first seen and heard
+me in Philadelphia in 1860, when I sang in 'Martha', and that since
+then his own attendance at what he was good enough to call my
+'victories in the realm of song' had been among his pleasantest {64}
+recollections.  He recalled the fact that on one of the occasions, when
+the Princess and himself had invited me to Marlborough House, his wife
+had held up little Prince George, in whose honour we were this night
+assembled, and bade him kiss me, so that in after life he might say
+that he had 'kissed the famous Madame Patti.'  And then, do you know,
+that whole company of royalty, nobility, and men of genius rose and
+cheered me and drank my health.  Don't you think that any little woman
+would be proud, and ought to be proud, of a spontaneous tribute like
+that?"
+
+It is difficult, when repeating in this way such snatches of biography,
+to suggest the modest tone and manner of the person whose words may be
+recorded.  It is particularly difficult in the case of Madame Patti,
+who was absolutely unspoiled by praise.  Autobiography such as hers
+must read a little fanciful to most folk; it is so far removed from the
+common experiences of us all and even from the extraordinary
+experiences of the renowned persons we hear about usually.  But there
+was not a patch of vanity in Patti's sunny nature.  Her life had been a
+long, unbroken record of success,--success to a degree attained by no
+other woman.  No one else has won and held such homage; no one else had
+been so wondrously endowed with beauty and genius and sweet simplicity
+of nature,--a nature unmarred by flattery, by applause, by wealth, by
+the possession and exercise of power.  Patti at fifty was like a girl
+in her ways, in her thoughts, her spirit, in her disinterestedness, in
+her enjoyments.  {65} Time had dimmed none of her charms, it had not
+lessened then her superb gifts.  She said to me one day:
+
+"They tell me I am getting to be an old woman, but I don't believe it.
+I don't feel old.  I feel young.  I am the youngest person of my
+acquaintance."
+
+That was true enough, as they knew who saw Patti from day to day.  She
+had all the enthusiasm and none of the affectations of a young girl.
+When she spoke of herself it was with most delicious frankness and lack
+of self-consciousness.  She was perfectly natural.
+
+She promised to show me the programme of that Philadelphia performance
+before the Prince of Wales so long ago, and the next day she put it
+before me.  It was a satin programme with gilt fringe, and it was
+topped by the Prince of Wales's feathers.  At that Philadelphia
+performance Patti made her first appearance before royalty.  In the
+next year she made her London début at Covent Garden, as Amina in "La
+Somnambula."  The next morning Europe rang with the fame of the new
+prima donna from America.
+
+"I tried to show them that the young lady from America was entitled to
+a hearing," said she, as we looked over the old programmes.
+
+"And has 'the young lady from America' kept her national spirit, or has
+she become so much a citizen of the world that no corner of it has any
+greater claim than another upon her affections?"
+
+"I love the Italian language, the American people, {66} the English
+country, and my Welsh home," she said.
+
+"Good!  The national preferences, if you can be said to own any, have
+reason on their side.  Your parents were Italian, you were born in
+Spain, you made your first professional appearance in America, you
+first won international fame in England, and among these Welsh hills
+you have planted a paradise."
+
+"How nice of you!  That evening at Mr. Alfred Rothschild's, the Prince
+of Wales asked me why I do not stay in London during 'the season', and
+take some part in its endless social pleasures.  'Because, your Royal
+Highness,' I replied, 'I have a lovely home in Wales, and whenever I
+come away from it I leave my heart there.'  'After all,' said the
+prince, 'why should you stay in London when the whole world is only too
+glad to make pilgrimages to Craig-y-Nos?'  Was n't that nice of him?"
+
+I despair of conveying any impression of the _naïveté_ with which the
+last five words were uttered.  The tone expressed the most innocent
+pleasure in the world.  When Patti spoke in that way she seemed to be
+wondering why people should say and do so many pleasant things on her
+account.  There was an air of childish surprise in her look and voice.
+
+I said: "All good republicans have a passion for royalty.  I find that
+an article about a King, or a Queen, or a Prince is in greater demand
+in the United States than anywhere else in the world.  So tell me
+something more about the Prince and Princess of Wales.  I promise, as a
+zealous democrat, that {67} no one on the far side of the Atlantic will
+skip a word.  Have the Prince and Princess visited Craig-y-Nos?"
+
+"No.  But they were coming here a couple of years ago.  See--here is
+the Prince's letter fixing the date.  But it was followed by the death
+of the Duke of Clarence, their eldest son, and then for many months
+they lived in quiet and mourning, only appearing in their usual way
+just before the wedding of the Duke of York (King George V).  They sent
+me an invitation to the wedding festivities.  But alas!  I could not
+go.  I had just finished my season and was lying painfully ill with
+rheumatism.  You heard of that?  For weeks I suffered acutely.  It's an
+old complaint.  I have had it at intervals ever since I was a child.
+But about that royal wedding.  When the Prince and Princess of Wales
+learned that I was too ill to accept their gracious invitation,
+they--well, what do you suppose they did next?"
+
+"Something kind and graceful."
+
+"They sent me two large portraits of themselves, bearing their
+autographs and fitted into great gilt frames.  You shall see the
+portraits after dinner.  They have the places of honour at Craig-y-Nos."
+
+We had reached the coffee stage of dinner, and the cigars were being
+passed.  The ladies did not withdraw, according to the mediæval (and
+shall I say popular?) habit, but the company remained unbroken, and
+while the gentlemen smoked, the ladies kept them in conversation.
+Nowadays you would say they all smoked.  Presently, some one {68}
+proposed Patti's health, and we all stood, singing, "For She 's a Jolly
+Good Fellow."
+
+That put the ball of merriment in motion again.  One of the young
+ladies, a goddaughter of the hostess, carolled a stanza from a popular
+ditty.  At first I thought it audacious that any one should sing in the
+presence of _La Diva_.  It seemed sacrilege.  But in another instant we
+were all at it, piping the chorus, and Patti leading off.  The fun of
+the thing was infectious.  The song finished, we ventured another, and
+Patti joined us in the refrains of a medley of music-hall airs,
+beginning with London's latest mania, "Daisy Bell, or a Bicycle Built
+for Two", and winding up with Chevalier's "Old Kent Road" and the
+"Coster's Serenade", Coborn's "Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo",
+and somebody else's "Daddy Would n't Buy me a Bow-Wow."
+
+Patti turned with an arch look.  "You will think our behaviour
+abominable."
+
+"No, I don't.  I think it jolly.  Besides, it's not everybody who has
+heard you sing comic songs."
+
+Her answer was a peal of laughter, and then she sat there, singing very
+softly a stanza of "My Old Kentucky Home", and as we finished the
+chorus she lifted a clear, sweet note, which thrilled us through and
+through and stirred us to excited applause.
+
+"What have I done?"  Patti put the question with a puzzled air.
+
+The reply came from the adjoining library: "High E."  One of our number
+had run to the piano.
+
+{69}
+
+Then I recalled what Sir Morell Mackenzie had told me a little while
+before he died.  We were chatting in that famous room of his in Harley
+Street, and we happened to mention Madame Patti.  "She has the most
+wonderful throat I have ever seen," said Sir Morell.  "It is the only
+one I have ever seen with the vocal cords in absolutely perfect
+condition after many years of use.  They are not strained, or warped or
+roughened, but as I tell you, they are perfect.  There is no reason why
+they should not remain so ten years longer, and with care and health
+twenty years longer."
+
+Remembering this, I asked Patti if she had taken extraordinary care of
+her voice.
+
+"I have never tired it," said she; "I never sing when I am tired, and
+that means I am never tired when I sing.  And I have never strained for
+high notes.  I have heard that the first question asked of new
+vocalists nowadays is 'How high can you sing?'  But I have always
+thought that the least important matter in singing.  One should sing
+only what one can sing with perfect ease."
+
+"But in eating and drinking?  According to all accounts, you are the
+most abstemious person in the world."
+
+"No, indeed!  I avoid very hot and very cold dishes, otherwise I eat
+and drink whatever I like.  My care is chiefly to avoid taking cold and
+to avoid indigestion.  But these are the ordinary precautions of one
+who knows that health is the key to happiness."
+
+"And practising?  Have you rigid rules for that?  One hears of
+astounding exercise and self-denial."
+
+{70}
+
+"Brilliant achievements in fiction.  For practising I run a few scales
+twenty minutes a day.  After a long professional tour I let my voice
+rest for a month and do not practise at all during that time."
+
+During my visit to Craig-y-Nos we usually spent our evenings in the
+billiard rooms.  There were two, an English room and a French one.  In
+the French room there was a large orchestrion which had been built in
+Geneva for Madame Patti.  It was operated by electricity and was said
+to be the finest instrument of its kind.  Our hostess would start it of
+an evening, and the ingenious contrivance would "discourse most
+eloquent music" from a repertoire of one hundred and sixteen pieces,
+including arias from grand operas, military marches and simple ballads.
+Music, of course, is the fascinator that Patti cannot resist.  The
+simplest melody stirs her to song.  In the far corner from the
+orchestrion she would sit in a big easy-chair, and hum the air that
+rolled from the organ pipes, keeping time with her dainty feet, or
+moving her head as the air grew livelier.  Or she would send forth some
+lark-like trill, or urge the young people to a dance, or a chorus, and
+when every one was tuned to the full pitch of melody and merriment, she
+would join in the fun as heartily as the rest.  I used to sit and watch
+her play the castanets, or hear her snatch an air or two from "Martha",
+"Lucia", or "Traviata."
+
+One night the younger fry were chanting negro melodies, and Patti came
+into the room, warbling as if possessed by an ecstasy.  "I love those
+darky songs," said she, and straightway she sang to us, {71} with that
+inimitable clarity and tenderness which were hers alone, "Way Down upon
+the Suwanee River", "Massa's in the Col', Col' Ground", and after that
+"Home, Sweet Home", while all of us listeners felt more than we cared
+to show.
+
+Guests at Craig-y-Nos were the most fortunate of mortals.  If the guest
+were a man, a valet was told off to attend him; if the guest were a
+lady, a maid was placed at her service.  Breakfast was served in one's
+room at any hour one chose.  Patti never came down before high noon.
+She rose at half-past eight, but remained until twelve in her
+apartments, going through her correspondence with her secretary and
+practising a little music.  At half-past twelve luncheon was served in
+the glass pavilion.  After that hour a guest was free to follow his own
+devices until dinner time.  He might go shooting, fishing, riding,
+walking, or he might stroll about the lovely demesne, and see what
+manner of heavenly nook nature and Patti had made for themselves among
+the hills of Wales.  Patti's castle is in every sense a palatial
+dwelling.  She saw it fifteen years before I did, fell in love with it,
+purchased it, and subsequently expended great sums in enlarging it.
+The castellated mansion, with the theatre at one end and the pavilion
+and winter garden at the other, has a frontage of fully a thousand feet
+along the terraced banks of the Tawe.  But the place has been so often
+described that it is unnecessary to repeat that oft-told story, or to
+give details of the gasworks, the electric-lighting station, the ice
+plant and cold-storage rooms, the steam {72} laundry, the French and
+English kitchens, the stables, the carriage houses, the fifty servants,
+or of the watchfulness, care, devotion, which surrounded the melodious
+mistress of this miniature kingdom.  Those matters are a part of the
+folklore of England and America.
+
+But I must say something of Patti's little theatre.  It was her special
+and particular delight.  She got more pleasure from it than from any
+other of the many possessions at Craig-y-Nos.  It was a gem of a
+theatre, well proportioned and exquisitely decorated.  Not only could
+the sloping floor be quickly raised, so that the auditorium might
+become a ballroom, but the appurtenances of the stage were elaborate
+and complete.  For this statement I had the authority of the stage
+manager of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.  This expert was
+supervising certain alterations at the Patti theatre while I was at
+Craig-y-Nos, and he told me that the house then contained every
+accessory for the production of forty operas!
+
+Patti sang occasionally at concerts in her theatre.  All her life she
+treasured her voice for the public; she had never exhausted it by
+devising an excess of entertainment for her personal friends.  And so
+most of the performances in the little theatre were pantomimic.
+Although Patti seemed to me always to be humming and singing while I
+was at the Castle, yet there was nothing of the "performing" order in
+what she did.  She merely went singing softly about the house, or
+joining in our choruses, like a happy child.
+
+{73}
+
+One morning, while a dozen of us were sitting in the shade of the
+terrace, the ladies with their fancy work, the men with their papers,
+books, and cigars, we heard, from an open window above, a burst of
+song, full-throated like a bird's.  It was for all the world like the
+song of a skylark, of glorious ecstasy, as if the bird were mounting in
+the air, the merrier as it soared the higher, until it poured from an
+invisible height a shower of joyous melody.  No one amongst us stirred,
+or made a sound.  _La Diva_ thought us far away up the valley, where we
+had planned an excursion, but we had postponed the project to a cooler
+day.  We remained silent, listening.  Our unseen entertainer seemed to
+be flitting about her boudoir, singing as she flitted, snatching a bar
+or two from this opera and that, revelling in the fragment of a ballad,
+or trilling a few notes like our friend the lark.  Presently she
+ceased, and we were about to move, when she began to sing "Comin' Thro'
+the Rye."  She was alone in her room, but she was singing as gloriously
+as if to an audience of ten thousand in the Albert Hall.  The
+unsuspected group of listeners on the terrace slipped then from their
+own control, and took to vigorous applause and cries of "_brava,
+brava_."
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the birdlike voice above.
+
+We looked up, and saw Patti leaning out at the casement.
+
+"Oh," said she, "I couldn't help it, really I could n't.  I 'm so
+happy!"
+
+At luncheon she proposed an entertainment in the theatre for the
+evening of the following day.  {74} We were to have "Camille" in
+pantomime.  The preparations moved swiftly.  Among the guests were
+several capable amateur actors.  The performance began a little after
+ten.  Some musicians were brought from Swansea.  A dozen gentlefolk
+hastily summoned from the valley, those among the guests who were not
+enrolled for the pantomime, and a gallery full of cottagers and
+servants made up the audience.  We had "an opera" in five acts of
+pantomime, with orchestra, and all together it was fun.  Of course,
+Patti carried off the honours.  There was supper after the play, and
+the sunlight crept into the Swansea Valley within two hours after we
+had risen from table.
+
+I said to Patti after the pantomime, "You don't seem to believe that
+change of occupation is the best possible rest.  You seem to work as
+hard at rehearsing and acting in your little theatre as if you were 'on
+tour.'"
+
+"Not quite!  Besides, it is n't work, it's play," replied the
+miraculous little woman.  "I love the theatre.  And, then, there is
+always something to learn about acting.  I find these pantomime
+performances useful as well as amusing."
+
+Every afternoon about three o'clock Patti and her guests went for a
+drive, a small procession of landaus and brakes rattling along the
+smooth country roads.  You could see at once that this was Pattiland.
+The cottagers came to their doors and saluted her Melodious Majesty,
+and the children of the countryside ran out and threw kisses.
+
+"Oh! the dears," exclaimed the kind-hearted {75} Queen, as we were
+driving toward the village of Ystradgynlais (they call it something
+like "Ist-rag-dun-las"), one afternoon.  "I would like to build another
+castle and put all those mites into it, and let them live there with
+music and flowers!"  And I believe she would have given orders for such
+a castle straightway, had there been a builder in sight.
+
+On the way home Patti promised me "a surprise" for the evening.  I
+wondered what it might be, and when the non-appearance of the ladies
+kept the gentlemen waiting in the drawing-room at dinner time, I was
+the more puzzled.  The men, to pass the time, inspected the "trophies"
+of the prima donna.  It would be impossible to enumerate them because
+Craig-y-Nos Castle was another South Kensington Museum in respect to
+the treasures it held.  Every shelf, table, and cabinet was packed with
+gifts which Patti had received from all parts of the earth, from
+monarchs and millionaires, princes and peasants, old friends and
+strangers.  There was Marie Antoinette's watch, to begin with, and
+there were portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to end with.
+There was a remarkable collection of portraits of royal personages,
+presented to Patti by the distinguished originals on the occasion of
+her marriage to M. Nicolini.  Photographs of the Grand Old Man of
+Politics and the Grand Old Man of Music rested side by side on a little
+table presented by some potentate.  Gladstone's likeness bore his
+autograph and the inscription, "_Con tanti e tanti Complimenti_";
+Verdi's, his autograph and a fervent tribute written at Milan.  There
+were crowns and {76} wreaths and rare china; there were paintings and
+plate, and I know not what, wherever one looked.
+
+If one were to make Patti a gift, and he had a King's ransom to
+purchase it, he would find it difficult to give her anything that would
+be a novelty, or that would be unique in her eyes.  She had everything.
+For my part, I would pluck a rose from her garden, or gather a nosegay
+from a hedgerow, and it would please her as much as if it were a
+diadem.  She valued the thought that prompted the giving, rather than
+the gift itself.  She never forgot even the smallest act of kindness
+that was done for her sake.  And she was always doing kindnesses for
+others.  I have heard from the Welsh folk many tales of her generosity.
+And to her friends she was the most open-handed of women.
+
+There was one dark, drizzly day during the visit to Craig-y-Nos.  It
+mattered little to the men.  The wet did not interfere with their
+amusements.  But every lady wore some precious jewel that Patti had
+given her that morning,--a ring, a brooch, a bracelet, as the case
+might be.  For the generous creature thought her fair friends would be
+disappointed because they could not get out of doors.  How could she
+know that every one in the Castle welcomed the rain because it meant a
+few hours more with Patti?
+
+The "surprise" she had spoken of was soon apparent.  The ladies came
+trooping into the drawing-room wearing the gowns and jewels of Patti's
+operatic roles.  Patti herself came last, in "Leonora's" white and
+jewels.  What a dinner-party we {77} had that night,--we men, in the
+prim black and white of evening dress, sitting there with "Leonora" and
+"Desdemona" and "Marguerite" and "Rachel" and "Lucia" and "Carmen" and
+"Dinorah", and I know not how many more!  Nobody but Patti would have
+thought of such merry masquerading, or, having thought of it, would or
+could have gone to the trouble of providing it.
+
+Of course, we talked of her favourite characters in opera, and then of
+singers she had known.  She said it would give her real pleasure to
+hear Mario and Grisi again, or, coming to later days, Scalchi and Annie
+Louise Carey.  The latter, being an American and a friend, I was glad
+to hear this appreciation of her from the Queen of Song.  "Carey and
+Scalchi were the two greatest contraltos I have known; and I have sung
+with both of them.  I remember Annie Louise Carey as a superb artist
+and a sweet and noble woman."
+
+I said "Hear, hear," in the parliamentary manner, and then Patti added:
+
+"Now we will go to the theatre again.  There is to be another
+entertainment."  It was, of all unexpected things, a lantern show.
+Patti's arrangement for that was, like everything else at Craig-y-Nos,
+from her piano to her pet parrot, the only one of its kind.  It was
+capable of giving, with all sorts of "mechanical effects", a two hours'
+entertainment every night for two months without repeating a scene.
+Patti invited me to sit beside her and watch the dissolving views.  It
+seemed to me that it would be like this to sit beside Queen Victoria
+{78} during a "State performance" at Windsor, only not half so much
+fun!  Here was Patti Imperatrice, dressed like a queen, wearing a crown
+of diamonds, and attended by her retinue of brilliantly attired women
+and attentive gentlemen of the court.  And it was so like her to cause
+the entertainment to end with a series of American views and to sing
+for me "Home, Sweet Home", as we looked out on New York harbour from a
+steamship inward bound.
+
+The next morning I started from Craig-y-Nos for America.  As the
+dogcart was tugged slowly up the mountain side, the Stars and Stripes
+saluted me from the Castle tower, waving farewell as I withdrew from my
+peep at Paradise.
+
+
+
+
+{79}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+JOHN STUART BLACKIE
+
+The wind was from the east, the Scotch "mist" from everywhere, but
+Professor Blackie had a sunny heart that made one forget the raw
+weather.  I thought the sun was shining and the skies blue when I went
+to lunch at Number 9 Douglas Crescent, Edinburgh, one November day in
+the early nineties.
+
+Almost any day in half a century you might have seen Professor Blackie
+striding through Edinburgh as strong as an athlete, hearty as a young
+hunter.  One morning I encountered him as he was beating eastward
+against half a gale, his cape flying, his cloud of white hair tossing
+against his big-brimmed, soft black hat, his cheeks rosy with the
+winter wind, and his kind eyes dancing with the delight he felt in
+exercise.  He was eighty-five!
+
+I told him of reading somewhere that he loved to play the peripatetic
+philosopher.  How he laughed!  "Do they say that of me?  Ho, ho, ho!"
+And then he trolled a "Hi-ti-rumty-tum", snatching an air, as his habit
+was, from a half-forgotten song, and ending with an exclamatory line of
+Greek.  He looked like a prophet apostrophising the gods.
+
+"And they say I speak 'a confusion of tongues.' {80} Don't mind that,"
+said he.  "Greek, Latin, Gaelic, German, English--all are one to me.  I
+borrow the words that come readiest for the thought.  But Greek is the
+great language."  And he strode down the hill.
+
+He was the most picturesque figure then living in Edinburgh, and many
+thought him the greatest man in the Scotland of those times.  He was
+the "Grand Old Man" of that northern kingdom, and in vitality and
+spirits and capacity for work he was at eighty-five the youngest man I
+knew.  He was packed with wisdom and overflowing with music and
+merriment.  If he had not been so musical and so merry you might have
+called him Scotland incarnate.  Doubtless he was that, with the music
+and merriment added.  As for character, even Scotland never produced a
+nobler one, nor set it in a more imposing figure, or in a grander head.
+Scholar, poet, philosopher, teacher, learner, political writer, lover
+of the classics, strenuous believer in modern progress, he was sure
+that the world was never better than in his day, the Victorian day, and
+that it was growing better steadily.  They were all optimists then.
+Lord Salisbury, when prime minister, added that they were all
+socialists.  Professor Blackie drew the line at that.  Perhaps
+Salisbury was quoting Harcourt.
+
+Visiting in Glasgow, I received one morning a note from him inviting me
+to lunch at his house in Edinburgh.  On the lower, left-hand corner of
+the envelope he had written a line of Greek, as his custom was.  This
+time it was an adjuration: {81} "Speak the truth in love."  But who
+could speak of him in other words than those of love?  In his note he
+had written "Come and talk."  But he did all the talking.  What an
+inspiring flood it was!
+
+No sooner was I in his hall than I heard, to my disappointment, the
+sound of what seemed lively conversation from an adjoining room.  I had
+hoped to find him alone.  The prospect of a luncheon party dampened my
+ardour.  But when the maid conducted me to the presence, there sat the
+Scottish sage alone, declaiming a Gaelic poem.  At least he told me it
+was Gaelic!
+
+"Laugh," cried he, "laugh.  'T will do ye good.  Ah, y' are one o' the
+laughin' men!  I like them.  Try a man; will he no' laugh, or smile,
+don't tie to him.  There 's too much gloom in the world."
+
+What a picture he was in that hour.  Yes, and hours after, when I left
+him.  The tall old man with strong, smooth-shaven face, like one of the
+traditional gods of his favourite lore, but in no other respect
+resembling a mythological being.  His head was crowned, not with
+laurel, but with a wide-brimmed Panama or leghorn hat, beneath which
+streamed his long white hair.  And his body was lost in the embraces of
+a blue dressing-gown which came to his heels; and around his waist were
+yards of red silk sash, the ends of which trailed behind him.
+
+"Punctual," said he.  "You are sharp to the minute.  Came by the eleven
+train, eh?  An hour and five minutes on the rail.  Wonderful how we
+live now!  Glasgow to Edinburgh and return, {82} ninety-six miles for
+seven shillings and sixpence, first class.  The quickest travelling in
+the world, and the cheapest.  That's one thing the auld Greeks could
+na' do.  Fol-de-rol-de-rol-de-ri.  Progress, progress; I believe in it.
+I 'm a marching man.  There's nae such thing as standin' still; you go
+forward, or you fall back.  Will ye ring the bell?  I thank ye!
+Bachelor's hall the day.  My wife is in the country, but we will try to
+be comfortable."
+
+While we ate Professor Blackie talked, burst into snatches of melody,
+rippled in Greek, or thundered in German, or gave the dear twist of
+Scotland to his words, or, when he thought there had been enough of
+that, drew from the "well of English, pure and undefiled."  And all the
+time he wore his hat!
+
+"You won't mind, I know," he said.  "Eighty-five and no glasses to my
+eyes.  There 's protection in the shade of a hat's brim.  Eighty-five
+and no glasses!  The only proof I 'm eighty-five is the almanac.  There
+'s no proof in my body.  I 'm as young as ever there."  And then he
+turned the Greek tap so that Aristotle larded the lunch.
+
+He had been in love with Greek for more than sixty years; he taught it
+for thirty or forty years; he knew it as well as he knew English; he
+read modern Greek newspapers; he had the best Greek library in the
+kingdom; I daresay he dreamed in Greek.  I said: "You talk as if, in
+spirit, you were more a Greek than a Scotsman."
+
+"Not that"--he half sang the words--"Oh, {83} bonny Scotland for me.  A
+man should stick to the land where God put him!"
+
+He drew the knife along the breast of a chicken.  "My wife won't let me
+carve when she 's at home," he said.  He looked threateningly at a
+joint.  "Never mind, never mind," said he, and then in a chant, "hey
+nonny, hi nonny."  Pause.  Then "Come off, old boy," and a wing and a
+leg clattered to the platter.  "The nearer the bone the sweeter the
+meat," said he.  "But statesmen have carved empires more easily."
+
+"Mr. Gladstone, for example," said I, referring to the Home Rule Bill.
+
+"Ho, there; but he has n't performed the amputation!"
+
+"You don't agree with your old friend about that policy?"
+
+"No, nor about Greek.  But we are friends still.  As for discussion, we
+began that when we first met.  How many tens of years ago was that?  We
+have been discussing ever since.  Yes, forty years!  We met at Dean
+Ramsey's house.  Gladstone was a splendid man to disagree with even
+then."
+
+As Professor Blackie talked of his friends, the names of nearly all his
+contemporaries in England, Scotland, and Germany came hurrying forth.
+But he would n't tell anecdotes about them for two reasons; first, he
+never remembered good stories; second, "I don't live in the past," he
+said.  He was not a good talker, if good talk means keeping up your end
+in conversation.  He kept up more than his end.  He was always ready
+for a monologue.  {84} He did n't converse, he exploded.  His
+utterances were volcanic.  There would come an eruption of short
+sentences blazing with philosophy; then a kindly glow over it all, and
+the discharge would subside quickly with a gentle rumty-tum, or a
+snatch from some old Scotch ballad.  We had been talking of education.
+Suddenly the table shook under a smiting hand, and these words were
+shot at me:
+
+"Teaching!  We are teaching our young men everything except this: to
+teach themselves, and to look the Lord Jesus Christ in the face!  You
+are doing it in America, too.  You are as bad as we are in Britain."
+And then immediately, and with a seraph's smile, "May I pass you a
+wing?"
+
+He quoted from one of his books, a recent one: "Of all the chances that
+can befall a young man at his first start in the race of life, the
+greatest unquestionably is to be brought into contact, and, if
+possible, to enter into familiar relations with a truly great man.  For
+this is to know what manhood means, and a manly life, not by grave
+precept, or wise proverb, or ideal picture; but to see the ideal in
+complete equipment and compact in reality before you, as undeniably and
+as efficiently as the sun that sheds light from the sky, or the
+mountain that sheds waters into the glen."
+
+Strong influences were about Blackie's life in his youth, and he
+became, in his turn, a great influence in other lives.  He was the son
+of a Scotch banker, and was born in Glasgow.  He had his first
+schooling in Aberdeen, and he entered college at twelve and the
+University of Edinburgh at fifteen.  At {85} the latter place he
+studied under John Wilson ("Christopher North").  At Aberdeen he had
+the best Latin instruction of his time.  There they were famous
+Latinists.  At the University of Edinburgh it was mainly religion with
+him, and the Bible his favourite reading.  At twenty he went to
+Germany, the Germany that is dead.  His strong grave face would light
+up when he spoke of the men he had known there.
+
+"Niebuhr was the biggest man Germany has produced, but Bunsen was the
+greatest all round.  Bunsen looked like Goethe.  I told him so, and
+found that others thought so.  But Bunsen had a sweeter mouth than
+Goethe.  My father's teaching, the nature that God gave me, and
+Bunsen's influence, have been the shaping forces of my life.
+
+"I returned to Scotland, was called to the bar at twenty-five, and ran
+away from it at thirty.  I was not meant for a lawyer.  Aberdeen
+University made me its Professor of Latin Literature, and I kept at
+that till 1852, when Edinburgh appointed me Professor of Greek.  I was
+thirty years at that time.  A few years ago I retired.  There is the
+story of my life."
+
+No.  Only the story of the shell of his life.  It said nothing of what
+he had done.
+
+"Done!" exclaimed the old man.  "If you live to be as old as John
+Blackie, you 'll find it less important to know what a man has done
+than to know what he is.  Done?  I 've taught Greek, written a little,
+preached a good deal!"
+
+But many men teach Greek, and everybody writes {86} nowadays, and the
+globe is a vast pulpit from which all who are not dumb try to preach,
+while only the deaf long to listen.  John Stuart Blackie's achievements
+are not to be measured by phrases.  He was one of the strong teachers
+of men.  Many men now celebrated have told me that they studied under
+him and learned little Greek but more wisdom than an entire faculty
+could teach them, or any number of books.  "The art of the teacher is
+to teach the student to teach himself", the old man was fond of saying.
+
+Blackie was a marching man, you will remember.  For years he marched
+across Scotland, and up and down, lecturing the people.  If Scotland
+had a hall in which he did not lecture on Burns, on Goethe, on Scottish
+Song, Education, Government--to his list of themes there was no end--it
+must have been built since his death.  No wonder they called him a
+"peripatetic philosopher."
+
+He said to me: "I think I can do more good by speaking to people than
+by writing to them.  I have written thirty or forty volumes, if you
+count the little ones, but I don't know how to write books to please
+the public."
+
+"How can that be?" I asked.  "A bookseller told me that your
+'Self-Culture' has already run to thirty editions."
+
+"Oh, that was not written for the public, but for my students; and the
+public happened to like it."
+
+"A distinction without much difference then."  And I thought of his
+"Essays on Social Subjects", "Four Phases of Morals", "Homer and the
+Iliad", {87} and the book "On Beauty"; of his "Songs of Religion and
+Life", "The Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands", "Musa
+Burschicosa", "Songs and Legends of Ancient Greece", "Scottish Song",
+"Poetical Tracts", and so on.  The public had seemed to like them.  And
+the public of Edinburgh must have found some attraction in his novel
+"Altavona", for, he said, "They made a great row over it here, thought
+they had identified one of the characters, and went buzzing about over
+their discovery.  But I 'm not a novelist.  I was trying to effect
+reform in the Scottish Land Laws.  I believe in Home Rule for
+Scotland," he added.
+
+"Why not, then, for Ireland?"  This was putting one's head into the
+lion's mouth.  But he purred gently: "I don't know Ireland!  I've been
+there only once!"  That was a fair hit at Gladstone.  "Scotland I do
+know!"  The last words came like a blast from the mountains.
+
+Once on a time Professor Blackie printed a list of one hundred and
+twelve Scottish songs, and he declared that every Scotsman should know
+them all.  I suppose it was patriotism even more than a love of
+learning that impelled him to raise £10,000 by four years' labour, and
+endow with it, at Edinburgh, a Professorship of Celtic Literature.
+
+He lived on an edge of Edinburgh, and his house overflowed with books
+and pictures.  It commanded a northerly outlook, and the country rolled
+up almost to the windows.  "Look there," said he, pointing to the big
+window of the dining room, "the sun's out, and you can see the Fife
+Hills.  I see them about {88} three times a month when our mists lift.
+The Forth Bridge is yonder"--pointing.  "Wonderful thing that Forth
+Bridge.  You whiz through towards Perth in five minutes!"
+
+Above the fireplace was a large portrait of himself, painted years
+before by James Archer, of the Royal Scottish Academy.  It represented
+its subject gazing, with head uncovered, at a mountainous landscape.
+"That's the poetic Blackie," said the original, "the Blackie who loves
+to roam hills and glens.  Yon is Blackie militant," pointing to a
+severer portrait on the opposite wall.  "A very different person, as
+you see.  A painter can show only one aspect of a character in a single
+portrait, and the public, seeing but one portrait, will see but one
+side of the character.  That's why there are several Blackies on these
+walls.  Come and see my friends as they hang."
+
+He led the way to the entrance hall whose walls were hung with
+paintings, engravings, photographs, old prints.  A bust of "Christopher
+North" occupied a pedestal at the foot of the stairs.  "And there's
+Nolly," sang the Professor, pointing to an oil likeness of Cromwell.
+We would take a step or two, and then pause to look at a portrait,
+while my energetic host threw out an explanatory phrase whimsically
+abbreviating the names of the men he liked best.  "Tom," said he, "Tom
+Carlyle, a tyrannical genius who did a lot of good in a hard way.
+Bobbie," and he stopped before a portrait of Burns, "Bobbie was a
+ploughman, but the artist here made him a dandy, and he never was
+that." {89} We must have stopped twenty times on the first flight of
+stairs, and at each pause the old man would shoot a remark.  At the
+drawing-room door he paused again, exclaiming: "Aristotle, Shakespeare,
+Goethe, and the Apostle Paul--these are my heroes!"
+
+The drawing-room was a national, or rather an international portrait
+gallery in little.  We began with a line of faces at one end of which
+was Goethe, at the other end Bunsen.  There were portraits everywhere,
+on the walls, in the chairs, on the tables; some of them rested on the
+floor.  Sir Henry Irving as Becket had a chair.  Blackie stopped in
+front of him.  "That's a man who has done a great work," said he.  "The
+people require amusement, and Irving has amused them nobly.  Ah, you
+see Mary Anderson over there.  A marvellous sweet woman.  Scott's next
+to her on that wall, now.  Ah, no, I never saw him.  I wish I had known
+him.  'Green grow the rushes, O!'  Here are some preachers--Chalmers,
+John Knox, Guthrie, Norman Macleod, Cardinal Manning.  Ye 'll think it
+a queer assortment, maybe, John Knox and Manning.  Well, the five o'
+them were men, man, men!"
+
+"Dear, dear, who has done this thing?" he cried, as if startled.  We
+stood before an easel which held a portrait of himself.  An engraving
+of Gladstone stood beneath, on the floor.  "Wrong!  It's the wrong
+order," said he.  "We must change it.  Down goes Blackie; up goes
+Gladdy.  He belongs above me."  He suited the action to the word and
+shifted the portraits.
+
+{90}
+
+Presently we marched up another flight of stairs to his study, which
+consisted of three connecting rooms lined with books.  "This is where I
+live," he said.  "Seven thousand volumes hereabout.  See the Greek
+here, here, everywhere.  Man, man, Greek is the only living bridge
+between the present and the past!"
+
+Then, snatching up a handful of newspapers from Athens, he continued,
+"Some folks call Greek a dead language.  Poor souls!  They don't know
+any better.  These things should interest you.  They are fresh from
+Athens; not a week old."  And then he read aloud from them, a bit of
+politics, an advertisement, lines from the bargain counter, as if to
+show that one touch of shopping makes the whole world kin.  "But no
+heroes, man, no heroes!  There's no Aristotle now, no Shakespeare, no
+Goethe, no Apostle Paul!"
+
+We sat awhile in the study, and Blackie "surveyed mankind from China to
+Peru" in lightning flashes.  He always left one panting behind,
+breathless, trying to keep pace with his rushing thoughts.  He had done
+that sort of thing all his teaching life, and that was why men said
+they learned but little Greek from him, but absorbed streams of wisdom.
+They would say that when teaching, he never stuck to his text.  The
+best you could do was quietly to watch and listen, remember and apply.
+After all, that was what he wanted men to do--to learn to teach
+themselves.
+
+There are men, very distinguished men, who are much more easily
+described than John Stuart Blackie.  {91} What he said of the portrait
+painter is equally true of the portrait writer.  I might borrow his own
+phrase and say that there was the preacher, there was the teacher, the
+patriot, the man of merry soul; and there was the Blackie of odd
+moments who was all these in one, as I saw him, with straw hat, blue
+dressing-robe, and trailing red sash.  If I picture him as I saw him
+then, going about the house in his queer gear and genially nicknaming
+great folk in the intervals of snatches of song, you are not to think
+of him as merely an eccentric and entertaining old gentleman.  He was
+very much at his ease, and he made me feel happily so.  He was natural
+man without a pose, without an affectation.  He never posed.  He did
+not care what others thought or said about him, what he cared for was
+what they thought and said about his subject, whatever that might
+be--country, or religion, or song--and it all led to manliness.  "Be a
+man!  Be God's man!"  That was the burden of his teaching, preaching,
+writing, scholarship, philosophy, religion.  He wrought great things
+for the manhood of Scotland.
+
+I remember his coming to Glasgow one night while I visited there.  He
+lectured for some society of young men.  His theme was Love.  When he
+had finished, a minister jumped up and shouted this invitation:
+
+"Put that into a sermon, sir, and come and preach it to us next
+Sabbath.  A guinea and a bed!"
+
+"What?" roared Blackie.  "D'ye think I'd preach the Gospel for money?
+I 'll preach it for nothing if ye 'll come and listen!"
+
+{92}
+
+Sometimes they said he was a droll person who went about Scotland
+cracking jokes.  And I have heard them say that he "played too much to
+the gallery."  But the men who said those things liked their sermons
+delivered by long-faced folk, and wanted their lectures peppered with
+piety.  They had their suspicions of laughter.  Blackie bubbled over
+with good spirits.  Others might make the public sigh and weep; he knew
+that it is better to make them laugh; that if you make them "feel good"
+they will like you well enough to listen to what you have to say and
+think about it.  As for "playing to the gallery" one has only to recall
+Blackie's life-long admonitions to Democracy in order to see the error
+of that assumption.
+
+The best word-picture of John Stuart Blackie was unknown to the public
+at the time of which I write.  It was unknown even to Blackie himself
+at that time.  It was written by one of his pupils, Robert W. Barbour,
+a brilliant and scholarly man.  His "Letters, Poems, and Pensées"
+appeared subsequently in a volume edited by Professor Drummond, a
+memorial volume circulated privately.  It was with Professor Drummond's
+permission that I published, years ago, an extract from one of
+Barbour's letters.  Barbour, when it was written, was in charge of a
+school somewhere in the Highlands.  One day his old master, Blackie,
+came up from Edinburgh for a blow of the mountain air and a visit to
+Barbour, who thus described the occasion:
+
+"Then follow minutes of Elysium, were life only the Academy, and the
+world made for students and {93} Professors!  I hear Professor Blackie
+talk of foreign travel, of the pictures it gives to hang forever in
+one's after-study; and as the brave old snowy head falls back against
+the claret of the sofa, he brings me out, one by one, the
+pictures--Rome, Florence, Milan, Gottingen--latest hung therein.
+
+"After dinner the Professor and I have an hour and a half's stroll to
+the school, while I drink in the delightful desultoriness of his talk,
+and try to stop just when he does--which is not always easy; for you
+cannot tell why this crystus should seize his fancy, or that
+'potentilla' interrupt his thought.  But it only breaks to flower forth
+again more beautiful, as he talks first of Italy, its grace we lack so
+in Scotland, its lack of sternness we could so well supply; its few
+great hearts alive and active, its multitudes asleep and slow; then of
+its new literature; then the political parties; then what poets should
+do now, not to be so sundered from their time as Browning (who walked
+these roads), nor so bound to the mere accident of rhyme.  Let poets
+write short, sympathetic lives of men; let them write history, not
+stories.
+
+"And so we come to the school where the Professor has half an hour of
+cross-questioning the best scholar, to the advantage of the whole
+school; and such happy definitions, and such funny 'pokes' with the
+mind and the walking-stick, and such instructive similes and amusing
+information.  They are rather annoyed when I tell them how great a man
+my master is.  Then they sing to him in good Scotch to his heart's
+desire....
+
+{94}
+
+"At last he rises, and asking them something in a Gaelic too good, or
+bad, or both (or rather book-born), to be understanded of them, he
+breaks into a beautiful Gaelic lament, while the whole little audience
+stands open-mouthed, eyed, and eared, and hardly recovers to whisper
+'Good-bye, sir', ere he and I are out into the air again.
+
+"I apologise for having given him such little work for so long, and he
+hums out something in German, which he breaks half sternly to say:
+'There are four things a man must love--children, flowers, woman,' and,
+must I say it? 'wine.'  He went on to tell me how hateful and horrible
+a nature Napoleon's always had seemed to him.  Napoleon said: 'I love
+nothing, I love not woman, I love not dice, I love not wine, I love not
+politics.'
+
+"Then the hill came, and with the hill our thoughts could not help
+climbing.  Was I licensed?  No, not ordained yet, of course.  Would I
+preach the splendid possibilities in man, to sink to the beasts which
+perish, or to rise to heaven itself?  He did not deny that the heart
+was deceitful and desperately wicked, but should we not call on men to
+realise for what they were made....  No man understands others, he
+said, who does not leave himself more behind, and go and sit by others,
+wherever they may be.
+
+"He could not say what Greek one should read who had few books and less
+time.  'No, read only where the heart runs; read nothing except that
+about which you are passionate...' So I got no lists of authors or
+works.  'Read where you are {95} thinking; don't read where you are not
+feeling.'  This and much more on war, churches, architecture, youth and
+new opinions in theology, and materialism (he had read some of the
+latter; he could n't for the life of him remember it) and philosophy.
+
+"He talked," continues Barbour, "and I treasured up.  But most on the
+three tongues, and what was work for poets.  Then came afternoon tea
+and raillery between him and my mother.  Then they packed into the pony
+phaeton--my professor a perfect picture, his broad leghorn bright with
+a flower, scarlet of seedum, fringed by golden yew, and the ladies a
+good background."
+
+So you see, it was the same John Stuart Blackie years and years before.
+"Do stay to tea, man!" he urged, when I said I must be going, that
+there would be just time to catch such-and-such a train for Glasgow
+where an appointment was to be kept.
+
+"Ah, then punctuality's the word.  Be late and be nothing."  He came
+down to the front door with me, his leghorn flapping, his sash-ends
+trailing on the stairs.  There were volcanic salutations to portraits
+which we had missed when going up.  I said good-bye to the Grand Old
+Man of Scotland.
+
+"Good-bye," said he, "and dinna forget--Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe,
+and the Apostle Paul--my heroes!"
+
+In the gathering dusk I descended the steps, as he stood in the open
+doorway, singing, and gazing towards the Corstorphine Hill.
+
+
+
+
+{96}
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+LORD KELVIN
+
+He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making
+difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in
+green morocco.  It would be five minutes before the carriage started,
+and he recollected that fact just as he reached the door and had put on
+his overcoat.  Another man, almost any other, would have idled while
+the five minutes passed, and most men, especially busy men, would have
+fussed nervously at having to wait when they were ready.  But Lord
+Kelvin, being the busiest of men, never wasted time by fussing, and
+never lost it in idling.  Having five minutes he would solve a problem,
+so he pulled the memorandum book from his coat pocket, where he always
+carried it, and sat on the stair and worked.
+
+He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young as those of the
+youngest of his students.  They say that a man is as old as his
+arteries.  The saying might have originated with him, if it ever
+occurred to him that he had arteries.  But I am not sure that the
+customary anatomy was not, in his case, reinforced by an ingenious
+system of electrical conductors through which a mysterious energy was
+driven by {97} his dynamic mind.  Like all great teachers he was ever
+learning.  But it would be difficult to say when he began to learn, for
+he was only ten years old when he entered the university!  And he was
+thoroughly equipped for entering upon his student work even at that
+age.  At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy,
+and he held that professorship for the rest of his life!
+
+Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural science in the
+nineteenth century.  The twentieth century has not, thus far, produced
+his superior.  He was born in 1824, he died in 1908.  It was my
+privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of his life.  A
+kinder man, one more considerate of the abysmal ignorance of the fellow
+creatures with whom he came into contact, could not be imagined.  He
+was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even a Scottish pose, and
+it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to find a better embodiment of
+life than that.  Scottish he was, though born in Ireland.  And his fame
+was associated with that of Glasgow University which had the honour of
+receiving him into student life and which received the greater honour
+of his distinguished services for a period almost as long as the
+psalmist allots to the life of a man.
+
+When he was eighty-three he outlined, as, probably, he had often
+outlined before, the plan of a boy's education.  "By the age of
+twelve," said he, "a boy should have learned to write his own language
+with accuracy and some elegance; he should have a reading knowledge of
+French, should be able to {98} translate Latin and easy Greek authors,
+and should have some acquaintance with German.  Having learned the
+meaning of words, a boy should study Logic.  I never found that the
+small amount of Greek I learned was a hindrance to my acquiring some
+knowledge of Natural Philosophy."  Some knowledge of it!  There,
+indeed, was modesty.  For who had more knowledge of natural philosophy,
+or so much, as Lord Kelvin?
+
+Is it necessary to say that he was not born to baronies?  Surely, that
+much all readers may be presumed to know, some wiseacre will remark.
+But if one were painting a portrait instead of writing it, nothing
+would be more futile than to omit the subject's nose on the presumption
+that the public knew he had one.  William Thomson, who became Lord
+Kelvin, was born in Belfast, the younger of two brothers.  The elder
+brother was James, and he became famous as a professor of engineering.
+He died, however, some fifteen years before his brother.  James was
+named for his father, and that James, the father, was born on a farm
+near Ballynahinch, County Down.  His Scotch ancestors had planted
+themselves in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+That farmer's boy had a huge hunger for knowledge.  When he was eleven
+or twelve years old he taught himself, having no teacher to aid him,
+the principles of the sundial, so that he could make dials for any
+latitude.  Also, from books which he contrived to get, he learned the
+elements of mathematics.  By and by he began teaching in a little
+school.  He taught in the summers, and in {99} the winters he studied
+at Glasgow University, continuing to do so for five years, and then he
+was appointed a teacher in the Royal Academic Institute of Belfast.
+When his son William had reached the age of eight, the scholarly parent
+was appointed to the Professorship of Mathematics at Glasgow
+University, a position he held for twenty years.  His scientific
+attainments were high, and his classical scholarship was distinguished.
+He educated his sons himself, until each was ten, and then sent each to
+the university.  Lord Kelvin said to me once, when we were talking of
+those early days: "I had a great father."
+
+The Kelvin is a little stream that winds through the grounds of Glasgow
+University.  When Queen Victoria bestowed a peerage upon Sir William
+Thomson (she had knighted him many years before that) he chose for his
+title the name of the little stream by whose side he had spent his
+fruitful and illustrious life.  His had been a life of labour, but it
+had been congenial labour.  He had contributed vastly to the sum of
+human knowledge; he had invented useful things, to the amazement of
+pedantic men who think that science should remain with scientific
+persons and never be applied to the wants of the world; at least, not
+applied by the scientific discoverer of the principles or things.  But
+with all his theories he was a practical man, and he prospered.  That
+day when he sat on the stair for five minutes, and concentrated the
+training of sixty years upon the page of a notebook, we went to White's.
+
+{100}
+
+Once upon a time there was a White, a James White, who, in Glasgow,
+made instruments of precision which found their way all over the world.
+And so he became the maker of various things that Sir William Thomson,
+afterward Lord Kelvin, had invented.  When White died, or retired, or
+possibly before that, Kelvin acquired his business and establishment
+and continued the manufacture of instruments of precision, the
+establishment being conducted under White's name, as before, and as
+possibly it may be to this day.  Anyhow, we went to White's, where Lord
+Kelvin took me into his laboratory and showed me, among other things,
+his "Siphon Recorder" which was very interesting, albeit very puzzling
+to the non-technical mind.  I asked him what it did.  The technical
+descriptions I had read were rather baffling.  His answer was: "The
+electric current in an under-sea cable, say an Atlantic cable, is very
+weak and weary.  This reaches out from the shore, and helps it along,
+and writes down what it says."  It was for this invention that he was
+knighted in 1866.  He had connected the hemispheres.
+
+He was one of the courageous and hopeful band that laid and worked the
+first Atlantic cables.  Submarine telegraphy had been first employed in
+1850 when a line was laid across the English Channel between Dover and
+Calais.  But the scientific camps were divided in opinion about the
+practicability of working across thousands of miles of ocean-bed.  One
+faction declared it "beyond the resources of human skill."  Robert
+Stephenson said the project could end only in failure.  Of course, the
+{101} moneyed men were timid.  Most of them were more than timid; they
+were scared.  Faraday had found that the transmission of signals by
+submarine cable, on a line from Harwich to Holland, was not
+instantaneous.  "The line leaked," said the financial men, "and most of
+the electricity that was pumped into it spilled into the sea.  This
+does not occur on land lines," they said; "we will not invest."
+
+William Thomson discovered and formulated "the law which governs the
+retardation of electrical signals in submarine lines."  Whitehouse
+found that with a line 1125 miles long, a signal required a second and
+a half for transmission.  Thomson's law showed that on a line long
+enough to connect Ireland with Newfoundland the transmission of a
+signal would require six seconds.  This meant a dismally limited
+service.  Only a few words could be cabled in an hour.  The croakers
+were pleased.  The men whose habit it is to say "I told you so" were
+joyous.  The financiers would use their capital for other purposes.
+But Cyrus Field of New York found the money, and William Thomson found
+the way to utilize his own law to make success out of what had seemed
+to others to be defeat.  He invented the "Siphon Recorder."  Then the
+cable was laid under the Atlantic, and on August 17, 1858, Thomson's
+instruments sent and received this message:
+
+"Europe and America are united by telegraph.  Glory to God in the
+highest, and on earth peace and goodwill toward men."
+
+Two weeks later the cable broke.  The world jeered and lost faith,
+according to its habit.  Some {102} called the cable undertaking "a
+swindle", some "a hoax", some a silly toy.  These were thoughtful
+critics.  Eight years passed, eight years of effort to make and
+submerge a cable that would endure.  In 1866 the difficulties were
+overcome.  The world congratulated itself and the men who had worked
+the "miracle."  Lord Kelvin told me the story as if it had been a
+little affair of the day before.  "There has been so much to think of
+since then," said he, "and there is so much more to be done!
+Harnessing Niagara is one thing."  The men who plan things and do them
+were already planning for that, and as in the cable project, they
+called in Lord Kelvin to help.
+
+"How far can we transmit electricity for power and lighting purposes?"
+they asked.
+
+"Three hundred miles," said he.
+
+They laid their plans for a much shorter distance, within a hundred
+miles, and they thought that Kelvin was dreaming.  Years later, when
+power and lighting current had been successfully conveyed over much
+greater distances than Kelvin had suggested, an acquaintance of mine
+asked him: "Why did n't you tell us that electric power can be
+conducted over these greater distances?  I thought three hundred miles
+was the limit."
+
+"The limit is not known," replied Lord Kelvin.  "In the case you refer
+to, I answered a specific question regarding a specific plan undertaken
+for commercial purposes.  The limit was improved by time and
+circumstance, not by Nature.  Ten years ago we could not build the
+machinery that is built {103} to-day, nor, on a great scale, employ the
+conductors that are used to-day.  My suggestion concerned the means
+then known, not the means that might be developed in a decade."
+
+"Well, I lost a chance," said the would-be investor, who was also a
+Scot.
+
+"So, I imagine, did the capitalists of Archimedes' day.  You will
+remember that they failed to provide him with a fulcrum," said Lord
+Kelvin dryly.
+
+Lord Kelvin, when a young man, became permanently lame as the result of
+a skating accident, but his lameness did not retard his physical
+activity.  Sir William Ramsay, the celebrated chemist who had been a
+pupil of Kelvin, said that it "lent emphasis to his amusing class
+demonstration of 'uniform velocity' when he, Kelvin, marched back and
+forth behind his lecture-bench with as even a movement as his lameness
+would permit; and the class generally burst into enthusiastic applause
+when he altered his pace, and introduced them to the meaning of the
+word 'acceleration.'"
+
+Ramsay's opinion was that Kelvin "was not what would be called a good
+lecturer; he was too discursive."  Ramsay doubted whether any man "with
+a brain so much above the ordinary, so much more rapid in action than
+the average, can be a first-rate teacher....  But Kelvin never allowed
+the interest of his students to flag.  His aptness in illustration and
+his vigour of language prevented that.  Lecturing one day on 'Couples',
+he explained how forces must be applied to constitute a Couple and
+illustrated the direction of the forces by turning around the {104}
+gas-bracket.  This led to a discussion on the miserable quality of
+Glasgow coal-gas and how it might be improved.  Following again the
+main idea, he caught hold of the door and swung it to and fro; but
+again his mind diverged to the difference in the structure of English
+and Scottish doors.  We never forgot what a 'Couple' was--but the idea
+might have been conveyed more succinctly."  Yes, and ten to one the
+receivers of it would have forgotten what a "Couple" was!
+
+I heard Kelvin address the Royal Society in London while he was
+president of that body.  He had invited me to come, and I was curious
+enough to see the most distinguished scientific body in the world
+learning something from the world's most distinguished mathematician,
+electrician, and natural philosopher.  The hall in Burlington House was
+filled.  Had an earthquake swallowed the hall then, the world would
+have been deprived instantaneously of dozens of men who were doing its
+thinking for it.  The subject of the discourse was not thrilling, nor
+could the lecturer have been accused of an attempt to pander to
+popularity.  The subject was "The Homogeneous Division of Space."
+There shot through the hour's talk a stream of descriptive phrases such
+as "tetrakaidekahedronal cells", "parallelepipedal partitionings",
+"enantiomorphs ", and their progeny.
+
+The genial old gentleman on the platform would rest his weight upon his
+hands on the table, or the lecture-desk, and lean forward towards his
+audience, and tell some puzzling facts about nature's puzzles, {105}
+pouring streams of numbers and their multiplications and divisions into
+their ears while they floundered in the mathematical deluge.  He would
+see that he had them puzzled, that his mind was working too fast for
+them; he must have surmised it from the expressions on their faces, for
+while he announced theories, discoveries, and drew conclusions, they,
+with all their knowledge and experience, would look as blank or
+bewildered as schoolboys, and he would step back from the table and,
+with a winning smile, remark, "It's this way", or "After all, it's
+simpler than it seems", or "I think it would be demonstrated so", and
+turning swiftly on one heel would face the blackboard and draw upon it
+in strokes that were like flashes, a diagram which made it all so clear
+that his hearers chuckled, or laughed outright; then swiftly he would
+turn again and face them with that winning smile which seemed to mean,
+"See how simple it is!"  Then they would applaud him, which is very
+difficult for the Royal Society to do.
+
+Lord Kelvin's was the first house in the world to be lighted by
+electricity throughout.  He utilized the current in every nook and
+corner, in attics and cellars, in cupboards, closets and wardrobes,
+long before anybody else had attempted to do so.  This was when
+everybody else thought electric lighting a luxury, but his purpose was
+to prove it a necessity.  That was his way.  Whenever he acquired new
+knowledge he applied it forthwith to the betterment of the human lot.
+He thought that science for the sake of science, or scientists, was as
+stupid a formula as "art for art's sake."  Cheese for cheese's sake
+{106} would be quite as useful to mankind.  Of what use was knowledge
+if it were not applied to the needs of man?
+
+He was a yachtsman, but not for sporting purposes, or faddishness, or
+luxurious idleness.  He loved the sea, and his yacht, a schooner named
+_Lalla Rookh_, enabled him to wrest from the sea some of its secrets.
+For twenty years he went sailing every summer, living aboard weeks at a
+time.  He held the certificate of a master navigator.  It was on board
+the _Lalla Rookh_ that he invented his famous apparatus for taking
+soundings and his no less famous compass.  These things became
+necessities for navigators.
+
+The first pair of telephonic instruments that Alexander Graham Bell
+brought to Europe were presented by him to Lord Kelvin, who immediately
+put them to use by connecting his house with that of his brother-in-law
+and assistant, Doctor J. T. Bottomley.  The first electrically lighted
+house in the world was the first in the old world to be connected by
+telephone for purposes professional, social, personal, and domestic.
+For how could Kelvin, who was always peering into the future, be afraid
+of new things?  He peered into the past, too, for you remember how he
+startled the orthodox mind by his calculations regarding the age of the
+earth.
+
+Lord Salisbury, just before he became Prime Minister for the last time
+(his long term of 1895-1902) was Chancellor of the University of Oxford
+and at the same time President of the British Association for the
+Advancement of Science.  At Oxford, {107} in a memorable year, and in
+behalf of the University of which he was chancellor, he welcomed the
+association of which he was president, and he reminded his learned
+listeners that Lord Kelvin, whom he alluded to as "the greatest living
+master of natural science amongst us", was the first to point out that
+the amount of time required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory
+for the working out of the process of evolution which they had imagined
+"could not be conceded without assuming the existence of a totally
+different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted."
+Hot things cool.  The once seething earth has cooled and is cooling.
+So many million years ago it must have been hotter than now by
+calculable degrees.  "But if at any time it was hotter at the surface
+by fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, life would then have been
+impossible on this planet."
+
+Lord Kelvin assured us that organic life on earth cannot have existed
+more than a hundred million years ago.  So if you believed in
+Archbishop Ussher's chronology, and niggardly dealt out to the earth an
+age of only six thousand years, or went so far as Professor Tait with
+his ten million, you had, by Kelvin's figuring, a tremendous margin to
+fill up somehow.  Of course the orthodox jumped and squealed.  But the
+geologists and biologists stamped and yelled.  Some of them wanted more
+than Kelvin's stingy allowance; they wanted not one hundred million
+years, but hundreds of millions.  And there was a pretty ferment in the
+camps!
+
+Sir William Ramsay I have quoted on Kelvin's {108} illustration, in the
+class room, of the term "acceleration."  Kelvin maintained speed when
+he had got it up.  Remember that he was lame, and consider his energy.
+He would dart at an object that stood a few feet from him, on his
+lecture-bench, use it for whatever demonstration was required, and then
+dart at another, or at the blackboard, or at the pointer, as if he were
+a busy bee extracting honey from the flowers.  There was certainty
+about everything he did; no hesitation, no floundering, no hemming and
+hawing for a word, or the next act.  His lameness merely lent emphasis
+to the fact that he was walking; it did not prevent his swiftness of
+movement.  Across the grounds of the university I toiled after him like
+"panting time."  He gave the impression of readiness for a race, and
+might challenge you at any minute.  His gown was always streaming
+behind him, his mortar-board cap in imminent danger of blowing off in
+the breeze stirred by his advance.  Well, he had raced the world many
+years and had always won.
+
+Some great men are so impressed by their own greatness that their
+manner becomes ponderous and vast as if they lived in a belief that
+they cast shadows on the sun.  Not so Lord Kelvin, who never seemed to
+think that great men thought him a greater than themselves.  His manner
+was simple, gentle, courteous, and direct.  He was easy to talk with,
+and yet he had no small talk.  But it was not easy to answer his
+questions.  There was never such a man as he for asking questions
+unless it were the Chinese Viceroy, Li Hung Chang.  Whatever your
+profession, {109} trade, interests in life, he would put questions that
+went to the roots of your matter and revealed on his part a greater
+knowledge of the problems involved than you dreamed existed.  By
+tireless questioning he learned.  But where Li Hung Chang turned the
+results of his questioning to his own benefit, Kelvin applied them to
+the good of the world.  Yet when, in 1896, they celebrated the fiftieth
+anniversary of his professorship at Glasgow he was, I take it, the most
+surprised man in all the galaxy of the famous.  The dear old gentleman
+with the domed head, the white hair, and generous white beard seemed to
+be asking himself, "What next?  Why all this fuss and feathers?"  But
+he was apparently genuinely pleased, too, for all the tributes bespoke
+honest admiration of achievement and character.  Fifty-one learned
+societies, twelve colleges, and twenty-eight universities were
+represented.  They were of all countries.  That day the world, and all
+that was therein, lifted its hat to Lord Kelvin.
+
+I may slip in here a quotation from Emerson.  "In Newton," said
+Emerson, "science was as easy as breathing; he used the same wit to
+weigh the moon that he used to buckle his shoes; and all his life was
+simple, wise, and majestic.  So it was in Archimedes--always self-same,
+like the sky.  In Linnæus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and
+equality--no stilts, no tiptoe; and their results are wholesome and
+memorable to all men."
+
+What Lord Kelvin had done, and was still to do, could not be described
+by any writing of less than encyclopaedic scope, and a knowledge as
+wide and {110} deep as his own.  Helmholtz may be quoted, as he has
+been quoted by many who attempted the larger task from a scientific
+standpoint.  Helmholtz was his intimate friend.  Helmholtz said: "He is
+an eminent mathematician, but the gift to translate real facts into
+mathematical equations, and vice versa, is, by far, more rare than to
+find a solution of a given mathematical problem, and in this direction
+he is most eminent and original."
+
+Kelvin's first published paper was a defence of the mathematician,
+Fourier.  His second was on "The Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous
+Solid Bodies, and Its Connection With The Mathematical Theory of
+Electricity."  I think he was eighteen then.  He was certainly showing
+the bent of his mind.  Fifty or sixty years later he said, in a
+presidential address to the Royal Society: "Tribulation, not
+undisturbed progress, gives life and soul, and leads to success where
+success can be reached."  I do not know what his tribulations were, but
+they may have been the tribulations of defeat.  He may have faced many
+defeats, but he won more successes.  And the world was more concerned
+with scientific discoveries during his career than it had been in the
+time of Count Rumford and Humphry Davy, whose work in disproving that
+heat is a material body had been forgotten because nobody seemed to
+think it more important than curious.  Sometime in the eighteen-forties
+James Prescott Joule ascertained the dynamical equivalent of heat, and
+settled the fact that heat is a mode of motion.  Kelvin may be said to
+have leaped to the side of his friend.
+
+{111}
+
+Lord Kelvin was the first to appreciate the importance of Joule's
+discovery, and it was not long before he placed the whole subject of
+thermodynamics on a scientific basis.  He put his conclusions into
+these easily understandable words: "During any transformation of energy
+of one form into energy of another form, there is always a certain
+amount of energy rendered unavailable for further useful application.
+No known process in nature is exactly reversible: that is to say, there
+is no known process by which we can convert a given amount of energy of
+one form into energy of another form, and then, reversing the process,
+reconvert the energy of the second form thus obtained into the original
+quantity of energy of the first form.  In fact, during any
+transformation of energy from one form into another, there is always a
+certain portion of energy changed into heat in the process of
+conversion, and the heat thus produced becomes dissipated and diffused
+by radiation and conduction.  Consequently there is a tendency in
+nature for all the energy in the universe, of whatever kind it be,
+gradually to assume the form of heat, and having done so to become
+equally diffused.  Now, were all the energy of the universe converted
+into uniformly diffused heat, it would cease to be available for
+producing mechanical effort, since, for that purpose, we must have a
+hot source and a cooler condenser.  This gradual degradation of energy
+is perpetually going on, and, sooner or later, unless there be some
+restorative power of which we have, at present, no knowledge whatever,
+the present state of things must come to an end."
+
+{112}
+
+He revealed the Electrodynamics of Qualities of Metals; the size of
+atoms, the horse-power of the sun; he determined the rigidity of the
+earth, the laws of the tides, made far-reaching discoveries in
+electricity, in vortex motion; it might be said of him that he took the
+universe for his field.
+
+But in a chapter like this one is tempted to dwell too long on high
+achievements.  What attracted one more than the achievements was the
+man, the kindly, sympathetic man who loved truth not celebrity, and
+work more than its rewards.  He was ever the same, whether one met him
+in Glasgow, London, at sea, or in America, the same simple,
+straightforward, kindly character.  He retained his mental activity to
+the end.  He died at eighty-four, and seemed only to be departing on
+another journey in quest of truth and friendship.
+
+On one of the afternoons when I sat with him in his study, within the
+precincts of the university, he said, "Patience, great patience is the
+need of this generation.  It asks results before it earns them.  Man is
+too wasteful of the resources he finds in the earth.  The most of our
+coal is lost in smoke; the most of our heat is dissipated in the air.
+We need patience not less than courage in dealing with our problems."
+The study was lined with engravings and photographs.  Darwin and Joule
+and Faraday looked down from the walls, and there were pictures of the
+cable-laying ships, the _Hooper_, and the _Great Eastern_.  There were
+trophies of travel,--from specimens of sea-bottom along the African
+coast, to quite personal mementos of his lectures at {113} Johns
+Hopkins University and other places in America.
+
+A typical day of Lord Kelvin's was, in outline, this: After breakfast
+he would, at nine, face his class in the university and lecture for an
+hour.  I heard him in such an hour lecture on "Kepler's Laws."  He
+lectured to his class three days a week.  After the lecture he would go
+to White's where he was perfecting an electric metre.  After White's he
+would return to the university and lecture until one o'clock, say, on
+the "Higher Mathematics."  Then home to lunch.  After lunch consulting
+work on the lighting of a town by electricity.  After that an hour in
+Lady Kelvin's drawing-room, taking tea with friends.  Then work in the
+study over the laws governing the formation of crystals.  Then dinner.
+Then calculations in the study, or writing a paper for one of the
+numerous societies of which he was a working member.  In the intervals,
+with his secretary's aid, he would attend to his correspondence.  And,
+if waiting for his secretary, out of a coat pocket would come the
+little green book, and into it would go notes, calculations, or
+diagrams, perhaps all three.  That little green book would come out
+whenever he had a minute to spare, in his dressing-room, or on the
+stairs, or in a train, or a cab, wherever he happened to be, and the
+thought flashed.  I often wondered what his thoughts were on the
+conservation of personal energy.
+
+
+
+
+{114}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TENNYSON
+
+Freshwater is an overgrown village which sprawls about the western end
+of the lovely Isle of Wight.  The meanness of much of its masonry is
+compensated by its remarkably wholesome air.  Man has done his best to
+spoil Freshwater, but he has not wholly succeeded--yet.  Give him time,
+and more radicalism, and he will make it one of the ugly spots of
+earth.  I made its acquaintance in the early spring of 1882, and
+subsequently have visited it many times.
+
+When I first made acquaintance with Freshwater, there was no railway
+within eleven miles, Newport being the terminus of the island lines
+which were as drolly inconvenient as they are now.  The fiddling,
+amateurish railway, which has come in since then, has not only robbed
+Freshwater of its seclusion but has saddled parts of the rolling
+country with shabby streets of mean houses worthy of a Montana mining
+town.  Towards the downs and the sea much of the old charm remains.
+About Farringford it is undisturbed.  And it was at Farringford, that
+lovely estate, that Tennyson lived.
+
+I had quarters in a house that faced the sea.  And these quarters were
+mine whenever, in the {115} thirty-six years since that delightful May,
+I returned to Freshwater.  They are mine no longer.  The house has
+become an hotel.  Now, in the thirty-eighth year of my Freshwatering, I
+have lodgment elsewhere.  The house that sheltered me so long is
+scarcely a quarter of a mile from Tennyson's Lane, and many of the
+poet's friends have stayed in it, and friends of Watts, for that great
+artist also lived in Freshwater, first at a house which is now called
+Dimbola, and subsequently at "The Briary", a charming home built by the
+Prinseps and facing Tennyson's "noble Down."  In the rooms to which I
+have so often retreated, and where I so often watched the blue Channel
+dancing in the sunshine, there are, or were, many mementos of past
+days.  Some of them were photographs, and, as any one who knows the
+Freshwater legends may guess, they were taken by Mrs. Cameron, the
+first of the artist photographers, and, in her day, the celebrator of
+all the celebrated who came to Freshwater to visit the poet.
+
+Mrs. Cameron lived at Dimbola which is at the southeastern corner of
+the Farringford estate.  "She were a concentric lady who wore velvet
+gowns a-trailin' in the dusty roads," as one old-timer described her to
+me.  Her photography was not professional but amateur, and her skill in
+it was quite remarkable.  So was her persistence.  She would not permit
+a possible "subject" to escape without "taking" him or her.  She was
+quite intimate with the Tennysons, and always called the poet by his
+Christian name.  One day, while there was a smallpox scare about, she
+rushed to Farringford, {116} with a stranger in tow, and finding
+Tennyson within, she opened the door of the room where he was sitting,
+and bidding the stranger follow, cried, "Alfred, I 've brought a doctor
+to vaccinate you.  You must be vaccinated!"
+
+Tennyson, horrified, fled to an adjoining room and bolted the door
+after him.
+
+"Alfred, Alfred," Mrs. Cameron called, "I've brought a doctor.  You
+must be vaccinated; you really must!"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Oh, Alfred, you 're a coward!  Come and be vaccinated!"
+
+She won.
+
+When Garibaldi visited Tennyson, he planted a tree in the Farringford
+grounds.  And Mrs. Cameron planted herself before him, and begged him
+to come and be photographed.  Rather eccentric, as my old-timer had
+tried to convey, she had that morning hastened to Farringford without
+hat, or gloves, and with her sleeves rolled up, just as she came from
+her "dark room", and her hands were stained with photographic
+chemicals.  Garibaldi seems to have taken her for a beggar and was
+turning away, when she knelt before him and implored him to let her
+photograph him.
+
+Again she won.  She always won in such contests.
+
+Mrs. Cameron's day was before the days of dry plates and films.  The
+accumulation of negatives that she left when, with her husband, she
+returned to Ceylon, where they had formerly lived for many years,
+passed into the possession of a son.  I do not {117} know what has been
+their subsequent fate; but if uninjured they would be very interesting
+now, and a collection of prints from them would have a value all its
+own.  She made a number, I daresay many photographs of Tennyson and the
+members of his family; and when Longfellow came to Farringford, the
+good lady triumphantly proclaimed him a captive.
+
+She was a kind-hearted, good-natured soul, but when she wanted to carry
+a point she could be as imperious and decisive as any one that ever
+lived in the Isle.  The neighbourhood children she would persuade by
+"sweeties", or, failing these, by main force, to "come and be
+photographed" in this character or that, and there were maid servants
+with classic faces and ploughmen with fine heads who posed for her as
+characters in plays and poems, in costumes which she would improvise.
+Mrs. Cameron was a generous, interesting, impulsive woman.  Much of
+Freshwater legend gathers about her, and her camera, and her diligence
+in amateur theatricals.
+
+In my island study there hung for many years the two best photographs
+of Tennyson that I ever saw.  They were taken by Mrs. Cameron.  The
+first was, I believe, taken about 1870, or '72.  It represents the poet
+seated, and holding with both hands a book half opened in his lap.  He
+wears a black morning coat, closely buttoned, cut in the fashion of the
+time.  Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in his
+portraits, here is the stiff "dickey" of Piccadilly; the cuffs, too,
+are in the mode, and over the coat a {118} monocle hangs.  It is quite
+out of the style of other Tennyson portraits with which I am reasonably
+familiar, but on that account it has a special interest of its own.
+The second photograph, to which I have alluded, is not only thoroughly
+characteristic but has achieved some fame as "The Dirty Monk", and is
+thus autographed by its original:
+
+  "_I prefer 'The Dirty Monk'
+      to the others of me.
+            A. Tennyson.
+    Except one by Mayall._"
+
+
+When I returned to Freshwater for three or four months in 1913, after
+several years' absence, I looked, as usual, for this precious pair.
+But they had gone, and no one could tell, or would tell, when or where.
+Some souvenir hunter must have loved them too well.
+
+There are, or were, some Morland prints, too.  George Morland lived and
+painted in Freshwater, in a bit cottage that stood in front of the site
+of this house, but which disappeared nearly a century ago.  Mrs.
+Cameron, could she revisit the glimpses of the moon, would find her
+quiet old village developed into a sprawling, country town.  It had
+five hundred inhabitants when Tennyson first came to it in a sailboat
+from the mainland, in 1852, or 1853; it has between five and ten
+thousand now, west of the Yar.  The number shifts with the summer
+visitors, and the military cannot be counted, for they come and go in a
+variable stream.  Ever since the war began, the fit and the wounded,
+the trained and the {119} untrained have passed through in large
+numbers, or have stayed for longer or shorter terms.  A war town has
+grown up on a border of the old town.  Golden Hill is now an expanse of
+barrack huts and not of yellow gorse.
+
+Mrs. Cameron believed in getting things done, not in talking about
+them.  She transformed the coal shed at Dimbola into a dark room for
+developing her negatives; and the poultry house became a studio.  When
+her husband, a recluse who had n't so much as seen the beach for a
+dozen years, wanted a lawn, she had turf dug by night and laid in the
+garden.  Calling her husband to the window next morning, she pointed to
+the expanse of new-laid turf and said, "There 's your lawn!" as if any
+one would deny her power to work miracles.
+
+Farringford, of course, is enclosed by hedges and trees, literally
+surrounded by them.  The house itself is still further protected from
+the gaze of the outer world by an inner circle of trees and shrubbery.
+The estate is bisected by the lovely lane which has been described in
+every account ever written of Tennyson, and photographed a thousand
+times.  It, in turn, has a hedgerow on each side and is over-arched by
+elms.  It is really an approach to the farm which is attached to the
+home acres, and through it, for walking purposes, the public has a
+right-of-way.  At the crest of the rising ground is a little green
+door, set in the high-banked hedge which guards the home lawns, and by
+this green door the poet would pass to the down along another lane
+which runs at right angles to the one associated with his {120} name
+and immediately opposite the green door.  A few feet beyond this, a
+rustic bridge overhead spans Tennyson's Lane, and by this bridge the
+poet could cross into a woodland without having to enter the Lane,
+where his privacy might be disturbed, and so walk to Maiden's Croft,
+where a little green summerhouse stands under the trees and where he
+often wrote and meditated.  From this summerhouse he had the best view
+of the beautiful and noble down.  From the windows of Farringford there
+are exquisite views of seascape and landscape, with lush fields in the
+foreground,--a view, on sunny days, of quite un-English colour.  In the
+distance St. Catherine's Point and above it the white crown of the
+Landslip, and above that the dark shape of St. Boniface Down, lifting
+its head eight hundred feet toward the clouds; in the middle distance a
+tumble of green hills, and to the right the sea dappled with shafts of
+light and colour ever changing,--mauves and blues and greens, splashed
+with browns and reds, shifting and playing there under the sun.  It
+might be Italian sea and Italian landscape.  And Tennyson called it his
+"bit of Italy."  You can see it just as he saw it, if you pause at an
+iron gate on your left, near the top of the rise in the Lane, and you
+will have in the foreground a group of Italian-like trees beyond which
+Stag Rock and Arched Rock stand with their feet in the tiny bay.  It is
+of all bits of English land and water one of the most memorable for
+form and colour,--this little Italy.  And it drew Tennyson to
+Farringford and held him there.
+
+{121}
+
+Tennyson was not seen much in the village, but he often walked to the
+bay.  Here is my first glimpse of him: a tall man looking like a
+cloaked brigand; his head was swallowed by a great hat, soft and black,
+and he was pointing with a stick.
+
+"Making yourself at home here, aren't you?" he was understood to say in
+something between a rumble and growl.
+
+An artist friend of mine was seated on a sketching stool at the iron
+gate, making a study of the "bit of Italy."  Before the stool was an
+easel, a palette, and a box of water colours.  Tennyson, who was
+near-sighted, saw at first only the seated figure on the camp stool,
+leaning back against the open gate and gazing at the unique view.
+
+"Very much at home," continued the poet.
+
+The right-of-way was for walking only, not for sitting in chairs and
+encumbering the earth with easels and general impedimenta of the fine
+arts.  My friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably not
+thought of this, and, having a sudden consciousness of intrusion,
+whispered to me, around the hedge:
+
+"Tennyson!  O Lord!"
+
+The great man drew nearer, and then, taking in the situation, said:
+
+"Ah, painting!  Brothers in art.  Good morning!"
+
+This was perhaps tender treatment as compared with what we had heard a
+pair of strangers might have expected.  But my friend, although
+flurried because Jove had passed, remained at work.  I forget, though,
+whether the sketch was ever completed.  {122} I was curious enough,
+however, to pass on, by a detour, in the hope of seeing Jove on his
+homeward stroll.  But he had vanished, and there were no thunderings,
+near or far.
+
+Mrs. Cameron and her household, after years at enlivening and
+photographing Freshwater, returned to Ceylon.  The departure was an
+occasion for a liberal distribution of photographs among the
+inhabitants of the West Wight; and where there was a souvenir to be
+given or a tip to be left, mounted portraits of celebrities, or of
+models dressed as characters in fiction or poetry, were handed out.
+Thus it happened that many of the pleasant lodging-houses in the
+vicinity became galleries of Cameron art.
+
+"Ideal" Ward had built a country mansion within a mile of Farringford.
+It was called Weston Manor.  The eminent Catholic scholar and writer
+was, of course, a friend of Tennyson.  And the two would dispute, of
+course, about religion, or, rather, about theology, without the
+slightest effect upon each other's opinions.  The house is still in the
+possession of the Ward family, but is not occupied by them.  For some
+years the private chaplain at Weston Manor was Father Peter
+Haythornthwaite, a most agreeable and hard-working man.  Father Peter,
+as they called him in the island, was also a friend of Tennyson and
+frequently a companion of his walks.  He told me an amusing story
+connected with his first dinner at Farringford.  Tennyson had an Irish
+maid, Mary by name.  The family were very fond of her; her devotion to
+them was equalled only by her zeal in serving them, which she would
+{123} sometimes do in a domineering, if loyal manner, to which the poet
+bowed submissively.  Tennyson disliked formality and stiffness, and was
+uncomfortable in a dress suit and starched shirt.  Dressing for dinner
+he avoided whenever he could.  Mary had laid out his most ceremonious
+clothes.
+
+"Put them away," said he.  "I 'll not wear them!"
+
+Mary insisted.
+
+"Now, I see," said Tennyson.  "I am to wear them for that priest, eh?"
+
+"Plaze, sir!"
+
+"Will he come in his altar robes and stole?"
+
+"The saints forbid!" said she.
+
+"If they forbid him, why should they compel me?" he asked.
+
+"It 's I, yer Honour, that tell ye, for the sake of the house!  And he
+'s a man of God."
+
+"I could n't resist that, could I?" the poet asked of Father Peter.
+"And so," said he, "I dressed."
+
+At the table one evening, Tennyson, being in a humorous mood, composed
+rhyming epitaphs upon every name that occurred to him.
+
+"What would you say of me?" asked Father Peter.
+
+Instantly this couplet rolled from the lips of the host:
+
+  "Here lies P. Haythornthwaite,
+  Human by nature, Roman by fate."
+
+
+A letter of Mrs. Cameron's came under my observation one day, and I was
+permitted to make a note from it.  "Tennyson," she wrote, "was very
+violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for {124} autographs.
+He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was
+connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records;
+that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great
+men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; and
+that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he
+thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew
+nothing, and would know nothing, of Jane Austen; and that there were no
+letters preserved, either of Shakespeare's, or of Jane Austen's; and
+that they had not been ripped open like pigs.  Then he said that the
+post for two days had brought him no letters, and that he thought there
+was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and his fame."
+
+That last touch is delicious.  Tennyson did not like to be ignored.  He
+was proud, and justly proud, of his fame.  Sir Edwin Arnold said:
+"Tennyson had a noble vanity, a proud pleasure in the very notoriety
+which brought strangers peeping and stealing about his gates."  Perhaps
+so, but it was a case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be to
+him through whom the offence cometh."  He hated to have tributes thrust
+upon him; he hated intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too
+much from that sort of thing at Farringford when summer visitors
+overran Freshwater.  He liked to be recognised along the country roads;
+he liked to have people lift their hats to him; he liked to know that
+his work meant something to the passer by.  But he shunned the merely
+curious stranger.
+
+{125}
+
+And so it was natural enough that he should have built a summer home on
+the mainland, Aldworth, where there was no summer resort and no plague
+of the curious.  His friend, James Knowles, of the _Nineteenth
+Century_, designed the house, and there Tennyson passed many happy
+summers and autumns.  And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of
+1892, he died.  Whether he loved Farringford more, or Aldworth more, I
+do not know.  But probably he was as much attached to one as to the
+other, for each had its special associations.
+
+The Tennysonian cloak, the Tennysonian hat, the rolling collar, and the
+touzled beard and hair were not unique.  There lived at one time in
+Freshwater a brother of the poet.  He resembled the poet and dressed
+like him.  At the same time there was another resident of the place who
+not only resembled Lord Tennyson but "got himself up" in close
+imitation of his dress and manner.  He was a warm admirer of Tennyson,
+and was immensely flattered to be mistaken for him by strangers.  Small
+boys of the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny tips from
+this adoring person by pretending to mistake him for their celebrated
+townsman.  On the whole it was rather a good thing to have three
+figures in the place, any one of which might be looked upon or followed
+by the summer visitor as the famous poet.  It might be puzzling if the
+stranger met two or three Tennysons in a mile, but two of them could
+easily divert attention from the third, who was skilled in avoiding
+strangers.
+
+There was an aged man who had been a gardener {126} at Farringford and
+was living on a little pension from that quarter.  One morning he heard
+that the Poet Laureate had died.  Meeting Father Peter in the road he
+expressed his grief that "his pore ludship have passed away."  Then,
+with much concern for the succession, he asked:
+
+"D'ye think likely Mr. Hallam will follow his father's business?"
+
+Father Peter thought it quite unlikely.
+
+"Ah," said the pensioner, much relieved.  "I think nowt on 't, nowt!"
+
+I have seen Farringford described as "a beautifully wooded gentleman's
+park."  It must, at least, be acknowledged that if the gentleman were
+not beautifully wooded, he lived there, and that he lived a beautiful
+and serene life, a noble life, adding greatly to the fame of England,
+and no less to the human lot.  Forty of his eighty-three years were
+Farringford years.  Never was poet more happily placed than in this
+earthly paradise.  Every circumstance of loyalty and love, of
+understanding and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aldworth.  And
+never had genius a more devoted aid than Tennyson had in his son
+Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson, shield and buckler to his father and
+to his gentle mother, the dear lady who seemed like a spirit held on
+earth only by the devotion of husband and son.  A family life richer
+and more tender one does not know among all the lives that one has
+seen, or ever heard of.  To write more about it now would be impious.
+
+Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in Westminster {127} Abbey, on
+an October day in 1892, a committee of his neighbours in Freshwater was
+formed for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the rural region
+where half his life had been passed.  The memorial was meant to be a
+local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally
+enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a monument, tablet,
+or window, in the village church.  But a more fitting idea was adopted.
+
+There stood on the summit of the High Down, "Tennyson's Down" as it is
+more generally known, a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber
+surmounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long ago, fire had
+blazed when alarms were signalled from hill to hill along the coast.
+This beacon had been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served
+through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of
+ships passing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by
+the Needles.  Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the
+edge of a long white cliff, it was easily seen by navigators bound
+inward or outward.  For forty years Tennyson had made it a point of
+call in his almost daily walks.  The committee believed that in the
+place of the old wooden structure a granite shaft could be erected,
+serving at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to seamen.
+
+The Reverend Doctor Merriman, Rector of Freshwater, Colonel Crozier,
+Doctor Hollis, and others, invited me to join the committee, and I did
+so, suggesting that Americans would wish to share in {128} erecting the
+proposed memorial, but that it would be scarcely possible for them to
+participate were the object undertaken purely as a village or
+neighbourhood tribute.  The broader suggestion was adopted.  A Celtic
+cross in Cornish granite was designed by Mr. J. L. Pearson, of the
+Royal Academy, and the Brethren of Trinity House (the Lighthouse Board)
+consented to preserve it in perpetuity if the committee would provide
+for its erection.  I communicated with my old friend, Mrs. James T.
+Fields of Boston, the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and she
+brought together an American committee for the purpose of coöperating
+with the one in Freshwater.  Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her
+first associate and the first American subscriber.  The daughters of
+Longfellow and Lowell were members of the American committee, and so
+were Mrs. Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret Deland, Miss
+Sarah Orne Jewett, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Thomas Bailey
+Aldrich, Mr. H. O. Houghton, Mr. George H. Mifflin, and others.
+Several American newspapers courteously drew attention to the proposed
+memorial, and Mr. George W. Smalley made an appeal through the New York
+Tribune, as I did through other papers.  Subscriptions were purposely
+confined to small amounts so that the humblest lover of Tennyson could
+contribute his mite.  I remember that among the first to come were
+twenty-five cents "from a bricklayer", and "a dollar from a proof
+reader."
+
+The cross was erected and now, a quarter of a century later, it shows
+scarcely a sign of weather, {129} though it fronts the sun, and the
+storms beat upon it, seven hundred feet above the sea.  It bears this
+inscription:
+
+     IN MEMORY
+     OF ALFRED
+   LORD TENNYSON
+   THIS CROSS IS
+  RAISED A BEACON
+   TO SAILORS BY
+   THE PEOPLE OF
+   FRESHWATER AND
+   OTHER FRIENDS
+    IN ENGLAND
+    AND AMERICA
+
+
+Cliff-erosion causes the precipitous brink to creep slowly toward the
+cross.  By or before the middle of the present century it may become
+necessary to remove the Beacon Cross some yards to the north.
+
+It was, I think, on the day of Tennyson's burial that the following
+letter appeared in the _Times_, over the signature P.L.I.
+
+
+"Perhaps the following anecdotes may be of interest, related as they
+were in a paper read privately by the late James T. Fields, in 1872,
+during my stay in Boston.
+
+"Mr. Fields said that while staying with the poet at Farringford,
+Tennyson said at midnight, 'Fields, let 's take a walk!'  It was a dark
+and wild night, the sea breaking at the foot of the cliffs.  Knowing
+the dangers of the place and his near-sightedness, I feared for his
+safety; however, he trudged on through the thick grass with his stick,
+I also using the one he had lent me on setting out.
+
+{130}
+
+"Presently he dropped on hands and knees in the grass.  Alarmed I
+asked, 'What is the matter?'  He answered in a strong, Lincolnshire
+accent, 'Violets, man, violets!  Get thee down and have a smell; it
+will make thee sleep the better!'  He had detected them by his acute
+sense of smell, aided by his strong love of nature.  I dropped down,
+and the sense of the ridiculous struck me forcibly,--in such a position
+at midnight lying in the thick grass.  He joined in my laughter, and we
+started for home.
+
+"He was egotistical to an extreme, but it was superb, and deeply
+impressed one.  An old lady once, sitting next to Tennyson while some
+of his poems were being read, exclaimed, 'Oh! how exquisite!'  'I
+should say it was,' replied the poet.  At another time he said no one
+could read 'Maud' but himself.  'Fields, come and see me, and I will
+give you "Maud" so that you will never forget it.'  This was perfectly
+true.  I felt I could have listened to him forever, and would go any
+distance to hear it as he gave it."
+
+
+There was much more to the same purpose.  But Mr. Fields, like several
+others who have written about Tennyson, may have over-emphasised the
+poet's "egotism."  Tennyson was an absolutely honest man.  He said what
+he thought.  If another said that his work was "exquisite" or "superb",
+or this, or that, he would not affect a self-depreciation which he did
+not feel.  That would have been dishonest.  If the work were fine, he
+knew it and said so.  If it were over-praised, he said that too.  He
+was not imposed upon by flattery, and he hated that and detected it
+easily enough.  The "violet" incident above has been quoted frequently.
+It is quoted here because Mr. Fields was mistaken about {131} "the
+thick grass."  That does not grow on the down.  Besides the furze
+bushes, there is only close-cropped turf.  If he walked through "thick
+grass" it may have been on the way to and from the down, perhaps, by
+the way of Maiden's Croft.  And on the down the poet would have been in
+no peril through his short-sightedness.  He was a countryman, and knew
+every inch of the way.  A countryman can tell by the slope of the
+ground, by "the lie of the land" under his feet, whether or not the
+down is leading him astray.  If he is sure-footed, far sight will not
+help him much in the dark.  But Fields, although a kindly soul, was a
+publisher, and he might easily have felt "ridiculous" when kneeling at
+the feet of a poet.
+
+A diligent antiquary lived at Freshwater in Tennyson's time.  He lived
+in Easton Cottage, nearly opposite the road-end of Tennyson's Lane.
+His name was Robert Walker, and he was well advanced in age.  When I
+knew him, in the nineties, he was very deaf, so that talking with him
+was tiresome.  But he had interesting talk to give, even if he received
+none in return.  He had been a dealer in antiques, I forget where, but
+I remember that he told me he had made and lost two fortunes, and was
+sheltering his last years under the shreds of the second.  He told me,
+too, that he had been offered the curatorship of a well-known museum,
+but had declined, preferring retirement in Freshwater.  I have a vague
+recollection of being shown the correspondence.  But, at any rate, the
+old man promised to confer new fame on Freshwater by proving that it
+{132} had very ancient fame, indeed, as a harbourage and stage in the
+overland route to the tin mines of Cornwall in the time of the
+Phoenicians!
+
+His argument was something like this: In the obscure past there were
+Phoenicians.  So much we grant.  They conducted with the world at
+large, or with as much of it as was then known, a trade in tin.  Strabo
+tells us so.  Whence came their tin?  From Cornwall.  And how did they
+get to Cornwall?  By the Isle of Wight, which seems a roundabout way,
+but was not so.  The "ships" of the Phoenicians "were little more than
+open boats, partly decked, and liable to be swamped by the dash of the
+waves over their sides and prows.  They were propelled by rowers,
+numbering from thirty to fifty; if wind served they stepped a single
+mast and hoisted a single sail."  They avoided the heavy seas of the
+Bay of Biscay, and came by the rivers of France.  Up from the
+Mediterranean they would proceed by the Rhone to where Lyons is now.
+There they would leave their vessels.  From there overland to the
+Seine, where they had another fleet awaiting them.  Then down the Seine
+to where Havre, or Barfleur, or Cherbourg stand now, and thence across
+the Channel to the Isle of Wight, the nearest front of barbarian
+England.
+
+Freshwater was then an island.  It is almost an island now.  The little
+tidal river, Yar, rises within a few yards of the Channel and flows
+north, to the Solent.  In those days there was probably no beach at
+Freshwater Bay; the present beach was formed after modern man had
+constructed a causeway {133} there.  In those days the waters of the
+Channel flowed into the Yar, making a shallow estuary sufficient for an
+anchorage, where the Phoenician craft could lie while their adventurous
+crews were following the Cornish trail, a feat easily performed,
+because, in those days, the Isle of Wight was doubtless joined to the
+mainland at Hurst Castle.  If it were not it should have been, in order
+to add interest to the story.
+
+About the beginning of the eighteen-nineties workmen were widening and
+lowering the road which skirts Farringford and the Briary, and gives an
+entrance to the rear of Weston Manor.  They dug so closely into a
+Weston hedge that, in going below the subsoil of it, they discovered
+the remains of ancient structures containing pottery, ash, charcoal,
+lime, enamelled bricks, and so on.  Walker declared the remains were
+Phoenician, and the site that of a crematorium and a pottery.  He cited
+evidence which I have not space to record.  Being an antiquary he
+turned on other antiquaries.  He wrote a pamphlet.  The Antiquary
+magazine took up the case and cited similar discoveries, undoubtedly
+Phoenician, in South Devon.  Warm arguments for and against the
+Phoenician theory were thrown back and forth.  And Freshwater laughed.
+It was sure, and is sure still, that the anti-Phoenicians had the best
+of it, and Neighbour Walker the worst of it.  A neighbour would have
+the worst of it, of course.  But Walker persuaded the Ward of the time
+(Granville) to preserve the discoveries and to erect above them two
+protecting domes of concrete.  {134} Walker, I think, had the best of
+it, for if he could not prove the remains to have been Phoenician, his
+adversaries could not prove them to have been anything else.  The
+antiquary is dead, and the local cabmen point, with the scorn of their
+calling, to "Walker's Pups" in the hedgerow as you drive to Totland or
+Alum Bay.
+
+Local prophets, here as elsewhere, may prophesy without excess of
+honour.  Tennyson himself used to tell an anecdote which had the run of
+the village:
+
+"There 's Farringford," said a cabman to a visiting "fare."
+
+"Ah!" responded the latter, "a great man lives there."
+
+"D' ye call him great?" retorted cabby.  "He only keeps one man, and
+_he_ don't sleep in the house!"
+
+Just as I reach this point in this chapter, there comes to me, in
+Hampshire, the news of Lady Ritchie's death.  This means the breaking
+of almost the last link of that old Island circle.  And it means the
+vanishing from life of one of the sweetest and dearest old ladies I
+have ever known.  She was Thackeray's eldest daughter.
+
+When my wife and I left the Island, late in 1918, Lady Ritchie was one
+of the last friends we saw.  She came to our gate to say good-bye.  She
+was then over eighty-one.  How many of my friends are more than eighty!
+The most active youth is ninety-three!  He also is an Isle of Wighter.
+Lady Ritchie was an Isle of Wighter half of every year.  She had first
+visited Freshwater with her father {135} when she was a child, and her
+association with it had never ceased since then.  For many years past
+she had a little house there.  "The Porch" it was called.  The colder
+half of the year she lived in London, in St. Leonard's Terrace,
+Chelsea; the warmer half at "The Porch."  In 1918, when Chelsea
+Hospital, the home of the red-coated Old Pensioners, was bombed by
+German aircraft, she had a narrow escape.  Her house faces the hospital
+grounds, and every window pane in the front was shattered.  She was
+sitting in her drawing-room at the time, but was unhurt by the flying
+glass and unruffled by the flashing and crashing all about her.  She
+was then approaching her eighty-first birthday.  But ladies of
+eighty-one, however unconquerable, do not go through such an experience
+without nerve strain.  When I saw her again, a few weeks later, she,
+for the first time, seemed conscious that age was advancing upon her.
+The pleasant little gatherings became fewer; she was much fatigued
+after them.  But her spirits were as high as ever, and her thought as
+kindly.
+
+When the United States entered the war, she came to me with a jubilant
+letter from an old friend of hers in New York.  Her friend had written,
+"I rejoice that you and I are now fighting together, side by side."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Lady Ritchie, reading the letter to me, "think of it!
+Two old ladies of eighty fighting shoulder to shoulder!"  And
+straightway she made a little American flag which she hung at "The
+Porch" door, alongside a Union Jack.
+
+{136}
+
+She was, I think, the last of that once considerable group whose
+members always addressed, and alluded to, the first Lord Tennyson as
+"Alfred."  And she was as full of stories of him as an egg is of meat.
+The last time we passed Farringford together, she said:
+
+"I like to think of the expression on Alfred's face when he was told
+that a new boy-in-buttons, a country lad whom he had just taken into
+service, answered the doorbell one day, and saw a tall, sedate
+gentleman standing there.
+
+"'Tell your master that the Prince Consort has called,' he said to the
+boy.
+
+"'Oh, crickey!' exclaimed the youngster, who fled to the innermost
+parts of the house.
+
+"Somehow, I forget how, the message was conveyed to Alfred, who found
+the Prince waiting at the door, still laughing at the boy's
+consternation.  The Island life was fairly simple in those days."
+
+And what is left of that old life is gracious, kindly, hospitable.  In
+no place in any part of the earth have I met with greater kindliness
+than in Freshwater.  That is why I am fond of the West Wight and have
+been there so often.  I wonder if ever I shall go there again.  Once I
+crossed the Atlantic to go there and only there.  And now, to-day that
+gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to return.  How kindly
+she was, and gentle!  What sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner
+that was not put on and off like a gown.  It was innate.  There are few
+left in the world like that dear lady.  The present generation calls
+them old-fashioned.  {137} Theirs was indeed an old fashion, and the
+world is poorer because it does not know how to match it.  Their spirit
+was not the spirit of the age as we see it at the dawn of the third
+decade of the Twentieth Century.  Farewell, dear lady, you were
+Thackeray's finest work!
+
+
+
+
+{138}
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+GLADSTONE
+
+The enthusiasms and antagonisms set alight by Mr. Gladstone in his long
+career flame now, a generation after his death, quite as fiercely as
+they did before the Great War.  Not that he was a warlike man, except
+upon the hustings and in the House.  You would think that everybody
+could see now that Gladstone was right about the Turks.  But Woodrow
+Wilson and the ex-Kaiser have not seen so much.  They were on the side
+of the Turks and Bulgarians.  Wilson was so much on their side that he
+would not fight them, and by his abstention contributed to the
+situation which made the Armenian massacres a continuous entertainment
+for Berlin, and isolated Russia from her Allies.  And there is Ireland,
+of course, Ireland with De Valera instead of with Parnell.  And there
+is Egypt.  And there is India.  All of these synonymes for trouble, and
+debates in the House.  All these troubles to be healed by talk.  But
+there is no one now who talks so well as Mr. Gladstone.
+
+When Gladstone died, men did not agree about what he had done in his
+more than sixty years of public life,--done, that is, for the United
+Kingdom {139} and the Empire.  They do not agree now.  What was the
+outstanding achievement of his life, the thing, above all, by which
+posterity will remember him?  Was it his devotion to the freedom of
+human kind?  Perhaps.  But the main question is so difficult to answer
+that I shall not attempt the task, not merely because it is difficult,
+but mainly because it is not my intention to tread the mazes of British
+politics.
+
+The Nineteenth Century, the despised Victorian Age, if you please, was
+an age of great men.  Some of them seem smaller now than they did
+before July, 1914.  Bismarck, for example.  Bismarck was a liar.
+Gladstone was not.  And yet he had a theological mind.  Gladstone's
+stature has not diminished with the shrinking process of time.  But
+will it diminish?  Who can tell?  The world salutes his integrity.
+Does it salute for integrity and courage any political personage of
+to-day?
+
+The world was taught, generation after generation, that the emergency
+produces the man.  The year 1914 and its six successors brought
+emergency to every country, such emergency as no country had ever known
+before.  But the emergencies did not produce the political men.  Only
+France produced the political man.  Without him, German intrigue would
+have overrun the world, even after the Germans fled from France and
+Belgium and the East.  We would have been smothered by words and
+machinations, as northern France and Belgium had been smothered by the
+Teutonic cloud-bursts.  But there was Clémenceau,--Clémenceau who had
+appointed Foch.
+
+{140}
+
+These two men and the Allied commanders brought victory to
+civilisation.  If the politicians do not destroy the work and plans,
+the "peace" they are making now will endure for a while.  If the
+politicians, toying with their new doll, the League of Nations, keep
+their heads in the clouds, I believe they will come crashing to earth
+within ten years, frightened and amazed by a greater and longer war
+than has yet been known.  They sowed its seeds in the Armistice and at
+Versailles.  And later when, month after month, they changed their
+plans from day to day.
+
+It is sometimes unwise to avoid digressions.  No apology is made, or
+considered necessary, for this one.
+
+I was speaking of Mr. Gladstone.  It was my privilege to see him and
+hear him frequently during twenty years.  Perhaps it was due to some
+defect of nature that I was never much influenced politically by him.
+His eloquence was anything you may choose to imagine it, and you would
+have admired it, if you could dissociate from it the involved phrases,
+the delicate adjustments, the hair-split meanings which might balance
+any interpretation that might be put upon them, the contradictions, the
+finely-spun arguments which, woven into the texture of his speeches,
+would enmesh the unwary,--you would have admired it hugely if you could
+have dissociated these things from it.  His majorities probably did not
+make the effort.  He had the magic of making them forget.
+
+He could be, and was, eloquent on any subject, {141} and, for that
+reason, he could and did unsettle many minds on many themes.  He was a
+word-spinner of extraordinary skill and charm, and he made multitudes
+think they had opinions of their own when their opinions were what he
+had taught them.  That is one of the gifts of leadership.  And it was a
+special privilege of Mr. Gladstone's leadership of democracy that he
+remained an aristocrat by habit and inclination.  Morley's "Life" of
+him contains this passage from a privately printed account of Ruskin at
+Hawarden:
+
+
+"Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time between
+Ruskin and Mr. G. when Ruskin directly attacked his host as a
+'leveller.'  'You see _you_ think one man is as good as another, and
+all men equally competent to judge aright on political questions;
+whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.'  And straight came the
+answer from Mr. Gladstone, 'Oh dear, no!  I am nothing of the sort.  I
+am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle--the rule of the best.
+I am an out-and-out _inequalitarian_,' a confession which Ruskin
+treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly."
+
+
+Eloquence has not been rated modestly among the arts during some
+thousands of years.  Whether it has done more for the advancement or
+the retardation of man may be a subject for dispute.  That it has done
+both is unquestioned by those who talk less than they think.  It is a
+useful accomplishment when the object is to get a body of men to think
+and act in unison; it is equally useful in promoting disunion.  It is
+therefore of most service to politicians {142} and preachers, the aim
+of these gentlemen being to promote unity for their own causes by
+promoting disaffection in and with all other causes.  Of all the
+statesmen of the nineteenth century, Mr. Gladstone was preëminent in
+the promotion of disaffection.  I do not know that he uprooted anything
+that deserved to remain among the habits or institutions of mankind; I
+do not know that he preserved anything that should have been cast upon
+the dust heap; I do not know that he originated anything; but I always
+think of him as a great opportunist who was sometimes on the right
+side, and quite as likely to be on the wrong.  But he differed from
+other conspicuous opportunists in this: he always wrestled with the
+devil of unbelief.  Before adopting a policy he would ask himself, "Is
+this right?"  If he adopted it, you would know that he was convinced of
+the righteousness of his cause.  That he had converted himself,
+convinced himself by his own eloquence, did not make his conviction
+less sure, but made it perhaps, more clinching because he had talked
+himself into belief.  His eloquence, therefore, had effect upon himself
+no less than upon others, as Lord Beaconsfield more than implied when,
+in a political speech at Knightsbridge, in 1878, he alluded to Mr.
+Gladstone as "a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance
+of his own verbosity."
+
+If Mr. Gladstone has been credited too much and too often with all the
+qualities of a saint, it was, perhaps, because his opponents were
+always ready to attribute to him the traits of a devil.  In our later
+time there has been no such adulation and no {143} such hatred as were
+poured upon him.  And I take it that these excesses were due to his
+absorption in things, or subjects, rather than to interest in men.
+Individuals did not interest him; causes did.  The cause, whatever it
+might be, filled the universe.  He could not see men, the people were
+so conspicuous.
+
+It may have been a fault, it was certainly a characteristic, that when
+he had once resolved, he expected his followers to exchange, as quickly
+as himself, old ways of thought for new.  It did not occur to him until
+after the event that he had struck not only the wrong but the unpopular
+note in the American Civil War.  He saw the thing in one way only, and
+he was immensely surprised when he learned that there was another side
+to the question, and that it was taken by the country most concerned.
+But he did what he could and subsequently made a long and almost abject
+confession of error, which might have shaken, if it did not, the
+general appreciation of his powers of judgment.  It will be said there
+was the case of Ireland.  To be sure there was the case of Ireland.  It
+is always with Britain, even if the Irish are not,--as in the war
+against Germany.  But Mr. Gladstone understood Ireland and the Irish as
+little as,--well, as little as the Americans understand them.  Lord
+Salisbury, on a certain occasion, said that he (Salisbury) had never
+seen Mr. Parnell.  Almost any one, then, might have repeated to him the
+famous injunction of Oxenstiern: "Go forth, my son, and see with how
+little wisdom the world is governed."
+
+Lord Salisbury did not know Parnell by sight, and {144} he gave
+Heligoland to the Kaiser.  Neither Parnell nor Heligoland were
+important enough in his opinion to justify even visual acquaintance.
+The world has suffered for his superior neglect in one particular,
+perhaps in both.  But if he, or if Gladstone, or if Gladstone and
+Salisbury had foreseen what would happen, the world might not have
+acted any more wisely than it did.  It is always too late to be wise.
+Nobody would have believed the oracles; the truth was in opposition to
+the world's inclinations.  It is usually so.  And that is why great men
+are shunted to the wrong tracks, and so are "great" men only for their
+age and hour; it is why prophets are stoned, and mediocrities arise and
+talk, prevailing by sound.  Nowadays the eminence of men is fixed by
+their capacity for catching votes and the commotion they make in doing
+so.
+
+I thought Mr. Gladstone a vindictive old gentleman.  It was not the
+fashion to think of him in that way.  You were supposed to insist upon
+his more saintly qualities, but there is some difficulty in associating
+attributes of saintship with eminent politicians during their lifetime,
+and at the same moment keeping your face straight.  The Roman Church,
+in its sagacity, defers consideration of saintship until long after the
+decease of the candidates for canonisation.  Some centuries, indeed,
+are required before the purely human element in man may be superseded
+by the purely divine, even in cases where the voting majority is heavy.
+
+If Mr. Gladstone were not vindictive, I do not see how he contrived so
+successfully to give that {145} character to his countenance when he
+was not speaking.  One does not say when his countenance was in repose.
+Repose was unacquainted with his countenance, or with any part of him.
+The energy which fully charged his body flowed through his mind in a
+restless and surging torrent.  And if he were vindictive, I do not see
+anything strange, or much that is derogatory in that.  A leader of
+politics must be genuine, or fall far short of greatness.  His
+opponents cannot be opposed to him merely in a parliamentary sense.
+They may be as genuine as he, but if he hates their acts as evil in
+nature and result, he cannot in honesty refrain from distrusting the
+men who lead and inspire the acts, though he may pretend as much as he
+pleases to do otherwise.  His indignation against men and measures does
+not cease with the adjournment of the House, or with the close of an
+electioneering campaign, unless he is a hypocrite.  And if he fail to
+pursue his public enemy for the purpose of making him ineffective for
+public harm, does he not give a too generous interpretation to public
+duty?  That a man is to be hated only at certain hours, or when he says
+certain things, is conceivable only by the tolerant mass which must
+usually be told what to think, and which, nine times out of ten, can be
+relied upon to think to order, especially on party matters.  A
+political party, in any country, is not intended for thinking purposes,
+but, like an army, is for fighting purposes.  If it's in, it fights to
+stay in; if it's out, it fights to get in.  It uses speeches and
+programmes as military leaders use smoke-screens and gas-discharges,
+{146} to obscure the real operations and confound the enemy.  In the
+last century we had not learned, although we may have suspected, that
+the world must be made safe for hypocrisy.  It remained for the
+twentieth century to announce this.
+
+A journalist who gets below the surface of things cannot remain a party
+man, for the more useful he is to one party the less useful he is to
+journalism.  Sooner or later, and usually sooner than later, he must
+come up against the barbed wire which divides proprietary or editorial
+interests from the area of his own convictions.  Perhaps the latter are
+less important than they seem.  But they may be more important.  At any
+rate, like Touchstone's Audrey, they are his, and if he has a
+conscience, which is to be presumed, a conflict between his pen and his
+principles is bound to occur, unless his chief, or his employer, is a
+paragon of courage.
+
+"I can't afford the truth, as you call it," said an editor-proprietor
+one day,--it was over an article about Gladstone.  "I must go with my
+public."  He went with it, but his contributor did not.  The latter was
+given the choice of resigning or writing.  He did both.  He wrote his
+resignation.  How Mr. Gladstone heard of this I do not know, but hear
+of it he did.  It was to his interest to side with the editor, as he
+did politically, but he met later the contumacious subordinate and said
+that he was glad to see a junior who stood by his principles and knew
+how to do so.
+
+"If I have any advantage over others," said the G.O.M., "it is the
+advantage of a long experience {147} which has taught me to value the
+quality that Cromwell attributed to his soldiers.  Oliver said, 'They
+make some conscience of what they do.'  If we are not ruled by
+conscience, we are in anarchy.  Good conscience makes for fair fighting
+in politics or war."
+
+"Yes, but, Mr. Gladstone, if the opponent _does n't_ fight fairly?"
+
+"'Bear it that the opposed must beware of thee!'"
+
+That is well as far as it goes.  But we do not "fight by the book of
+arithmetic."  Did "the opposed" in Mr. Gladstone's wars beware of him,
+or of his England?  One does not seem to recall their wariness.  Not
+even the Mahdi's.  Gordon fought with the front door open, so to speak.
+Gladstone did not then "make the opposed beware" of his administration,
+_i.e._ England, for the time being.  And there were other cases.  Is it
+only one's own side that must beware of a policy of dilly-dally?  The
+"ecstatic madman", as Lord Acton, in one of his letters, called Gordon,
+gave the world furiously to think.  But Gladstone knew what Gordon was
+when he sent him out.  And it is more difficult now than it was then to
+relieve the venerable statesman of responsibility.  Gladstone hated
+war.  But his hatred of it did not make war any the less inevitable or
+less necessary.  The enemy rejoiced because the G.O.M. hated war.  Let
+the Pacifists note!
+
+Of the many times when I saw Gladstone at close range, I recall at the
+moment a night at the Lyceum while Irving was playing "The Merchant of
+Venice."  From my seat it was easily possible to observe the {148}
+Grand Old Man in his stall.  The eagle eyes had always fascinated me.
+It was as interesting to watch his terrific face as to watch Irving.
+"Terrific" is not too strong a word.  Gladstone's face during the Tubal
+scene reflected every emotion of vengeance that forced itself from
+Shylock's soul, and during the Trial scene he glared at Antonio with
+inquisitorial ferocity while Shylock whetted his knife.  It would be
+the usual and conventional thing to describe this as a tribute to
+Irving's acting, and in support of this to quote Gladstone's
+appreciation of that distinguished man, "Shylock is his best, I
+think"--but the spectator at a play, if we may take Hamlet's word for
+it, is readier to show sympathy with the victim than with the
+tormentor; and it was not until after Shylock had whetted his blade
+that he became changed from the victorious torturer to the abjectly
+tortured man.  Up to that point Gladstone's face expressed demoniacal
+glee; after it he did not appear to be interested.  The psychologists
+and the partisans may quarrel over this as they please.  I think that
+non-partisans who had much opportunity to study the old
+parliamentarian's face at close range, amid varying conditions, will
+not quarrel over this interpretation, or with the adjective employed.
+
+Take another and a very different instance, when Gladstone was the
+central figure of a moving scene.  It was a Liberal Conference at
+Manchester, in December, 1889.  Gladstone had been ill.  The press had
+reported him seriously ill.  It was unlikely, the papers said, that he
+could again address a public {149} meeting, unlikely that he would
+reappear in the political field.  But he appeared at Manchester, and
+his appearance drew the attention of all Liberal Britain, and a good
+share of its representative men in person.  The immense hall was
+packed.  The seats had been removed from the floor to make room for a
+greater throng than could otherwise gather.  So close was the pressure
+that it was impossible to move one's arms, even to raise them.  The
+audience worked itself, or rather was worked, to a high pitch of
+enthusiasm by a skilful organist who played upon them with patriotic
+songs and Scottish, Welsh, and English ballads.  When the kettle was
+boiling merrily over this fire, and the lid rattling up and down, an
+old, grey head, world-famous, was seen rising through the
+platform-crowd, and the alert and venerable figure which carried it
+moved quickly to the front against a whirlwind of cheers.  The roar was
+like that of a gale-driven sea beating against cliffs.  It did not
+cease until its idol had raised his hand for silence.  When it had
+ceased he sat down, and the chairman called the meeting to order.
+
+A few minutes later, the chairman called upon Mr. Gladstone to speak.
+The G.O.M. rose to another outburst of welcome, and, upon obtaining
+silence, said: "Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen."  And then the
+storm of cheering broke anew.  It continued for a quarter of an hour,
+gaining constantly in force and volume.  It was taken up in the crowded
+streets.  It was a tempest of sound, within, without.  The five words
+had started an avalanche!  When had those five words, or any five,
+unloosed {150} such clamour?  The voice that uttered them had boomed
+through the great hall like the discharges of big guns.  The deep,
+strong tones, the alertness of motion, the flash of the eagle eyes,
+said to the assemblage more than the words.  Eighty years?  Yes, but
+eighty years young, with health, vigour, fighting power undiminished.
+The audience could not restrain its joy.  Roar upon roar succeeded,
+wave upon wave of emotion rolled over the crowd; it was a demonstration
+of thanksgiving, of congratulation, of delight.  I have never seen or
+heard its equal in all the pageants, conventions, progresses,
+demonstrations of popular enthusiasm that I have witnessed in many
+parts of the world.  Above them all this stands alone, unique in
+fervour and significance.
+
+"Standing as I do on the verge of four score years"--was the note to
+which the audience again responded.  The shouting was a personal
+tribute, not merely a political one.  I cannot remember what the G.O.M.
+said in his speech, but I remember that there was scarcely anything of
+a specific character concerning political measures or men.  Gladstone
+was keeping his powder dry.  He dealt in generalities.  He was always
+at his best when so dealing.  He lifted his themes to an exalted pitch
+and did not wreck himself on details.
+
+It was only his greyness that acknowledged age.  His voice was as deep
+and rich as ever it had been, his bearing as alert, his movements as
+graceful.  He seemed to say, "It is impossible to grow old, but, as I
+cannot live forever, let us get on with the work in {151} hand."  His
+capacity for believing that the moon is made of green cheese, and, what
+was more important, of making others believe it, was boundless.  What
+was the spell he cast upon his hearers?  Even when he was in
+Opposition, perhaps because of that, for he was best then, the House of
+Commons would be crowded when he spoke.  I have seen him at such a time
+switch on his green-cheese oratory and hold the House for an hour or
+two, tense, expectant, submissive under the spell.  When he finished,
+great cheering would rise from both sides,--from his followers because
+they were charmed, or overwhelmed, and, being of his party, believed in
+the green-cheese theory and were ready to eat the cheese; from his
+opponents because they too were charmed, or all but overwhelmed, and
+for the moment forgot that fealty to their own party should have left
+the other side of the House to do the cheering.  If a vote could have
+been taken when Gladstone ended his speech, the House would have been
+unanimous for cheese.  But parliamentary procedure permits, or compels,
+a leading opponent to reply, and the reply broke the spell and recalled
+several hundred Britons to their partisan duties.
+
+It was always amusing to watch Gladstone's face when he came before an
+enthusiastic audience either in the outer world or within the House of
+Commons.  As the cheers of welcome increased, he would look about him
+in a puzzled way, as if he were wondering what caused the
+demonstration, as if he were asking himself, "What have I done to be
+dragged from obscurity?"  It has often been said that "he could {152}
+have been a great actor."  But he was one.  It has also been said that
+he would have been a great archbishop.  But archbishops in his time led
+such tame lives that Mr. Gladstone would have been discontented with
+the episcopal lot.  It is easy, though, to imagine him cursing
+magnificently with bell, book, and candle.  He was a great performer.
+
+His detachments were even more remarkable than the attachments of other
+men.  No subject absorbed him save when he was working on it.  That is
+another way of saying that his power of concentration was absolutely
+under control at all times.  He would turn from the subject which he
+had dropped for the day to another subject which he would work at for
+half an hour, or six weeks, or six years, or a lifetime, and give all
+his energies to the task in hand, and yet be ready to concentrate at a
+minute's notice on whatever might turn up.  They say he had no sense of
+humour.  Perhaps they mean that he was not witty.  Perhaps he did n't
+appreciate jokes.  It is not always easy to know what "they" mean by a
+sense of humour.  I have known Gladstone to keep the House of Commons
+laughing for a quarter of an hour by sheer exercise of the comic
+spirit, although it must be said that he did not often exercise this.
+But when he did it, there was purpose in it.  The tragedy, that is to
+say, the serious business of the hour, was to follow.  Seeing Gladstone
+in his great moments was like seeing Edwin Booth as Richelieu; you had
+similar thrills, smiles, and satisfaction.
+
+Very few persons outside his family knew him really well, no matter how
+long they might have {153} been associated with him in public work.
+All the men who knew him that I knew agreed in one thing, however much
+they disagreed in others,--he had the spirit and the manner of command.
+A public gathering, a cabinet council, a dinner party were equally his.
+It will be remembered that he addressed Queen Victoria as if she were a
+public meeting, and she did n't like it.  But that illustrates what I
+mean when saying that he was not interested in persons but in causes,
+or subjects; he was not interested in a dinner party but in what he had
+to tell it.  The other guests--his hosts, too--might have been
+disembodied spirits, but it was he who would "communicate" with them,
+not they with him.  He would detach himself from them as easily as from
+politics.
+
+He made his own "atmosphere", and it was often far removed from
+politics.  Thus, at the approach of the political crisis of 1886, just
+before the House was to vote on his first Home Rule Bill, he was
+staying with his wife at Lord Aberdeen's house at Dollis Hill.  A
+friend of mine, not a political personage, was of the house party, and
+he told me how the G.O.M. would drive out from town alone, after dark,
+in an open carriage, and forget the fate of governments, especially his
+own, although that fate was to be decided within a few hours.
+
+Entering the drawing-room, he said, "While driving out here from the
+House last evening I counted twenty-eight omnibuses going in one
+direction.  To-day being Saturday, I thought the number would be larger
+than that, and I estimated thirty-five.  I {154} counted thirty-six."
+And then he discoursed on the increasing business of passenger
+transportation in the metropolis.  Not a word about politics.
+
+On the following afternoon (Sunday) the members of the Cabinet and
+other prominent partisans went out to Dollis Hill for an informal
+consultation with the Prime Minister.  They were uneasy in their minds.
+The vote would be taken next day, and they might find themselves out of
+office,--as indeed they did for the six years following.  The afternoon
+being fine, they walked in the garden and discussed the perils of the
+situation, and waited for Mr. Gladstone to summon them, or to come and
+join them.  They continued to walk and wait.  But Mr. Gladstone did not
+appear, nor did he summon any one.  But the Secretary for Ireland
+thought that he might be engaged with the Secretary for Foreign
+Affairs, and the Home Secretary thought that he might be with the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Still Gladstone did not send word, and
+the political mountains waited for Mahomet.  Concluding that the old
+gentleman was fatigued and had gone to his room for a nap, they began
+to retreat homeward.  They left singly, and by twos and threes, after
+some hours of vain waiting.  By and by the Gladstones appeared and told
+their host that they had had "a charming afternoon."  They had strolled
+to the garden gate and had stopped to look at the view.  The country
+road enticed them.  They came to a pretty church, and as service was
+about to begin, they entered and remained for the benediction.  They
+had returned slowly, but highly edified.  The next day Gladstone {155}
+met his foes and was cast into the cold shades of opposition.
+Doubtless he had expected this, but, doubtless, he had not expected to
+be cast so deep,--six years' deep.
+
+I remember what a former ally of his had said to me just before the
+Manchester Conference: "No, I am not going to Manchester.  I don't
+agree with Gladstone's Irish policy, but I know that if I were to go to
+Manchester I would shout with the rest."  Those were days when the
+world had sunk far into the morasses of parliamentary talk.  All things
+were to be settled by talking and voting and pious intentions.  A
+complacent faith in Democracy was to save the world, if, indeed, the
+world were not already saved by it.  In English-speaking countries it
+had become little short of dishonourable to praise naval and military
+valour; and reliance upon force as the defence of a nation was thought
+to be unchristian.  Democracy was to be shielded by its own virtue.  We
+have heard that since the Great War, too.  It is the old story of an
+old dream.  Envy, hatred, and malice had departed from the world.
+There would be no more cause for great wars.  The era of perpetual
+peace was about to dawn.  Nations were to put their trust in a
+parliamentary God, a Deity of Congresses.  When every one voted, there
+would be a new heaven on a new earth.  The credulous invented a new
+kind of treason of which any one was accused when he expressed,
+publicly, doubts of the sanity of a democracy which could not see that
+the voter unprepared to defend his "sacred vote" by arms was risking
+his privilege, his goods, his kith and {156} kin, was imperilling his
+right to live as a freeman.  He had put his faith in words.  Mr.
+Gladstone was the nineteenth century's greatest conjuror with words.
+But he was incapable of demanding, as Woodrow Wilson did, that a nation
+should be "neutral in thought", while freedom, the very right to think,
+was being beaten down.  Gladstone would not have blundered like that,
+you say.  But it was not a blunder, it was a crime.
+
+
+
+
+{157}
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WHISTLER
+
+A familiar voice said, "Come!"
+
+It was Whistler's voice.  I turned and answered, "All right.  Where?"
+
+The slender, dapper figure halted; over the quizzical face a look of
+astonishment flashed; the flat-brimmed silk hat lifted perceptibly by
+the contortion of an eyebrow; and the immortal monocle dropped into the
+right hand as was its habit when punctuating a sentence of its
+controller.  The monocle was Whistler's question mark, his exclamation
+point, his full stop; it served even as parenthesis when occasion
+demanded.
+
+"Where," replied Whistler, "where should an honest Londoner go at this
+hour but home to dine?  Come, then!  Escape the awful gaze of the rude
+world.  We 're blocking Bond Street.  Let's call a worthy hansom."
+
+A hansom worthy of its fare was found by searching,--varnished,
+resplendent; it bore a striped awning, and its driver was smart and
+wore a boutonnière; and its horse shone and arched a proud neck.  We
+were at Chelsea in ten minutes.  We were {158} neighbours there.
+Stopping the cab at the Tower House, in Tite Street, Whistler alighted,
+exclaiming:
+
+"And the painter and his bride said 'come.'  We are not out of the
+packing cases yet; but come in.  I 've something to show you.  You must
+stay and dine, or I won't show you what it is."
+
+And we mounted to his flat.
+
+Mrs. Whistler knew that I was accustomed to "Jimmie's" ways, and so she
+affected no surprise when she met us at the door and learned that I had
+come to dinner.  She merely said, as if it were all in the day's work:
+
+"We 've just moved in.  Pardon the chairs.  Let's make a housewarming
+of it."
+
+It was easy to "pardon the chairs", for there were none to pardon,--in
+the drawing-room to which I was shown.  There were only unpacked
+packing cases.  And I sat on one.  Whistler turned on the lights and
+then darted into another room from which he returned speedily, showing
+his roguish smile and carrying in his hands a bundle of printer's
+proofs which he laid beside me on my packing case.  Standing over them,
+screwing his monocle into his eye, he said:
+
+"There 's the thing I wanted to show you; my _magnum opus_: 'The Gentle
+Art of Making Enemies.'  Do you mind looking 'em over, with an eye to
+correction, while you wait?  My idea 's a brown paper cover like the
+'Ten O'Clock.'"
+
+And with that he darted out again, returning immediately with a box of
+cigars and a case filled with cigarettes.
+
+{159}
+
+"Burnt offering to the High Gods," he said.  "I go to prepare the
+libations."
+
+And he went.
+
+Mrs. Whistler, after a few gracious words, went also, presumably to
+give directions for the table.  I was left to myself, the packing
+cases, the proofs, and the cigars.  My watch said seven thirty, and
+presently seven forty-five, and, on the heels of that, eight o'clock.
+I was interested, but I was also hungry.  But neither of the Whistlers
+had yet reappeared.  Meantime I read on and on, admiring immensely and
+chuckling every minute or two over the stupidities, the jealousies, the
+ridiculous follies of mankind as revealed in "The Gentle Art."  And it
+was nine o'clock!  Jimmie came in with a fat bundle of newspaper
+clippings.
+
+"Read!" he cried.  "Some of these should be included, don't you think
+so?  Hope you are not hungry!"  Then he disappeared again.
+
+I was too hungry to smoke.
+
+There were sounds occasionally from beyond the closed door.  Although
+noncommittal, they were encouraging; they at least indicated human
+presence and the probability, in an uncertain future, of food.  At nine
+forty-five I had reached the end of the proofs, the press clippings,
+and almost of patience, when Jimmie came tripping in with pantomimic
+action which meant abasement and a plea for mercy.  Then said he:
+
+"I fear the Lord hath made me forgetful of time.  But there 's
+atonement toward.  Have you read 'em?  Oh, Sheridan, Sheridan Ford,
+thou naughty {160} one, prepare for doom!  Madame, I pray you do the
+honours."
+
+And Mrs. Whistler, who had appeared behind him, enchanted me by saying,
+"Dinner is served."
+
+It was ten o'clock!  The Whistlerian hour.
+
+I do not know what they had been doing.  Had they been unpacking china
+and linen and chairs, while the maid foraged the neighbouring shops?
+Had an unpremeditated feast produced itself by Jimmie's conjuring?  Had
+Jimmie cooked the dinner while Mrs. Whistler arranged the table with
+its dainty ware, and silver, and soft linen, and shaded lights?  Or had
+they reversed the parts?  I shall never know.  But there was the
+daintiest, most delicious dinner, most charmingly served, and there
+were two or three kindly wines, a coffee that the master himself had
+prepared, and a soothing _liqueur_ from his beloved Paris.  It was a
+dinner that more than reconciled one to perishing on a packing case.
+And through it all Whistler summed up his philosophy of life and art,
+as previously and subsequently he had set it forth elsewhere.  We sat
+till long after midnight in high session, debating selections from
+press clippings which had been showered upon him by his "excellent
+Romeike."  "Shall I put in this, or omit that?  Here 's something too
+good to lose!"  And so, with what he called "infinite jerriment",
+another portion of "The Gentle Art" began to take shape.  In its
+further progress I had no hand, as I was off to America in a day or
+two, and Jimmie needed no aid in goading his solicitors to the pursuit
+of Sheridan Ford who had, Whistler {161} said, infringed his literary
+rights.  The pursuit of Sheridan was an epic which aroused more than
+nine days' wonder; it led from London to Antwerp, from Antwerp to
+Paris, from Paris to New York and back to London again.  The
+"Extraordinary Piratical Plot" was defeated, the "piratical edition"
+was suppressed, and, in the early summer of 1890, there appeared,
+published by the graceful, sympathetic, and cordial aid of Mr. William
+Heinemann _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified
+in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully
+Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred On to Unseemliness and
+Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right_.  The
+dedication was no less characteristic:
+
+"To the rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid Themselves of the
+Friendship of the Many, these pathetic Papers are inscribed."
+
+Upon my return from America I found the Whistlers established at Number
+21 Cheyne Walk a few steps from my own door.  It was not Whistler's
+good fortune to live long in any house, at any rate in those years.  He
+had two years, or something less, at Tower House, and something less, I
+think, at Cheyne Walk, and, in April or May, 1892, he removed to Paris.
+After that I saw him but seldom, for my wanderings upon the face of the
+planet were to increase and multiply.  But during the '88-'92 period he
+was often in my home.  It was his peculiarity and privilege not to come
+when he was asked, or expected, but invariably to arrive as a sudden
+gift from the gods, and for the most part {162} he chose the
+Sunday-evening "Smoke Talks" rather than the suppers, because at the
+latter he would be more likely to encounter some of "the Serious Ones
+of this Earth", already "carefully exasperated", in which case he would
+be bored, while at the former he would be sure to meet the choicest
+talkers at a late hour.  He would drop in at eleven, or at midnight,
+and stay till two in the morning with half a dozen congenial beings who
+would not only relish his wit, but sparkle with their own, and who were
+capable of appreciating him as an artist without requiring explanatory
+charts and diagrams.
+
+One such evening we had been talking of Carlyle, who had lived around
+the corner in Cheyne Row.  Whistler told some pleasant anecdote of him.
+
+"There!" exclaimed Theodore Wores, a disciple of Whistler's, "I always
+thought Carlyle was not so black as he 's painted."
+
+Whistler sprang to his feet, and falling back in mock horror, cried, as
+he stared at Wores, "_Et tu, Brute?_"
+
+The room shook with laughter.
+
+On another occasion a well-known critic was laying down the law about
+somebody's "technique."  He appealed to Whistler for confirmation.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Whistler, "that's an opinion one would wish to
+express _diffidently_."  Among his hearers was an artist accustomed to
+illustrate in Punch some of the "Things one would wish to express
+differently."
+
+You know what Whistler said to the Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward
+VII) at an Exhibition {163} of the Royal Society of British Artists.
+Whistler, recently elected president, was showing the Prince around the
+galleries.
+
+"What is the history of your Society?" asked the Prince.
+
+"It has none, Sir; its history begins to-day," was the quick reply.  It
+fitted like a glove.  There were sleepy years behind; and anything you
+like later.  Whistler stirred up the pools of somnolence.  He did not
+stir them long, for the British artists of those days, whether or not
+they were interested in art, preferred Britons for presidents.  I
+daresay they were right.
+
+One afternoon he came to my flat with the tall bamboo wand which he
+often used, in Chelsea at any rate, instead of a walking stick.  He was
+of a phenomenal slenderness, which was emphasised by the long wand, and
+the long, flat-brimmed hat, and the long, black, tight coat.  He had
+yellow gloves, and his little soft shoes--his feet were the smallest I
+ever saw on a man--were the last word in daintiness.  No London maker
+could have produced them.  Jimmie was always, at all points,
+fastidious.  He gesticulated more than any Briton, but his
+gesticulations were not Parisian, they were Whistlerian.  He pointed
+dramatically to the ceiling and murmured, "White, all white."
+
+"White."  Then to the walls--"All white.  And a white you can wash!
+Londoners forget that they must live in their houses in winter.  All
+their colours are dismal, and there 's no sun."
+
+"Apropos?" I was about to enquire.
+
+{164}
+
+"Didn't you tell me, the other day, that you intended redecorating this
+place?"
+
+"Sometime, when my ship comes in."
+
+"It doesn't need a ship.  A navy wouldn't do for Cheyne Walk.  May I
+offer a suggestion?"
+
+"The knowledge of a lifetime," said I, quoting his famous hit at the
+Ruskin trial.
+
+"Very well then; I 'll come in."
+
+And he went all around the flat, pointing here and there with his
+bamboo wand, and saying, "Such-and-such a colour here, and such a line
+there.  My dear boy, this is the whole secret,--tone and line.  The
+good colour--the right one--and the good line--the right one--cost no
+more than the wrong.  People overlook these things; they forget them,
+they ignore them altogether, and then have the misfortune to live.
+They don't go mad, because they 're British.  And you 'll not, because
+you 'll have the right colour and the right line.  Come.  Let's walk.
+I 'm free for the evening.  We 'll dine at the Club."
+
+That was Whistler, Whistler the neighbour, the phase of him that I knew
+quite as well as any other phase.  Later on, when I "did up" my flat, I
+remembered the details of his suggestions, and carried them out.  The
+result was that I had one of the most delightful flats in London.
+
+The appreciation of those who understood warmed his heart.  He had had
+to fight his way from the beginning against the least imaginative, the
+stodgiest, the narrowest, the most unsympathetic criticism, and the
+most prejudiced, because the least {165} enlightened public (as to art)
+in the world.  But his fighting was not for his own hand merely; he was
+the champion of art as against ignorance, complacent or aggressive.
+
+It is difficult to believe now that for many years in the last century
+Whistler's work was opposed with rancour, or bitterly derided.  Now the
+world salutes his memory as that of a master; then he was called a
+coxcomb, a charlatan, an impostor, excepting by "the rare Few" who had
+rid themselves of the blighting ignorances of the many.  There were
+many pigmies who, because they walked on stilts, were thought to be
+giants in those days.  Their stilts warped, or broke long ago, their
+lights have dimmed with the passing years, or their names are
+remembered merely as having been targets for Whistler's wit.  Had he
+not "killed" these men, their existence would have been forgotten.
+
+As I have said already, it was not Whistler the fighter, nor Whistler
+the "airy-incomprehensible" whom I saw most frequently in Carlyle
+Mansions, but Whistler the neighbour.  I do not remember that any one
+has ever written of him in that character.  He used to drop in on
+dreary, rainy evenings when, he said, "the world depressed" him, or
+when some happy stroke of fortune had gratified him.  Or he would come
+on moonlit nights and gaze from my high windows where the views of
+Thames were quite remarkable, and drop his fighting mood, his satire,
+his butterfly attributes.  I had called him "the butterfly with the
+sting."  The phrase pleased him.  "Yes, there you have me," he said.
+{166} But he would drop the sting, and the monocle, and the air of the
+sprite, and would be quite human, almost "One of the serious of this
+Earth."  One night he came jubilantly, and no sooner had he lost
+himself in a grandfather's chair by the fireplace, than he said, with a
+kind of moan:
+
+"He's gone!"
+
+"Who's gone?" I asked.
+
+"My old friend Thomas Carlyle.  He lived with me many a year, and I
+sold him to-day for a base thousand pounds."  This with a touch of
+sadness, permitting the monocle to drop into his right hand, and gazing
+reflectively at the fire.  Then, with a sudden turn towards me: "The
+Mun-eeee-ci-pal Corrrrporration o' Glasgie has purchased it for its
+Arrt Museum."  The monocle was thrust to the eye again where it seemed
+to flash the question, "What do you think of that?"
+
+I thought very well of it, and said something to the effect that it was
+a wise city which knew enough to buy such a masterpiece.
+
+"Surprising, is n't it?" said Whistler, and then he told me that a
+committee of braw Scots had called at his studio to conduct the
+negotiations for Glasgow.  His mimicry of the baillies I will not try
+to reproduce here.  Type cannot present it.  Action, expression,
+accent, all are lost.  It was a delightful imitation, and I shouted
+with laughter when Whistler mounted the climax of his story:
+
+"'But Mr. Wheestler,' said one of the baillies, by way of expostulation
+over the price I had modestly suggested, 'but Mr. Wheestler, this is a
+moderrn {167} paainting, an' I ken that moderrn paintings mostly faade.'
+
+"Behold me there," continued Whistler, "the Butterfly Rampant, hotly
+retorting, 'Gentlemen; you are mistaken.  It is the damnation of modern
+paintings that they do _not_ fade!'"
+
+It was about the same time that France bought that other masterpiece,
+the portrait of "The Artist's Mother."  Whistler came to tell me a few
+hours after the transfer to Paris had been arranged.  He said quietly,
+as if he were touched deeply,
+
+"France gives me honour, and I accept the invitation for Mother.
+Mother goes to the Luxembourg, and, after my death, to the Louvre.
+They pay her expenses, for what more does the _honorarium_ amount to?
+It's only one hundred and twenty pounds.  But one cannot sell one's
+Mother.  She will be glad that I am represented in the Luxembourg, and
+later in the Louvre.  I am glad it is Mother who will represent me."
+
+And then, probably because he feared that he was dropping into
+sentiment, he broke off gaily with a jest about "another ghost who
+haunted the pavements of Chelsea", a critic stung to death by the
+Butterfly, "the late Harry Q--" still haunting Tite Street.  "The late
+Harry", it may be said to children of the present hour, was quite as
+much alive as Whistler, and occupied--Whistler said "haunted"--the
+house which Jimmie had built and which he had lost in bankruptcy.
+
+I had received from a friend in Boston a letter asking if I would
+"sound Whistler" about the {168} probability of his accepting a
+commission for the decoration of some part of the Public Library.  The
+authorities hesitated about approaching him.  They had an idea that his
+attitude toward America was antagonistic, they knew he was "touchy";
+they did not wish to submit a proposal, or to invite a suggestion, that
+might, ninety-nine chances to one, evoke a scornful reply.  He might
+tell them he was not a housepainter.  "You are a friend of his.  Won't
+you find out how he would receive a proposal, and advise us how best to
+make an approach?"
+
+One day when, like Rosalind, he was in "a coming-on disposition", I
+asked, "What is your real attitude towards America?"
+
+"I haven't any," said he.  "How can a man have an attitude toward a
+continent?  Oh, there are the discerning; more of them, perhaps, over
+there than here.  But there 's no 'public taste' there nor here.  There
+never was 'public taste' anywhere.  There's only the relation of beauty
+to the discerning.  That's all.  But the American mind is not closed.
+The English mind is closed and bound.  England wants art that tells
+stories.  I want art that tells of beauty."
+
+"If the discerning in America were to say, 'There's Whistler now, an
+American; we wish him to do a great public work'--for instance, a room
+in the Boston Library, or something like that,--well, would you accept?"
+
+"Of course!  It would be the evidence of discernment that I 've been
+waiting for.  But there's no chance of it."
+
+{169}
+
+"Yes, there is; I assure you there is."
+
+"If that's true, I'd really like it.  I'd like it immensely."
+
+"Hand on heart?"
+
+"Hand on heart!"
+
+The offer came to him, but, as far as I know, he never carried out the
+work.
+
+He left Chelsea soon after that, going to Paris to live.  But before
+going to Paris he met, at my home, my dearest friend, of whom I shall
+write later.  My friend is dead now, but he had produced then two
+excellent novels and a successful play.  Whistler expressed an interest
+in him, and he looked in one evening to ask me if he might borrow the
+books.  I lent them to him.  Here is another aspect of his entertaining
+character.  After he had been some months in Paris, I wrote to him
+reminding him of the volumes, which, for certain personal reasons, the
+author never permitted to be reprinted.
+
+Fatal error!
+
+Whistler never replied.  I never saw him again.  But that was Travel's
+fault, not mine.  I never heard again from Whistler.  And he never
+returned the books!
+
+
+
+
+{170}
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HENRY DRUMMOND
+
+We were smoking churchwarden pipes and telling how Jock This and Sandy
+That had made their money.  I hope the Free Kirk folk will not be
+scandalised by the revelation, especially by that of the churchwardens.
+While Drummond lived I concealed this grievous sin, but now that he has
+been dead nigh upon a quarter of a century, I think he will fare no
+worse for it in heaven, whatever might have been the case in Glasgow in
+the early nineties.  He wore a velvet smoking jacket, too, and we
+toasted our toes before his study fire on one of the worst nights it
+has ever been my fortune to see in Scotland or elsewhere.  The wind was
+lifting roofs and toppling chimneys to the ground, and the rain was
+like streams from a thousand fire engines.  There was never a better
+night for a fireside.
+
+Jock This and Sandy That got into the conversation (not bodily but in
+essence) because their experiences illustrated what Professor Drummond
+was saying about "getting on in the world."  And he was saying these
+things because he liked talking other men's shop, not his own.  The
+point he made was this: it is n't necessary to emigrate in order to
+{171} prosper.  He had been talking to a group of young men about this
+that very day.  He had a way with him when talking to young men.
+
+"How do men get bored?" he asked.  "I never get bored.  I can be
+interested in something always.  Time never drags on my hands.  But
+Jock and Sandy can't get interested unless they are making more money,
+so they keep at it all the time.  They are lost without their
+occupation.  Money is a fine thing--to use.  If you have n't it, the
+man who has it uses you as well as his money.  Can we find the way to
+make money without becoming its slaves, as almost all men are who make
+it?"
+
+In the early nineties Henry Drummond was what they call "one of the
+best sellers."  Who reads him now?  I ask for information.  If his
+books had been fiction, we could understand that the fashion had
+changed in twenty years.  But has the fashion changed in God?
+
+Youth used to follow Drummond in troops.  When he died more than the
+youth of Scotland mourned.  But youth does not mourn long.  It has in
+that respect the advantage of age, which usually makes new friends only
+with difficulty; youth has but to summon them, and they come.  Drummond
+had an immense capacity for friendship.  I have said he had a way with
+youth; yes, of both sexes and all ages.  But his greatest friends were
+young men; and his greatest friend of all was D. L. Moody, the
+revivalist.
+
+Drummond was saying, as we sat before the fire, drawing clouds from
+churchwardens:
+
+{172}
+
+"I don't believe in old saws, do you?  Now there 's:
+
+  "'Early to bed, and early to rise,
+  Make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.'
+
+
+"What nonsense!  Healthy, if you like, but how wealthy and how wise is
+the manual labourer?
+
+  "'Bed at dark,
+  Up with the lark.'
+
+
+"Suppose you work with a night shift?  Try bringing up a generation on
+these old wives' tales.  But they 're merely an example of our British
+habit of trying to rule by phrases instead of by ideas."
+
+In the hall around the corner, I thought, they might suspect this sort
+of thing as inclining toward heresy.  But you never can tell.  "One
+man," as a proverb-muddled acquaintance of mine used to say, "one man
+may lead a horse to water, but another may not look over the fence."
+
+They were still buying Drummond's books in large quantities,--"Natural
+Law in the Spiritual World" and "The Greatest Thing in the World."  I
+liked to think that the slender gentleman with longish hair, who was
+sartorially British to the _nth_ power, could write things like that in
+the morning and in the evening keep me company with a churchwarden, and
+these were very long churchwardens, old style, and we smoked "Glasgow
+Mild."  Drummond, being a sensible man, wanted, as I say, to talk some
+other man's shop.  He wanted to talk mine but could not pin me down.
+It was his shop I wanted.  One of his young men with a literary {173}
+turn wished to go to America and become a journalist.  Would I advise?
+
+"Why America?" I enquired mildly.  "You have admirable newspapers in
+Scotland.  Besides, you were saying that 'it is n't necessary to
+emigrate in order to prosper.'"
+
+"It's unkind to remind a man of his inconsistencies," said he.
+
+"I would like to save a good Scot, especially if young, from the
+mutilations of American journalism.  More especially if literary.  Tell
+him to learn the trade at home first.  He 'll be trained more
+thoroughly here.  There they 'll put him 'on space' to the uttermost
+ruin of any literary gift he may have.  Space-writing means
+word-spinning--the more words the more money, if you have the knack of
+escaping the blue pencil.  Space-work will knock seven-ways-for-Sunday
+any literary turn he may have.  American journalism will do that,
+anyhow."
+
+"Perhaps I 'd better kill him."
+
+"My dear sir, your American experiences have done you good."
+
+"They put me under gas and injected the spirit."
+
+And with that we heard the clock strike the hour when we should start
+for the place where he was to lecture that evening on "The Greater
+Gratitude."
+
+
+Professor Drummond, in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World", had
+attempted, as a clerical and friendly critic said, "to treat religion
+as a fact of nature, no less solid and capable of scientific analysis
+than any other fact which science claims for its {174} own."  Everybody
+read the book, for it was translated into all the European languages.
+And everybody read its successor, "The Greatest Thing in the World."
+The volumes, which were small, carried the name of their author around
+the globe in a large way, for they came from the press in tens of
+thousands.  I suppose he had a million readers, and the most these knew
+about him was that he held the professorship of natural science in the
+Free Church College at Glasgow, that he was but little over thirty when
+he wrote the little books, and that, for a year, he had disappeared in
+the wilds of Africa.  He returned to find himself famous, or as some
+thought and said, notorious.
+
+He had fluttered the theologians, not flattered them.  He was a
+theologian himself.  His object was to stretch theology to man's size.
+The champions of a hundred orthodoxies and heterodoxies chattered
+fiercely behind their bulwarks of texts.  It seems a very small matter
+now, but, after all, it helped us all, for Drummond was a helpful man.
+He was a young man's man, and there you have one of the keys to him.
+
+To be a professor of anything in the Free Kirk College might imply that
+a man was hampered as to words and views.  It was not so in Drummond's
+case, at any rate.  I have said that he was a theologian; I will add
+that he was a geologist.  When I knew him, he was famous and forty-two,
+and he had recently discovered in Glasgow the remains of a fossil
+forest.  He had just returned from America, where he had been lecturing
+at the Lowell {175} Institute, in Boston, on "The Evolution of Man."
+How he laughed over his Boston surprise!  Of course he knew the Lowell
+Institute by name, but he had n't an idea of what it really was.  He
+had supposed that he would have an audience of two or three dozen old
+fogies and a number of short-haired blue-stockings.  He found the place
+crammed with alert human beings, mostly young, and all enthusiastic.
+There was a greater crowd outside, hoping vainly to get in.  His
+thought was, as he mounted the platform: "My lecture won't do.  I must
+popularise it.  There are no Dryasdusts here."  He altered the lecture
+as he went along, and when he had finished, he returned to his hotel
+and undertook to rewrite all the lectures he had brought from Scotland.
+There were no fogies in the throngs that heard him.  He had already
+been two or three times to America; now he began to understand what it
+really was,--the country of the young.
+
+Drummond lived at Number 3 Park Circus, Glasgow.  He kept bachelor's
+hall there, and kept it very well, indeed.  The house was spacious,
+"rich not gaudy", the rooms set in carved woods and trophies of ivory,
+and everything about them suggesting comfort and agreeable taste.  It
+did not in the least suggest the abiding place of a theologian,
+Scottish or otherwise, and it did not hint at the granite-like hardness
+of the houses of some geologists I have known.  If I say that we had
+jolly evenings there, smoking churchwardens and talking of travel, the
+life of cities, and Scottish tales, and New England and Old England,
+and the Academy, and books, {176} and Gladstone, and Hyde Park, and the
+Rocky Mountains, it is only to show that theological-geologists can be
+human.  Drummond was more than human; he was companionable.  He had
+always the appearance of ease, but he was a persistent worker.  Work
+never drove him, though; he held the reins over it and mastered it.  If
+you had an appointment with him, the time was yours; he had set it
+apart; you were not made to feel that there was any pressure.  This may
+seem a simple thing to do; but, as most men live, it is not.
+
+Drummond's person was tall and slender; he had brown hair; his eyes
+were--shall I call them brownish-grey?--his moustache and short side
+whiskers inclined to a sandy tint; his voice was pleasing, and he shook
+hands with a hearty grip.  He attracted you not so much by cordiality
+as by sincerity.  He went to the point at once.
+
+I was making a study of British municipal policy and administration,
+with a view to certain movements in America.  Drummond was helpful
+daily.  He knew the things that had been done and the men who did them;
+he knew the practical fellows and the extremists; the men who worked at
+reforms and the men who merely talked about them; the originators and
+the copyists; the men who were out for politics and party, and the men
+who were out for the good they could do.  And so I got at results and
+saved time and weariness, though not without much weariness and time.
+Down narrow, grimy streets, piloted by Bailie This, or Bailie That, or
+Superintendent Thus and So, or Overseer of T'other, {177} I went by day
+and night through the densest, soul-rending parts of Glasgow; up
+twisting flights of stairs, through murky alleys and through atrocious
+smells; people were shovelled there to live as they could.  At every
+little distance we would come to spaces where old masonry was being
+levelled, and new bright buildings going up; lodging houses, tenements,
+model dwellings, bathhouses, feeding places, washing places, drying
+places, places where the sunlight and air could enter, could sweep
+about,--the municipality was overhauling things.
+
+I would return to Drummond's, rid myself of the everlasting Scotch
+mist, have a bath, a nap, a change of clothing, and then tuck my knees
+under his mahogany, tell about what I 'd seen, and the drenching,
+fatiguing day, and, "as sure as eggs is eggs", his explanations would
+bring in Moody.
+
+"That was Moody's doing," he would say; or "Moody started us," or
+"Moody collected the money to begin this work, or that," or "Moody
+showed us the way."
+
+Moody was "the biggest man I ever knew," he said.
+
+"Then why not talk of him?"
+
+"I 'd like nothing better.  Unless you knew him, and knew him at work,
+you could n't half appreciate him."  I feared I never did.  "Well,
+then, take him as a manager of men--" and there would begin a run of
+anecdote showing that the renowned evangelist was a great organiser,
+and would have been as great in the business world, or the political
+world, or the military world, had he chosen to enter, as {178} he had
+been in the hearts of Scotsmen, Englishmen, and Americans.
+
+Moody had discovered Edinburgh, or Edinburgh had discovered Moody; I
+was never quite sure which.  Anyhow, Moody made Drummond discover
+himself and his work in life, and that is the most important discovery
+a man can make.  Drummond was a Scotsman of the Scots.  He was born
+near the field of Bannockburn.  He came of God-fearing folk, or as he
+preferred to say, God-loving.  His father was a wealthy merchant, and
+meant that his boy should become a minister.  But the boy took his
+theology without going in for orders.  He made science his profession,
+and taught theology to scientists and science to theologians.
+
+"I would never be wholly off with the one, nor wholly on with the
+other," said he.  "I am fond of both.  And I believed that I was better
+as a geologist and botanist than I could possibly be as a preacher."
+
+When Moody and Sankey came to Scotland, the latter, with his keen
+capacity for selecting staff officers, selected Drummond as one of his.
+Drummond shared two years of labour with the American revivalists.
+They went through England, Scotland, Ireland.  Then Moody and Sankey
+returned to America, and Drummond returned to his studies, religious
+and scientific, gained his professorship, taught his classes, wrote his
+books, carried on evangelical work among young men, geologised in
+Malta, Africa, and the Rocky Mountains, and found this a good world to
+live in if you knew how to work.
+
+We were reviewing his experiences one day.  I said:
+
+{179}
+
+"You have omitted to mention a great advantage that you started with
+and have kept."
+
+"What's that?" he asked.
+
+"Money.  You never had to work for your living.  You were free to
+indulge your bent, your theological-evangelical-scientific bent, free
+to help your soul and work for the souls of others, without having to
+think about bills, or grind your powers for the taskmaster, Debt!"
+
+"Moody had n't a dollar when he began his work in Chicago," said
+Drummond.  "See what he did!"
+
+"Moody was a genius.  He made a business success before he gave himself
+to religious work.  He had proved his greatest power--the management of
+men.  You or I would have had to grapple with theology, or geology, or
+to swim in ink, once we had started and had been left to ourselves."
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"No doubt about it.  A poor man can be a theologian, or a follower of
+science, but he can't be both, and explore the Rocky Mountains and
+Darkest Africa, and conduct soup kitchens in Glasgow, and do a
+two-years tour with Moody and Sankey."
+
+"That aspect had n't occurred to me.  I am glad I was not compelled to
+have it occur to me," said Drummond.
+
+"A man needing money and unable to get it is like a machine without
+lubricating oil.  Almost any man who has done much without money could
+have done more with it," I said.
+
+{180}
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"Are we to think that friction is the best result?"
+
+"No," Drummond answered.
+
+"Some men can't make money because their work does n't run to it, or
+they may have the ability, but not the desire, or they may not be able
+to afford to make money; you remember Agassiz's case.  Perhaps he did
+n't need it."
+
+"Money-making is a special faculty," said Drummond.  "A man has it or
+does n't have it, as he may or may not have a musical ear, an eye for
+colour, a delicate sense of smell, and so on.  I know moneyed men, and
+I daresay you know others, who are duffers outside their special lines.
+Most men are duffers outside their special lines."
+
+"The defect of specialised training, eh?"
+
+"Possibly: like over-specialisation in the trades."
+
+"Cutting threads on screws for thirty years," said I.
+
+"Shall we say the same thing of theology?  Most men may overtrain in
+that."
+
+"They do.  Therefore try mixing science with it."
+
+"That must dilute theology.  A little too much science, and the
+theology becomes watery.  But in the Roman Church they dilute the
+science."
+
+"Don't you think it depressing to listen to Carnegie's cant about his
+intention to die poor?" I asked.  "What else could he do?  He says
+nothing about _living_ as a poor man.  Poverty is a 'blessing' that we
+all recognise in essays, sermons, and speeches, but we use all the
+strength we can to avoid the blessing, and we don't delude the poor
+with our {181} pretences.  All of us like to use money as a force.
+Perhaps you would call it a mode of motion."
+
+"That sounds like Moody," said Drummond.  "There 's the other side," he
+went on, "the deadly monotony of the lives of the average rich folk,
+deadly monotony, a weary existence dragged along without any interest
+in useful things.  Take an interest in things; that is the way to live;
+not merely think about them.  No man has a right to postpone his life
+for the sake of his thoughts.  This is a real world, not a think world.
+Treat it as a real world--act!"
+
+"That is from your 'Programme of Christianity'," said I.
+
+"Yes.  The might of those who build is greater than the might of those
+who retard."
+
+We got to talking about socialism.  "Its basis," he said, "is
+materialism, not man.  Herbert Spencer said: 'By no political alchemy
+can you get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.'  And that's a good
+standard for testing politicians.  None better."
+
+Drummond was always looking at the bright side of life, illuminating it
+with common sense.  And he loved a joke as well as anybody.  He told
+with gusto of the fun he had at the Chicago Exhibition when, one
+evening, a dozen Arabs and Turks strode through the grounds, gazing
+gravely at the marvels of that western civilisation.
+
+"Marvellous," he repeated.  "We shall never see anything like it again.
+Nor like those Arabs.  If you could have seen them, as they passed from
+light to darkness at an exit gate, while, choking {182} with laughter,
+they removed the sheets and pillow cases, and silk handkerchiefs, and
+colored tablecloths which had served them as robes and turbans and
+sashes, you would have said they were as marvellous as anything in the
+show.  And when they wiped the colour from their faces, you would have
+recognised several of the most learned professors in America and one
+Scotsman with a smudge on his cheek."  He roared at the recollection.
+
+He was a professor at twenty-five.  And his pupils were university
+graduates studying for the ministry.  It was part of their duty to
+study natural science, to know something about the world they would
+preach in and the stupidity of trying to dig science out of Scripture.
+Well, Drummond was the man for his work.  And besides natural science,
+his work was for philanthropy and a rousing, liberalising evangelicism.
+At the end of his week in the classroom he would run over to Edinburgh
+and hold a religious service with a thousand young men attending
+earnestly.
+
+"How do you get into personal touch with your college students?" I
+asked him.
+
+"There you touch a tender point," he said.  "There is n't enough
+personal touch in the colleges of Scotland!  We put too much faith in
+lectures.  Young men come but rarely into personal touch with their
+professors.  I knew very little of mine.  And that's the rule.  A man
+must break through the routine; the professor must, the student must.
+Personal touch would open both of them.  Take So-and-So at the
+University.  He lectures in the {183} morning to one hundred and fifty
+or two hundred students.  In the afternoon to two hundred more.  No
+personal touch in that; no opportunity for it.  Youth can't be taught
+in droves, or saved in masses.  And yet, if you go in for individual
+development, or by small groups, you multiply the work beyond all
+possibility.  Our system is wrong.  It neglects character for the sake
+of competition.  But what can be done?  Effort, individual effort, is
+the only thing worth a bawbee.  All the rest is formulae."
+
+He said that, as far as his own efforts went, he did what he could, in
+every way that he could.  The development of personal responsibility
+was what he drove at.  "That's the aim and end of life.  If you don't
+base education on it, what is the use of education?  Come.  We are
+responsible for our physical condition.  Let's go for a walk!"
+
+Even in Scotland there are moments without rain.  Pallid things that
+might have been stars peeped through the scudding clouds.  We walked
+on, with good, easy strides, and talked,--talked of patriotism for one
+thing.  "We don't have to teach that in Scotland," he said.  "We take
+it for granted.  Every Scot is born with it.  And there 's no
+immigration in Scotland.  We 're luckier than you, in America, where
+you have--what is it?  A million a year pouring through the steerages?
+I asked about that in my visits, but could n't find that you were
+teaching patriotism, except by fits and starts, in widely separated
+places.  They were talking of teaching it there in the schools.  What a
+funny idea!  School is n't the place to acquire {184} patriotism.  Home
+is!  But where you have immigration on a huge scale the conditions
+differ, I confess."
+
+The talk swung over to Gladstone.  Drummond was very friendly with him.
+I had said that I thought the G.O.M. a vindictive old gentleman.
+Drummond laughed: "Oh, but we worship him.  We take him very seriously."
+
+"Yes, and he illustrates your favourite theory about taking an interest
+in things."
+
+"Right!  He is interested in things--movements, tendencies of thought,
+theology, religion, literature.  I can't, though, quote him as an
+authority on science.  But his interest, his active interest in things,
+keeps him fresh and young, and out of grooves.  He is interested in
+things, in masses, nations, races, mountain ranges, literature, not
+art--literature above all, theological literature most of all."
+
+"In Home Rule but not in Home Rulers," I interrupted.
+
+"Does not the greater include the less?"
+
+"Sometimes," said I, "but in politics it does not include even what is
+set down in black and white.  Where would you put Gladstone as compared
+with your other hero, Moody?  Moody, you say, was the biggest human
+being you ever knew."
+
+"I won't retract that.  Gladstone throws a greater spell over his
+hearers, and, when one meets him, an incomparable fascination.  Moody's
+influence will last the longer, and so will his work."
+
+This was interesting, to say the least of it.  Then we turned home.
+
+Four years later, Drummond died.  Only forty-five!
+
+
+
+
+{185}
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SIR HENRY IRVING
+
+Too much is said about the evanescent nature of an actor's fame.  Is it
+so evanescent?  Or are we believing, according to habit, merely what we
+have been told?  Burbage's fame has lived as long as Queen Elizabeth's,
+and that is long enough.  Suppose the Great Queen's fame eventually
+should chance to live longer than that of her subject, what is there
+evanescent about the latter since it has lived already through the
+three hundred years which separate us from his death?  Betterton's fame
+may yet outlive that of the sovereigns under whom he
+flourished,--Charles II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne.  What reason
+have we to suppose that it will not?  Betterton's name has been one of
+the highest, most honoured names in England for two centuries and a
+half.  Garrick's fame has lived as long as Doctor Johnson's, and
+Garrick had no Boswell.  Mrs. Siddons is as well known to-day as, say
+George III, and more favourably known.  Talma's fame has not been
+eclipsed by Napoleon's.  Of Rachel we know as much as of the Empress
+Josephine.  It is easier to tell offhand who was a famous actor one
+hundred and fifty years ago than {186} to say who was Prime Minister at
+the same time.  Plunket was a greater orator, by all accounts, than
+Gladstone or Canning, Disraeli or Bright.  Tell me--without looking him
+up in a Book of Reference--who was Plunket?  Who were the chancellors
+of exchequer during Henry Irving's reign?  Who were the leaders of the
+House of Commons?  How long must fame last to satisfy all reasonable
+requirements?  The names of how many princes, generals, preachers,
+statesmen, survive their deaths a hundred years?
+
+An actor's fame, however short it may be, is long enough.  How long has
+the fame of Roscius lasted?  An actor has more than fame.  He has the
+public's affection, its money, its applause, its cheers.  And he has
+these nightly, besides the name that lingers after death.  How will you
+prove now that Macready's name is less well known than Macaulay's?  Are
+you safe in asserting that Edmund Kean's name will not add another
+century to its credit?  Or Kemble's name?  What reason is there for
+assuming that Byron's will live longer than that?
+
+Even if the art of acting die, and the acted drama with it, overwhelmed
+by the cinema, it does not follow that the names and memories of the
+great players who have already lived will perish the more quickly.  We
+may cherish them with a lively curiosity as the eminent practisers of a
+lost art, cherish them, in fact, because we are no longer able to
+replace them.  The cinema could never have given us Sir Henry Irving,
+or the Kendals, the Bancrofts, or John Hare, or Edwin Booth, or Joseph
+Jefferson, or {187} Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson.  No, not if it
+unreeled to a million spectators an hour, and its daily receipts
+exceeded the transactions at the Bank of England!
+
+It is something to have lived till the second decade of the twentieth
+century turns the corner, and find that Irving still glows in the
+memory, Irving and the Lyceum nights.  That glow makes the generation
+which has it richer than the generation which has it not.  The Lyceum
+with Irving was as different from anything now known to London as was
+all Europe before the war.  You cannot make the generation that is
+pressing on behind understand this.  Words cannot do it.  Moving
+pictures cannot do it.  Imagine a motion picture of "To be or not to
+be"!
+
+There was once an art of acting.  It is used now chiefly by
+politicians.  But if their parts are more important, their presentation
+of them is less interesting than that of Irving and Ellen Terry, and
+the others mentioned here.  And it is of no importance at all to art.
+The politicians will be remembered only for the troubles they bring to
+us and to posterity; the actors are still remembered for the enjoyment
+they brought.
+
+We who saw Irving through his long reign know what the world lost in
+losing him, for we seek through the world and find nothing to take the
+place of that sovereign and his achievements, nothing at this day to
+suggest them even remotely.  The lack is a gap in life.
+
+Will the gap ever be filled again?  I doubt it.  What chance is there
+of filling it?  To begin with, {188} they tell us every day that public
+taste does not run in that direction.  It really does not seem to do
+so, that is certain.  And as the survivors of an older tradition die,
+their tradition dies with them.  Tradition means more to the theatre
+than it means to other callings.  Irving died in 1905.  His tradition
+cannot be revived, that is clear.  And it required traditions unbroken
+for nearly three hundred years to make the conditions for him.  Broken
+now, for the first time in three centuries, who shall replace them?
+And how?  It may never be done.  I do not say that it never will be
+done, but I do say that all the conditions of modern entertainment are
+against it.  And the generation which furnishes the majority of the
+playgoers of to-day does not care a button.  It is their affair, after
+all.  And they cannot take from us what we have had.
+
+Irving was a kingly possession.  He was as much a national figure as
+any statesman, or painter, or warrior, or popular personage of his
+time.  He was a great man, and he worked to noble ends.  No one could
+be in his presence without the consciousness of being in the presence,
+under the spell, if you like, of a great man.  If one appreciates him
+more since his death, it is because the world is so much the poorer for
+his absence.  We cannot say: "The King is dead; long live the king."
+There is no king.  There is not even a pretender.
+
+Irving's declamatory moments were often queer, but his handwriting was
+always almost the worst in the world.  It was almost as bad as Horace
+Greeley's.  I have letters from him which I cannot read to-day.  {189}
+I have forgotten what they were about and appear to have kept no key to
+their mystery.  But I connect with them pleasant recollections, for
+they never concerned anything that Irving wanted for himself, but
+always something that he wanted to do for somebody else,--an invitation
+to the play for some distinguished visitor from my own country, a
+supper in the Beefsteak Rooms, a Sunday up the river, or something of
+the kind.  If, at the time, the hieroglyphics were indecipherable and
+could be associated with no known subject, I would take the letter to
+my neighbour, Bram Stoker, Irving's business manager and _Fidus
+Achates_, and adroitly prevail upon him for a translation.  Usually,
+though, the letter from Irving would be followed, next post, by one
+from Stoker who would say: "The Chief tells me that you have kindly
+consented to so-and-so, or will bring So-and-So, or ask This-and-That;
+do you mind my suggesting Thus-and-So?"
+
+Stoker's handwriting was almost as cryptic as Irving's, but not quite.
+It could be read by due perseverance.  And, at the worst, one could
+always know who wrote the first letter because Irving's signature was
+like a flight of stairs, and Stoker's--well, it was different.  Whether
+Stoker followed up all the letters of his Chief with a translation I
+cannot say, and now that he has followed his Chief Out Beyond there is
+no one who can decipher the few remaining letters and so revive in my
+memory incidents which I am sure were charming and in every way
+delightful.  I must get on without the letters.
+
+I saw the beginning and the end of Irving's {190} management of the
+Lyceum Theatre, and nearly all the brilliant achievements between the
+beginning and the end.  Management!  It was more than a management; it
+was an august and splendid reign!  It lasted more than twenty years; it
+made victorious expeditions to America; it seemed likely to end only
+with his life.  And it did end only with his life.  But the Lyceum,
+which he had made his home, which indeed he had made the chief temple
+of the drama in the English-speaking world, passed from his control as
+the nineteenth century died.  He made valiant efforts to restore his
+kingdom, but the Fates prevailed against him.  He went to Drury Lane
+for a while, but it was not _his_ place, not _his_ temple, not the
+centre to which _he_ had drawn the world.  He reigned now, but did not
+govern.  He felt the change.  Misfortunes had pressed upon him hotfoot.
+The splendour and pomp had vanished; he withdrew from London; he became
+a king in exile; he died in the provinces.  They gave him a stately
+funeral in Westminster Abbey.  If they had supported him as liberally
+in his final years as they had in his prosperous ones, I would not be
+inclined to scoff as I do sometimes when the Londoners flatter
+themselves on their loyalty to old favourites.  And Irving would not
+have died, as I think he died, with a broken heart.  But he was valiant
+and upstanding to the end.
+
+A public loyalty that can last twenty years is indeed marvellous at any
+time.  The marvel is the more interesting in Irving's case.  He served
+his public with all his power.  They knew that.  They {191} were
+conscious, I suppose, of Irving's limitations, but I am not sure that
+he himself was conscious of them.  At any rate, his limitations set no
+bounds to his endeavours.  And he achieved everything,--great fame,
+adulation, financial success; he was more honoured than any other actor
+of his century; his life was dignified, his death became the man.  But
+what a marvel it was that this man could have become renowned among
+great actors!
+
+He could not conquer his mannerisms, or he did not.  The spectators had
+to do that, or ignore them.  His mannerisms were dropped between the
+spectator and the performance like a veil.  It was a thin veil, but
+none the less a veil.  You saw him through the veil.  Suddenly the veil
+would rise, there would be no mannerism; as suddenly it would fall.
+And you heard him through strange obstacles.  He could not walk, on the
+stage, without frequently strutting.  Sometimes he did not talk, on the
+stage, without mouthing, marring the King's English.  If he had
+learned, he had not mastered the elements of his calling.  The elements
+mastered him.  He had not the strength for what are called "sustained
+flights" of passion.  And yet he would thrill you.  There were times
+when he thrilled you with the suggestion of his meaning, rather than
+with the expression of it.
+
+It is a commonplace of dramatic criticism to assert that there is not,
+and that there cannot be, such a thing as intellectual acting, because
+acting is concerned wholly with emotions.  But Irving proved that what
+is impossible for the critics was possible {192} for him.  There were
+three aspects of any character he played which never could escape the
+appreciation of an audience: the inner character, his conception of
+it--the soul, if you will; the meaning of the man, if you will
+not--that was the first aspect.  The second was the picturesque aspect.
+Irving was always picturesque.  He understood the appeal to the eye.
+Graceful he could not be, but he was always picturesque and always in
+the picture.  The third aspect was the dramatic, the action through his
+personality.  He could and did express every dramatic instant, every
+meaning, expressed them somehow,--by flashes of the mind, by movement,
+by simple gesture, by accentuation of line, by lights, by shades.  It
+was acting illuminated by intellect.  Whatever he did had behind it a
+powerful and searching mind, and you came to regard it for its
+operations.  And your admiration of him, if you did admire him, was
+intellectual rather than emotional.  You liked him, or you disliked
+him.  There was no halfway.  I am speaking of him now as an actor, not
+as an actor-manager.  When I first saw him, I thought him the worst
+actor there could be in the world.  I was young then, but I had seen
+much fine acting, great acting.  I had grown almost to manhood under
+the great art of Edwin Booth.  Hamlet was the first part I saw Irving
+play.  I suppose that, even then, I knew the lines almost as well as
+Irving himself.  I thought he was speaking Choctaw, or Yorkshirese.
+His vowels confounded him.  They confused me.  The effect was
+distressing.  After Hamlet I had seen him, during '79, in revivals of
+{193} "Richelieu" (which did not impress me much), "Charles I" (which
+did impress me), "Eugene Aram", "The Bells", and one or two other
+parts.  It was on November 1, 1879, that he produced "The Merchant of
+Venice."  This was the first of the "great productions" at the Lyceum
+under his management.  His reign actually began then, for then he began
+fully to exercise his powers.  The Tubal scene revealed all Irving's
+defects; they stood between his Shylock and my eyes and ears; they
+barked at me, jumped at me like grotesque manikins; I sympathised with
+the old lady who is reported to have said, after an hour of Irving's
+Hamlet: "Does that young man come on often?  If he does, I'll go home!"
+
+But there were other moments which denied the Tubal scene altogether.
+That was forgotten as if it never had been.  Shylock grew under your
+eye, inner man and outer man.  The presentation of the entire play felt
+the magic of the poet-author, the poetic powers of the manager.  I
+began to understand what Irving was--the actor-manager with a poetic
+spirit.
+
+Possibly the full impact of the shock of his strange personality had
+worn down its effects by this time.  And I had come to know London
+better.  I had had a year of it, and in that time had heard all there
+was to hear about Irving.  His name and his doings were talked of
+everywhere; the Lyceum, where he had acted several years under
+Bateman's management, had become a British institution; and Irving was
+as much talked of, everywhere, as the Prince of Wales, {194} Mr.
+Gladstone, or the weather.  Discussion of his mannerisms was inevitable
+at any dinner party or afternoon tea.  Burlesques of him were frequent,
+imitations of him were part of the stock-in-trade of weary comedians
+and gifted amateurs.  But, in spite of all the skits and all the
+laughter, every one respected the man and his work, and knew he was a
+genius.
+
+When his Shylock came, the awkwardness of the actor was concealed by
+the costume, or what was not so concealed became apparently
+characteristic of the Jew.  If the Tubal scene showed him almost
+tone-bound and muscle-bound, the other scenes found him free of many of
+his afflictions.
+
+Actor-manager with the poetic spirit!  Those Lyceum nights were quite
+Arabian.  How fully I realise that as I look back upon them more than
+forty years after.  The pit nights at the play were the best nights I
+ever knew at the play, wherever the pit, but not, it must be
+acknowledged, whatever the play.  When I ceased to be a pitite, and my
+connections with the press thrust me a few feet nearer the footlights,
+half the pleasure of theatre-going vanished, never to return.  What had
+been a joyous zest became plain duty which had to be fulfilled whatever
+the conditions.  As a pitite one went to the play for the fun of the
+thing; as a stallite he went in quest of "copy."  As a pitite one had
+the pleasure of anticipation.  Even the fatigue of waiting hours at the
+doors, and going without dinner, had compensations; one knew that at
+least he had capacity for endurance.  One had, in brief, {195}
+enthusiasm.  One does not have enthusiasm in the stalls, or does not
+display it.  In the pit he lets it loose.  There is nothing so
+contagious as an expressed enthusiasm for a thing, or against it.  And
+the pitite is always conscious of the fact that man is a gregarious
+animal.  The stallite has forgotten this, if ever he knew it.  He may
+not prefer segregation, but he is the victim of it.  The usages are
+stronger than his feelings.  The pitite's feelings come first.  That is
+why the pit is important to the London actor, whatever it may be to the
+box office.
+
+I have mentioned the first night of Irving's "Merchant of Venice."
+That was November 1, 1879.  I was in the very front of the crowd that
+waited five hours in the old covered passage that led up from the
+Strand.  There were no _queues_ in those days.  Only the strong faced
+that struggle at the doors.  You stood hours in the swelter, and then
+when the bolts were heard thrusting back from their rings, you thrust
+yourself back against the crowd, which surged and pressed behind you,
+and was pressed again by the less fortunate beings in the distant rear.
+The tactical manoeuvres consisted in avoiding the door frame while you
+clung to your half-crown and leaned heavily against your neighbour who
+was hurled against your ribs.  The strategy was to know which half of
+the door opened first and directly opposite the hole behind which the
+ticket seller stood ready for action.  If you lowered your arms you
+were helpless in the crowd.  The art was to hold them in front of you,
+breast high, with your half-crown clenched in your left hand, because
+that was {196} nearer the box office.  If you put your hand in your
+pocket, you were lost, the crowd would rush you aside.  If you muddled
+for change, they roared at you.  Your left hand slapped your half-crown
+on the ledge, your right snatched the pit-check which slid across to
+you; you ran past the ticket collector, shoving the check into his hand
+and, making a sharp turn to the left, dashed along the benches until
+you came to the middle of the pit, and then went over the tops of
+bench-backs until you had captured your place in the centre of the
+front row!  You had won the best place in the house!  A barrier
+separated you by half an inch from the last row of the stalls.  You
+were cheek by jowl with the mighty.  You saw the celebrities of London
+arrive, you heard them chat; you saw them make others uncomfortable as
+they uncomfortably squeezed their way to their seats (for the Lyceum
+stalls were set closely) and as they entered your neighbour would tell
+you who they were, or you would tell him.
+
+It was in the pit of London's theatres that I first came to know the
+London crowd, to understand it, to share its enthusiasms, or the
+reverse.  It was in the Lyceum pit that I came to know how the crowd
+adored Irving, the place Ellen Terry had in its heart, and the place
+traditions held in the heart of the pit.  Are there such pitites now, I
+wonder, as there were thirty and forty years ago?
+
+Those first nights with the first favourites dissolved my American
+notions of the British character.  I had heard, with the rest of the
+outer world, that the British were stolid, phlegmatic, cold, and what
+not, {197} that they repressed their emotions, that they would not and
+could not let themselves go.  I was to find what everybody finds,
+sooner or later,--that the individual and the mass differ as chalk from
+cheese.  The pit crowds were not icebergs; they had not the immobility
+of mountains.  They laughed, they wept, they cheered; they unlocked
+their emotions.  They were the most sentimental, the most enthusiastic,
+the most appreciative crowds I had ever seen.  The individual was
+dissolved in the mass.  He became natural man.  The crowds always took
+fire from a spark.  They received their favourites as if they were
+conquering heroes.  Irving, their greatest favourite, they received
+like a reigning monarch.  One has to learn this about the British;
+their hearts are big and near their skins, and that is why, as
+individuals, they armour them.
+
+If you know how to touch them, they respond with such demonstrations of
+devotion, of enthusiasm, of loyalty, as no other race ever equals in
+our time.  Their loyalty to Irving they expressed with a zeal that was
+greater even than their appreciation of his powers, immense as that
+appreciation was.  They loved the man.  He embodied for them another
+lofty mark in the records of English achievement.  He was great and
+would be greater by the integrity, the persistence, the elevation of
+his purpose.  Such qualities win the English, and deep is the loyalty
+with which England rewards them.  That, at all events, was true in the
+Victorian days.
+
+There was a blessed vision called Ellen Terry, in those far-away Lyceum
+nights.  Her power was {198} charm.  And she wielded her power almost
+to the end of King Henry's reign.  In comedy she was alluring,
+audacious, delightful,--as Portia, for instance; as Beatrice; as any
+number of arch, graceful, incomparable creatures.  In tragedy,--well,
+we forgave her the tragedies, her Lady Macbeth, for example.  As
+Ophelia there was nothing to forgive; as Juliet--here was the exception
+to her tragic parts; she was a poet's dream, a fragile, loving, playful
+thing enmeshed by fate and borne down to death.  Ellen Terry was the
+witching consort of Irving's reign.  She won half his battle.  "A star
+danced, and under that" she "was born."  When Father Time told her that
+she could not play Portia and Beatrice and Juliet any more, half the
+attractiveness of the Lyceum was gone, and Irving had to carry the load
+alone.
+
+But I have wandered far from the first night of "The Merchant of
+Venice."  It was a great occasion.  "Everybody" was there.  To my
+gratified eyes the audience was nearly as interesting as the play and
+the players.  Celebrities were "as plenty as blackberries."  Now forty
+years have gone, and the celebrities have gone with them.  And the
+nonentities, too.  Of the two thousand or more persons who saw the
+performance that night, it may be that not more than fifty survive.
+
+There is no one in these days to rouse us as we were roused in the late
+seventies and to the end of the century.  The playgoer of to-day is fed
+on other stuff, on experiences quite unlike those his predecessors
+knew.  And he is not fed so well.  He is {199} growing up, or has grown
+up, without standards.  All's fish that comes to his net.  I wonder
+what he would think of Irving if, by miracle, Irving could return to
+the Lyceum with undiminished powers, with Ellen Terry as she was in the
+eighties, and all the galaxy and circumstance that surrounded them?  I
+think the playgoer of the present would scarcely notice Irving's
+mannerisms of speech, of gesture, of gait, he has seen so many
+mannerisms almost equally quaint, heard so much speech that is quite as
+queer.  What caused Irving's mannerisms?  For the life of me I cannot
+tell.  They were not always with him.  They grew upon him with the
+seasons.  I do not think he affected them.  He was too honest, too
+sincere for affectations.  Besides, he did not need them to attract
+attention.  And they injured his work.  They were not caused by
+physical defects.  They were entirely absent when he was not acting.
+Then his movements and speech were easy, pleasing.  His manner had
+great dignity.  I have said that his mannerisms were not with him in
+all characters, nor at all times.  Intensity might bring them out.
+Declamation did so almost invariably.  But they could not be relied
+upon either for coming or for going.  What caused them?
+Self-consciousness perhaps, nervousness possibly.  But why should he be
+self-conscious or nervous in his own theatre, where he played every
+night, and show no trace of either when he spoke at a university, or a
+dinner, or a public meeting?  Why should he walk naturally and with
+ease in Bond Street, and with constraint, as if he were rheumatic, as
+Hamlet, at Elsinore, and why {200} should he speak with perturbed
+vowels when he was in costume, and in easy control of them when in
+ordinary dress?  The questions are easily asked; they have never been
+answered.  If I have dwelt upon his peculiarities, it is partly because
+no one could ignore them, but mainly because he was so great a man that
+we can measure his powers by the obstacles against which he contended.
+His peculiarities of speech and motion may have been the causes which
+retarded his advancement for so many years.  And, by the way, he was
+born in Somersetshire.  Perhaps it was the Somersetshire dialect that
+cropped out at times in his delivery.
+
+Irving's maltreatment of vowels gave much offence to trained ears.  I
+do not know when I ceased, if ever I did cease, to wince at some of his
+pronunciations, but with time they ceased to present themselves as
+crimes for scourging, and came to be regarded as misfortunes, as
+penalties that must be endured for seeing him and enjoying him.  When
+all is said, this thought remains,--the Lyceum productions were
+immensely satisfying; the beauty of them, the appeal to the eye, the
+appropriateness of everything that was painted, or woven, or said, or
+done; the groupings, the general and particular movement, whether of
+principals or supernumeraries, the tone of the thing, the atmosphere of
+it.  When was the like known before?  When since?
+
+Seeing through the fog of mannerism took me a year.  After that, as I
+have said, I grew gradually to appreciate him, to admire him.  When I
+made {201} his acquaintance, ten years after first seeing his Hamlet, I
+had long passed from the benches of opposition.  But even then the
+wonder grew.  First it had been: how did this man of many mannerisms
+ever become an actor and one of the most distinguished actors of his
+time?  And then it was: how does he escape from carrying his mannerisms
+into private life?  For he did not carry them there.  He was a natural,
+unaffected gentleman, distinguished in bearing, courteous, fine in
+dignity, without pose.  He walked and talked like a human being
+accustomed to the best of intellectual society, accustomed, indeed, to
+the ruling of men.  He was then neither tone-bound nor muscle-bound.
+He moved with a certain ease, spoke with exquisite courtesy and quiet,
+and did not speak too much.  He preferred to listen rather than to
+talk.  He could--and did--make excellent speeches after dinner, or
+before the curtain.  They would always have a touch of humour and a
+touch of pathos.  They would always be in earnest.  He never spent
+himself on trivial things; he never trifled about anything.
+
+He had a certain air of authority; he had, at any rate, earned the
+right to breathe it.  Besides, it protected him from bores.  It made
+him, as a listener, the more gracious by just the suggestion of
+deference to an opinion, especially when he had invited the opinion.
+He preferred flattering to being flattered.  Perhaps discreet flattery
+was an instrument that he knew how to employ better than most men.  It
+may have been on that account that {202} when it came his way he did
+not care for it.  In all things he preferred giving to receiving.
+
+Next to his work he enjoyed hospitality, that is, the exercise of
+hospitality.  He did not like going out, and very seldom went out to
+dinners and receptions, those affairs of which one grows weary in
+London, because there are so many of them, and the celebrity is so
+often a sacrifice.  He enjoyed being the host.  This gave him the right
+of selection, with the minimum of sacrifice.
+
+And what a host he was!  You saw him at his best then, I think, his
+Majesty in evening dress, presiding at his table, after the play.  You
+had seen him crowned and robed and reigning, heard him cheered by his
+loyal subjects, the British public, and now you were to sup with him
+after the play.  His guests--they might be two, or six, or a
+dozen--would be shown to a suite of historic rooms upstairs behind the
+scenes, the rooms which in the eighteenth century and later had
+belonged to The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks.  Perhaps, that night,
+the play had finished at eleven.  The green curtain seldom fell earlier
+at the Lyceum.  In fifteen or twenty minutes Irving would come in.  If
+Miss Terry were coming, she would be later.  An actress is usually
+longer than an actor about "changing."  But whether she came, or not,
+and she would not always come, the feast would be a memorable one, both
+as to company and to dishes, to coffee and cigars and wines.
+
+In those days teetotalism did not stalk over the world, and arrogantly
+claim all the virtues, and cry {203} tyrannically, "You shall not touch
+wine!  There are weak souls who cannot drink without drunkenness.  To
+protect them we shall deprive you!"  A lot of kindly feeling has
+vanished with the rise of Bolshevism, Syndicalism, and Teetotalism.
+Are we coming to a time when Shaving will be forbidden because razors
+are dangerous?  If there are people who drink to excess, are there none
+who eat excessively?  Are dyspepsia and indigestion to reduce the world
+to a common level of sallowness and pain, to the pangs and palenesses
+that prevail in teetotal regions?  What has all this to do with Henry
+Irving?  Nothing, of course, seeing that he died in 1905.  But were he
+living and in his prime, I can fancy him saying, as many another man is
+saying: "No more America for me.  They won't let me have a pint of wine
+with my dinner.  I believe in freedom."
+
+Irving's first nights were famous for their supper parties.  These were
+not given in the Beefsteak Rooms but on the stage.  The stage would be
+cleared after the play, and at long tables, at the rear of it, the
+guests would help themselves, and stroll about, smoking, talking,
+munching chicken sandwiches and salad, and sipping champagne, claret,
+or whatever was going.  There would be two or three hundred guests,
+possibly more, men and women titled and untitled, well known in
+politics, science, letters, art, and social leaders, generals, and
+admirals, an epitome of that world which is London.  It would be one of
+the most enjoyable receptions of the season.  Wearied with conversation
+and {204} standing about, the guests would begin to disperse about one
+or half-past one in the morning.  By two o'clock, usually, nearly all
+of them would be gone.  Then some one would find a few chairs, and half
+a dozen of us would sit in a corner talking, and presently Irving would
+join us, and the talk would gain in weight and point.  About three
+o'clock, I think it was seldom earlier, we would start homeward.
+Frequently Irving and I would go together.  My hansom would drop him at
+the door of his chambers in Grafton Street, and then I would go on to
+Chelsea.  But whether on first nights, or on other nights, this was our
+custom for ten years, a custom broken only by my increasing absences
+from London.  I might be in New York or Washington, or Rome, but Irving
+would know somehow, and we would exchange wires on first nights.  On
+his first night in the World Beyond, I was farther away than usual.  I
+was in Chicago.  I wondered, when I heard, next morning, that he had
+gone, whether he missed the little group that used to foregather with
+him, and what hansom had conveyed him after his life's drama, and who
+had accompanied him Home.  Always he had seemed to me a lonely man.  He
+was a generous man and a great one.  And his fame will last as long as
+the English stage retains its fame.
+
+
+
+
+{205}
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+HENRY M. STANLEY
+
+Stanley was the most self-contained man imaginable, when he chose to
+be.  And when he chose to be otherwise, his anger was terrific.  He had
+a hard face and steely-cold grey eyes.  Neither eyes nor face revealed
+what he felt, if he wished to conceal feeling.  I have seen him quite
+unmoved, rock-like, when, after an African expedition, he met devoted
+friends, or faced a cheering multitude, or drove his way through an
+angry mob.  All was one to him if he had to get anything, or go
+anywhere, or do anything.  None the less he felt, and his feelings were
+deep, but he held them in the closest grip.  But when his temper blazed
+you wanted to call out the engines.  He could not tolerate blunderers
+and fools; he had no patience with reformers, nor with sentimentalists;
+and very little with Emin Pasha, whom he came to regard as possessing
+the "mushy" qualities.  Perhaps I should say that he had a great deal
+of patience with Emin Pasha in view of the fact that Emin, while
+willing to be found, did not wish to be "rescued", and so Stanley had
+his aches and pains and hardships for his trouble.  It is possible to
+sympathise with him.
+
+Stanley returned to London in April, 1890, after {206} the Emin
+Expedition.  There were crowds to greet him in the streets, and a big
+crowd at the railway station.  I went, with an old friend of his, to
+meet him at the train.  We had special cards to the platform at which
+the train would arrive, and were fortunate enough to secure places at
+the point where Stanley's saloon carriage stopped.  There were about
+five hundred holders of similar cards, I should think, and among them
+the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who was a very old friend of Stanley.
+When the train pulled in, the privileged five hundred broke ranks with
+a rush and a roar and a waving of hats and handkerchiefs.  The crowd
+beyond the platform barriers took up the cheering.  As everybody on the
+platform knew the Baroness by sight, a path to Stanley was promptly
+cleared for her, and immediately the explorer advanced and shook hands
+with the kindly old lady.  But he did not smile.  He was as grim as a
+statue.  He lifted his hat two or three times to the crowd, but he
+scarcely looked at it.  He seemed in no way elated or touched by the
+popular greeting, but I suppose he was touched.
+
+As soon as he saw the Baroness, he removed his hat, carrying it in his
+left hand, and stepping forward quickly, held out his right.  But he
+did not speak; nor did she.  Her kind old face quivered a little, and
+there were tears in her eyes.  Perhaps if she had spoken, she would
+have shown too much emotion.  Stanley, I thought, realised this, and
+was silent.  But he kept the old lady's hand in his and shook it a
+little every instant or so, while he looked out over the mass of faces
+beyond.  When he recognised {207} any one standing near him, he nodded,
+but said never a word; he would look again at the venerable lady, and
+give her hand another little shake, and then, when all was ready, he
+gave her his arm and escorted her to her carriage, her husband
+following.  The three entered the carriage, and Stanley stood up,
+bareheaded, and bowed to the cheering crowd.  But never a word spoke he.
+
+Out of the station they drove amid a din of cheering, but still he
+maintained his silence.  One of them told me afterwards that he was
+silent until they reached their door in Stratton Street, Piccadilly.
+All the way the crowds cheered.  Sometimes, when the roar was unusually
+loud, he would lift his hat.  Then, when the spectators saw that his
+close-cut hair had turned white, they would double their cheers.  I
+don't know what men think about when they experience such moments.  I
+have asked many who have had them.  They seemed to think that they were
+gratified, or puzzled, or stunned.  I can imagine Stanley asking
+himself: "When can I get out of this?"  But his face might have been
+the face of a graven image,--say a Sphinx from the sands of North
+Africa.
+
+The next time I saw him in public was at St. James' Hall, about a week
+later, when he addressed an audience invited by the Emin Pasha Relief
+Committee.  It was a ribboned and jewelled audience; it was composed of
+royalties, nobilities, famous commoners and fighting men, diplomats who
+sparkled and bishops who did not, men of letters, men of science and
+art, not to mention their radiant ladies, {208} an audience which
+literally shone, for the affair was an "occasion."  The Prince of Wales
+(afterward King Edward VII) presided; his Princess and the present King
+sat in the front row.  If I were to give a list of "among those
+present" it would exhaust pages of "Debrett" and "Who's Who", to say
+nothing of my own pages.  The Emin Pasha Relief Committee had done the
+thing handsomely, as well they might, for this was Stanley's first
+public appearance since his return from the expedition of which the
+world babbled long.  It was all in the day's work for him.  He never
+turned a hair.  He was in command of that audience, he told it what he
+wished to tell it, quietly, resolutely, and his words went home.  They
+would have thought he addressed such audiences every night.  But he had
+spoken in circumstances far more difficult.
+
+At the proper moment he took his manuscript in hand and walked to the
+edge of the platform.  When the audience had finished its applauding
+welcome, he looked about for a reading desk, or a table, on which he
+might put his papers.  He seemed puzzled, and I daresay he was, that
+the committee of the occasion had not provided something of the kind.
+The Prince of Wales was quick to perceive his need, and picking up a
+small table that stood in front of his own chair, he carried it to
+Stanley and placed it in front of him.  Then the explorer smiled,
+bowed, and thanked the Prince, and, turning to his audience, he fitted
+a pair of gold-bowed spectacles before his eyes and plunged at once
+into his address.
+
+{209}
+
+He told simply, directly, without oratorical flourishes, but as a
+courageous man to whom dangers were familiar, the story of that awful
+march into the heart of Africa.  It was a famous march then.  The world
+has since forgotten it, I daresay, having had, for years, its fill of
+deadly suffering.  But it is worth remembering as a tale of heroism,
+and I am able to repeat here some of the passages which I preserved at
+the time.  Stairs, and Parke, and Jephson, and Nelson, the surviving
+officers of his expedition, were with him on the platform.
+
+
+The little religion that our Zanzibaris knew, said Stanley, was nothing
+more than legendary lore, and in their memories floated dimly a story
+of a land that grew darker and darker as you travelled toward the end
+of the world, and drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay
+supine, coiled round the whole earth.  And the ancients must have
+referred to this, where the light is so ghastly, where the woods are
+endless, and are so still and solemn and grey, to this oppressive
+loneliness amid so much life, this loneliness so chilling to the heart!
+And the horror grows darker with their fancies, the cold of early
+morning, the comfortless grey of the dawn, the dead white mist, the
+ever-dripping tears of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling
+thunder-bursts.  When night comes with its thick, palpable darkness,
+our Zanzibaris lie cuddled in their little damp huts, they hear the
+tempest, the growling of the winds, the grinding of the storm-tossed
+trees, the fall of granite, the shock of the trembling earth, the
+roaring and rushing as of a mad, overwhelming sea--and then the horror
+is intensified.
+
+It may be, next morning when they hear the shrill sounds of the
+whistle, and the officers' voices ring {210} out in the dawn, and the
+blare of the trumpet stirs them to preparation and action, that the
+morbid thoughts of the night, and the memories of the terrible dreams,
+will be effaced for a time.  But when the march has begun once again,
+and the files are slowly moving through the woods, they renew their
+morbid broodings and ask themselves: "How long is it to last?"
+
+They disappear into the woods by twos and threes and sixes, and, after
+the caravan has passed, return to the trail, some to reach Yambruja,
+and upset the young officers with their tales of woe, some to stray in
+the dark mazes of the forest, hopelessly lost, some to be carved for
+the cannibal feast.
+
+Those who remain, committed by fears of greater danger, mechanically
+march on, the prey to dread and weakness, the scratch of a thorn, the
+puncture of a pointed cane, the bite of an ant, the sting of a wasp.
+The smallest thing serves to start an ulcer, which becomes virulent and
+eats its way to the bone, and the man dies.
+
+
+That self-contained man had been the leader in that march of death.
+Weeks, months, years of such fighting he had known, fighting not man
+but nature, a foe he could not strike in return.  Sometimes man and his
+weaknesses aided the enemy, jolly black, or surly black fellows packed
+with superstitious fears.  The voice of the demagogue was loud in
+England in those days, but not so loud as it is in these days.  Stanley
+had been criticised harshly for his "treatment of the natives"; they
+were "our black brothers" and all the rest of it; he had even been
+criticised for making expeditions at all, since "only by black labour
+could expeditions go forward.  What is there in it for the blacks?"
+There {211} were other mushy-minded objections similar to those
+employed by pacifists in these days.  He had his own way of hitting
+back at the mollycoddles.  They had been asking what he got out of the
+bold adventure.  That is always the way.  He turned to Stairs and
+Parke, Jephson and Nelson, and said quietly to his audience:
+
+
+These men were volunteers.  What did they "get out of it", save the
+dangers they sought, the sport which perhaps they found, such
+contribution to general and special knowledge as they might make, and
+their consciousness of duty performed?  They are English gentlemen.
+Two of them are officers in the British Army.  Mr. Jephson paid a
+thousand pounds for the privilege of accompanying the expedition.
+Captain Nelson left a comfortable home and the luxuries of civilised
+life for the sole purpose of joining in the rescue of one of Gordon's
+governors, whom the great soldier's untimely fate had left in a
+perilous position in the extreme south of the Soudan.  These volunteers
+pledged themselves to be loyal and devoted, and I must confess,
+assuming that I am a sufficient judge, being naturally jealous of
+anything that is not downright and real, that they have redeemed their
+pledge in the noblest and completest manner.
+
+Darkest Africa has been to them a fiery furnace, a crucible, and a
+question chamber, which they have tried, each of them to the very
+depths of their natures.  They have borne every trial to which they
+have been subjected with more than Spartan, with old-English fortitude,
+the fortitude that existed before mawkishness and mock sentiment had
+made men maudlin.  It is for you who hear me now to do your part toward
+recognising the merits of these young gentlemen, or causing them to be
+recognised {212} by those who have the power to dispense awards
+appropriate to noble and thorough and uncalculating performance of duty.
+
+
+The gossips used to say, as if they took a peculiar pleasure in saying
+it, that Stanley did not recognise loyalty in others.  But if the
+remarks just quoted were not recognition, and handsome recognition,
+given, as they were, before the most influential audience that could
+have been assembled in London, I do not know what recognition could
+possibly be.
+
+Of all my memories of Stanley, the most amusing relates to the
+"American Dinner" given in London in his honour.  It was not so amusing
+at the time, because that was a time of mishap and muddle.  Apart from
+the fact that the name of America should be associated, not allied as
+Mr. Wilson would insist, with a mismanagement which seemed especially
+determined to prove false the tradition that Americans have a natural
+and trained capacity for getting things done, the thing was a roaring
+farce.  There was a "Committee", of course, but the Committee had
+nothing to do with the arrangements.  There were forty "Honorary
+Stewards", but I can vouch for the fact that the honorary stewards had
+nothing to do with the arrangements.  I was one of the forty.  The
+ebullient zeal of one man who undertook to do everything, and who
+welcomed the responsibility, because he was a friend of Stanley, was
+responsible for the general wreckage of the elaborate plans which
+promised a dinner of ceremony and resulted in an informal collation.  I
+have always supposed that the kindly gentleman who undertook the whole
+{213} thing, and who was really one of the best fellows going, must
+have paid a good share of the cost of this entertainment to his friend
+Stanley, and insisted, therefore, upon having his own way, or the
+members of the Committee must have shirked their duties, which is n't
+likely, considering who they were.
+
+Well, here was an American dinner to Stanley.  There were sixteen
+speeches, save the mark!  And eleven of the speakers were Englishmen.
+There must have been at least three hundred and fifty men at the
+dinner, and fully one half of them, possibly more, were not Americans.
+Not an American dish was served, and the caterers, whoever they were,
+did not serve the first course until an hour and a half, or something
+like that, after the dinner should have begun.
+
+There was no one to receive the company.  The chairman was there, but
+most of the guests arrived before he did.  There was no reception
+committee.  The honorary stewards had no badges or other marks to
+distinguish them from anybody else, and no searcher for a guide or for
+information knew who they were.  There was no table plan, no list of
+guests.  Nobody knew where he was to sit, or who would be his
+neighbours.  We heard that the printer's forms had collapsed into
+horrible "pi" just at the point of going to press.  Although, as an
+"honorary steward", I arrived a quarter of an hour before the time
+announced, I could find on the premises none of my companion
+honoraries, nor was any list of them available.  I was talking with two
+{214} or three arrivals when a familiar voice behind me asked: "Are we
+alone in Africa?"
+
+"It looks like it, Mr. Stanley," said I.  "I can't find the huts, or
+the bones of the feast, or the chief of the tribe.  But you have come
+to the rescue, as usual."
+
+Stanley looked amused.  "Where's our friend ----?  Have you seen him?"
+he asked.
+
+I explained what I had heard about the dear fellow's dilemmas, and the
+little that I understood of them.
+
+"Then we 'll have to work our passage," Stanley said.  "Will it be all
+right if I stand here?  I 'll have to meet everybody, I suppose.  They
+won't fear I 'll bite 'em, will they, if there 's no manager to keep me
+tied up?"
+
+And so it was to Stanley's good sense and his willingness to enter into
+the spirit of the thing that the affair got under weigh.  But it was a
+long time in arriving anywhere.  I saw Whistler put his head in at the
+door.  I went after him and introduced him to Stanley.  "I say," said
+Whistler to me, "are you stewarding?  I 'm a steward, too.  It's all
+stew, is n't it?  But I don't know what to do, do you?  Is there
+anything to eat?"
+
+"Not yet," said I.
+
+"B-r-r-r-r-h!  What's that?"  It sounded like a crash of china in an
+adjoining room.
+
+"The end of all things, I should think," said Stanley.  "I say, there's
+the Duke!  No Committee?  Well, I 'll receive him."
+
+"The Duke" was the Duke of Teck, the father {215} of the present Queen.
+In a minute he was followed by another Duke, Sutherland.  And there
+were Stanley's chief officers, who were to share with him the honours
+of the evening.  And very soon the rooms were filled.  But nobody in
+authority appeared, or if appearing, no authority was exercised.  For
+an hour and a half everybody stood about, accumulating hunger and
+getting very tired.  And there was no one to say what was to be done,
+or when, or how.
+
+At last somebody cried: "Gentlemen, dinner is served.  This way,
+please, and sit where you like!"
+
+We all cheered at this.
+
+And so the royalties, and the guests of honour, and the orators of the
+evening followed the hungriest men who were nearest the doors, walked
+rapidly into the dining room, and took the first seats they could find.
+The affair had become a picnic.  But there was a meal.  That was the
+important thing.  After famishing so long, we had a dinner of sorts.
+But there were sixteen speeches to follow!  This fact we learned from
+the souvenir albums which we found at our plates.  In the course of
+time the speeches began.
+
+One of them issued, poured, from a New York lawyer who stood in a far
+corner, waving his arms and displaying vast expanses of shirt-cuff.  He
+spread-eagled, he made the eagle scream, he Gods-countried till you
+could hear the corn grow.  Nothing could stop him.  He ran on till he
+ran down.  And then the Grenadier Guards Band, Dan Godfrey {216}
+conducting, struck up the "Star Spangled Banner."  That was another
+relief.
+
+The American dinner to Stanley was given in the Portman Rooms in Baker
+Street.  The Portman Rooms had formerly housed Madame Tussaud's
+Waxworks.  Perhaps the hall in which we dined had been the Chamber of
+Horrors.  I suspect it.  At any rate, there was a general air of
+wonderment as to what might happen next.  We would have liked the
+affair more if the Committee, or the Manager of All Things, had given
+less of his useful attention to souvenir albums and elaborate trophies,
+and more attention to the details of the evening.  Some one had
+designed a large, costly, and elaborate silver shield, on which were to
+be depicted events in Stanley's career.  It was to be presented with a
+flourish of trumpets, that is to say, a speech by the Consul-General.
+But the shield was unfinished, although on the spot, and some of the
+flourishes had to be omitted.  If the table plans were omitted,
+somebody had managed to get up a list of guests, at the last minute.
+But that was incomplete, too.  In that dim English way which robs men
+of their first names and puts them down with a single initial, even
+Cumberland, the mind reader, who was present, could not have guessed,
+without seeing him, that "H. Hunt" was Holman-Hunt, and not Helen, or
+Henry; that "H. White" was Henry White, the secretary of our Legation,
+and later Ambassador at Rome and Paris, still later the unabashed
+deliverer of a pro-German speech, and in the Wilsonic course of events,
+a member of the American Delegation {217} to the "Peace Conference" of
+1918-1919.  But so many names were disguised by the poverty of labour
+which denied them all connection with their owners that I must now deny
+them space on this page.  I remember that "B. Harte" was Bret Harte,
+that "E. Gosse" meant Edmund Gosse, and I remember that "Prof. John S.
+Hopkins of Gilman University", as he appeared in the newspapers of the
+following morning, was really Professor Gilman of Johns Hopkins
+University.  To this day the Briton persists in printing the name of
+that university "John S. Hopkins."
+
+We wished to hear the speeches of Stanley and his officers, or, say,
+the remarks these gentlemen might make.  Not a button did any one care
+for the other speeches, and the less we cared, the more they lapsed
+into oratory.  We knew that Stanley and his men would give us plain
+talk over our cigars, and that is what they did.  Some of Stanley's
+talk that night I can quote from a report that was made at the time.
+Did I give the date?  It was May 30, 1890.
+
+
+On a wintry afternoon, in 1867, just twenty-three years ago, I started
+from America for Africa, at the imperial command of one of the
+dollar-powers of America.  I was as ignorant as a babe of the land I
+was going to.  As I look back upon my stock of resources I am not
+unmindful that none could be poorer in what was fitting and necessary,
+but I possessed some natural store of good will, fondness for work, and
+a wholesome respect for the boss, the employer--the paying power.  I
+learned down south what they mean by the saying "Root hog, {218} or
+die!"  They mean if you don't work, you shan't eat.  It's another form
+of the scriptural saying: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy
+bread."  In the America of my time they understood that.
+
+In Abyssinia I acquired several lessons from English journalists, the
+most important being what chaff is, and the second--that black trousers
+in the daytime are not suitable.  I learned, also, to distinguish good
+soldiers from bad, what kind of men made the best officers....  It
+takes longer to know an Englishman than to know any other Christian, or
+any pagan, that I ever came across.  He does n't walk up to you, as the
+Yankee does, and pester you with questions about your private business
+and your conjugal experiences.  He looks at you as if he did not care
+whether you lived or died, starved or rotted.  Yet if you do him a
+little service, he is so grateful that he will remember it.  Not
+effusive, like a Frenchman, nor gushing like a German, he does not
+regard you superciliously, as a Madrileno would, or look upon you as
+legitimate prey, as is the custom of the Greeks; but he has the knack
+of assuming a profound indifference to your existence.
+
+I was sent to Spain to study Spanish war and politics.  I discovered a
+defect, and I doubt greatly whether the Spanish leaders have yet become
+conscious of that defect.  They could not execute the laws.  They
+lacked the courage to do so.  Therefore, the Republic, which could be
+sustained only by justice, was impossible.
+
+It was necessary for me to wander further afield, to view cities and
+men, great works, great assemblies, many countries--Greece, Egypt,
+Palestine, Turkey, Russia, Persia, India, and then, after being well
+seasoned with experience, I entered Africa as a leader of men.
+According to the rules I was not {219} ripe, judging by what I now know
+and what less I knew then.  I was still young and very rash,
+headstrong, I relied too much on force.  Fortunately fate was
+propitious, I was not prematurely cut off.
+
+Marching eighteen hundred miles into Africa, I had time to think.  It
+was reflection I needed.  Yet I was a dull pupil, and my blood was like
+molten lava.  I must admit that while with Livingstone I saw no good in
+the lands I travelled through.  The negro was precisely what he ought
+to be--a born pagan, a most unloving and unlovable savage.
+Nevertheless, much of what Livingstone expounded was unanswerable.  I
+attempted to parry what he said by lavish abuse of the natives and
+their country.
+
+In 1873 I was back again in Africa, on the opposite side of Africa, and
+after the brief Ashantee campaign, returned with a few more experiences.
+
+The beginning of my real African education was in 1875 while sailing
+along the shores of the greatest lake in Africa.  It came like a
+revelation to me.
+
+Now I have shown you what a dull, slow, student I was.  You can well
+understand how lightly the abuse and chaff of my brother journalists
+sit on my mind.  For there were even duller and slower folk than I.  It
+is not one lecture, or one speech, or even a hundred, that will suffice
+to infuse a knowledge of the value of Africa into the English mind.  It
+took ten years for people to believe thoroughly that I did find
+Livingstone!
+
+Only a few days ago one of the most prominent men in England said: "I
+do not know what you have been doing lately in Africa, Mr. Stanley, but
+if you are to lecture I will gladly go to hear you."  And so I say that
+although in this assembly we may know what is going on in Africa, we
+must not suppose that the British public, or the journalism which is
+its reflection, is any wiser to-day than in the time of Mungo Park.
+
+
+{220}
+
+Rather neat scoring, I think.  The world does not change much.
+
+Stanley married and went into Parliament.  One day I thought it might
+be interesting to see him try conclusions with an election crowd in
+London.  He was contesting on the Surrey side of the river.  I think it
+was in Lambeth.  He got a new experience.  The crowd heckled him, and
+tried to shout him down, just for the mere joy of living.  But they
+could n't silence him.  While they bellowed, he would stand calmly and
+look at them.  After some minutes of this kind of thing, he managed to
+be heard.
+
+"Is this my meeting or yours?" he asked.  They were quite certain the
+meeting was their own.  The interruptions were numerous.  I was
+thinking what he would do with a mutinous lot in Darkest Africa, and
+presently he told them that the savages compared pretty favourably with
+"their white brothers in London"!  The crowd yelled, but they couldn't
+disconcert him.  He finished his speech; cut it short, no doubt, but
+did n't appear to do so.  Only the persons near him could hear what he
+said, there was so much noise.  As he left the meeting, the gentle
+souls began to throw things.  I saw them trying to overturn his
+carriage.  His wife was in it!
+
+Stones flew.  But Stanley lived to fight again.  Knowing him, I think I
+know how angry he really was.
+
+"But," said he when we met again, "I longed for a few seconds of
+Africa!  My education is n't completed yet.  I am learning about
+British {221} electioneering crowds.  When they shout: 'Fair play, fair
+play', they mean 'Fair play for our side.'  Come now, that's a fact."
+
+It is unnecessary that I should incriminate myself.
+
+I never could see what satisfaction Stanley got from being a member of
+Parliament.  In his heart he would have been glad, once or twice, to
+lead them all, Government and Opposition and their followers, into an
+African jungle--and lose them.
+
+I see I have not mentioned that he became Sir Henry.  But I knew him as
+Mr.
+
+
+
+
+{222}
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+A bright, warm, summer morning.  I was working under pressure in my
+study in Cheyne Walk on an article which had to be finished that
+afternoon.  Saturdays were my busiest days and this was Saturday, and
+only morning.  The maid rapped at the study door and said, "Mr. John
+Burns to see you, Sir."
+
+In came Burns, preceded by his great voice and hearty laugh, making
+apology for interruption.  "Can you drop the work and come with me?"
+said he.
+
+"Impossible," said I.  "Sorry, but--"
+
+"Well, I 'm off to George Meredith's," said he, laying a post card on
+my writing table.  The post card was from Meredith, who appointed the
+meeting, and added:
+
+"We 'll have a fine Radical day.  Bring your friend."
+
+"You are the friend," said Burns.
+
+"I 'll come," said I.  "Give me a quarter of an hour, and I 'll finish
+this article somehow."  And so I made sacrifice to one of my gods, the
+god that dwelt on the sunny slope of Box Hill.  The article {223} was
+brought to a quicker turn than it had dreamed of, a hansom was called;
+we rushed to Clapham Junction and took train for Burford Bridge.
+
+It was more than a quarter of a century ago, but it seems like
+yesterday.  And yet, though it was more than a quarter of a century
+ago, the Great Dock Strike had seemed so long before that it was almost
+forgotten.  In the dock strike, that is to say, in 1889, I had made
+John Burns' acquaintance.  He says I "discovered" him, discovered the
+real John Burns under the red-hot agitator who was expected to lead a
+hundred thousand men to incendiarism and the sack of London.
+
+I do not remember the year which brought this Meredith day to our
+spinning world.  But it must have been in the early nineties, and Burns
+on the London County Council, and perhaps for a session or so a member
+of Parliament.  The date, however, does n't matter.  If it were not
+1892 it may have been 1893 or '94.  Let's get on.
+
+Neither Burns nor I had ever met George Meredith.  Burns and he had had
+some correspondence which resulted in the post card and our expedition
+to Box Hill that blossomy, fragrant morning when the England of dreams
+lay all about us, and the stream that ran by Burford Bridge "babbled o'
+green fields" and played with flowers.
+
+We arrived at the little station in Surrey about noon.  Whatever it may
+be now, it was then a little station.  We strode off to Box Hill, and
+turned a corner, and there, trapping the sunshine, was Flint Cottage,
+George Meredith's home, at the bottom of {224} a sloping garden running
+over with roses.  Roses, roses everywhere, and higher in the sloping
+garden, overlooking a valley that the gods had made for poets to dream
+in, was a little chalet where Meredith wrote, and slept, and had the
+muses to wait on him.  To the chalet a gardener directed us when we
+asked for his master.  We climbed the path.  The chalet door stood
+partly open.  Burns knocked on a rose trellis.  "Come in!" cried a
+voice.  In we went.  There was George Meredith, in a Morris chair, with
+a rug over his knees, and sheets and sheets and sheets of manuscript
+over the rug.  If he were to rise, the whole mountain of paper would
+tumble helter-skelter to the floor.
+
+"No! don't move," said my companion.  "I'm John Burns."  Then he
+introduced me.
+
+"I knew you, John Burns, I knew you.  Your photographs are like you.
+The voice is what I imagined it would be.  Sit, gentlemen, sit.  There,
+by the window.  No better view in England, I really think.  I comfort
+myself with it.  It is good enough for parliament-men and our
+scribbling kind," said Meredith, smiling roguishly at me.  The grasp of
+his hand was firm and generous.  His voice had rich, deep tones.  But
+he looked a fragile being.
+
+"Like the schoolboy, I can say, 'This is n't writin', it's readin','"
+and he pointed to the manuscript.
+
+"Chapman and Hall-ing," I ventured to say.
+
+"That's right," said Meredith, "you see the slave bearing his burden."
+
+If John Burns' photographs were faithful, so were Meredith's, or so was
+the one with which I had been {225} familiar.  His beard and hair were
+grey, almost white then.  He looked older than he was.  He was only
+sixty-five.  Only sixty-five, and I thought him old!  He lived to be
+eighty-one.  I liked his voice.  I had been told that it was high and
+shrill.  It was nothing of the kind.  It was mellow, clear, and his
+speech was scholar-like, with quaint shafts of wit.  They used to tell
+of his "artificial talk."  I heard none of it.  He was as natural as
+his roses.  But there might be prickly thorns under the rose.
+
+Meredith gathered his papers and put them aside.  He leaned back in his
+big, comfortable chair, and said "now let's talk" as another man might
+say "let's have a drink."  And we three sat, and talked and remade the
+world like a lot of youngsters.  We knew better, each of us, knew that
+the dreams we were indulging would never be realised, that probably we
+would never call them up and look at them again--we would n't
+dare--they would be buried with us, no doubt.  Some other youngsters
+might dream similar dreams by and by.  No doubt they would.  But to-day
+was to-day.  And to-morrow I would be twice as old as Meredith, though
+half his years, and know in all my body half as much as his little
+finger knew.  That very day he was the youngest of the three.  He
+bubbled quietly, like champagne in a hollow-stemmed glass.  The
+conversation capered.  We might have been lads out of school, and we
+ragged the authorities.  Meredith was the youngest and gayest of the
+three, Burns the most enthusiastic, and I came dragging on with not
+exactly timorous whoop-hurrahs!  And it was {226} June, and high noon,
+with roses everywhere, and still more roses, and the humming of bees.
+And the big world was far away--a million miles.
+
+It was "a fine Radical day" no doubt, in more than the limited
+political sense.  Burns was the only political Radical of the three.
+He called me "a crusted Tory."  I don't remember what he called George
+Meredith, who left us guessing, I think, as some of his printed pages
+were likely to do.  Anyway, we did n't talk books.  Life was better.
+And there was a lot of life to talk about yet, at the end of an age.
+Besides, our host was pressing us to stay to luncheon.
+
+Down the garden path we strolled, still talking.  Meredith said, as we
+seated ourselves at table: "I 'm here alone at present: you come like a
+rescuing expedition.  This talk is a shower on parched land."  After
+luncheon the talk went on, under trees, and tea-time had come before we
+knew it.  After tea a walk over Box Hill.
+
+You will have gathered by this time that the talking was not about
+Meredith or his books.  He guided us from those high pastures where we
+would have liked to browse to the lower marshes where we might stumble
+as we pleased over politics, Home Rule and no rule, free trade and
+protection, dear food and cheap food, municipal administration, the
+housing of the poor, socialism, and all those everlasting puzzles which
+England is discussing now as she discussed them thirty years ago.  They
+were very dear to John Burns.  They seemed interesting to Meredith.  He
+enjoyed talking another man's {227} shop; at any rate, he enjoyed
+talking Burns' shop so much that the talk scarcely touched on books.
+It may be mentioned at this point that John Burns, even at that time,
+owned probably more books than Meredith, and knew the insides of them.
+Whether or not he knew the insides of more books than did Meredith is
+another matter.  Meredith, you know, was a publisher's reader.
+
+I did manage, while we were at tea, to get in a word about "One of Our
+Conquerors" and its tribute to good wine, certain passages which could
+have been written only by a connoisseur.
+
+"Ah, I 'm that; yes, I 'm that!  Burns would n't appreciate that, but
+you do."  And I spoke of a certain description in the same book, a view
+from London Bridge, westward, in the late afternoon.  And the man
+chasing his hat in a high wind.  I said I had taken an American friend
+there recently, and he had had to chase his hat, and then, for solace,
+we had gone to the restaurant in the city, the one described by
+Meredith, and had had food, and cracked a bottle of the delicate wine
+which, with tender ritual, had been opened and served to the two men in
+the story.
+
+"And," said I, "although you disguised the restaurant and the label, I
+will not disguise from you the fact that my friend is also a
+connoisseur of the bright and beautiful, the American celebrator of
+choice things and moments--Thomas Bailey Aldrich--and that he rose at a
+point in our simple feast and said, with reverence: 'I salute George
+Meredith.'"
+
+{228}
+
+Meredith's eyes twinkled.  He rose, lifted his straw hat, bowed, and
+said: "The Author of 'Marjorie Daw', I am your obliged and humble
+servant."
+
+And so the honours were even between Aldrich and himself.
+
+Burns put in his word here.  "We must go for the five-thirty train.
+Good-bye, Mr. Meredith, we have had the--"
+
+"No, no, John Burns!  It 's not to be heard of!  Both of you are to
+stay for dinner!  Mark you that, John Burns.  Never, never shall I
+forgive you two if you leave a poor lone man of ink without dining at
+his table.  The thing is forbidden, forbidden absolutely, John Burns."
+
+Is it strange then that we stayed for dinner, having already taken
+luncheon, tea, and a stroll with the magician of Box Hill?  Not only
+did we stay, but we stayed till nearly midnight, having just time to
+catch the last train for London.
+
+And this is a very pleasant part of my recollections of the day:
+
+Our host, when he had shown us to the dining room, excused himself for
+a moment, lighted a candle, and, opening a door in a corner of the
+room, descended to the cellar.  In two or three minutes he reappeared,
+his delicate face lighted by the candle which he held in his left hand
+directly behind a dusty half-bottle of wine, through which the light
+shone softly in a ruby glow.  One saw first the wine, then the light,
+then the face, as ascending the stairs they entered from below,
+mounting slowly with {229} exquisite care lest the wine be shaken.
+Slowly, and with great care, Meredith wrapped a napkin around the
+bottle, and drew the cork, placing the bottle at my plate and saying,
+with the most gracious, old-world courtesy: "For one who knows and
+appreciates, from one who appreciates and knows."
+
+There was "approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley!"
+
+"John Burns is a teetotaller, they say," added Meredith.  "Of such is
+not the kingdom of my heaven.  Burns says you discovered him.  What do
+you think of your discovery?  Tell me how it came about."
+
+"Burns does not embody my idea of a modest man," said I.  "As for that,
+there seems to be some doubt, nowadays, whether modest men should be
+permitted to live.  What does Gilbert say:
+
+  "'You must stir it, and stump it
+  And blow your own trumpet,
+  Or, bless me, you have n't a chance!'
+
+
+"Well, I came upon Burns first, in '89, when he had London scared (of
+course London would n't confess that it was scared but it was) and he
+was 'stumping it' at the dock gates, and from cart-tails on Tower Hill,
+and was listened to by thousands and tens of thousands of hungry men,
+and their wives, and youngsters--"
+
+"'Agitating the dregs of London', the newspapers put it," said Meredith.
+
+"All for sixpence an hour," said Burns.
+
+"You have the floor!" said Meredith to me.
+
+{230}
+
+"I told you he is not accurately described as a modest man.  This is
+_my_ story," I continued, "the story as I see it.  London had heard of
+him--when was it?--in '86, or so, when he led a crowd of East Enders to
+Trafalgar Square where mass meetings were not permitted, and the crowd
+got out of hand and smashed plate-glass windows, and Burns got his head
+broken, or nearly so, and went to gaol."
+
+"'Serve the brute right!'  I remember the run of thoughtful British
+opinion," put in Meredith.
+
+"I was not in England at the time, but I remember the verdict," I said.
+
+"The trouble was," said Burns, "I hadn't been introduced to the
+authorities.  There I touched a fundamental British prejudice.  The
+affair secured me the introduction, and opened Trafalgar Square--"
+
+"To the mob," said Meredith.
+
+"To mass meetings," said Burns.
+
+"I am playing British chorus," was Meredith's rejoinder.
+
+"Second chapter," said I.  "There came the year of the Great Dock
+Strike.  The casual labourer swarmed out of chaos, and struck for a
+sane, not to say 'civilised' method of hiring, and sixpence an hour."
+
+"And the dock companies, or whatever they were, were not sane, and,
+also, they had n't a sixpence, they said"--thus Meredith.
+
+"Which was absurd, Mr. Meredith, as you are on the point of adding," I
+went on.  "We don't know how many thousands of men were thrown out
+{231} of work.  Nobody knows to this day, but here is what I am coming
+at; there were thousands of them, and there was great suffering in
+their families.  Well, when I first saw Burns he was organising
+kitchens, and feeding women and children, and making ten speeches every
+twenty-four hours, and sleeping an hour or two when he could find time
+and a place to lie down.  Some nights he did not sleep at all.  The
+night before I met him he slept four hours in his clothes and boots.
+In three days he made thirty-six speeches; in three weeks he averaged
+ten speeches a day, out of doors.  He is hoarse still, no wonder.
+
+"I lost sight of him for a bit, and found him again on Tower Hill,
+speaking to a big crowd.  His platform was a dray.  When he stopped
+speaking and jumped down from the dray, I introduced myself to him,
+said I was mightily interested, and that I wanted to interview him.
+
+"'All right,' said he; 'begin!'
+
+"If he were not modest, I was.  'Not here,' said I, 'let's go where we
+can talk in quiet.'  So I tucked him into a hansom and, followed by a
+yelling crowd which we soon left out of sight, we drove to a club of
+mine in the West End, where we had a long talk.  The immediate results
+were--oh, well, some articles in which I tried to show the world the
+real John Burns."
+
+"That was the discovery?" asked Meredith.
+
+"Burns calls it so.  He was no more modest about being discovered then
+than he is now.  He has a way of telling you straight what he thinks,
+or what he 's at, or of telling you that he won't tell you."
+
+{232}
+
+"I 've noticed that.  John Burns, are you under any delusions about
+popularity?  I think you are not."
+
+"I 'm not," said Burns.  "When the crowds are cheering their loudest, I
+am asking myself how soon they will hang my carcass on the outer walls."
+
+"A cheering and useful inquiry," observed Meredith.  "My impression is
+that you have a long course to cover.  But leaders of the people are
+wisest when they remember that there _are_ outer walls for the hanging
+of carcasses."
+
+"The confessions of Radicals strengthen the soul," said I.
+
+"These are not confessions; they are articles of faith," exclaimed
+Burns.
+
+I intimated that my faith in a political sense was as a grain of
+mustard seed, human nature being what it was, and political stupidity
+unconquerable.  Gladstone being mentioned by our host, I asked Burns to
+tell his Gladstone story, that is, what the G.O.M. said to him, and
+what he said to the G.O.M. at their first meeting.
+
+"It was in the lobby of the House of Commons," Burns explained, "soon
+after my election.  You know I was not what might be called a
+worshipper of that wonderful man.  A bit too independent for his
+liking, perhaps."
+
+"And the only thing he would dislike, perhaps," said Meredith, smiling.
+
+"Well, you know.  I was in the lobby, talking with a front-bench
+Liberal when the great man passed.  The member with whom I was talking
+{233} took me up to him and presented me.  The G.O.M. bowed, and we
+shook hands.  He said:
+
+"'It gives me pleasure, Mr. Burns, to see you here, to welcome you to
+the House of Commons.'
+
+"I replied, 'Believe me, sir, my pleasure is equal to your own!'
+
+"A hit, a palpable hit!" cried Meredith.  "I can see Gladstone drawing
+in his horns."
+
+"He stiffened a bit, and we went our ways.  That is all there is of the
+story," added Burns.
+
+"The one about the docker and the matches is not bad," said I.
+
+"Let me have it," begged Meredith.
+
+"At one of my meetings near the dock gates, a fellow shouted: 'Burn the
+docks; break in and burn the docks!'  He interrupted me two or three
+times with that cry.  The crowd was sullen.  It had n't got its
+sixpence yet.  I must stop the roaring fellow, or his mates might get
+out of control.  I borrowed a box of matches from the nearest man.
+'Catch!' I cried to the noisy chap.  He caught it as I flung it over
+the heads of the crowd.  'Now, then,' I called to him, 'if you are
+crazy, if you don't care what happens to all these men and their wives
+and children, and if you want to ruin this strike, go, fire the docks!'
+But the man did n't move.  I waited, but still he did n't move.  Then I
+said: 'Your hand has n't the courage of your mouth.  Take the matches
+from him, men, hand 'em back to me.  Make way for him.  He 's shown
+that he 's a braggin' coward.  Out with him!'  He skulked away, hooted
+by the crowd.  I suppose that was the {234} origin of the yarn that I
+was inciting the mob to burn the docks."
+
+"That's the way history is written, John Burns.  Have you found your
+dockers suspicious regarding you?"  Meredith put the question with a
+naïve air.
+
+"Of course.  Men of their kind are always suspicious, until they know
+you.  Why should n't they be?  Whoever went among 'em before those days
+with any other purpose than to get the best of 'em?"
+
+"They suspected your decent clothes," said I.
+
+Burns laughed.  "One morning I appeared in a new suit of blue serge
+like this, and a new straw hat, like that.  'Where'd you get 'em,
+Burns?' one man shouted.  'He 's makin' more 'n sixpence out o' us,'
+yelled another.  Then I had to explain, anyhow, I did explain, that
+Madame Tussaud's had given me a new suit, so that they could put my old
+one on a wax figure of me.  Tussaud's wanted my old hat, but my wife
+would n't part with that.  She wanted it as a trophy."
+
+We sat at table all the evening talking, George Meredith, John Burns,
+and I.  Of all the men one had ever heard talk, I can't remember one
+who had a charm of voice and speech excelling Meredith's.  I can feel
+its fascination now across the interval of nearly thirty years.  It
+was, I have said, a musical voice, but it was more than that.  It was
+rich and deep and delicate.  The enunciation was perfect with a
+perfection that was rare and individual; his voice was an instrument
+with many banks of keys.  Charm was its characteristic, charm that no
+{235} one could describe, although many have tried to do so.  And his
+eyes, you could say, were bluish-grey, or grey-blue, but you could not
+say--as they twinkled, or flashed, or seemed at rest like little lakes,
+pellucid, undisturbed, or lighted instantly as some humorous or
+sympathetic thought moved behind them--you could not say how, or why
+they held you, or had the power, a pleasant power, of searching you,
+looking through you.  There was nothing that you could describe in so
+many words, but there was much that you could feel and like.  Even when
+Meredith spoke of man, or woman, or deed that he did not like, and
+spoke with dramatic force, his gaze would not blaze or harden.  He
+seemed to be searching serenely beyond the surface for the element of
+comedy, searching with sympathy and humour for the thing that he could
+understand, and understand better than any one else in the world.  You
+could always touch him with a sympathetic humour.  He did not like wise
+owls, or rather the owlishness which the run of humans take for wisdom.
+
+His strength, George Meredith's strength, was in his perceptions, his
+appreciations; physically he was frail, or was frail then!  You would
+n't have supposed him ever to have been a great walker and a man of
+athletic tendencies.  But he had been.  Now he walked rather slowly,
+with a stick, and seemed glad to stop every few minutes.  His face made
+me think of a cameo, by the delicacy of its carving.  There was
+exquisite beauty in it, and the voice enhanced that.  But even the most
+delicate lines {236} were firmly carved.  If you handled him roughly
+you might bend him, but you could not break his spirit.  At the time I
+speak of, he was beyond his years, far beyond them; physically, but in
+no other way, he seemed an old and fragile man.  And yet neither voice
+nor eyes suggested anything of the kind.  In spirits and outlook he
+retained the keenness of mighty youth.  When he talked with us he was
+of no age at all, the agelessness of the eternal; it was only when he
+walked with us about his garden, or over Box Hill, that the flesh
+betrayed, now and then, its limitations.  If you had had his eyes, you
+might have looked through his body.  A strong wind might have carried
+him away.  But he lived sixteen years after that, and, for all his
+touch of melancholy, they were happy years.
+
+Others could tell other tales of him and have done so; have said, for
+one thing, that he was quick and tempery.  What they meant was that his
+highly sensitive make-up had n't its times or seasons, but were on and
+off quite unexpectedly, as is usually the case with highly sensitive
+folk.  Men do not study such sensitive creatures with the object of
+avoiding trouble; they blunder and thunder on and then are amazed, when
+they have struck a nerve centre, to find that it has its own method of
+reacting.  And then George Meredith had been more than half his life a
+reader for publishers.  And all his life he was writing poetry and
+novels!  Now if there is any act less likely than another to insure
+peace of mind, it is the reading of other persons' manuscripts.  And to
+do that regularly, professionally, for several {237} decades, while you
+prefer to be a poet and love to be a novelist, is to give oneself to
+occupations which not only jar upon each other, but upon the nerves of
+him that undertakes the triple task.  Meredith must have had a rare
+power of concentration to preserve his own authorship from saturation
+in the flood of manuscripts in which he swam for forty years.  His
+experiences would have paralysed the creative capacity in most men.
+
+I can suppose only that they who found his talk "artificial" must have
+touched some spring in him that Burns and I did not press.  We found
+him entirely free from artificiality.  No pair of strangers could have
+been more agreeably entertained.  And yet we inflicted upon him a long
+day.  They say he was "gey ill to live wi'."  Perhaps he was; perhaps
+he was not.  But why should n't he have been?  Most writers are.  And
+why should n't they be?  They are of a sensitive sort, in greater
+degree, or less.  Their business is mainly to observe, to consider, to
+speak with ink.  These things require concentration of mind.  And while
+the world is running in and out, and kindly intentioned persons are
+making suggestions which have no relation to the business in hand, or
+wondering why their wish cannot have precedence, or why their opinion
+is not the most important thing in the universe, the poet's work, or
+train of thought, has to get on, or the novelist's, or the reader of
+manuscripts'.  It may be true that no creative gentleman has a right to
+moods, but at least he has a right to tenses.  No such plea is put
+forth for the rest of mankind.  {238} Probably the fact is that the
+person criticising considers his own mood the more important of the
+two.  Artistic sensibilities are as difficult for their possessors to
+endure all the time as they can possibly be for any one else to
+encounter a part of the time.  But who ever thinks of that?
+
+We talked on through the evening, without leaving the dining room.  I
+caught Burns looking apprehensively at the clock.  "Yes," said I, "we
+can catch it if we go at once.  It's the last train."  There was a
+hurried leave-taking, and we were off.  We left the kind old gentleman
+standing in the doorway, holding a lamp which lighted us down the path
+and shone full upon his face.
+
+"Well?" said Burns, when we were seated in the train.
+
+"A glorious day!" I answered.
+
+"Never a better," said Burns.
+
+Surely we never went through a better day together, and we went through
+many.
+
+Late one afternoon in 1907, I was crossing the outer lobby of the House
+of Commons just as John Burns was crossing it in the opposite
+direction.  He saw me first and called out to me.
+
+"Where have you come from now?" he asked, when we had shaken hands.
+"And how long is it since we met?"
+
+"America this time," said I.  "I 've been there four years.  But it
+must be seven years since I 've seen you."
+
+"Gadabout!" said he.  "Did you ever have another Meredith day?"
+
+{239}
+
+"No," said I, "nor anything like it.  Let's go again."
+
+"Let's," was his response.
+
+But we did not go again, for, as it turned out, another ten days called
+me back to America.  Burns, of course, was already in the Cabinet, but
+he wore a blue serge suit, just as of yore.
+
+In 1913 when again I came to England, I did not see him.  I had several
+months in the country but only ten days in town, when I fled with an
+attentive influenza which Freshwater drove away.
+
+But in 1916, having come the day before from a liner at Liverpool, I
+was walking in Victoria Street just as Burns turned a corner.
+
+"The oddest thing," said he.  "I was just thinking of our day with
+Meredith.  Let's talk.  But don't talk politics.  Which way are you
+going?"
+
+"Any way," I said.  And we strolled into the cloisters of Westminster
+Abbey.
+
+
+
+
+{240}
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+PARNELL
+
+The man most talked of in '88-'90 was not Mr. Gladstone but Mr.
+Parnell.  The Parnell Commission "had shaken the earth", as an Irish
+writer said in a moment of unusual restraint.  And during its
+long-drawn life, as during the events which immediately had preceded
+it, "the uncrowned king of Ireland" was the foremost topic of
+conversation and of newspaper attention.  From the ordeal of the
+Commission he emerged with triumph, a triumph which in its turn caused
+some planetary commotion, only to be met with the divorce suit of
+Captain O'Shea, and the subsequent storms, and snarls, and hopeless
+desertions of Committee Room Fifteen.  Thence to heartbreak and death
+was but a short and rapid decline.
+
+I knew Parnell but slightly; no one knew him well.  Lord Salisbury did
+not know him at all, had never taken the trouble to cross the lobbies
+between the Houses of Lords and Commons and look at him or listen to
+him.  "I have never seen him," said Mr. Gladstone's rival.  And it was
+common report that the men who knew Parnell least of all, and least of
+all about him, were his own {241} followers.  Even that is possible, if
+it seems unlikely.  One of his most conspicuous followers, who wrote
+conspicuously and talked about him and about Home Rule, I knew very
+well, and for years I wondered if he really knew as little as he said
+he did about his chief's ways and work and wisdom.  He made a great
+mystery of them, as many of the Irish members did, or pretended to do.
+They told you that he kept them at arm's length, scarcely nodded to
+them, or, if he nodded, did so in a manner that was cold and distant
+beyond belief.  They were the dust beneath his feet.  But they told you
+that they did not resent this treatment; it showed the superiority of
+the man.
+
+Whether they resented it or not, you may form your own opinion by what
+they did to him when they got the chance.  But before the squalls and
+gales arose in Committee Room Fifteen, he had held them together; they
+were a disciplined body.  No man before his day had been able to hold
+them together, to discipline them, to force his will upon them.  No
+other parliamentary leader of the Irish before him produced results.
+But he produced them.  His followers feared him, and they feared him
+because he was so unlike themselves, so un-Irish.  His "mystery" lay in
+his immense capacity for holding his tongue; in his aloofness; in his
+concentration.  He knew how to get from the rest of the United Kingdom,
+from the English and Scotch and so on, what he wanted; as a rule, his
+followers did not.  He knew how to play the political game in the
+British way, with additions of his own; his {242} followers did not.
+They had not the patience; they may have had other qualities more
+captivating than his, but they had not the patience or the art of
+command.
+
+There was a time when I doubted that he was really so elusive as
+political persons said.  And if he were so, why?  It could not be for
+the mere pleasure of eluding, or deluding people.  There would be very
+little pleasure in that.  Well, one day my doubt was dispelled.
+
+Parnell had made an appointment to see me at the House of Commons.  It
+was not for the purposes of a newspaper interview, for he would not
+have given himself the trouble on that account.  It was not for any
+purpose or interest of my own.  I had conveyed to him a proposal from
+an American editor.  It was a proposal which Parnell had not only not
+declined, but which he was considering with some favour.  I was to meet
+him again and discuss it further.  The time and place were of his
+choosing.  I was punctually there, only to be met with the message:
+"Mr. Parnell is not in the House."
+
+That may have been technically true, as Mrs. A. may be technically "not
+at home" to Mrs. B.  But he was somewhere on the premises, because I
+saw him enter them.  There were good reasons for assuming that the
+appointment had not slipped his mind, or his memoranda.  And so I
+thought that the person who told me Parnell was not in the House might
+have invented the reply he gave.  He knew of the appointment, and,
+though he did not know its purpose, knew that Parnell had wished to
+{243} see me; why, then, should he give a reply which might put his
+Chief in the wrong.  But then, why had not Parnell sent word or left
+word, making another appointment?  He would scarcely have declined the
+proposal from America without the courtesy of another meeting.  Indeed,
+he had promised that.
+
+"Very well," I said, "I will wait."
+
+But the agreeable gentleman could not assure me that Mr. Parnell would
+be at the House that day.
+
+"Has he been here?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+It was too early to go away.  Question time was not over.  I decided to
+wait.  Mr. Parnell's representative withdrew.  After a while I thought
+there had been a mistake somewhere.  Then I remembered that the
+emissary "could not assure" me, etc.  I thought this odd, in the
+circumstances, and concluded not to wait any longer.  The affair was
+Parnell's, not mine.  But if he had decided to decline the proposal
+concerning which he had invited me to call upon him, it was not
+particularly civil of him to take this offhand way of doing so.  I left
+the House and went toward the Westminster Bridge station of the
+Underground Railway, just opposite the Clock Tower of St. Stephen's.
+Turning the corner by the gates of Palace Yard, I saw Parnell, ahead of
+me, cross the street and enter the railway station.  He took an
+eastbound train.  I was just in time to catch the same train but not to
+catch him.
+
+He alighted at the next station, Charing Cross.  So did I, intent on
+overtaking him.  But there was {244} a blocking crowd at the exit
+stairs where tickets were collected, and he was away first.  Up
+Villiers Street I followed him to the top at the Strand, where he
+turned into the South Eastern Railway station.  This was interesting.
+Why had n't he, I wondered, taken the outside stairs that led from
+Villiers Street into the station?
+
+"Possibly he has caught sight of me," I thought.  "Is he trying to
+elude me?  Let's see."
+
+He entered the South Eastern station at the left-hand door.  He left it
+presently by the door on the other side of the cab yard and crossed the
+Strand to the telegraph office, which at that time was exactly opposite
+the cab entrance to the railway.  I withdrew into the tobacconist's
+pavilion at the gate and there awaited Parnell's exit from the
+telegraph office.  But he didn't recross the Strand to the station.  A
+hansom was passing the telegraph office door.  Parnell ran out, hailed
+the cab, entered it, and drove eastward along the Strand.  I took
+another cab and kept his in sight.  His cab was held up by a block a
+little to the west of Wellington Street, where a long stream of traffic
+was crossing to Waterloo Bridge.  Parnell left his cab in the crush and
+disappeared in the pack of humans and vehicles.  I left my cab, walked
+back a short distance along the south side of the Strand, and there
+turned down by the Savoy Theatre, lingering a little, and then down the
+steps to the Embankment, keeping inside the gardens.  My guess was
+right.  Parnell passed within a few feet of me.  He was walking
+westward.  I walked inside the gardens, {245} he outside and well in
+advance.  He reached the Underground station again, passed through it
+to Villiers Street, walked up Villiers Street to the wooden stairs of
+the South Eastern, while I remained at the entrance of the Underground.
+Then I took a cab to my Club in Piccadilly.
+
+If Parnell thought that he had the best of the chase, that he had given
+me "the slip", he had another opinion, probably, when, as he was about
+to enter a suburban train, he was approached by a courteous young man
+who introduced himself as my assistant and said how fortunate it was
+meeting like this, because it gave him the opportunity to ask if Mr.
+Parnell would send me the reply which he had promised for that day, as
+I wished to cable it to New York.
+
+"Parnell did n't turn a hair," said my assistant, when he reported to
+me at the Club a few minutes later.  "If he were surprised, he did n't
+show it.  But he narrowed his eyes and said, in a frigid way that
+brought down the temperature of that cold station, 'I will write.'  And
+then the train started."
+
+"And he with it?" I asked.
+
+"No.  It left both of us on the platform.  I bade him good afternoon
+and came here.  I suppose he took the next train."
+
+I made no comment, but calling for a cable form, wrote on it this
+message for New York:
+
+    "Parnell declines."
+
+
+"But he has n't declined," my assistant exclaimed.
+
+{246}
+
+"No, but he will.  You can keep that cable message in your pocket until
+he does."
+
+The reason I had not followed Parnell into the South Eastern station
+was that in the train from Westminster to Charing Cross I had told my
+assistant what to do, and where I thought Parnell was going.
+
+For Parnell's reply I did n't care one way or another.  But I thought
+that I was even with him for his evasion of me at the House, of his
+treatment of an appointment which he had made, and of a courteous
+proposal.  My method of letting him know, without having said so, that
+I was not entirely ignorant of his reasons was, in the circumstances,
+quite legitimate.  He could not and did not take open exception to it.
+And for nearly thirty years I never mentioned it.  I do so now simply
+to illustrate what I mean by his elusiveness.  It may interest the few
+who remember some of his traits.  It is quite erroneous to suppose, as
+many souls not altogether simple seem to do, that a journalist always
+tells all that he knows.
+
+But I might throw in here this remark: In all that promenade and hide
+and seek in London streets, nobody seemed to recognise Parnell, nobody
+turned to look at him.  He was merely a passerby like another.  Crowds
+stare, they do not observe.  They see only what is pointed out to them,
+what they expect to see,--and not always that.
+
+Two or three days later, in reply to a telegram of inquiry, Parnell
+declined the proposal from America.  My assistant sent both the inquiry
+and my cable.  Concerning the latter, he asked me:
+
+{247}
+
+"What made you certain in advance?"
+
+"A rule known to astute politicians--2 and 2 make 4.  It is not altered
+by Home Rule, or other matters."
+
+I have often observed, with forty years of opportunity for doing so,
+that few persons know so little of conditions in Ireland, of Irish
+conditions in Parliament, of the "Irish movement", whatever that may be
+at any given time, as the Americans, and particularly the Irish in
+America.  I have had my share of rebuke for mentioning this.  An
+illustration will serve.
+
+During the summer of 1890 I had a few weeks in the United States.  One
+evening in Boston I happened to meet, as I was passing his office, a
+man whom I knew well, Jeffrey Roche, Editor of _The Pilot_, an Irish
+paper and the principal organ of Roman Catholicism in New England.
+Roche had been the assistant, and later became the successor, to the
+late John Boyle O'Reilly, and like him was a delightful and lovable
+fellow and the writer of charming verse.  He hated England, of course,
+and as I did not, we had many tilts, in print and out of it, but we
+were always good friends.
+
+"Hullo, Jeffrey," said I.
+
+"Hullo, my enemy," said he, laughing as we shook hands.
+
+"Why 'enemy'?" I asked.  "Has poor old Ireland another grievance?"
+
+"You wronged Parnell!"
+
+"Sit down and tell me about it," said I.
+
+And we went to dine at the nearest restaurant where the dear fellow
+explained that an article of {248} mine, sent from London and published
+in the _Boston Herald_ during the previous February, had "scandalised
+all Irishmen" and "imperilled the chances of Home Rule."
+
+"Dear, dear," said I, "that's a lot for one man to do!  How did it
+happen?"
+
+"Your article said that an action for divorce had been entered by a
+Captain O'Shea who named Parnell as corespondent."
+
+"Well, what of it?  Everybody knows it."
+
+"I don't know it.  We don't know it here.  Nobody knows it."
+
+"And you 're an editor, Jeffrey!  Is that the way you keep the run of
+the news?"
+
+"Such a case has never been tried."
+
+"It has not _yet_ been tried, you mean.  Of course not; it has to take
+its turn.  It will come on in the autumn."
+
+"Who is O'Shea?"
+
+I stared at Roche in amazement.  And then I laughed.
+
+"Jeffrey," said I, "you do it very well."
+
+"Do what?  No," said he, "it is n't acting.  Who is he?"
+
+I told him, and added that the question had been put differently by the
+Irish members of Parliament a long time ago.  They asked at one
+time--"Why is he?"  After a while they asked nothing.
+
+"And your article said that the Irish party would turn against Parnell
+if the case were tried, and that the English Liberals would throw him
+over, and the Home Rule cause would go to pieces."
+
+{249}
+
+"Pardon me, Jeffrey, my article said that those would be some of the
+results if O'Shea won his case, not if the case were tried."
+
+"Gladstone would n't turn against Parnell!"
+
+"Jeffrey, if that's all you know about the Irish Question, take my
+advice and return to Ireland by the next ship and study it on the spot.
+Then go to Westminster and study it there.  Learn what the Unionists
+think, what Liberals think, and what Mr. Gladstone, as leader of the
+Liberal Party, has to think, and--"
+
+"It's another Piggott trick!  Parnell's defence will show it all up."
+
+"Suppose he should n't defend himself?"
+
+"That's unfair!"
+
+"Let me tell you a thing or two.  Make a note of 'em, and see what
+happens within a year!"
+
+In the course of the next two hours Roche heard more of the inside of
+Irish and English politics than I would have supposed could previously
+have escaped an editor's mind.  It was clear that the comings and
+goings of Irish parliamentarians bent on propaganda and money-raising
+had not left behind much information that could guide a distant editor
+over a course abounding with obstacles.  My experience with Roche that
+evening resembled all the experiences I have ever had in the United
+States when talking on the Irish question with persons who seemed
+really anxious for information.  And the situation is much the same at
+this hour, differing only in kind, not in degree.
+
+The events of November and December, 1890, {250} proved to my doubting
+friend the truth of all I had told in print or out of it during the
+preceding months.  But he was as much surprised at the end of the year
+as he had been when I talked with him in May.  Roche died years ago;
+perhaps he knew by that time how matters stood.  At all events, perhaps
+he knows now.  The Irish in America were not in those days, and have
+not been since then much or far behind the scenes of a certain
+political stage.  They have paid their money, and, like other
+audiences, have remained in front to watch, to listen, to applaud, or
+to hiss.  If they have frequently applauded or derided in the wrong
+places, other audiences beholding other dramas have done no less.
+
+The conditions in Ireland, and concerning Ireland, are not new to me.
+I have known them pretty well for forty years.  If I were an Irishman I
+would think, no doubt, on most points political, with other fellow
+countrymen of my party.  But what party would that be?  I might answer,
+if you could tell me where I would have been born and of what religious
+faith.  My sympathy with Ireland is deep; it would be so, if only for
+the matchless, the invincible stupidity with which she has been and is
+still governed.  But her "injustices" and "woes" have long since been
+wiped out.  That is one thing they do not know in America.  But it is
+unnecessary to go beyond certain Nationalist speeches in the House of
+Commons to learn as much.  John Redmond said a good deal on that point.
+But now there are no Nationalist speeches, no Nationalist members to
+speak of.  The Nationalist Party is dead.  The {251} Irish seats in the
+House of Commons are empty, voluntarily empty.  Had Ireland done her
+share in the War, she would have had Home Rule before the Armistice.
+But she would not do her share, and she does not appear to desire Home
+Rule, and Great Britain did not try to force her.  In America the
+meaning of this is not quite understood.  While Great Britain was
+sending millions of men to the front, while her manhood was everywhere
+conscripted, while her fathers and sons were fighting the malignant
+German, while she was depriving herself of money, food, clothing,
+economising in the very necessaries of life, not merely in order to
+provide for her armies, but to aid her allies, Ireland did nothing.
+Ireland's food was not rationed; she had plenty and to spare; plenty to
+eat, plenty to drink, plenty to wear; petrol and motor cars were not
+forbidden her, they were forbidden to Britain; the luxuries which
+Britain denied herself were abundant in Ireland; she was, in fact, the
+most favoured country in Europe.  She was never so prosperous as
+throughout the war.
+
+But not a hand would she lift to defend her soil against the Germans.
+Thousands of Irishmen were at the front; they fought splendidly, but it
+was not in accordance with the will of Ireland that they fought.  It
+was because they willed it themselves.  Ireland was exempted from
+conscription.  Englishmen and Scotsmen, Welshmen and Cornishmen, all
+the men and all the women from Land's End to John O'Groat's have long
+memories for things like that.  And so have many Americans.
+
+{252}
+
+It is useless, I suppose, to say that Parnell's course had he lived to
+and through the war time, still leading Irish politics, would have been
+this, or would have been that.  He did not have to face such
+conditions; they were not forward in his time, but they were always at
+the back of the minds of some British statesmen, and he knew it.  He
+knew that the dominant reason which stood between Ireland and
+Independence was the need of Great Britain to guard herself against
+attacks and invasions from the Continent.  France was thought to be the
+potential enemy then, as she had been supposedly since the days of
+Napoleon I.  Well, we know what Germany did.  England could no more
+allow the island on her western flank to become an independent power
+than the United States could permit any of her forty-eight States to
+break away from the family roof.  Are arguments for separation based on
+racial and religious differences more valid in the case of Ireland than
+they are in the case of the United States?  What are the racial
+differences between Ireland and Great Britain compared with the racial
+differences in the United States, differences which arose through
+conquest and purchase, not alone through immigration?  The Indians, the
+Mexicans, the Spaniards, the French, the Negroes?  And then the welter
+of immigrations on top of these?  And is the argument for majority
+rule, based, as it is usually, upon the majority in Ireland, more
+valid?  Ireland is, and has been for centuries, an integral part, a
+vital part of the political organism known since 1801 as "the United
+Kingdom", and {253} of that organism the Irish population, in Ireland,
+is but a small minority of the whole!  In an age of democracy shall a
+minority rule?  In the United States we know something about secession;
+we have clear and firm opinions on it now.  Why should we expect
+Britain to permit the secession of Ireland?  And if the Ulster problem
+presents such "vast difficulties", what becomes of the famous
+panacea--Self-Determination?  Won't the panacea work in Ulster's case?
+
+These points were just as clear in Parnell's day as they are this
+morning.  The Home Rule cause was one thing; the Separatist,
+Independence case was quite distinctly another thing.  Parnell knew
+that he could never satisfy Ireland if Independence were what she
+wanted.  The hot-heads in her politics were seeking that and not Home
+Rule.  Home Rule was almost won by Parnell; after him it was thrown
+away by bitter dissensions within his party.  Thirty years more were
+required to bring the factions to a point where they could pull
+together.  Then the inevitable dissensions broke out anew.  The power
+that had been John Redmond's slipped away, and Redmond's party went to
+pieces as Parnell's had done.  It is folly to put the blame on the
+Nationalists alone, or on the Ulstermen alone.  The conditions do not
+mix.  They are antagonistic.
+
+And, though the ideals of Ulster are not the ideals of the rest of
+Ireland, must Ulster be punished for her ideals?  Ulster asks the
+privilege of being loyal to Britain.  Must she then be punished for her
+{254} loyalty and punished by Britain?  That is a question which
+Americans who are so frequently called upon to interfere in the Irish
+question never ask themselves, because it is never presented to them.
+But if they were to ask it concerning any State in the American Union
+in its relation to the Government at Washington, there is no doubt what
+their answer would be.
+
+What of the rest of Ireland?  At present the Sinn Feiners have the
+floor.  They proclaim openly what the Nationalists, or most of them,
+are said to have concealed; their object,--Independence.  But they know
+that if Ireland should become an Independent Power, she must meet her
+obligations of financial maintenance.  She could not meet them without
+drawing upon, or absorbing the revenues of Ulster.  And she might not
+be able to meet them then.  Are these matters, and matters such as
+these, to be settled, or even helped by pious resolutions passed in
+Madison Square Garden, or Faneuil Hall, or the Congress at Washington?
+
+It might be thought that the ingenuity of man, to say nothing of his
+justice, could find a way out of this age-long dilemma.  It can be seen
+that the dilemma is not quite so simple as at a distance it has been
+commonly supposed.  And it can be said that difficult as the problem
+is, it has become none the less difficult through the conflict of views
+and policies of Sinn Feiners, clericals, Home Rulers, Ulstermen, the
+Asquith government, or the Lloyd-George government, politicians in
+America, or rhetoricians anywhere.
+
+{255}
+
+I find that thirty years ago I wrote in an American newspaper: "Parnell
+puzzles the British mind, because measures proposed in behalf of
+Ireland are rejected whether they come from Mr. Gladstone or from Mr.
+Balfour.  It has not yet dawned upon the British mind that Parnell
+means that Parliament wastes its time over land bills and other
+remedial legislation; that the Irish mean to settle the land question,
+and all other Irish questions, without English assistance.  What he
+wants is Home Rule and not land acts.  What he wants beyond Home Rule
+he does not say, and no one is in his confidence."
+
+It was all very well, but he could not prevent the Briton from bringing
+gifts, nor could he avoid him.  The world has moved a long way since
+Parnell died and has brought changes of which he did not dream.  But
+there, stripped of detail, was his object.  If the ultimate object were
+not set forth, it was because he wanted Ireland to get Home Rule first.
+The difficulties of the step beyond that he knew well and appreciated
+thoroughly.  Perhaps it was because he knew the British view so well,
+and could understand it so well because he was half-English and
+half-American, that his point of view was not limited by Irish
+experiences and aspirations.  It may be that he did not expect
+Independence in his time, perhaps not really at any time.  But whether
+he did or not, he said in the House of Commons, in April, 1890, "We
+have not based our claims to nationhood on the sufferings of our
+country."  Well, if they were based on other {256} grounds, it is
+likely that he saw insurmountable obstacles in their way.
+
+I am far from agreeing with the conventional assertion that Parnell
+wrecked his party and postponed Home Rule by a generation.  Such
+assertions are made easily, and they are easily accepted by the crowd.
+They ignore many other factors, even factors that I have suggested
+here.  And they ignore the necessity which all politicians were under,
+or supposed themselves to be under, of claiming a virtue, though some
+had it not.  I think of some politicians who were professionally
+horrified over the O'Shea case, although their own lives would not have
+borne the examination of a divorce court, and who had not in their
+lives the mitigating circumstance that Parnell had,--an absorbing love.
+And I think of the politicians who were professionally "surprised" but
+who had had a long preparation for what was coming.  All the forces of
+hypocrisy and cant were let loose at that time, all the forces of envy,
+hatred, malice, and uncharitableness; and they did not rest until
+Parnell was crushed and dead.  The spectacle was enough to make one
+nauseated forever with politics--and some other things.
+
+Mrs. Parnell's book on her husband, published in 1916, throws a clear
+light upon that chapter in Parnell's life.  I see no reason to doubt
+its statements and conclusions; I see many reasons for accepting them.
+They confirm the impressions that many of us had thirty years ago, and
+relate facts that some of us more than surmised at that {257} time, and
+before it.  It is scarcely possible for them to deal with the hypocrisy
+and jealousy, revengefulness and cant that broke a man's life and a
+nation's cause.  These were not in Ireland alone.  Britain and America
+had their share.
+
+Was Parnell a great man?  I am inclined to think that he just missed
+greatness.  If he had won, there would be no doubt, I suppose.  That he
+was the man for his time there can be no denying.  It is idle, I
+suppose, to speculate whether he would have been the man for the time
+after Home Rule had been gained, for then the duties would have been
+vastly different.  And yet they would have called for qualities not
+common among Irishmen, among political Irishmen in Ireland, I
+mean,--the qualities that made him eminent and successful as a leader.
+He was not eloquent, but eloquence is not essential to greatness.  He
+did not inspire affection, devotion.  To this it may be answered that
+the people of his country loved him.  So they did.  But a great many
+politicians who were his followers did not.  Some of them entertained
+for him emotions quite opposite to love.  Of course he inspired
+respect; more than that, he instilled fear into the hearts of his
+parliamentary army.  They feared him then.  But if his aloofness, his
+detachment from the usual, even the unusual, affairs of society and
+human interest, was one of his most remarkable characteristics, it was
+in his favour rather than against him, it contributed to "the mystery"
+in which his personality was shrouded, a mystery cultivated less by
+himself than by legend.  {258} An eminent politician whose life is
+isolated must be "mysterious" to the crowd.
+
+He did not care for the play, for music, for pictures, or for
+literature, excepting when literature bore upon the work in hand.  He
+did not care for society, for sport, for games of any kind.  And so he
+was a mystery to more countries than one.  He was easily bored; the
+ordinary life of politics bored him, his followers bored him; it often
+bored him to make a speech.  His power was in his set purpose, his
+concentration upon it, his absolute disinterestedness.  Save in one
+instance, he ground no axe and was not the cause of axe-grinding by
+others.
+
+Although he was not an orator, he could and did put a case plainly,
+strongly, indeed with very great strength.  He was cool when it paid to
+be cool, vigorous when vigour was required; he was seldom impassioned.
+When he was angriest he was least stirred.  Internally he might rage,
+as when under general attack, when the assailants were, in a double
+sense, offensive, but outwardly he would be calm and pale.  You would
+know when he felt the fiercest stress, not by his voice nor by his
+actions, but by his pallor.  It was only in the last months of his life
+that he gave his temper free rein, let himself go, fiercely lashed his
+opponents, hitherto his partisans.  There was something of revenge in
+this, of resentful wrath long pent up.  Who shall say it was not
+justified, or that it was unnatural?
+
+What he would have been as an administrator we have no means of
+knowing.  What he would {259} have been as the leader of an Irish
+parliament we may at least imagine.  He had always been in Opposition.
+What he would have been in power we may guess but never know.  But his
+lot would not have been enviable.  It was never enviable.  His death,
+in 1891, was a happy release.
+
+
+
+
+{260}
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+"LE BRAV' GÉNÉRAL"
+
+Who _was_ Boulanger?
+
+At the Cheshire Cheese, a year before the war, a young Fleet Streeter
+asked the question.  He had heard some of us spinning yarns.  But the
+name of Boulanger meant nothing to him.  The world was created in the
+year he came to Fleet Street, say in 1908.
+
+There are times when I feel it necessary to apologise for writing of
+the days of antiquity.  There will certainly be some one to exclaim,
+when he sees the heading of this chapter, "Why drag Boulanger into
+_London Days_?"
+
+One answer would be: Because I knew Boulanger in London.
+
+"Was he ever here?  How strange we should have forgotten it!"
+
+Not in the least strange.  Boulanger was forgotten soon after he
+arrived.  He arrived at the Hotel Bristol, behind Burlington House, and
+was cheered by a few waiters and chambermaids.  It was a murky
+afternoon in the summer of '89,--dark, damp, and dreary.  I saw him
+alight from his carriage.  Some of the papers next day told of "the
+enthusiastic {261} greeting" he had received.  Thus history is made.  A
+few waiters, a porter or two, half a dozen chambermaids, and, of
+course, a manager.  These were the enthusiasts.
+
+It was a little disappointing to those who love "scenes", or have to
+describe them.  Nothing happened.  Of course, it was not disappointing
+to realise that one was a prophet.  I had prophesied a scene like this,
+months before, when quite another kind of scene was being played in
+Paris, when Boulanger had the ball at his feet, or the game in his
+hands, if you prefer a choice of metaphors.  He did n't play.  There
+was merely an escape of gas from the balloon.  The gas was not
+inflammable.
+
+"Le brav' Général" they called him.  Up to the twenty-eighth of
+January, 1889, he was the hope of France.  He was to be Head of the
+Army, Prime Minister, or President, or King, or Emperor, or Dictator,
+whatever he chose.  He was to save France.  She needed saving.
+Politically, she was in the dismallest bog.  She needed a MAN, thought
+she had found him in Boulanger, and on the twenty-seventh of January,
+Paris was to elect him to Parliament.  Paris would give him a backing
+so enormous that he would "seize the reins of power."  There would be a
+_coup d'état_.  That was what the papers said.  There was quite a
+commotion, naturally.
+
+Obviously I must go to Paris before the twenty-seventh; I must see the
+_coup d'état_ whose approach was thundering from all the presses of
+Europe.  There would be articles by the yard.  In those {262} times,
+newspaper reproductions of photographs were even less satisfactory than
+they are now.  I looked about for an artist who could go with me and
+illustrate my articles.  He must know something about the trick of
+drawing for newspaper reproduction, he must be a quick worker, for
+there was no time to be lost, and he must not be too well known because
+the chances were that a well-known artist would n't be able to cast his
+work aside at a day's notice, and bolt with me for Paris.  I sent my
+assistant to find the right man.
+
+He returned to me with a dejected look.  "I 've found only one man who
+can go," said he.
+
+"One is enough," said I.
+
+"Yes, but--will he do?  I 've only these two specimens of his work to
+show you."  And he laid two small drawings before me.
+
+"Capital!" said I.
+
+"He has been in Paris, studied art there.  And he lives in Chelsea."
+
+"Terms all right?" I asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I 'll see him to-morrow.  By the way, what is his name?
+
+"L. Raven-Hill."
+
+And so it came about that the young man--he was a very young man then,
+under twenty-two--who was to win fame as one of the principal
+cartoonists for Punch, went to Paris with me and illustrated the
+Boulanger election.  He illustrated for me other subjects in and about
+Paris.  And when I went to Ireland, to do a series of articles a little
+{263} later, he was the illustrator.  And he drew London subjects for
+me.  In fact, he was for about six months my chosen illustrator.  Then
+somebody in authority on the other side of the Atlantic wanted the
+preference given to certain other artists.  Authority, of course, had
+to be obeyed, since it was paymaster.  And in this case it had in its
+eye one or two young men who had come abroad, and who had influence
+enough to pull strings at headquarters.  They were cousins to the
+owner's aunts, or something like that.  Their work was too careless,
+grotesque, and altogether weak.  After allowing them sufficient
+opportunity to demonstrate this, even to the satisfaction of their
+proprietary relatives, they were released from service.  And ever
+afterwards I insisted upon choosing my own illustrators.  But meantime
+I had lost Raven-Hill, and some foreign mission calling me afield,
+there was no opportunity for renewing the connection.  When I returned
+to London, Raven-Hill had found his feet, as I knew he would.  The
+other day we compared our recollections of that time.  They did not
+differ.
+
+His work was admirable, even in those early days.  It lent distinction
+to the text.  I daresay that may have been the only distinction the
+text had.  Raven-Hill entered into the spirit of the thing, and would
+go to any inconvenience to get what I wanted.  And in the Boulanger
+campaign, that meant a good deal of inconvenience.  We travelled by
+night trains because they were cheapest.  If they were cheapest, they
+were also slowest.  But all was grist that came to our mill.
+
+{264}
+
+Paris we reached two days before the election.  We looked for
+excitement but found none.  It is not every day that Paris elects a
+"Saviour of France."  It was preparing to elect one, and it was certain
+that he was to save France.  There was a frenzy of bill-posting, but
+that was all.  All the electioneering was done by post and posters.
+Not a speech was made.  Posters covered everything, inches deep.  Paris
+was smothered by them.  Boulanger posters were covered with Jacques
+posters.  Jacques was the candidate opposing "Le brav' Général."
+Jacques was a nobody with money.  Only a nobody with money could have
+afforded to stand against "Le brav' Général."  Before he offered
+himself for the sacrifice, nobody had ever heard of Jacques.  After
+election day nobody heard of him again.  He had his little explosion of
+glory, and then happy obscurity.  But his account for bill-posting and
+printing must have been heavy.  So must have been Boulanger's.
+
+Statuary was covered with bills, and so were cabs.  A Boulangist would
+plaster a bill over the nose of a bronze lion.  A Jacquesist would
+follow and cover the Boulangist bill.  The lion in the Place de la
+Republique was hideous with bills from his snout to the tip of his
+tail, a great-coat of paper.  Above the lion a stone shaft was
+inscribed:
+
+       A
+   LA GLOIRE
+     DE LA
+   RÉPUBLIQUE
+   FRANÇAISE
+
+{265}
+
+The Glory of the French Republic seemed great enough to bear with
+equanimity the burden of Boulangist printing.  The men who were posting
+Boulangist bills carried ladders.  The Jacques men had no ladders.  And
+so the Boulangists had the best of it.  Wherever there was a smooth
+surface, and in numerous places where there was not, bills went up.
+They were manifestoes, proclamations, election cries.  Nobody made a
+speech.  The printer did all.  Arches, façades, trees, cabs, even the
+Opera House itself, theatres, shops, were splashed with coloured bills,
+Boulanger over Jacques and Jacques over Boulanger.  And only small boys
+took notice.
+
+The papers said that large reserves of police were held in readiness;
+they said the military had been strengthened.  One of them said that
+detachments of cavalry had been shod with rubber so they might come
+noiselessly upon rioters and smite them unawares.  An editor applauded
+the ingenious device.  He forgot that King Lear, long before, had
+thought it
+
+  "... a delicate stratagem
+  To shoe a troop of horse with felt."
+
+The London papers were even more excited than the French.  In fact, it
+had been the alarmist reports of Paris correspondents and news bureaux
+that had incited me to the journey.  I looked for the exciting scenes
+these gentlemen had witnessed and foretold.  There was nothing visible
+to justify their fears.  Where were the marching crowds that were
+singing "The Marseillaise"?  They had not marched, they {266} had not
+assembled, they had not sung a note.  It is not easy to describe an
+invisible demonstration.
+
+We went wherever a demonstration was possible or probable; we covered
+Paris by cab, by bus, on foot.  Excepting for the posters, Paris
+carried itself as usual.
+
+"Go to the Fourth Arrondissement if you would see the fun," said a
+friendly councillor who knew the ropes.  We went, but "the fun" did not
+come.  We found three hundred persons at the _mairie_, half of them
+registering, and the other half looking on.  They were as solemn as if
+they had been paying taxes.  The next day, Sunday, the voting took
+place.  There were 568,697 voters on the registries of Paris.  Of these
+32,837 did not vote at all, and 27,118 voted neither for Boulanger nor
+for Jacques.  Boulanger won, hands down.
+
+At eleven o'clock on the Sunday morning we were at Boulanger's house,
+expecting that the world would be there.  The world was not there, nor
+was anybody but ourselves.  The Rue Dumont d'Urville (Boulanger lived
+at Number 11) looked deserted.  It was off the _Champs Élysées_, near
+the _Arc de Triomphe_.  A thousand persons a day had, for weeks, been
+calling on "Le brav' Général."  In the preceding fortnight the number
+had doubled.  "To-day the General receives no one," said the boy in
+buttons who was sweeping out the hall.  So much the better; if he
+receives no one to-day, the more chance of seeing him.  Besides,
+Raven-Hill wanted to draw Boulanger from the life.  It would be a fine
+thing to have drawn the "Saviour of France" on the {267} day when he
+saved France; perhaps while he was in the very act of saving her.
+
+"It is impossible," repeated the boy in buttons, "the General does not
+receive to-day."
+
+But the General was a political candidate, and the boy in buttons was a
+Jew.  Palm oil passed from one of us to the buttoned youth.  Raven-Hill
+sketched him.  Jointly we begged for his autograph.  He wrote it
+underneath his portrait--"Joseph."
+
+"Joseph," said I, "you are famous from this hour.  Your portrait will
+appear in an American newspaper."  Joseph grinned.  He yielded.  He
+disappeared with our cards.  Returning presently, he said that the
+General would receive us, and he directed us up the stairs.  On a
+landing above stood "Le brav' Général."  He bowed, he shook hands in
+the English fashion, he did not embrace us in the French; he smiled, he
+bade us enter his study.  Monsieur l'artiste might sketch where he
+liked.  And R-H. sat in a corner, which commanded the large room, and
+began to draw without losing a minute.
+
+Would M. le Général talk with me a little while the artist drew?
+
+M. le Général begged a thousand pardons, but he was too much occupied;
+moreover he was never interviewed.  Would we smoke?  We would.  He
+passed cigarettes.
+
+"But, M. le Général, the election?"
+
+"_C'est une chose faite!_"
+
+That was all he would say.  And then it was only eleven in the morning.
+But he declared that the {268} thing was done.  And this with a calmly
+complacent air.  I admired his "nerve", as we would say in America.
+But that was all he would say:
+
+"_C'est une chose faite!_"
+
+He repeated it.  And I took it that France was saved.  And so she was,
+but not in the way he had expected; and not by him.
+
+Raven-Hill, whose French was at any rate in better working order than
+mine, tried questioning, but "Le brav' Général," with great courtesy,
+begged a thousand pardons and deprecated "interviewing."
+
+I begged ten thousand pardons, and R-H. resumed his sketching.  "Le
+brav' Général" handed me a small bundle of printed matter,--pamphlets,
+proclamations, manifestoes, announcements.  I would find it all there,
+he said.  I looked them over, thanking him, and saying that I had
+previously read them, which was the case.
+
+"Ah," said he, "_c'est une chose faite._"
+
+As a matter of fact, I was quite content.  I was getting what I wanted,
+the drawings.  I did not want political platitudes, and before election
+day I had formed the opinion that political platitudes were the
+General's stock-in-trade.  He had not a single political idea.  What he
+always said was what his backers wanted him to say.
+
+He was "the man-on-horseback", and that was enough.  France had been
+looking a long time for the man-on-horseback.  He would ride in and
+conquer the internal foes of France; they were numerous enough and to
+spare.  He would unite the country, bring it stability, cleanse the
+Augean {269} stables, win back Alsace-Lorraine, humble the Germans who
+had humiliated them, who had menaced them ever since 1870-1871.  He
+would be a MAN, this man-on-horseback.  And Boulanger had been riding a
+white horse these three years.  Sometimes he rode a black horse.
+
+At one end of the room, behind the chair where he sat at his writing
+table, was a large painting, a very large one, of General Boulanger on
+his horse.
+
+The room in which we sat was large, too.  It had been a studio and was
+now a study.  A great fireplace occupied one end of it, and the General
+on horseback occupied the other end.  The general himself sat below the
+portrait, at his writing table, while Raven-Hill drew and I smoked.  He
+could not have better suited the artist's purpose.  He was not quite
+like the photographs, engravings, paintings, "reproductions" of him
+that one had seen, and that filled France.  His hair was not clear
+black, and brushed nattily; it was streaked with grey, and worn
+shoe-brush fashion.  His beard was tawny, touched with grey.  His face
+was a stronger one, his head a better one, than the conventional
+portraits prepared you for.  He was between fifty-one and fifty-two at
+that time.  A handsome man, but disappointing.  He did n't impress one
+as being a man of authority, of decisions.  What his mouth was like,
+and what his chin, I do not know.  His beard concealed them.  But I did
+not get from him the impression of strength.  And yet he was the most
+popular man in France.  And that day the eyes not only of France, but
+of Europe, were watching him.
+
+{270}
+
+His face was deeply lined; his eyes were grey; he was in fatigue dress.
+May I whisper in your ear?  I do not believe that he was pressed with
+work; I believe that he was posing for us.
+
+He was a vain creature.  His vanity had been much indulged during the
+three years or more preceding.  He was an ordinary man of showy gifts,
+an efficient general in a small way.  He had been a favourite of
+fortune, and usually in trouble with his superior officers.  He always
+came out of the trouble "at the top of the heap", as they say.
+Freycinet made him Minister of War in '86.  The Ministry of War
+advertised him up and down the land.  It may be said to have begun his
+popularity.  He looked well after the lot of the private soldier.  As
+the private soldier came from every home in France, Boulanger had
+advocates who carried his name and praises to every fireside.  He
+understood that sort of thing.  His star was rising fast.  He glittered
+before the eyes of all men.  He was an heroic figure at reviews, a much
+sought figure in drawing-rooms; the clericals were zealous in his
+favour, purses were at his disposal.  He was the popular hero, without
+having done anything heroic.  Powerful partisans played, even paid for
+his favour.  His principal backer was the Duchesse D'Uzes.  There was
+an abundance of money.
+
+Well, when the artist had got what he wanted, had drawn the room and
+Boulanger, we took our leave and went forth for the melancholy Jacques
+and election scenes, saying _au revoir_ to Joseph at the door.  Joseph
+said--I think he had been {271} instructed to say it--and he said it
+with an air of one who whispered confidences:
+
+"The General will dine this evening at the Café Durand."
+
+The Café Durand, of course, was opposite the Madeleine.  We stopped
+there on our way about town.  We lunched there, and made friends with
+the head waiter, Edmond, a portly personage of manner and renown.
+Edmond was enlisted, as Joseph had been.  And he signed his portrait
+with a flourish quite royal--Edmond Ulray.
+
+Could R-H. see the private room in which General Boulanger and his
+friends would dine that evening?
+
+But certainly.  And Monsieur could draw it if he chose.
+
+Of course, that was what he chose to do.  And when the evening came, it
+was quite a simple matter for Edmond to arrange that R-H., without
+being seen, should draw "Le brav' Général", and Comte Dillon, and Paul
+de Cassagnac, Henri Rochefort, and Paul Deroulade, at the table, in the
+front room, up one flight, on the corner overlooking the Madeleine.
+
+Here was the centre of interest that night,--that room in the Café
+Durand.  Would "Le brav' Général" press the button there, spring his
+_coup d'état_, show himself to the crowd, and proceed triumphantly from
+there to the Élysées?  That was what the crowd expected.  That was what
+it wanted.  I was outside with the crowd.  R-H. was inside, sketching.
+It was marvellous how quickly he worked.
+
+The crowd knew that Boulanger was in the Café {272} Durand; they knew
+that Jacques was in a café on the opposite side of the way; they knew
+which was the winner.  And the thoroughfares were packed with people.
+They wanted to march, they wanted to sing, they wanted to cheer.  But
+nobody started them.  There was no demonstration.  Neither side wished
+a demonstration to go the wrong way.  Both sides knew that the
+government had determined to put down riots, revolutions, and
+disorders.  But why did n't somebody _start something_?  Jacques, being
+defeated, did not show himself.  Boulanger was victorious, but he did
+not show himself.  The crowd moved back and forth, packed within the
+boulevards.  But nothing happened.  No hero appeared at a window;
+nobody made a speech; not a curtain was drawn aside; not a flag
+fluttered.  By midnight the crowd had gone home to bed.
+
+And that is why I prophesied that night Boulanger's utter collapse and
+his probable flight for safety.  Little wisdom was required to make the
+prophecy.  A man who has the ball at his foot and doesn't kick it is
+not the "saviour" of a nation.  Boulanger had lost his chance.  The
+next day he was no longer the most popular of Frenchmen.
+
+He "saved France" by his failure.
+
+A little later he fled to Belgium.  A little later still he turned up
+in London, as I have said.  But he did not stay long at the Hotel
+Bristol.  He took a furnished house, Number 51 Portland Place, brought
+his horses from Paris, and gave out that he would ride in the Park at
+the fashionable hour.  But he did not ride.  And as he did not keep his
+word {273} in so small a matter, London lost what small interest it had
+in him when he did ride, or when he received.  One day "a grand
+Boulangist demonstration" was announced to take place at the Alexandra
+Palace.  Proceedings, more or less elaborate, were advertised, and they
+were to end with a "banquet" at five shillings a head.  Covers were to
+be laid for twenty-six hundred persons.  Only six hundred persons
+appeared.  Boulanger was to be "the lion of the season."  I don't know
+who thought so besides himself.  He issued an address "To the People;
+My Sole Judge", meaning the people of Paris.  The address was nine
+columns long!
+
+It fell to my lot to interview him on two or three occasions.  I did
+not wish to do so, but there were requests from headquarters.  Each
+time he sang the old songs.  The interview that you had with him one
+week would do for another, with the change of a few words.  He really
+liked to talk.  He pretended that he disliked being interviewed on
+political subjects, but that was mere mock-modesty.  He spoke English
+well enough.  In fact, he had been a schoolboy at Brighton, and he had
+represented France at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in
+1876.  He was merely "layin' low" that day in Paris, like Brer Fox,
+only he was not Brer Fox, his one desire being not to have anything
+said or done on the twenty-seventh of January that would give the
+Government an excuse for a raid on his designs.  I think he was rather
+a pitiable object.  Few others thought so before the twenty-eighth of
+January, 1889.  He was merely a mechanism for the issue of {274}
+promissory notes.  It was about two years after his arrival in London
+that he committed suicide on the continent.
+
+How well he illustrated Lincoln's saying about "fooling the people"!
+But he did not fool himself.  He was the tool of more designing persons.
+
+    "_C'est une chose faite._"
+
+
+
+
+{277}
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Aberdeen University, 85
+
+Acting, art of, 187, 188, 191
+
+Admiralty, the, 11
+
+Agassiz, Mrs., 128
+
+_Alaska_ (steamer), 6
+
+Albert Hall, 16
+
+Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, anecdote of, 227-228; on Tennyson Memorial
+committee, 128
+
+Aldworth, summer home of Tennyson, 125, 126
+
+Aldwych, 11
+
+Alhambra (music hall), 16
+
+Alma-Tadema, Sir Laurens, 45, 52
+
+_Alsatia_ (Anchor Line steamer), 1; description of, 3-4
+
+"Altavona" (by Blackie), 87
+
+Amiens, 24; cathedral of, 20
+
+Anecdotes of Aldrich, 227-228; of Drummond, 181-182; of Gladstone,
+232-233; of Tennyson, 121, 122-123, 129-130, 134, 136; of Whistler,
+157-160, 162, 163, 164, 166-167
+
+_Antiquary_ (magazine), 133
+
+Architecture of London, 10-13
+
+_Arizona_ (Guion Line steamer), 6, 39
+
+Arnold, Sir Edwin, quoted, 124
+
+Artistic sensibilities, author's comment on, 237-238
+
+Atelier Gleyre, Paris, 45
+
+
+Bancrofts, The, 16, 53, 186
+
+Barbour, Robert W., description of Professor Blackie, 92-95
+
+Barrie, Sir James, 17
+
+Beaconsfield, Lord, quoted, 142
+
+Bell, Alexander Graham, brings telephone instruments to Europe, 106
+
+Besant, Sir Walter, 17
+
+Betterton, fame of, 185
+
+Bismarck, 139
+
+Black, William, 17, 53
+
+Blackie, John Stuart, 79-95; ancestry and early life, 84-85; as a
+teacher, 85-86, 90; Barbour's word picture of, 92-95; comments on
+pictures in home, 88-89; compiles anthology of Scottish songs, 87;
+conversation of, 83-84; description of, 79-80, 81, 91; endows a
+professorship at Edinburgh, 87; home of, 87; lecture in Glasgow, 91;
+lecturer in Scotland, 86; love for Greek, 82, 90; novel by, 87;
+patriotism of, 87; portraits of, 88; quoted, 79-80, 81, 82-83, 84, 85,
+86-87, 89, 90, 91, 95; study of, 90; works of, 86-87
+
+Blackwood, 53
+
+Booth, Edwin, 186; art of, 192
+
+_Boston Courier_, author's first copy published in, 28
+
+_Boston Herald_, author's engagement with, 39-41; author's article
+published in, 248
+
+Bottomley, Dr. J. T., assistant to Lord Kelvin, 106
+
+Boulanger, General, 260-274; address of, 273; arrival in London,
+260-261; as candidate for French Parliament, 261, 264-265; at café
+dinner, 271; author's impressions of, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273-274;
+collapse and flight, 272; committed suicide, 274; demonstration for, at
+Alexandra Palace, 273; description of, 269-270; drawn by Raven-Hill,
+269, 271; elected to Parliament, 266; interviewed, 273; "man on
+horseback," 268-269; Minister of War, 270; represented France at
+Centennial Exposition, 273
+
+Braddon, Miss, 17
+
+Bridge, Sir Frederick, organist at Westminster Abbey, 53, 55, 56
+
+Brixton (London), 2, 3
+
+Browning, Mrs., quoted, 52, 54
+
+Browning, Robert, burial in Westminster Abbey, 51-56; death of, 51;
+friendship with Moscheles, 42, 44, 47, 50; portrait of, 46
+
+Bryce, Lord, 52
+
+Buildings, discomfort of some English, 13; interiors of English, 12-13;
+London public, 11, 12; warming of English, 12-13
+
+Burbage, fame of, 185
+
+Burdett-Coutts, Baroness, welcoming Stanley, 206, 207
+
+Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 53
+
+Burns, John, 222; agitator in "Dock Strike," 223, 229-234; anecdote of
+Gladstone, 232-233; day with Meredith, 224-234, 238; dress, 234, 239;
+hobbies of, 226-227; meetings with author, 223, 229-234, 238, 239
+
+Busses, 13-14
+
+Butler, Doctor (of Trinity College), 53
+
+
+Cable, first Atlantic, 100; broke, 101; final success of, 102; first
+message over, 101; laid, 101; Lord Kelvin's connection with, 100;
+operated, 101
+
+Cadogan Gardens, home of Moscheles in, 42, 47, 50
+
+Café Royal, 16
+
+Calais, 18
+
+Cameron, Mrs., 115; anecdote of, 115-116; description of, 115, 116,
+117; distributes her photographs, 122; encounter with Garibaldi, 116;
+energy of, 119; letter quoted, 123-124; photographs of Tennyson, 117-118
+
+Canterbury, 18; Archbishop of, 54
+
+Capel, Monsignor, 34-39; author's meeting with, 35; visit to, 37-38;
+death, 39; description of, 35-36, 37; goes to America, 39; home of, 36;
+hospitality of, 37; loss of standing, 38; pamphlet by, 38
+
+Carlton, Hotel, 16
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, 162; Whistler's portrait of, sold, 166-167
+
+Carlyle Mansions, 165
+
+Cecil, Hotel, 15
+
+Cedar Villa (Kensington), tenants of, 36, 37
+
+Cederström, Baroness, _see_ Patti
+
+_Century Magazine_, 45
+
+Chelsea Hospital bombed, 135
+
+Cheshire Cheese, London, 260
+
+Cheyne Walk, Whistler's house in, 161; author's home in, 49, 161, 164,
+222
+
+Cinema, limitations of, 186-187
+
+Civil War, American, Gladstone's attitude toward, 143
+
+Clémenceau, 139, 140
+
+Cleveland, Grover, portrait of, 46
+
+Coliseum the, 16
+
+Colvin, Sir Sidney, 52
+
+Committee Room Fifteen, 240, 241
+
+Comparison of English and American heating, 12-13; of French and
+English, 19; of sea travel, 3, 4-5
+
+Craig-y-Nos Castle (home of Patti), 57; beauty of, 61; description of,
+71-72; entertainments at, 74; evenings at, 70; guests at, 58-59, 71;
+lantern show at, 77; life at, 71; meals at, 60, 61, 67; merriment at,
+68; orchestrion at, 70; party at, 76-77; salute to author from, 78;
+theatre in, 72; treasures of, 75; view from, 60
+
+Criterion (restaurant), 16
+
+
+Davy, Sir Humphry, 110
+
+De Keyser's Academy (Antwerp), 45
+
+Deland, Margaret, on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+"Dimbola" (home of Watts, and later of Mrs. Cameron), 115, 119
+
+Dollis Hill (Lord Aberdeen's home), 153, 154
+
+"Dombey and Son", clothiers, 1
+
+Drummond, Henry, 170-184; achievements of, 178, 182; anecdote of,
+181-182; capacity for friendship, 171; death, 184; description of, 172,
+174, 176; financial independence, 179; friendship with D. L. Moody,
+171, 178; geologist, 174; home, 175; lecturer at Lowell Institute,
+Boston, 175; opinion of Gladstone, 184; optimism, 181; popularity of
+books, 171, 172, 174; professor in Free Church College, at Glasgow,
+174; quoted, 171, 172, 177, 179-181, 182-183, 184
+
+Drury Lane Theatre ("Old Drury"), 16, 90
+
+Du Maurier, George, 53
+
+
+Edinburth, 79, 80; University, 85
+
+Electricity, first house in Britain lighted by, 105; transmission of,
+102-103
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 109
+
+Emin Pasha, 205
+
+Empire (theatre), 16
+
+English discomforts, 13; ills, 13
+
+"Essays on Social Subjects" (by Blackie), 86
+
+
+Fame, length of an actor's, 186
+
+Faraday, Michael, discovery of, 101
+
+Farrar, Dean, 53
+
+Farringford (home of Lord Tennyson), 114; description of, 119, 126;
+views from, 120
+
+"Felix Mendelssohn's letters to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles", 44
+
+Fenchurch Street Station (London), 1, 7
+
+Field, Cyrus, connection with laying American cable, 101
+
+Fields, James T. (publisher), 130, 131
+
+Fields, Mrs. James T., on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+Fleet Street, 8, 15, 26
+
+Flint Cottage, Box Hill (Meredith's home), 223-224
+
+Floyth, Mrs., housekeeper to John Stuart Mill, 7-8
+
+Foch, General, 139
+
+Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston, 16, 187
+
+Ford, Sheridan, pursuit of, by Whistler, 160-161
+
+"Four Phases of Morals" (by Blackie), 86
+
+France formerly considered England's potential enemy, 252
+
+Free Church College, Glasgow, 174
+
+French and English, comparison of, 19
+
+Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 117, 118, 122; author's fondness for, 114,
+115; description of, 114; Lady Ritchie's home at, 134-135; life at,
+136; Tennyson's home at, 114; Walker's theory regarding its antiquity,
+131-133; Watts' home at, 115
+
+Froude J. A. (historian), 52
+
+
+Garibaldi at Farringford, 116
+
+Garrick, fame of, 185
+
+"Gentle Art of Making Enemies" (by Whistler), 158, 159, 160, 161
+
+Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 138-156; achievements of, 138; attitude
+toward American Civil War, 143, toward Irish question, 143; at Lord
+Aberdeen's house, 153-154; as an actor, 152; author's opinion of, 140,
+141-142, 144, 145, 148, 150; Burns' story of, 232-233; Drummond's
+opinion of, 184; eloquence of, 138, 140, 141-142, 156; energy of, 145,
+150; face of, 148, 151; influence of, 138, 151, 155; integrity of, 139;
+interest in causes, 143, 153; leadership, 141, 151, 153; letter to
+Patti, 62-63; object of adulation and hatred, 142-143; opinion of
+Turks, 138; power of concentration, 152, 153; quotation from Morley's
+"Life" of, 141; quoted, 146-147, 150; tribute at Manchester, 149-150;
+unsurpassed as a talker, 138
+
+Glasgow University, 97, 99
+
+Gordon, Gen. C. G., as a fighter, 147
+
+Gounod, portrait of, 46
+
+Grand Hotel, 15
+
+"Great Britain and Rome" (pamphlet by Capel), 38
+
+Great Central Hotel, 16
+
+_Great Eastern_ (cable-laying ship), 112
+
+Greeley, Horace, handwriting of, 188-189
+
+Grove, Sir George, 53
+
+
+Hambourg, Mark, description of, 47-48
+
+Hanway, Jonas, 15
+
+Hare, John, 16, 53, 186
+
+Harrison, Frederic, 52
+
+Harte, Bret, 53, 217
+
+Hats, 15
+
+Hay market Theatre, 16
+
+Haythornthwaite, Father Peter, friend of Tennyson, 122, 126
+
+Heating, comparison of English and American, 12-13
+
+Helmholtz, quoted, 110
+
+Heyermans (artist), 45
+
+Hippodrome, 16
+
+Holborn Restaurant, 16
+
+Holborn Viaduct, lighting on, 9
+
+Holmes, Doctor Oliver Wendell, on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+Holyoake, George Jacob, portrait of, 46
+
+Home Rule cause (Ireland), 251, 252, 253, 256
+
+"Homer and the Iliad" (by Blackie), 86
+
+_Hooper_ (cable-laying ship), 112
+
+Hotels, 15-16
+
+Houghton, H. O., on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+Howe, Julia Ward, on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+Hughes-Stanton, H., R.A.; home of, 36
+
+Hunt, Holman, 52, 216
+
+
+"In Bohemia with George du Maurier" (by Moscheles), 44
+
+Individuals and the masses, 197
+
+Ireland, argument for majority rule in, 252-253; attitude in World War,
+251; author's views on, 250-257; conditions in, 250; exempted from
+conscription, 251; Home Rule in, 251, 252; ideals of, 253; parties in,
+254; racial differences with Great Britain, 252; vital part of
+England's political organism, 252
+
+Irish question, 138, 143; ignorance of Americans concerning, 247, 249,
+250, 254
+
+Irving, Sir Henry, 16, 52, 185-204; air of authority, 201;
+achievements, 191; appeal to the eye, 192; as actor-manager, 193, 194;
+at Drury Lane, 190; author's opinion of acting, 191, 192, 193; burial
+at Westminster Abbey, 190; death, 188, 190, 204; delineation of
+character, 192; first-night customs, 204; first visit to America, 46;
+handwriting, 188, 189; hospitality, 202; in "Merchant of Venice", 193,
+194, 195, 198; in private life, 201-202; limitations, 191; loss of
+popularity, 190; loyalty of public, 190-191, 197; management of Lyceum
+Theatre, 190; mannerisms, 188, 191, 194, 199-201; national figure, 188;
+place as an actor, 187-188, 204; signature, 189; supper parties, 203-204
+
+Israels, portrait of, 46
+
+
+Jefferson, Joseph, 186
+
+Jephson (Stanley's officer), 209-211
+
+Jewett, Sarah Orne, on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+Joachim, violinist, friend of Moscheles, 45
+
+Joule, James Prescott, 110; appreciated by Kelvin, 111
+
+Journalist, as a party man, 146
+
+Jowett, Professor, 53
+
+
+Kelvin, Lord, 96-113; achievements of, 99, 112; acquires White's
+business, 100; addresses Royal Society in London, 104-105; ancestry,
+98; appointed professor of Natural Philosophy, at Glasgow University,
+97; character of, 97, 98, 108, 112; chooses title, 99; early days, 98;
+energy of, 96-97, 113; enters university at ten, 97; fiftieth
+anniversary at Glasgow, 109; first published papers, 110; fondness for
+asking questions, 108-109; greatest master of natural science of 19th
+century, 97, 107; installs telephone in home, 106; introduces electric
+lighting in home, 105; inventions of, 100, 106; lameness of, 103, 108;
+made a peer, 99; method of conducting classes, 103-104, 108; outlines
+plan of boy's education, 97-98; practicality of, 99-100, 103-104, 105;
+prophecy regarding electricity, 102-103; quoted, 110, 112, regarding
+energy, 111; Sir William Ramsay's opinion of, 103-104; study of, 112;
+theory of existence of organic life, 107; typical day of, 113; work on
+Atlantic cables, 100; yachtsman and master navigator, 106
+
+Kendals, the, 16, 186
+
+Kinglake, A. W., 52
+
+Kingsway, 11
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, 17
+
+Knight, Professor (of St. Andrews University), 53
+
+Knowles, James, of Nineteenth Century, designer of Tennyson's home at
+Aldworth, 125
+
+
+Lablache, singer, friend of Moscheles, 45
+
+_Lalla Rookh_, Lord Kelvin's yacht, 106
+
+"Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands" (by Blackie), 87
+
+Lathrop, George Parsons, Boston editor, 28
+
+Law Courts, the, 15
+
+Leadenhall Street (London), 1, 2
+
+League of Nations, 140
+
+Lecky (historian), 52
+
+Leighton, Lord, 53
+
+"Letters, Poems, and Pensées" (Barbour), 92
+
+"Life" of Gladstone, Morley's, quoted, 141
+
+Li Hung Chang, as a questioner, 108-109
+
+London, architecture of, 10-13; charm of, 10, 13; description of, 1, 2,
+10; drawbacks, 9; Esperanto Club of, 48; "finest site in Europe", 11;
+former leisure of travel in, 13-14; hats in, 15; hotels in, 15-16;
+improvements of, 11; interiors of buildings, 12-13; in the late
+seventies, 9-17; lighting of, 9; most livable place in world, 9; music
+halls, 16; public buildings of, 11; regiments in, 17; restaurants, 16;
+street cries in, 14; theatre crowds, 194, 195-196, 197; ugliness of
+modern, 11; views in, 12; writers in, 16-17
+
+London Bridge, 17
+
+"London Letters" of author, 29, 30
+
+Lowell Institute, Boston, Drummond lectures at, 175
+
+Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Avebury), 52
+
+Lyceum Theatre, 187, 202; author's experiences in attending, 194,
+195-196; great productions at, 193, 194, 200; management of Irving, 190
+
+
+Mackenzie, Sir Morell, description of Patti's throat, 69
+
+Macmillan (publisher), 53
+
+Maiden's Croft, Farringford, Isle of Wight, 120
+
+Malibran, singer, friend of Moscheles, 45
+
+Mann, Tom, portrait of, 46
+
+Manning, Cardinal, 39
+
+Marchmont Street (London), 7
+
+Maris (artist), 45
+
+Martin, Sir Theodore, 53
+
+Masson, Professor, 53
+
+Mazzini, portrait of, 46
+
+Memorial to Lord Tennyson, 127-129; American contributors to, 128;
+inscription on, 128, 129
+
+Mendelssohn, friendship with Moscheles, 43, 45
+
+Meredith, George, 16, 52, 222-239; conversation with John Burns and
+author, 229-234; day with, 224-234, 238; description of, 224-225,
+234-236; publisher's reader, 227, 236-237; sensitiveness, 236; strength
+of perception, 235; tribute to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 227; voice, 225,
+234
+
+Metropole (hotel), 15
+
+Mifflin, George H., on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+Moody, D. L. (revivalist), 171; tour with Sankey and Drummond, 178
+
+Morland, George, 118
+
+Moscheles, Charlotte, portrait of, 46
+
+Moscheles, Felix, 42-50; attainments of, 43, 46; birth, 43; celebrated
+friends of, 45; death, 43; fellow students, 45; friendship with
+Browning, 42, 44, 47, 50; godson of Mendelssohn, 43; home in Cadogan
+Gardens, 42, 46, in Elm Park Road, 47; hospitality of, 47, 50; interest
+in Esperanto, 48; literary work of, 44-45; meeting with Du Maurier, 45,
+with Stepniak, 49; moved to Leipzig, 45; "Pictures with a Purpose",
+46-47; portraits painted by, 46; study in Antwerp, 45, in Paris, 45;
+Sunday afternoons with, 44, 49-50; visited America with Irving and
+Terry, 46; water colours of, 46
+
+Moscheles, Ignaz, 43; friendship with Mendelssohn, 43, 45; moved to
+Leipzig, 45
+
+Muller, Max, 52
+
+Murray, Henry, disappointment of, 6; in London, 7, 39; on board the
+_Alsatia_, 5
+
+Murray, John, 53
+
+"Musa Burschicosa" (by Blackie), 87
+
+
+National Gallery, 10
+
+Nationalist Party, 250, 251, 253, 254; death of, 250; speeches of, 250
+
+"Natural Law in the Spiritual World" (by Professor Drummond), 172,
+173-174
+
+Neilson, Adelaide, 16
+
+Nelson (Stanley's officer), 209, 211
+
+Newport (Isle of Wight), 114
+
+_New York Tribune_, appeal for Tennyson Memorial in, 128; author's
+article in, 49
+
+Niagara, plan to harness, 102
+
+_Ninetetnth Century_, 125
+
+Normandy, cottages of, 23; ducks of, 22-24; hospitality of, 21-22, 24,
+25; peasants of, 23
+
+Northumberland Ave., London, 15
+
+Norton, Professor Charles Eliot, on Tennyson Memorial Committee, 128
+
+
+Old Adelaide Gallery (Gatti's restaurant), 16
+
+"On Beauty" (by Blackie), 87
+
+"One of Our Conquerors" (Meredith), 227
+
+O'Reilly, John Boyle, 247
+
+Organic life, Kelvin's hypothesis concerning, 107
+
+O'Shea, Captain (divorce case of), 240, 248, 256
+
+"Ouida", 17
+
+"Our Boys", run of, 16
+
+
+Paget, Sir James, 53
+
+Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, 51
+
+Paris, Election at, 261, 264-266, 271-272
+
+Parke (Stanley's officer), 209, 211
+
+Parliament Buildings, 10
+
+Parnell, Charles Stewart, 138, 143, 240-274; characteristics, 257-258;
+eludes author, 242-245; elusiveness of, 242, 246; love affair, 256;
+"mystery" of, 241, 257; object of, 255; Parliamentary leader of Irish,
+241, 252, 253; tastes, 258; wife's book about, 256-257
+
+Parnell Commission, 240
+
+Patti, Mme. Adelina (Baroness Cederström), 57-78; appreciation of
+Scalchi and Annie Louise Carey, 77; ancestry, 66; as a linguist, 61-62;
+care of voice, 69-70; collection of photographs, 75; description of,
+58, 59, 64-65; first appearance before royalty, 65; generosity of, 76;
+gifts to, 75-76; illness, 67; letter from Gladstone, 62-63; London
+début at Covent Garden in "La Somnambula", 65; love of theatre, 74;
+modesty of, 64, 66; proudest experience, 63-64; Rothschild's dinner to,
+63, 66; singing of, 68, 70-71, 72, 73; tribute from Prince of Wales
+(Edward VII), 63-64
+
+Pearson, J. L., designer of Tennyson Memorial, 128
+
+Penwylt, Wales, 57
+
+Phoenician remains at Weston Manor, 133-134; route to Cornwall through
+Freshwater, 132-133
+
+"Pinafore", run of, 16
+
+Pinero, Sir Arthur, 16
+
+Plays and players, 16
+
+Plunket, Baron, 186
+
+"Poetical Tracts" (by Blackie), 87
+
+Politics, author's views on, 139, 140, 145-146, 155
+
+Portman Rooms, London, 216
+
+Poynter, Sir E. J., 52
+
+Prince of Wales' Theatre, 16
+
+Prince of Wales (Edward VII), tribute to Patti, 63-64
+
+_Punch_, 162, 262
+
+
+Queen Square, London, author's rooms rear of, 7, 8
+
+Queen's Hall, 16
+
+"Quill Club", 8
+
+
+Rachel, fame of, 185
+
+Ramsay, Sir William, 107; opinion of Lord Kelvin, 103-104
+
+Raven-Hill, L., cartoonist for _Punch_, 262; draws Boulanger, 267, 270,
+271; illustrated author's articles, 262-263; work of, 263
+
+Receptions, Irving's "first-night", 203-204
+
+Redmond, John, on Ireland, 250; power of, 253
+
+Regiments, dress of, 17
+
+Restaurants, 16
+
+Rice, James, 17
+
+Ritchie, Lady, charm of, 136-137; death of, 134; escape from German
+bomb, 135; home in Isle of Wight, 134-135; quoted, 135; stories of
+Tennyson, 136
+
+Ritz, Hotel, 16
+
+Roche, Jeffrey, 247, 250; learns about Parnell from author, 247-249
+
+Rochester, 18
+
+Rodin, Auguste, 30; first article about, 31; gift to the author, 31
+
+Rothschild, Alfred, dinner to Patti, 63, 66
+
+Rouen, 24
+
+Royal Academic Institute of Belfast, 99
+
+Royal Academy, 30
+
+Royal Society in London, Lord Kelvin's address to, 104-105
+
+Rubinstein, portrait of, 46
+
+Rumford, Count, 110
+
+
+St. Ange, Raoul de, author's acquaintance with, 20-27; visit to
+Normandy with, 20-25
+
+St. Boniface Down, Isle of Wight, 120
+
+St. James Hall, 16
+
+St. James Restaurant, 16
+
+St. Paul's Cathedral, 10
+
+Sala, George Augustus, 32, 33-34; conversation with author, 32-34
+
+Salisbury, Lord, 143, 240; mistake of, 143-144; tribute to Lord Kelvin,
+106-107
+
+Sankey, Ira (revivalist), 178; tour with Moody and Drummond, 178
+
+Sarasate, portrait of, 46
+
+Savoy Hotel, 15
+
+Scala (theatre), 16
+
+Scarsdale Lodge (Kensington), famous tenants of, 36
+
+"Scottish Songs" (by Blackie), 87
+
+Separatist Cause (of Ireland), 253
+
+Serpentine Bridge (Hyde Park), 12
+
+Shaftsbury Ave., 11
+
+Siddons, Mrs., fame of, 185
+
+Sinn Feiners, 254
+
+"Siphon Recorder", invented by Lord Kelvin, 100, 101
+
+Smalley, George W., appeal for Tennyson Memorial, 128
+
+Smith, George Murray (Browning's publisher), 53
+
+"Songs and Legends of Ancient Greece" (by Blackie), 87
+
+"Songs of Religion and Life" (by Blackie), 87
+
+Sothern, E. A., 16; homes of, 36; hospitality of, 36, 37
+
+Spottiswoode (publisher), 53
+
+Stairs (Stanley's officer), 209, 211
+
+Stanley, Sir Henry M., 205-221; address at St. James Hall, quoted,
+209-210, 211-212; "American dinner" to, 212-220; character of, 205;
+experience with an election crowd, 220-221; famous march into Africa,
+209, 210; member of Parliament, 220, 221; portrait of, 46; quoted,
+217-219, 220-221; return to London, 205-207; temper of, 205; tribute to
+his officers, 211
+
+Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 53
+
+Stephen, Leslie, 53
+
+Stephenson, Robert, 100
+
+Stepniak, description of, 49; meeting with Moscheles, 49; portrait of,
+46
+
+Stoker, Bram (Irving's manager), 189; handwriting of, 189
+
+Strand, 15
+
+Street cries of London, 14
+
+"Sublime Society of Beefsteaks", 202
+
+Submarine telegraphy, 100, 101
+
+
+Talma (actor), fame of, 185
+
+Telephone brought to Europe, 106; installed in Lord Kelvin's house, 106
+
+Temple Bar, 15
+
+Tennyson, Hallam (second Lord), son of poet, 53, 126
+
+Tennyson, Lord (the poet), anecdotes of, 121, 122-123, 129-130, 134,
+136; brother of, 125; buried in Westminster Abbey, 126; description of,
+121; devotion of son, 126; "Dirty Monk" photograph of, 117-118; family
+life, 126; letter in _Times_ regarding, 129-130; life at Farringford,
+126; memorial to, 127-129; peculiarities of, 125; persons who resembled
+him, 125; photographs of, 117-118; proud of his fame, 124; sincerity
+of, 130; summer home of, 125
+
+"Tennyson's Down", 127
+
+Tennyson's Lane, 115, 119, 120
+
+Terry, Ellen, achievements as actress, 198; art of, 187; at Irving's
+supper parties, 202; at Lyceum Theatre, 187; charm of, 197-198; first
+visit to America, 46
+
+Thames Embankment, lighting on, 9
+
+"The Artist's Mother" (Whistler), portrait sold to France, 167
+
+"The Briary" (home of Watts), 115
+
+"The Greatest Thing in the World" (Drummond), 172, 174
+
+_The Pilot_, 247
+
+"The Porch", Lady Ritchie's home, 135
+
+"The Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous Solid Bodies, and Its
+Connection With The Mathematical Theory of Electricity" (by Lord
+Kelvin), 110
+
+Thomson, James, brother to Lord Kelvin, 98
+
+Thomson, James, father of Lord Kelvin, 98; scholarship of, 98-99
+
+Thomson, William, invented the "Siphon Recorder", 101; _see_ also Lord
+Kelvin
+
+_Times_, London, quoted, 129-130
+
+Tottenham Court Road, 16
+
+Tower House, Chelsea (Whistler's home), 158, 161
+
+Travel, comparison of sea, 3, 4-5; in London, 13-14
+
+Tussaud, Madame, 216, 234
+
+
+Ulster, ideals of, 253; problem of, 253
+
+
+Van Lorino, Moscheles' teacher, 45
+
+Vaudeville, the, 16
+
+Vaughan, Dean, 53
+
+Very's (restaurant), 16
+
+Victoria (hotel), 15
+
+Victoria Street (London), 11
+
+Victoria Tower, 12
+
+
+Walker, Robert, 131; theory regarding age of Freshwater, 132-133
+
+Ward, "Ideal", in Freshwater, 122
+
+Warren, Arthur, account of "American Dinner" given to Stanley, 212-220;
+acquaintances in Paris, 18-19; acquaintance with Henry Murray, 6, 7,
+with Moscheles, 43, 50; acts upon Whistler's advice, 164; appointed
+London correspondent to _Boston Herald_, 41; appreciation of Rodin, 30,
+31; arrival in London, 1-2; becomes an amateur journalist, 26-27;
+brings Moscheles and Stepniak together, 49; comment on artistic
+sensibility, 237-238, on teetotalism, 202-203; day with Meredith,
+223-238; day with John Stuart Blackie, 79-95; describes Browning's
+burial, 51-56; describes early career, 28-29; desire to write, 6;
+dinner with Whistler, 160; engaged as journalist by _Boston Herald_,
+40-41; evenings with Henry Drummond, 170-173, 175-176, 177, 179-181;
+experiences attending Lyceum Theatre, 194-196; experience with Parnell,
+242-245; first newspaper copy, 28-29, sees Browning, 47, sees Stanley,
+206, sees Tennyson, 121, trip to Paris, 18, work in London, 6;
+friendship with Lady Ritchie, 134, 135, 136, with Lord Kelvin, 97, with
+Whistler, 157-164, 165-169; homes in London, 7, 8, 49, 157-158, 161,
+164, 222; in France, 18-27; interview with Boulanger, 273, with
+Monsignor Capel, 35, 37-38; joins Committee on Tennyson Memorial,
+127-128; last visit to Isle of Wight, 134-135; learning London, 7;
+"London Letters", 29, 30; makes a study of British municipal policy,
+176-177; meeting with Irving, 200-201, with George Sala, 32, with John
+Burns, 223, 229-234, 238, 239, with Monsignor Capel, 35; memories of
+Lord Kelvin, 96-113, of father's burial, 56; native of Boston, 1;
+opinion of Boulanger, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273-274, of British
+character, 196-197, of Gladstone, 140, 141-142, 144, 145, 148, 150, of
+Irving's acting, 191, 192, 193, 194, 199, of Parnell, 255, 256,
+257-259; plans articles for American papers, 31, 32; recollections of
+first three weeks in London, 3; seasickness, 4-5; sees Irving for first
+time, 192; sounds Whistler regarding American commission, 168-169;
+Sunday Smoke Talks at home, 162; trip to Paris to interview Boulanger,
+261, 263-272; views on Irish question, 250-257, on politics, 139, 140,
+145-146, 155; visits to America, 32, 39, 41, 160, 238, 247, to
+Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 114, 115, 118, 136, to Normandy, 20-25, to
+Patti's home, 57-78; voyage to England in 1878, 3-5
+
+Waterloo Bridge, 12
+
+Waterloo Place, 12
+
+Watts, George Frederick, 115
+
+Westminster Abbey, 10, 12; Browning's burial in, 51-56; Poets' Corner
+in, 55; Tennyson buried in, 126
+
+Westminster Bridge, 12
+
+Weston Manor, Freshwater, 122; Phoenician remains at, 133
+
+Whistler, James A.  McNeill, 52, 157-169; anecdotes of, 157-160, 162,
+163, 164, 166-167; as a neighbour, 164, 165; called "butterfly with a
+sting", 165-166; champion of art, 164-165; characteristics of, 157,
+163, 169; description of, 157, 163; dinner at house of, 160; goes to
+author's Sunday Smoke Talks, 161-162; homes of, 158, 161; is offered a
+commission for decoration of Boston Public Library, 168-169; moves to
+Paris, 169; portrait of Carlyle sold, 166-167; pursuit of Sheridan
+Ford, 160-161; suggests decoration of author's flat, 104; "The Artist's
+Mother", portrait, sold to France, 167
+
+White, Henry, American Ambassador, 216-217
+
+White, James, manufacturer of instruments of precision, 100
+
+Whitehall, 11
+
+Whitehouse, 101
+
+Wilson, Woodrow, policy of, 138, 156
+
+Wolseley, Lord, 52
+
+Wood, Mrs. Henry, 17
+
+Wores, Theodore, disciple of Whistler, 162
+
+Writers in London, 16-17
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of London Days, by Arthur Warren
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON DAYS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 34812-8.txt or 34812-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
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