Chapter 3

LONDON FRIENDS

It was in 1874, as I have already mentioned, that on an introduction from Matthew Arnold we first made friends with M. Edmond Scherer, the French writer and Senator, who more than any other person--unless, perhaps, one divides the claim between him and M. Faguet--stepped into the critical chair of Sainte Beuve, after that great man's death. For M. Scherer's weekly reviews in the _Temps_ (1863-78) were looked for by many people over about fifteen years, as persons of similar tastes had looked for the famous "Lundis," in the _Constitutionnel_ of an earlier generation.

We went out to call upon the Scherers at Versailles, coupling with it, if I remember right, a visit to the French National Assembly then sitting in the Chateau. The road from the station to the palace was deep in snow, and we walked up behind two men in ardent conversation, one of them gesticulating freely. My husband asked a man beside us, bound also, it seemed, for the Assembly, who they were. "M. Gambetta and M. Jules Favre," was the answer. So there we had in front of us the intrepid organizer of the Government of National Defense, whose services to France France will never forget, and the unfortunate statesman to whom it fell, under the tyrannic and triumphant force of Germany (which was to prove, as we now know, in the womb and process of time, more fatal to herself than to France!), to sign away Alsace-Lorraine. And we had only just settled ourselves in our seats when Gambetta was in the tribune, making a short but impassioned speech. I but vaguely remember what the speech was about, but the attitude of the lion head thrown back, and the tones of the famous voice, remain with me--as it rang out in the recurrent phrase: _"Je proteste!--Messieurs, je proteste!"_ It was the attitude of the statue in the Place du Carrousel, and of the _meridional_, Numa Roumestan, in Daudet's well-known novel. Every word said by the speaker seemed to enrage the benches of the Right, and the tumult was so great at times that we were still a little dazed by it when we reached the quiet of the Scherers' drawing-room.

M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his aspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once ascetic and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance was as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of French literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knew him--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion; a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same time was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtle character to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important as questions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, specially conversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the "French critic on Milton," on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his most attractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--that when French people _did_ make a serious study of England, and English books, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakes about us than English writers make about France.

Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs, where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year or two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the Universities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale [i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great many. _But they are all Modernists!_" Since then, again, we have seen the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day.

But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that it was he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the _Journal Intime_ of Henri Frédéric Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me at once; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented and I plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end of it I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For the book abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed to challenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with his daughter Jeanne--a _schöne Seele_, if ever there was one--and we spent hours in the Russell Square drawing-room, turning and twisting the most crucial sentences this way and that.

But at last the translation and my Introduction were finished and the English book appeared. It certainly obtained a warm welcome both here and in America. There is something in Amiel's mystical and melancholy charm which is really more attractive to the Anglo-Saxon than the French temper. At any rate, in the English-speaking countries the book spread widely, and has maintained its place till now.

The _Journal_ is very interesting to me [wrote the Master of Balliol]. It catches and detains many thoughts that have passed over the minds of others, which they rarely express, because they must take a sentimental form, from which most thinkers recoil. It is all about "self," yet it never leaves an egotistical or affected impression. It is a curious combination of skepticism and religious feeling, like Pascal, but its elements are compounded in different proportions and the range of thought is far wider and more comprehensive. On the other hand, Pascal is more forcible, and looks down upon human things from a higher point of view.

Why was he unhappy? ... But, after all, commentaries on the lives of distinguished men are of very doubtful value. There is the life--take it and read it who can.

Amiel was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His _Journal_ is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic in one.

For myself [wrote Walter Pater], I shall probably think, on finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have added to those elements of natural religion which he was able to accept at times with full belief and always with the sort of hope which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs and the function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent we give to any assumptions, in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts are real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the _natural_ questions of the human mind.

A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing light upon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and most important influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is no sign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very much the contrary.

* * * * *

But all this time, while literary and meditative folk went on writing and thinking, how fast the political world was rushing!

Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, and the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr. Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr. Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr. Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which, if I remember right, he was to review for _Mind_.

He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in a rather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the "Goats"--i.e., the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir Stafford Northcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely literary or musical.

Then, with the Chief-Secretaryship there appeared a new Arthur Balfour. The courage, the resource, the never-failing wit and mastery with which he fought the Irish members in Parliament, put down outrage in Ireland, and at the same time laid the foundation in a hundred directions of that social and agrarian redemption of Ireland on which a new political structure will some day be reared--is perhaps even now about to rise--these things make one of the most brilliant, one of the most dramatic, chapters in our modern history.

It was in 1888, two years after Mr. Forster's death, that we found ourselves for a Sunday at Whittinghame. It was, I think, not long before the opening of the Special Commission which was to inquire into the charges brought by the _Times_ against the Parnellites and the Land League. Nothing struck me more in Mr. Balfour than the absence in him of any sort of excitement or agitation, in dealing with the current charges against the Irishmen. It seemed to me that he had quietly accepted the fact that he was fighting a revolution, and, while perfectly clear as to his own course of action, wasted no nervous force on moral reprobation of the persons concerned. His business was to protect the helpless, to punish crime, and to expose the authors of it, whether high or low. But he took it as a job to be done--difficult--unpleasant--but all in the way of business. The tragic or pathetic emotion that so many people were ready to spend upon it he steadily kept at a distance. His nerve struck me as astonishing, and the absence of any disabling worry about things past. "One can only do one's best at the moment," he said to me once, _à propos_ of some action of the Irish government which had turned out badly--"if it doesn't succeed, better luck next time! Nothing to be gained by going back upon things." After this visit to Whittinghame, I wrote to my father:

I came away more impressed and attracted by Arthur Balfour than ever. If intelligence and heart and pure intentions can do anything for Ireland, he at least has got them all. Physically he seems to have broadened and heightened since he took office, and his manner, which was always full of charm, is even brighter and kindlier than it was--or I fancied it. He spoke most warmly of Uncle Forster.

And the interesting and remarkable thing was the contrast between an attitude so composed and stoical, and his delicate physique, his sensitive, sympathetic character. All the time, of course, he was in constant personal danger. Detectives, much to his annoyance, lay in wait for us as we walked through his own park, and went with him in London wherever he dined. Like my uncle, he was impatient of being followed and guarded, and only submitted to it for the sake of other people. Once, at a dinner-party at our house, he met an old friend of ours, one of the most original thinkers of our day, Mr. Philip Wicksteed, economist, Dante scholar, and Unitarian minister. He and Mr. Balfour were evidently attracted to each other, and when the time for departure came, the two, deep in conversation, instead of taking cabs, walked off together in the direction of Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens. The detectives below-stairs remained for some time blissfully unconscious of what had happened. Then word reached them; and my husband, standing at the door to see a guest off, was the amused spectator of the rush in pursuit of two splendid long-legged fellows, who had, however, no chance whatever of catching up the Chief Secretary.

Thirty years ago, almost! And during that time the name and fame of Arthur Balfour have become an abiding part of English history. Nor is there any British statesman of our day who has been so much loved by his friends, so little hated by his opponents, so widely trusted by the nation.

* * * * *

As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the _Times_ attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forged Parnell letter in 1887, our connection with the _Times_ brought us, of course, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up, half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in the early hours of the morning my husband came back from the _Times_, brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband, however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was not in the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both very anxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries, the Commission came to the _Times_ witnesses, I well remember the dismay with which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Was that _all_? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir George Lewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the coming catastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, and suicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great. The _Times_ attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of the great paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound, how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of the Commission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters-- certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support of English opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land League methods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. After thirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go, and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution," with both the crimes and the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen had to organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder with the other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods of Irish disaffection was invaluable to those who were actually grappling day by day with the problems of Irish government.

It was probably at Mrs. Jeune's that I first saw Mr. Goschen, and we rapidly made friends. His was a great position at that time. Independent of both parties, yet trusted by both; at once disinterested and sympathetic; a strong Liberal in some respects, an equally strong Conservative in others--he never spoke without being listened to, and his support was eagerly courted both by Mr. Gladstone, from whom he had refused office in 1880, without, however, breaking with the Liberal party, and by the Conservatives, who instinctively felt him their property, but were not yet quite clear as to how they were to finally capture him. That was decided in 1886, when Mr. Goschen voted in the majority that killed the Home Rule Bill, and more definitely in the following year when Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer in a fit of pique, thinking himself indispensable, and not at all expecting Lord Salisbury to accept his resignation. But, in his own historic phrase, he "forgot Goschen," and Mr. Goschen stepped easily into his shoes and remained there.

I find from an old diary that the Goschens dined with us in Russell Square two nights before the historic division on the Home Rule Bill, and I remember how the talk raged and ranged. Mr. Goschen was an extremely agreeable talker, and I seem still to hear his husky voice, with the curious deep notes in it, and to be looking into the large but short-sighted and spectacled eyes--he refused the Speakership mainly on the grounds of his sight--of which the veiled look often made what he said the more racy and unexpected. A letter he wrote me in 1886, after his defeat at Liverpool, I kept for many years as the best short analysis I had ever read of the Liberal Unionist position, and the probable future of the Liberal party.

Mrs. Goschen was as devoted a wife as Mrs. Gladstone or Mrs. Disraeli, and the story of the marriage was a romance enormously to Mr. Goschen's credit. Mr. Goschen must have been a most faithful lover, and he certainly was a delightful friend. We stayed with them at Seacox, their home in Kent, and I remember one rainy afternoon there, the greater part of which I spent listening to his talk with John Morley, and--I think--Sir Alfred Lyall. It would have been difficult to find a trio of men better worth an audience.

Mrs. Goschen, though full of kindness and goodness, was not literary, and the house was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen's study. I remember J.R.G.'s laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complained that she could not get _Pride and Prejudice_, which he had recommended to her, "from the library." "But you could have bought it for sixpence at the railway bookstall," said J.R.G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, was a man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the present life-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind of symbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had become one of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier German life--with its measure, its kindness, its idealism--on which Germany has turned its back. The writing of this book was the pleasure of his later years, amid the heavy work which was imposed upon him as a Free-Trader, in spite of his personal friendship for Mr. Chamberlain, by the Tariff Reform campaign of 1903 onward; and the copy which he gave me reminds me of many happy talks with him, and of my own true affection for him. I am thankful that he did not live to see 1914.

Lord Goschen reminds me of Lord Acton, another new friend of the 'eighties. Yet Lord Acton had been my father's friend and editor, in the _Home and Foreign Review_, long before he and I knew each other. Was there ever a more interesting or a more enigmatic personality than Lord Acton's? His letters to Mrs. Drew, addressed, evidently, in many cases, to Mr. Gladstone, through his daughter, have always seemed to me one of the most interesting documents of our time. Yet I felt sharply, in reading them, that the real man was only partially there; and in the new series of letters just published (October, 1917) much and welcome light is shed upon the problem of Lord Acton's mind and character. The perpetual attraction for me, as for many others, lay in the contrast between Lord Acton's Catholicism and the universalism of his learning; and, again, between what his death revealed of the fervor and simplicity of his Catholic faith, and the passion of his Liberal creed. Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirred his blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and the Papal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with the Church of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things it had done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do with the excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from those of another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly and claim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century.

There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you will come to tolerate them in the present and future.

It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were, I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of _Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop. Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy.

These men [i.e., the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth.

These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never