Chapter 4

him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a serious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural mission of the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on her death-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ." All his friends, except the very few who knew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzled by this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject of Biblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing _Robert Elsmere_, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddon would have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, he possessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men who had written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and the writers, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetic tolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The New Reformation," in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of _Robert Elsmere_ by giving an outline of the history of religious inquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met Lord Acton one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we were both waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulation on the article. "I only wish," I said, "I had been able to consult you more about it." "No, no," he said. "_Votre siège est faite_! But I think you should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omitted so-and-so." Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he poured out that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest, thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him.

As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it was endless. I asked him once, when I was writing for _Macmillan_, to give me some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter I received from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge, bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme" of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to get through, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number of the books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves. Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of _Eleanor_, for which certain material was drawn from the life of Chateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would have thought it thrown away. He never despised novels!

Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of different sorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morning he had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60,000 volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whom Mr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge.

In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit as keen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poor speaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always, it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy and distinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, his influence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule struggle gave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constant friends and associates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all that critical time. But the great split was rushing on, and it was also in 1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr. Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. It was a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party was M. Clémenceau.

M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules Ferry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime of life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,[1] one of the most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.

How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral Maxse's dinner-table!--Clémenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described the interest we had both felt in M. Clémenceau. "Yet he seems to me a light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!"

[Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow of M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French destiny (January, 1918).]

In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident, I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any other course than that they did take."

Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearly how very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his great leader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing the rupture of 1886.

* * * * *

I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at a Kensington dinner-party, where he took me down. A man who talked loud and much was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit of opposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning.

_À propos_ of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"_Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises_"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out:

"_Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure, Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature_!"

breaking immediately into the _vieille chanson_, one line of which is worth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire.

Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, I urging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he would look up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it still went on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tête-à-tête; till the _chanson_ itself--"_Si le roi m'avoit donné--Paris, sa grand' ville"_--had been said, to his delight and mine.

The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or twice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of the evening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, I shall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without a moment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost the whole, of one of the immortal things in literature.

He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once or twice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the London world to know him well. His health began to fail just about the time when we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico.

He did not like _Robert Elsmere_, which appeared the year before his death; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his and mine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house. Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some passion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt, on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after ranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added:

"But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of mortality ... there is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we should rise up to meet him; but if that Person was to come into it, we should fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment."

Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near in spirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work is concerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the _Marriage of William Ashe_, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of the scenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if he would allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was then uninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked; and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the _mezzanin_. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palace was shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding it a little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was a bust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and the place was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come to die, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored. The _concierge_ pointed out to me what he believed to be the room in which he passed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everything was chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked to imagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vast chandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in the Italian spirit which through such long years had passed into his, and delighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of a child's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of the beautiful old place.

* * * * *

Mr. Lowell is another memory of these early London days. My first sight of him was at Mr. and Mrs. Westlake's house--in a temper! For some one had imprudently talked of "Yankeeisms," perhaps with some "superior" intonation. And Mr. Lowell--the Lowell of _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_--had flashed out: "It's you English who don't know your own language and your own literary history. Otherwise you would realize that most of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which you have thrown away."

Afterward, I find records of talks with him at Russell Square, then of Mrs. Lowell's death in 1885, and finally of dining with him in the spring of 1887, just before his return to America. At that dinner was also the German Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, a handsome man, with a powerful, rather somber face. I remember some talk with him after dinner on current books and politics. Just thirty years ago! Mr. Lowell had then only four years to live. He and all other diplomats had just passed through an anxious spring. The scare of another Franco-German war had been playing on the nerves of Europe, started by the military party in Germany, merely to insure the passing of the famous Army law of that year--the first landmark in that huge military expansion of which we see the natural fruit in the present Armageddon.

A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given the Conservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the full passion of economic and military development--all her people growing rich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet I have still before me the absent, indecipherable look of her Ambassador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table. Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips with Germany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It would have been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in Lowndes Square, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to credit the absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane!

A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a private capacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here is a characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters:

I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to you for saying so. Nobody but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of sympathy, and he started there!