ill. Desire is neither lasting nor consistent; it is even as a dream, a

mirage, the lightning, the foam of the sea. Observe the practice of the Law; the man who faithfully observes these holy practices meets with no evil. Loving tradition, morality and charity, be constant in patience and purity. Act in a spirit of mutual loving-kindness, in a spirit of helpfulness. Remember the Buddha, the Law and the congregation of the faithful. All that you see in me of supernatural power, of science, and of strength is produced by the agency of virtue, which is its cause, and comes from tradition, from morality and from modesty. Do you, too, practise this perfect restraint. It is not by phrases, nor by words, nor by crying that we can attain the doctrine of virtue. Acquire it by deeds; act according to your professions; never cease in making efforts. Not every one who acts is rewarded, but whoso does not act obtains nothing. Beware of pride, of haughtiness, and of arrogance; always gentle, and never straying from the straight path, be diligent in following the road which leads to Nirvana. Bestir yourselves in the search after the Road of Salvation, and with the lamp of wisdom dispel utterly the darkness of ignorance. Rid yourselves of the net of sin which is accompanied by repentance. But what skills it to say more? The Law is full of reason and of purity. When I shall have obtained the supreme intelligence, when the rain of the Law which leads to immortality shall fall, then come back to listen anew to the Law which I shall teach you.”

Then were the Gods consumed by sorrow at the loss of the Blessed One; but he comforted them by leaving in his place the Bodhisatva Maitriya, whom he consecrated by giving him his tiara and his diadem. Maitriya, then, will become Buddha (_vide supra_), when the corrupted world shall have lost all memory of the teaching of Shakya Muni.

* * * * *

The Buddha’s life upon earth was prolonged far beyond the span which is allotted to most men. He was some thirty years old when he first began to preach, and his ministration lasted fifty-three years. Surely it is not irreverent to apply to him the words of the Hebrew Psalmist: “Mark the perfect man and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.” Render “Peace” by “Nirvana,” no bad translation, indeed, and you have the Buddha. When at the last he felt that the dark mystery of death was overshadowing him, and that the end was at hand, he bade Ananda go and tell the Mallas of Kusinārā that their master would pass away at midnight, and invited them to come to him. There was at that time in Kusinārā an old and decrepit man a hundred and twenty years of age, upon whom the people looked as a saint. His name was Subhadra. This venerable man, believing in the greatness of the Blessed One, begged of him the boon of passing away before him; and, this being granted, Subhadra gave up the ghost. But when the assembled Bhikshus, being astonished at this favour, inquired the reason, the Blessed One told two last Birth Stories.

“Bhikshus, in days gone by there lived in a valley a deer, the master of a thousand deer; he was prudent, wide-awake and of quick perception. One day a hunter espied him and told the king. So the king assembled his army and surrounded all the deer and their leader. Then the leader thought: ‘If I do not protect these deer they will all be destroyed.’ So looking about the place in which they were penned, he perceived a torrent flowing through the valley; but the stream was so swift that the deer feared lest it should carry them away. But the leader jumped into the water, and finding foothold in the middle, cried to the herd: ‘Come, jump from the bank on to my back and thence to the other bank; it is the only means of saving your lives; if you do not do this you will surely die!’ The herd of deer obeyed, and though their hoofs striking his back cut the skin and tore the flesh, he never flinched. When as it seemed all the deer had crossed the water, he looked back, and saw a calf that had been left behind and could not cross over. Then, torn and bruised and racked with pain, he took the calf on his back, and crossed the stream with it. All the herd had now passed over, but the great stag knew that death was near, and he cried: ‘May what I have done to preserve the joy of life to these deer and this calf make me cast off sin, and obtain boundless and perfect light; may I become a Buddha, cross over the sea of regeneration to perfection and salvation, and pass beyond all sorrow.’ ...

“What think ye, Bhikshus? I am he who was then the leader of the herd. The deer are now the five hundred Mallas and the fawn is Subhadra.” (Adapted from Rockhill’s “Life of Buddha,” page 137 _et seq._)

One more Jātaka he uttered, and that was the last. He warned his weeping disciples not to mourn for him, or to look upon him as lost, for inasmuch as they had his law and his doctrine, he would still be with them. He spoke to them of the four places where pious men would rear monuments in his honour: (1) The Lumbini Garden, where he was born; (2) the place under the Sacred Fig-tree, where he became Buddha; (3) the Mrighadeva, the deer forest, from where the first sermon was preached; (4) the place where he died at Kusinārā.

At the last the Blessed One, uncovering his body, said to the Bhikshus: “Brethren, look well at the Tathāgata’s body, for it is as hard to find a Tathāgata as to see a flower on a fig-tree. Bhikshus! never forget it: decay is inherent to all things!” These were the last words of the Tathāgata. And so in the fullness of time, calm and holy, he entered Nirvana, that state in which all the desires, all the cares and all the sorrows of life have ceased to be. Is not that the ideal of “Peace, perfect peace?”

* * * * *

There is a Japanese proverb which says: “Meeting is the beginning of parting.” Pregnant, indeed, are those six words, for in them are summed up all the sorrows and the one inevitable certainty of life. When the parting with those who are dear to us takes place, how we treasure some trifle which brings to life recollections of the sweet communion of the past! And so it is with those relics of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. When Assheton Smith, the famous sportsman, was told that he must take his ailing wife to the South of France, he, being a wealthy man, answered: “That I cannot do, but I can and will bring the South of France to her.” And so there arose that marvellous conservatory, a glass palace, which I remember well, when nearly sixty years ago I used to go and stay with Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, who rented the place. In our humble way we bring home to ourselves the lands endeared to us by the careless gaiety of former days, scenes which are peopled by the ghosts of old friends whom we conjure up, living once more in the sunshine of happy youth. Is not that the chief sanity of the collector’s madness?

BUDDHA AND ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND CASTE—THE ARYANS

There are few days in the year, even in mid-winter, or, what is worse still, in March, when I cannot sit out in my Veluvana, a sun-trap snugly sheltered from the north and the biting east. It is my thinking-place, and on this 28th of January, for some mysterious reason, with his image before me, my thoughts have been held entirely by the Buddha himself. Not that I am a Buddhist, or in the remotest degree likely to become one, though we hear of convinced followers of that religion even among Englishmen; but, as those who condescend to read me will have guessed, the story of his life has a great attraction for me, and that none the less because it is the record of one of the greatest rebellions that ever took place. Indeed, there is something weirdly fascinating in the history of all revolution even where we most hate it. What show-place can possess greater interest than the tragic collections of the Musée Carnavalet in what was once Madame de Sévigné’s home in Paris? Yet it is made up of relics which make men shudder, especially those few still left who, like myself, long ago knew not a few people who had lived through the days of the Terreur.

I have stood in that house of gruesome memories spellbound by a fascination such as that by which a snake paralyses its victim. In quite another way I am entranced by the upheaval which was the work of the Buddha. There was not the faintest likeness between the two revolutions—indeed, they were diametrically opposites. The one all fury, flame and murder—hatred, the guillotine, and the _noyades_ of the Loire. The other, the calm extinction of all passion, all human desire, all ambition; a life spent in holy contemplation and in the wooing of that supreme wisdom which is virtue.

And yet Martin Luther himself, when he passionately scourged the Pope and his Bishop for the sale of indulgences, was not a more zealous rebel than this calm and contemplative Buddha, who, renouncing all honours and titles and worldly possessions for himself, contented, like St. Francis, to don the monk’s robe and to carry the beggar’s bowl, entered his peaceful protest against the usurpations and pretensions of the crafty Brahmans, who had long since drifted away from the simple and poetically beautiful teaching of the Rig Veda, albeit they acknowledged its authority as Sruti—inspiration, looking upon it as their one inspired sacred Book.[4] In that wonderful collection of hymns and prayers about which I wish to say a few words later there is no allusion to suttee—the awful institution under which widows are burnt with their dead husbands; none to child-marriages, another cruelty; none to caste. All of these were inventions of the Brahmans, and it was upon the doctrine of caste that they founded their claim to superiority over the kings and princes whom they had gradually supplanted.

So long as the king and priest were one—so long, that is to say, as the king conducted the ceremonies and sacrifices of religion—the authority of the king was unchallenged.[5] But there came a moment when the kings grew weary of a tedious ritual and delegated their religious duties to substitutes. That was the opportunity of the priestcraft, who, as the intercessors between the people and their gods—a powerful position indeed—were able to claim a rank higher than that of the king himself. Here was the beginning of Caste. When Buddha entered upon his ministry there were four castes: (1) The Brahmans, or priests; (2) the Kshatriya, the warrior and governing class, to which the kings and princes belonged—a class analogous to the Samurai or Bushi of Japan; (3) the Vaisiyas—farmers, traders, etc. These three classes, all of Aryan descent, were, and are, “the twice-born,” whose second birth is symbolized by their being invested with the sacred cord at an age which more or less corresponds to that of confirmation with us. (4) The Sudras were the fourth class; they were the lowest of all—despised as the descendants of the Dasyu, the enemies of the bright gods, the aborigines who were defeated by the migration of the white Aryan herdsmen descending upon India from the lofty plains of the Pamirs.

We talk glibly enough of Caste, yet there are not many of us who have any glimmering of light as to its real meaning or origin. The majority of Europeans speak of the word as if it were of Hindu origin, whereas it is simply a Portuguese word signifying race or family. In its present sense, indeed, it is of quite modern birth, for the old Portuguese Barbosa, writing in the sixteenth century, only uses the word _casta_ in the sense of family, speaking of men and women _de boa casta_, of good family. When he wished to indicate the mysterious divisions of Indian society, he used the word _leis_, laws, _leis de gentios_, laws of the heathen. (Sir Henry Yule’s glossary.) Apart from the word, we are apt to speak of Caste as if it were an institution, respectable at any rate on account of its hoary antiquity. Old it certainly is, yet it was not known to the sacred poets of the Rig Veda.

The word which comes nearest to caste in Sanskrit is “Varna” (colour), and in the early days of the Aryan invasion of India there were only two classes: the white conquerors and the “Dasyu,” or enemies, who were black, and, as the conquered people, looked down upon. What we call caste, then, which was originally a question of skin, had already in the Buddha’s time, five centuries before our era, become far more complicated than that. Ethnologically, the division between the white man and the black, the Arya and the Dasyu, the conqueror and the conquered, was as sharp as ever. But whereas the dark man remained as he was—the lowest of the castes—political reasons and the lust of power had subdivided the conquering race into three distinct classes, and, as I have said above, it was upon that subdivision that the Brahmans laid the “precious corner-stone” of their priestly tyranny.

When the glorious young prince, a Kshatriya and the heir to the throne, the incomparable scholar and athlete, the man whom men envied and women loved, cast aside his royal rank and went forth into the wilderness, taking upon himself all the burthens and privations of the poorest and meanest, in order that for them he might work, striving for the good of all mankind without distinction of colour or race, the Brahmans were forced to see in him a hostile champion, armed to attack their stronghold. He went further than this: he denied the divine authority of the Veda, without which the whole structure of Brahmanism crumbles to dust, and so he finally was branded as a heretic.

What cannot fail to excite surprise is the fact that although Buddhism “became the state religion of India under Asōka, the Constantine of India, in the middle of the third century B.C.” (Max Müller), and was only declining in the seventh century A.D., caste should not utterly have disappeared. But that was not the case—on the contrary, it has become more and more involved, for there are now not only the three divisions of the twice-born Aryas, and the outcast Sudras, but there are, moreover, the subdivisions to which professions and occupations have given rise; the goldsmith, for example, looking down upon the bootmaker and leather worker, and he, in his turn, refusing to hold communion with some craftsman whose superior he deems himself to be. No wonder caste has been described as “a standing puzzle to governors and the despair of all employers of labour.” Life is, indeed, complicated when the shadow of a man of meaner birth falling upon a boiling pot defiles the food which it contains by an impurity which is almost worse than poison. As in an Oriental household, perhaps even in a European household, it has been said that no matter how low a menial may be, there is always someone a step lower to whom by payment he may assign some of his duties; so below the Sudras there is the Pariah, the outcast, who, as the word implies, should carry a bell to give timely warning of the approaching contamination of his shadow.

Max Müller, in his “Chips from a German Workshop,” quotes a table by Berghaus showing the relative numbers of the people professing the chief religions into which the world is divided. Nothing can better show the extent of the influence which Buddhism, with an advantage of 500 years and more over Christianity, 1,100, and more, over Mohammedanism, has exercised upon mankind.

Buddhists 31.2 Christians 30.7 Mohammedans 15.7 Brahmanists 13.4 Various heathens 8.7 Jews 0.3

In a note, Max Müller adds that: “As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the following of Confucius and Lao Tze, the first place on the scale belongs really to Christianity. It is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three. The Emperor himself, after sacrificing to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-ssŭ Temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel.”

_Ex Oriente lux._ We see from this table that all the chief religions of the world have their rise, like the sun, in the East.

I have observed with no little astonishment that certain pundits of to-day speak in somewhat offensively patronizing tones of Max Müller, as if he were a thing of the past, all very well in his day, but not up to date, and already superseded. As to that, whether his theories upon the subject of mythology and comparative religion were sound or not, I am not competent to judge; but I feel that if others have pushed his work a step further than the point at which he left it, we may fairly ask whether, without his great labours, these sages would have attained their own success. There is no finality in science, and a Newton or a Faraday is in no way dethroned if others have built on the foundations which he laid. The world does not stand still, and it is the common fate of the pioneer that some new man should go beyond what he has reached. However that may be, the collating, translating and editing of the sacred books of India, and the editing of the thirty volumes of the sacred books of the East, including Chinese and Arabic works, were a colossal labour—the work of a lifetime, which has been of national and international value. All honour to the workman!

I first met Max Müller sixty years ago at the Deanery at Christ Church, where the evening parties were gatherings of all that was most distinguished in university life. He was then a most attractive personality, brilliant, of course, still young, not very tall, but extremely good-looking, an accomplished musician, the friend of Mendelssohn. His conversation was delightfully illuminating, and he was generous enough not to grudge the enjoyment of it to a humble undergraduate who was only too ready to sit at his feet. It was a regret to me that I left Oxford to enter the Foreign Office without having had the chance of attending his lectures; but his works on the Science of Language, and especially his “Chips from a German Workshop,” written at the behest of the great Bunsen, who persuaded the directors of the old East India Company on public grounds to defray the expense of his edition of the Vedas, have been to me the joy of many years, and still continue to fill many an idle moment, robbing it of its idleness, for who could be idle with Max Müller?

* * * * *

A very charming book is Sabatier’s “Life of St. Francis of Assisi.” To me one of its chief attractions lies in the strong parallel between the life of the mediæval saint and the Eastern reformer. The points of divergence are no more than would be accounted for by the differences of time, place and surroundings. St. Francis was not a prince of the blood royal like the Buddha, but he was the son of a rich man, one of those merchants and men of mark who travelled through the world, visiting all the important fairs of those days, and received as welcome guests by the great nobles. Indeed, they, too, had a sort of patent of nobility of their own, belonging to a guild of popularity—for in those days when newspapers were not, the rare visits of a man who could bring the latest court gossip from Paris or London, and whose waggons were often laden with golden tribute sent from beyond the sea to the Pope, were looked forward to with no little pleasure. So Francis, in his gilded youth, became one of the leading youngsters of the town, foremost in all mischief and riotous living, a fighter and a daredevil, ruffling it in all the fantastic coxcombry of weapons and dress which the ingenuity of mediæval tailors and armourers could devise.

Fighting there was in plenty in the Italian cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who so ready to fight as the extravagant young scapegrace, who was as keen to throw away his life as his money? After one of the local raids came imprisonment for a year—then more fighting, followed by illness, fever and repentance; after that solitude, meditation, and the final renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil, when the manifest likeness to the Buddha first asserted itself.

The long, lonely silences in the _carceri_, the little natural caves on the side of Mount Subasio, when the saint, plunged in profoundest thought, was dreaming dreams of founding an order which was to save mankind, cannot but remind us of the royal prince starving in the wilderness, he, too, dreaming of the rescue of the world from sin. Both founded their orders on principles which involved the giving up of everything to which men hold most firmly. There was to be no property, no house, no home, no family. Rags and beggary were no disgrace—rather the hall-mark of a spiritual nobility. Homeless, their disciples were to wander forth, trusting in Providence and charity, which should do something towards filling the beggar’s bowl. Neither saw at first that these were conditions which sooner or later must break down. Religion needs its luxuries and will have them: a school of absolute effacement of the world was impossible in the West as it had been in the East. To venture any minute sketch of the aims of the two reformers is beyond what I can do here. Both were animated by the most perfect spirit of self-sacrifice with which they vainly endeavoured to inspire their orders, but no founder of religion has yet succeeded in establishing principles from which their so-called disciples have not sooner or later found self-justified means of breaking away.

One prominent feature in the characters of these two saintly men has in it a touch of poetry which it were ill to miss. Both loved animals with a love that was almost holy. The Buddha held the taking of all life to be a sin, and it is impossible to read the Birth Stories, to which I have alluded elsewhere, without feeling that they were inspired by the tenderest sympathy. St. Francis preached to the birds, and when Buddha taught in the Deer Forest near Benares, stags and hinds stood still and listened.

“Birds, my brethren,” said St. Francis to the birds that fluttered round him, “it is your duty greatly to praise and love your Creator. He has given you feathers for raiment, wings to fly, and filled all your needs. He has made you the noblest of His creatures; He allows you to live in the pure air: you have no need to sow or to reap, but He cares for you, protects you and directs you.” And the birds stretched their necks, spread their wings, opened their beaks and looked at him as if thanking him, while he walked about amongst them, caressing them with the hem of his robe. Then he gave them his blessing and took leave of them.

When he was preaching at Alviano the swallows made such a noise with their twittering that he could not make himself heard. The gentle saint rebuked them: “It is my turn to speak,” he said. “Swallows, little sisters, listen to the Word of God, be silent and hold your peace, until I shall have said my say!” But for all this and much more, how St. Francis praised God for all His creatures and specially for “My Lord the Sun, for of Thee, oh! Most High, he is the symbol,”[6] we must turn to the pages of Sabatier. To St. Francis, as to the Buddha, all God’s creatures and the life which He gave them were sacred.

If there was much that was alike in the two men, there was one point in which they essentially differed. St. Francis was no scholar. He knew a little Latin, which he had learnt from the monks of St. George; that was a necessity for a man in his position, for Latin was a sort of lingua franca in his day, and was the language of sermons and of political discussions. Writing was a difficulty to him; he rarely took a pen in his hand and could do little more than sign his name. The autograph of the Sacro Convento, which is held to be genuine, gives evidence of great awkwardness. For the most part, he dictated, and would sign his letters with a simple T, the symbol of the Holy Cross. The Buddha, on the contrary, like St. Paul among the Pharisees, was a man of learning, deeply versed in the classics of the Brahmans, and well able to hold his own in discussions with the priests upon religion and upon the interpretation of the poems of the Rig Veda.

There is no ancient historical problem of so great interest as that of the Aryas, that mysterious people of whom we talk so much and know so little, as has been pointed out. The movements of the planets, the orbits of comets, have been accurately calculated; Nature is continually being compelled to yield many of her secrets to the patient investigations of science. But of this masterful white race, some of whom, from the high tablelands of Central Asia, swarmed down upon India as conquerors, while others, wandering by the shores of the Caspian Sea, overran Europe to become the progenitors of all that is noblest in mankind, there is no record, no history, and in regard to them even fable is silent. Where there is no writing, not so much as a graven stone, there can be no Champollion, no Rawlinson. The migrations of the Aryas, which meant so much for the children of men, were long unsuspected, and only in recent times realized. Even so, the few men of learning who gave thought to this crucial human enigma were travellers in a dense and dark forest, until in the Cimmerian gloom comparative philology opened out vistas—none too broad—through which they were enabled to gain glimpses of a civilization and people of whom all trace had been lost in the mist of many decades of centuries. Narrow as they were, they afforded the ποῦ στῶ, from which the investigation of the lost history was set in motion.

Of this modern learning we must acknowledge Max Müller as the foremost prophet. Bopp, Schlegel, Humboldt, Grimm and Burnouf were great men, but Max Müller, like Saul among the Benjamites, “from his shoulders and upward was higher” than any of them, and he it was who introduced the science of language into this country. To one who, like myself, has been a faithful believer in his teaching, it is a matter of unceasing wonder that there should be men of undoubted scientific and literary merit who hold in opposition to him that the Aryas were originally a European race, who in remote times found their way into Central Asia. This bold theory was started about the year 1839 by a famous Belgian geologist and ethnologist, Omalius d’Halloy, and it was taken up by no less a man than Robert Gordon Latham, by Benfey, Spiegel, Poesche, Penka, Schrader and others. Max Müller appears to attribute the idea to Benfey, a Jew, who was a learned Orientalist and professor of comparative philology at Göttingen. In Vol. IV., page 223, of Max Müller’s “Chips from a German Workshop,” we read: “We have all accustomed ourselves to look for the cradle of the Aryan languages in Asia, and to imagine these dialects flowing like streams from the centre of Asia to the south, the west and the north. I must confess that Professor Benfey’s protest against this theory seems to me very opportune, and his arguments in favour of a more Northern, if not European, origin of the whole Aryan family of speech deserve, at all events, far more attention than they have hitherto received.”

In spite of this, Max Müller does not seem to have bestowed that attention upon them, for I can find nothing either in confirmation or contradiction of the theory. He at once goes off at a tangent on the comparative inter-relations of the various Aryan _languages_ among themselves, but on the supposed European origin of the Aryan _race_ he is silent. I think it just possible that Max Müller may have wished to pay Benfey a compliment without committing himself to an endorsement of his views. Benfey had been strongly recommended to him by Bunsen, his own great friend and patron, for whom he cherished the most grateful affection.

In a letter, dated from Heidelberg, February 26th, 1855, Bunsen writes: “I wish you would take advantage of my communication to put yourself into correspondence with Benfey. He is well disposed towards you, and has openly spoken of you as the ‘apostle of German science in England.’ And then he stands infinitely higher than the present learned men of his department.” The desire to please Bunsen would account for Max Müller’s faint praise of Benfey’s theory, but its adoption would have seemed nothing less than the negation of all that he had so long striven to teach. (Cf. “Chips from a German Workshop,” Vol. III., page 469.) Of Omalius d’Halloy, Latham and the rest, Max Müller seems to take no heed. At any rate, I do not find them mentioned either in the “Chips” or in the lectures on the Science of Language.

I, for my part, should as soon accept the doctrine, in which I saw the other day that there is still here and there a believer, that the world is a flat surface, justifying the terrors of the sailors of Columbus lest, when they reached the extreme west, they should topple over, ship and all, into space or Hades, by whatever name you choose to call it.

To some men disputation and contradiction are an intellectual necessity—witness the beliefs that Bacon wrote _Romeo and Juliet_, and that Homer was an unlimited liability company of prehistoric ballad-mongers. According to the ethnological faith in which I have lived for the last sixty years, there existed in times so remote that they go back beyond the birth of chronology a white folk of shepherds and husbandmen who fed their flocks and tilled the soil in the valleys of the Highlands of Central Asia. There they increased and multiplied until the land of their birth could no longer hold them, and their pastures became insufficient for their flocks and herds. Then began their many wanderings. Toughened by a climate in which they had to live under most trying conditions of burning heat and extreme cold, they were a hardy race, having little to fear from the opposition of the weaker tribes who might seek to bar their way.

There is one point in regard to the theory that the Aryas were originally a European race, which, so far as I know, has not been taken into consideration. The Aryas were obviously a superior people. That they proved wherever they went. In every migration they came, conquered and remained. Has there ever been known a case where a superior race—not a handful of men, like the crew of the _Mayflower_, but a whole nation—has migrated, taking all the risks and uncertainties incident to travel and climate, and leaving the inferior race to enjoy the old well-proved home undisturbed?

Yet that is what the Aryas must have done if they left Europe for the terrors and privations of the Highlands of Asia, remaining to face the hardships of that inhospitable region for long centuries, until its insufficiencies drove them to seek the kindlier soil and climate which their forbears had deserted. But whether the Aryas left Europe for Asia and thence again descended upon Europe, or whether they were originally an Asiatic race of dominant nobility, that is a question over which we may leave the doctors to break their learned heads, in the confident assurance that never can they arrive at any certainty. Theory without a backing of facts, without documentary evidence, must remain valueless.

Only one thing in regard to the European migration or migrations is certain, and that is the fact that all the European languages, barring those of the Huns, their cousins the Finns, the Basques and the Turks (if we may call them Europeans, which let us hope will soon no longer be the case), can be traced back to the speech of the old tribe which perhaps three or four thousand years ago flitted south, east and west from the storm-vexed valleys of the Pamirs, conquering and civilizing, driving the aborigines before it like chaff before the wind.

When I was a lad we used to be taught by such pedagogues as were sufficiently advanced to have heard of Sanskrit, that this and that Greek or Latin or other European word was “derived from the Sanskrit.” That is all changed, and no teacher would nowadays dare to preach such nonsense. We know now that Sanskrit, which must have been more or less a dead language in Buddha’s time, only known at any rate by the more learned among the priests, was the descendant, like Greek, Latin, Russian, English, the Celtic tongues and others, from a much older language which was spoken by our forefathers in the Highlands of Central Asia. But Sanskrit, albeit not our parent speech, but rather a distant cousin of our own European tongues, dead and buried though it has been for some two thousand years, has been the key by which the learned have unlocked the door of the most secret muniment-room of ethnological lore.

It is not possible to realize all that the Buddha achieved in the world unless we have some conception of the religious and social condition of Asia at the time of his great renunciation. That condition was the result of the two great inroads of the Aryas, the one of the south into Persia, the other to the south and east overrunning India. The one was that of the fire-worshippers and Zarathustra (Zoroaster), whose sacred canon was the Zend Avesta; the other that of the Brahmans, whose inspired message was the Rig Veda. From the former are descended the modern Parsees and Guebres, and there is some justification for believing that the separation of these two streams of invasion may have been due to religious dissent; for to the Parsee—the believer in Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd), the one God, Creator of the Universe—the gods of the Brahmans are an abomination, and no book is to a pious Parsee so much to be abhorred as the Rig Veda. In the Veda the Gods are called Deva. This word in Sanskrit means bright, brightness or light being one of the most general attributes shared by the various manifestations of the Deity, invoked in the Veda as Sun, or Sky, or Fire, or Dawn, or Storm.... In the Zend Avesta the same word Deva means evil spirit. Like the Buddha, Zarathustra was a heretic and a dissenter, and his sacred book, the Zend Avesta, was an attempt to replace the worship of the forces of nature by a religion—purer and more spiritual—under one Divine Creator, Ahura Mazda, the wise spirit.

It is much to be regretted that, like our Lord, the Buddha should have left no written word of his own. It would have been interesting to know whether he held the Brahmanic gods in the same contempt as did Zarathustra and his followers. Inasmuch as he denied the inspiration of the Veda, he obviously must have repudiated them, and in his teaching, as it has been recorded, they play no part. But Max Müller certainly underestimates the respect assigned to them in the later Buddhism of the monks when he says: “In Buddhism we find these ancient Devas, Indra and the rest, as merely legendary beings carried about at shows, as servants of Buddha, as goblins or fabulous heroes; but no longer worshipped or even feared by those with whom the name of Deva had lost every trace of its original meaning.”

Now it is impossible to deny that all over the East, wherever there is a Buddhist temple, there the images of the old Devas, grim and repellent, are devoutly worshipped and propitiated by prayer, even by people who have no inkling of their significance. Moreover, it has been for many centuries the policy of Buddhist missionaries to claim the native saints in countries which they seek to convert as reincarnations of the Buddha, and therefore to be worshipped. For instance, in Japan, Hachiman, the indigenous God of War, is adored in Buddhist temples, and there are many such cases, where there is no question of “goblins or fabulous heroes.” In modern times the Jesuits adopted the same policy in China, in regard to so-called Worship of Ancestors and of Tien—Heaven; thereby bringing down upon themselves the wrath of the meddling and muddling Dominicans and Franciscans and the interference of the Pope, between whom and the Emperor-King Hsi there arose a controversy, in which the former was worsted and the cause of Christianity in China was set back for centuries.

I have spoken of the Aryas as of “a people of whom we know so little,” and yet, in truth, the wonder is that we should know so much with the almost mathematical certainty afforded by the study of language and of the Rig Veda, those beautiful hymns for which the Brahmans claim Sruti—divine inspiration—and which are by far the oldest document of the whole Aryan race. That there should exist any writing of the age to which they belong is a physical impossibility; the heat and damp of the Indian climate are swift and ruthless in their work of destruction. Even in the Buddha’s time the very language of the Vedas was dead and understood only by the priests. But we know from the journals of the Chinese pilgrim, Hsüan Chwang—as Max Müller points out—with what painful care the hymns were preserved orally by the Brahmans in the seventh century A.D. We have also, as he further points out, the analogy of Hebrew, the MSS. of the Old Testament, none of which is older than the tenth century, but of which the truth is tested by comparison with the Septuagint. We know that “every hymn, every verse, every word and syllable in the Veda were accurately counted by native scholars about five or six hundred years before Christ.” It is supposed that the collection of hymns was finished some eleven or twelve hundred years B.C. But some of the hymns were then ancient, some modern, “so that we cannot well assign a date more recent than 1200 to 1500 before our era for the original composition of those simple hymns which up to the present day are regarded by the Brahmans with the same feelings with which a Mohammedan regards the Koran, a Jew the Old Testament, a Christian his Gospel.”[7]

Some of the hymns appear to me to contain passages of almost sublime beauty, though Max Müller says: “The historical importance of the Veda can hardly be exaggerated, but its intrinsic merit, and particularly the beauty or elevation of its sentiments, have by many been rated far too high. Large numbers of the Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme: tedious, low, commonplace.” And then he goes on to show how the Gods are invoked to grant long life, food, large flocks, large families, for which they are to be rewarded with sacrifices, etc. Here I cannot but think that the great professor, for whom I entertain such sincere respect, is a little unfair. Is not the idea of looking to their God as the Giver of all good things common to all primeval peoples?

The Jews, for instance, though they were full of wise words about the vanity of riches, still looked to Jehovah to enable them to “eat the riches of the Gentiles,” and to lead them to “a land of wheat and barley and fig trees and pomegranates: a land of oil olive, and honey,” and of mineral wealth. Again Solomon says: “My son, forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my commandments; for length of days, and long life, and peace shall they add to thee.” Prayers for material prosperity to God, under whatsoever name He may be worshipped, are common to all religions, and it is hardly just to brand the hymns of the Veda as “tedious, low, commonplace,” because the ancient herdsmen of the Pamirs were no more disinterested in their prayers than the rest of mankind, but addressed their material petitions to God just as King David and King Solomon did.

It was natural enough that these men, abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks and herds by day and by night, under the eternal ice and snow of the heaven-reaching mountains, should worship the light—all that was Deva (light) was to them sacred and symbolical of the Godhead—and so the Deus of the Latins was originally Light, and when we talk of “divine,” “divinity,” we are looking back to the worship of our ancestors when they prayed to the Sun, the Fire, the Sky, the Dawn, which were the givers of all good things. Sometimes they are invoked under the names of Varuna, Mitra, Indra. “In one hymn Agni (fire) is called the ruler of the universe, the lord of men, the wise king, the father, the brother, the son, the friend of men.... In another hymn, Indra is said to be greater than all; the Gods, it is said, do not reach Thee, Indra, nor men; Thou overcomest all creatures in strength. Another God, Soma, is called the King of the World, the King of Heaven and Earth, the Conqueror of all. And what more could human language achieve in trying to express the idea of a divine and supreme power, than what another poet says of another God, Varuna: ‘Thou art Lord of all, of Heaven and earth; thou art the King of all, of those who are Gods and of those who are men?’”

How beautiful is the following litany:

“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born Lord of all that is. He established the earth and this sky; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“He who gives life, He who gives strength, Whose command all the bright Gods revere; Whose shadow is immortality; Whose shadow is death; Who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“He who through His power is the one King of the breathing and awakening world; He who governs all, man and beast; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“He Whose greatness these snowy mountains, Whose greatness the seas proclaim with the distant river; He Whose regions are, as it were, His two arms; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“He through Whom the sky is bright and the earth firm—He through Whom the heaven was ’stablished, nay, the highest heaven—He who measured out the light in the air; who is the God to Whom we shall offer sacrifice?

“He to Whom heaven and earth, standing firm by His will, look up trembling inwardly—He over Whom the rising sun shines forth; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“Wherever the mighty waterclouds went, where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose He who is the sole life of the bright Gods; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“He who by His might looked even over the waterclouds, the clouds which gave strength and lit the sacrifice, He who alone is God above all Gods; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

“May He not destroy us—He, the creator of the earth; or He, the righteous, who created the Heaven—He also created the bright and mighty waters; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?”

Well might Max Müller, who has unearthed them, redeem his dispraise of the hymns by saying: “Hidden in this rubbish there are precious stones!” Right well do the hymns, or, at any rate, those which he admits to be “precious stones,” deserve their title Rig Veda, the knowledge of Praise. Nothing can be finer, more masculine, than a propitiatory hymn to the Maruts, the Storm Gods, of which he gives us a translation: “They make the rocks to tremble, they tear asunder the kings of the forest. Come on, Maruts, like madmen, ye Gods, with your whole tribe.” No wonder men, whose lives had to face the terrors of the icy wilderness, sought the favour of the unruly forces whose rage meant death to them and to their herds and flocks. A hymn to Agni (fire), “the son of strength, the conqueror of horses, the highborn,” is less striking, but the zenith of the Vedic poetry is reached, as it seems to me, in a prayer addressed to Ushas, the Dawn. What a picture it suggests of the old herdsman in those frozen solitudes, falling on his knees when the stars grow pale before the first glimmer of light that stretches along the eastern horizon, thankfully to worship the radiant Goddess who puts to flight the dark shadows of the night and its unseen dangers. Listen to his song of praise:

“She shines upon us, like a young wife, rousing every living being to go to his work. When the fire had to be kindled by men, she made the light by striking down darkness.”

“She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving everywhere. She grew in brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows (the mornings), the leader of the days, she shone gold-coloured, lovely to behold.”

“She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the Gods, who leads the white and lovely steed (of the sun), the Dawn, was seen revealed by her rays, with brilliant treasures, following every one.

“Thou who art a blessing where thou art near, drive far away the unfriendly; make the pasture wide, give us safety! Scatter the enemy, bring riches! Raise up wealth to the worshipper, thou mighty Dawn.”

“Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright Dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, thou the love of all, who givest us food, who givest us wealth in cows, horses and chariots.”

“Thou daughter of the sky, thou highborn Dawn, whom the Vasishthas magnify with songs, give us riches high and wide; all ye Gods protect us always with your blessings.”[8]

So the old shepherd prays, and the Goddess, answering to his call, spreads her rosy mantle over the sky, and tinges the snowy peaks and ridges of the ice-bound mountains: the sun rises in his glory, and the peace of a new day is born to the world.

The piety of the old Aryans admits of no doubt. We are told that the consciousness of sin is a prominent feature in their religion. The poet of the Veda searches eagerly for his sin, and finds it not in his will but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds up evil before his eyes, and at last he turns to his God, the God of Grace who enlightens the simple. He believes in the power of the gods to take away from man the heavy burden of his sins. “Varuna is merciful to him who has committed.”

One more point should be noticed in any attempt, however slight, to give a sketch of the religion of the Veda. Max Müller tells us that it knows of no idols. This is the more remarkable when we think of the innumerable idols of savage and revengeful Gods by which Indian, Chinese and Japanese temples are degraded; all the nightmares of later monks who knew nothing of the pure and clean-minded Aryans, whose Gods, as Oldenberg tells us, in contrast to others, were bright and friendly beings without malice, cruelty and deceit.

It has been well said that the highest value of the sacred poems of the Aryans is historic, and that value has been revealed by the comparatively recent study of Sanskrit. That is in the school in which we learn who the Aryans were, what was the manner of their lives, their religion and their thoughts; and we can, in a measure, trace much of what, after many centuries, led to the development of a Hindu school of metaphysics, in comparison with which the much vaunted Pythagoreans and Greek thinkers were as babes and sucklings. The very name Arya tells us that this ancient people was a race of husbandmen and tillers of the soil, the root _ar_ from which the word is derived being found again in the Latin _arare_, to plough, _aratrum_, a plough, and in the Greek ἄροτρον; and when we talk of our “daughters,” it is well that we should remember that our ancestors on the Steppes, many thousand years ago, themselves invented the word “duhitar,” the milk-maid, the very word with which we Europeans, in one shape or another, caress our women-children. The hymns and prayers of the Vedas abound in allusions to the herds and flocks of these old farmers, whose best friends—and therefore the objects of their adoration—were the sun, the stars, the rains of heaven; just as their enemies—therefore to be propitiated—were the storms, the snow and the cruel winds: these were—the life-givers and death-givers. The life of the lonely watcher of the Steppes was of its essence one of contemplation, reflection and introspection.

Let me give one pregnant quotation from Max Müller’s “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature”: “At the first dawn of traditional history we see these Aryan tribes migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward toward the Seven Rivers (the Indus, the five rivers of the Punjab and the Sarasvati), and ever since India has been called their home. That before that time they had been living in more northern regions, within the same precincts, with the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans, the Celts, is a fact as firmly established as that the Normans of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia. The evidence of language is irrefragable, and it is the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historical periods. It would have been impossible to discover any traces of relationship between the swarthy natives of India and their conquerors, whether Alexander or Clive, but for the testimony borne by language.” (“Sanskrit Literature,” pp. 12, 13.)

To the learned Jew—a Semite, to the Hungarian, the Finn, or the Basque, who are Turanian settlers in Europe, the history of the Aryans is an interesting study, linguistic or racial. To us true Europeans, to us true Aryans, it has a far greater significance. It has all the charm of an inquiry into a piece of remote family history—all the glamour of a pedigree, not to be measured by a few puny centuries, but reaching far away into the clouds of incalculable æons.

Talking idly in a garden, we can do no more than touch the mere fringe of a mighty problem, even though it should be suggested by the great silent Buddha. For instance, we have summoned as witness the one word “daughter,” when there are so many others that we use a dozen times a day which are equally strong links in the long chain of evidence by which we prove our descent. But no matter—we have started the clue: let who will pick it up. It will reward him.

THE COMMUNE

My Pegasus is not always inclined to take long flights. Sometimes when a lazy fit is upon him he will venture no more than a trip across the Channel, carrying me to Germany, Italy, Switzerland—perhaps landing me no further off than some place in France. But of that beloved country I have so many recollections, some gay, some sad, that I crave to go no further. One such trip is very short but very tragic. Forty-six years have passed since the episode of which I write, but the scenes of those few days are graven so deeply in my mind that no lapse of time can ever efface them. They haunt me like the pathetic thoughts which are aroused by the solitary little pink slipper of the Princesse de Lamballe in the Musée Cluny. Thoughts are such obstinate vagabonds that they must needs choose their own road, and not even the Buddha, in his Veluvana, can drive them eastward unless such be their will.

The final tragedy of 1871 (from a repetition of the horror of which, may Heaven preserve France and ourselves!) is no doubt in these days eclipsed by the brutal outrages upon which _Kultur_ is ever improving. What will forty-five more years do? That mechanical invention and chemical discoveries should come into play is, I suppose, inevitable. The strange thing is that the whole coarse-fibred soul of the German seems to be infected by the very potentialities of all these ghastly new discoveries, which seem to urge him on to new cruelties and new crimes. In 1870 he knew how to spare. Witness Paris. Now it is otherwise. Still, to us who lived in those days what will always be known as the Franco-German war remains as a poignantly painful memory; though the ravages of war and the carnage were terrible, it was the parricidal fury of anarchy and its monads which made men’s blood run cold.

The Commune, that hideous catastrophe which reversed the unnatural, crime of Saturn—the children murdering and devouring their own parent—ended tragically with the month of May, 1871. One morning I got a note from the Duke of Sutherland, saying that he had received information that the first train would be allowed into Paris the next day, and suggesting that we should go over and see whether we could be of any use. We started the following morning—the Duke, George Crawley, Wright, the Duke’s secretary, and myself; but the train was stopped at Creil that afternoon, and we had to stay there rather miserably for the night. The place was swarming with Prussian soldiery, scowling and truculent-looking, clanking their spurs defiantly all about the station and town. The people returned their evil looks with interest, but it was of no use—they were the masters. _Væ victis!_ It is a terrible sight to see a great people trampled on and tortured by the savagery of a victorious army; but when that army is a Prussian army—ask the Belgians.

There was no difficulty the next day; the train started early, and we were in Paris betimes. There were not many cabs at the station, but there was no great competition, so we were soon suited. I got on the box by the driver, as I was curious to hear what he had to say of the siege and the Commune. Strange to say, he, like every Parisian with whom I talked, was far more bitter against the Commune than against the Prussians. After all, men said, the Prussians spared our monuments; the Commune destroyed them. When we arrived arrests were taking place all over the town, and there was still some shooting of men in the streets, though we did not see it. Full of pathetic suggestion were the little heaps of clothes piled up in the squares and at the corners of streets.

There were some uniforms, but mostly they were made up of humble blouses and the civilian caps of what we should call street arabs—the _titis_ of old Paris. The owners, as the cabman said, were all rotting in the Fosse Commune; he himself was full of belated valour. “If there had only been ten men like me,” he protested, “ten determined stalwarts, a horror like the Commune would have been impossible.” I asked him what he did. “Mon Dieu! Monsieur! Que pouvais-je faire contre tous ces brigands? J’étais tout seul. Je me suis refugié dans la cave.”

The next day a worthy shopkeeper held just the same language. Ten men such as himself could have held the Rue de la Paix and kept the Communards at bay. He tried to persuade his neighbours, but they would not join with him, so, regretfully, he, too, hid in the cellar. It was strange to listen to these bourgeois who had shown such courage and determination and endurance during the siege, when the Prussians were battering them out of existence. They could face the Prussians gallantly; before the Commune they quailed.

The Rue de Rivoli was a piteous sight. The Ministère des Finances was burnt and gutted; the roof had fallen in, the windows were all gaping, and out of one of them there was a bit of charred blind fluttering dismally in the light summer air like the ghost of a flag. The Tuileries were nothing but a pile of charred stones, hardly the skeleton of a palace left; but the Louvre was luckily to all intents and purposes unharmed. It was enough to make a man weep to see the havoc, the ruins, and everywhere the signs of murder and violence. The Communards and pétroleuses had done their work thoroughly.

We dropped the luggage at the hotel, dismissed the cabman, still fully convinced of the potentiality of his own valour, and started forth for a morning stroll on foot.

When we came to the Place Vendôme, the great column, the bronze record of the past glories of the French army, was lying prone on a bed of straw, torn down by the sacrilege of Gustave Courbet, the Ministre des Beaux-Arts under the Commune. It had been badly smashed, and some small fragments had been carried away as souvenirs, but many of these were, I was told, recovered. As we drew near to look at the cruel misdeed, a _peloton_ of soldiers came along with a civilian in their midst, whom they were carrying off to a guard-room hard by. It was Courbet himself, whom I knew well by sight. I was not the only man to recognize him. An elderly gentleman with a little boy of about fourteen years was passing by. When he saw the prisoner he dashed forward, and before the guards could stop him, knocked off Courbet’s hat, shouting out: “Au moins, scélérat, tu te découvriras devant la colonne que tu as fait tomber.” Courbet, dazed by this fury of explosive patriotism, picked up his hat and said nothing, while the gentleman, well pleased with himself, walked on with his little son, and the guard grinned satisfaction, but took no further notice.

I had often seen Courbet in former days at the Café Royal, where he used to go for his midday meal. As he was something of a _sommité_, a celebrity in art as elsewhere for all his rebellious proclivities, the maître d’hôtel used to receive him with the greatest ceremony, bowing to the ground and rubbing his hands: “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. Que pourrai-je offrir à Monsieur ce matin. J’ai un Chateaubriand qui est de toute confiance,” etc., etc., etc. Courbet would sit down with majestic condescension, like a true anarchist, deigning to be waited upon with all the adulation which was due to him.

Well, it so happened that after the little scene which I have described in the Place Vendôme, we went on to the Café Royal, where we were received with effusive welcome by the maître d’hôtel. Like everybody else, he began talking about the recent tragedies and inveighing against the Commune. I told him of the arrest of Courbet, his old patron, and he at once launched out into the most violent abuse of him. “Oh! Monsieur, ne me parlez pas de ce sale communeux! Si jamais il ose remettre les pieds ici c’est à moi qu’il aura affaire!” I asked him why he used the word “communeux,” I thought the word was communard. “Oui, Monsieur,” he replied sententiously, “mais on dit _crapule_, _crapuleux_, _commune_, _communeux_, c’est plus méritant.” Courbet was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and was condemned, moreover, to pay a very heavy fine for the fall of the column—none too severe a punishment in all the circumstances of the case.

Some time after the expiration of the six months I was again in Paris, and went to the Café Royal for luncheon. Who should come in a few minutes later but the great Courbet. Up rushed the maître d’hôtel to meet him, and I anticipated a first-rate row. Not a bit of it! To my amazement I heard the old welcome: “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet! Qu’est-ce-qu’on peut vous offrir ce matin?” etc. The old story, the old refrain, the obsequious bows, the festive rubbing of hands. I could not resist reminding my friend of what he had said a few months before. Ah! he said, that was all so long ago! “D’ailleurs,” he added, “il ne faut pas oublier qu’il a été ministre, et on ne sais jamais ce qui peut arriver!”

Old Lady Edward Thynne used to tell a capital story of Courbet, whom she met a few years before 1870 at some artistic gathering in Paris. He had been airing his political views for some minutes, when to draw him out she said: “But then it seems that all this while I have been talking with a real red republican.” “Rouge, Madame,” was the answer, “dites, plutôt, violet,” and then he went off again at score. “But why,” she asked, “do you say that you want to pull down the Tuileries?” “Madame, parce que tant que cette sacrée maison durera il y aura toujours des coquins qui voudront venir y demeurer.”

Another notable arrest was that of Paschal Grousset, the so-called Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was caught disguised as a woman in the Rue Condorcet, which created a great sensation. Sir Edward Malet, who as second secretary of the British Embassy, had been obliged to have some dealings with him, told me that he was really a very pleasant little man, who was always civil and obliging to foreigners. “Not a bad little fellow,” Malet used to say. I saw him some years later in London, when he was correspondent of I forget which of the French newspapers, and he came to me at the Office of Works to ask for an admission to a volunteer review which the Queen was to hold in Hyde Park. He was so agreeable that I quite understood Malet’s verdict on him.

In the evening we went to dine at Voisin’s, where I had heard that the members of the Government of the Commune had been dining and breakfasting every day during their short lease of power. Good old Bellanger, the famous _sommelier_, was delighted to see us. I asked after a certain old chambertin—had he any left? “Pour Monsieur il y en aura toujours,” was the answer. But I said, “I wonder that your late patrons did not drink it all up!” “Ah! Monsieur, si vous croyez que j’allais donner de ce vin là à ces charapans! Monsieur, lorsque j’ai su qu’ils allaient venir ici je suis descendu dans la cave et j’ai changé toutes les étiquettes. Ils croyaient boire les meilleurs crus—s’ils avaient su ce que je leur servais! Mais j’étais sûr de mon affaire! Est-ce qu’ils s’y connaissaient ces animaux-là?” And then he went on grumbling: “Ah! mais non, non! Du chambertin—jamais de la vie!” Truly there is a comic element in every tragedy, and a grave-digger in every Hamlet.

* * * * *

Of all the crimes and cruelties which disgraced the Commune, none excited greater horror than the murder of Monseigneur Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, and the priests who with him and many others were seized as hostages. The flames of the Tuileries and other monuments, the hell-fire orgies of the mob and the pétroleuses drunken with the lust of blood and incendiarism—when the very firemen pumped petrol instead of water on to the burning buildings—were almost forgotten in the execration of that sacrilege. Upwards of sixty hostages, all innocent peaceable men, against no one of whom could any misdeed be alleged, were put to death. They were imprisoned in La Roquette, and on the 24th of May the Archbishop and the Abbé de Guerry, the Curé of the Madeleine, with Monsieur Bonjean, the president of the Cour de Cassation, and three Jesuit priests (Fathers Ducondray, Allard and Clair), after a sham trial, were led into the courtyard of the prison and shot. The Archbishop, who was the second of the victims to suffer, met his death like the hero and Christian martyr that he was. He stepped to the front, and praying to God for the forgiveness of his murderers, gave them his pastoral blessing. Two of the firing party, less hardened than the others, knelt down and asked his pardon. When the butchery was over the ruffians stripped the Archbishop’s honoured body, and that no degradation might be wanting, carted it off to be thrown like the carrion of a malefactor into the Fosse Commune. Even decent burial was to be denied to him.

After the last desperate fight at the cemetery of Père la Chaise, in which men and women fought like tigers and tigresses, neither giving nor asking for quarter, all mad to kill, and kill, and kill, the body was recovered and carried to the archiepiscopal palace, where it lay in state, with those of the other priests. All Paris flocked to do homage to one of God’s saints, and take a last look at the beloved old man. Those who could afford it were in deep mourning, but all were weeping from the richest down to the poorest and humblest, as I saw them march past the body. The Archbishop, lying mitred and robed, looked like a waxen image. There was no sign of pain in his face, no trace of the cruel sorrow and long suspense by which his last days must have been racked; on it was written only that divine peace which passeth all understanding.

The hour-glass had been turned and the sands of the Commune had run out. The prison of La Roquette, the scene of so many horrors, was now in the hands of the Versaillais, and the cells of the hostages were more fitly tenanted by the murderers who but a few days before, when to be respectable was a deadly crime, had ruled Paris with a rod of terror. Passing by the prison, after leaving the Archbishop’s palace, we saw that the great gates were open, and a crowd was gathered outside eagerly watching and craning necks to see what was going on within. I asked what the people were waiting for? A batch of prisoners was to be led out to the fortifications to be shot. Next to me was standing a rather pretty young girl of about fifteen or sixteen years, nicely but very simply dressed, evidently the daughter of well-to-do bourgeois parents. In charge of her was a bonne, an elderly woman wearing a linen cap, and the typical tartan fichu pinned across her breast.

Presently the excitement began. First came three omnibuses, their usual function, as their placards showed, being to take pleasure-seekers to the Jardin des Plantes; they were driven by soldiers, other soldiers or gendarmes sitting on the top and acting as conductors. Inside an evil-looking crew of scowling ruffians, some of them wounded, all dirty, unshaven and truculent-looking—villains who knew that for them even hope was dead. The omnibuses were followed by litters, in which other soldiers were carrying men who had been seriously wounded, some of them terribly mangled.

In one of the litters lay a dark, fierce-looking man, with a shock mass of black hair. His head and face, pale and haggard, with a beard of three or four days’ growth, were tied up with blood-stained linen bandages. His eyes were closed, and he seemed hardly conscious, too feeble to move, too tired to care. He was respectably, even well dressed in a frock coat. Evidently a man in a superior position to that of those who had gone before. As he came, and owing to some obstruction, his bearers paused for a minute, the girl near me gave a piercing shriek, and crying out: “Papa! Ah, Papa, c’est Papa!” fell sobbing into the arms of her nurse. She had come on the chance of one last look, and had, as the bystanders said, been waiting for hours.

The wounded man, hearing the cry and recognizing the dear young voice, opened his eyes, and pulling himself together for a supreme effort, tried limply to wave his hand. His lips moved, and during the short halt tried to utter a few words, but voice would not come to his bidding; he uttered no sound, his eyes closed again, and quickly his bearers turned the corner and he was out of sight. That dumb farewell was the last of him. The final act can have been but a small matter to him, for he was, indeed, little more than a corpse already. The poor child stood there shaking from head to foot and weeping on the bosom of her bonne, and the crowd dispersed. It was a harrowing scene, it was a pathetic scene, the pathos of which could hardly be forgotten by any who witnessed it. After nearly half a century I can still see that grim procession of death, and the young girl’s shriek of agony rings in my ears.

Those were days of horror. Retribution had come with no halting foot; shrifts were short, and justice wasted no time over inquiries; it was even said that a good many innocents perished with the guilty. Whether that is true or not is hard to say, but it was an accusation which in the circumstances was sure to be made. An outcry was raised against the four generals of the Republican armies, Vinoy, Ladmisault, Cissey and Donay, to whom the guardianship of Paris, divided into four parts, was entrusted.

But far more virulent than any of the attacks upon them were the charges that were brought—most unfairly, since they only obeyed orders—against the Marquis de Gallifet and his dragoons. Those charges came from the white-livered party, set on by such Communists as had managed by hook or by crook to escape observation and save their skins. These did not hesitate to accuse Gallifet of wholesale murders of innocent men and women when the executions took place outside the Arc de l’Etoile. From inquiries which I made on the spot and at the time, I believe that he did no more than his duty.

Gallifet was a most determined man, to whom duty was something sacred, bound to be carried out to the letter at any cost. He was, moreover, a born soldier, loving his men as they loved him, and cut to the quick by the deaths of so many comrades. As a cavalry leader, all men recognized his great worth. Brave as the steel of his own sword, utterly reckless of his life, as he had shown in the disastrous Mexican campaign and in the Great War, his courage was so infectious that his troopers would have followed him had he ordered the charge to be sounded against all the hosts of Satan. War was for him something very real, not to be treated with half measures or milksop compromises. He was a fighter, and he fought in deadly earnest.

We hear much in these days from peacefully-minded lawyers of the iniquity of reprisals. It would be a good thing if some of these learned gentlemen would remember the old adage, “Inter arma silent leges;” adding to it the words, “et juris consulti.” It is good to see on this 3rd of February, 1916, that there is at least one great leader of thought left in this country who takes a saner and more masculine view of reprisals than that which is held by some bishops and semi-parsonic lawyers. Lord Rosebery’s letter to the _Times_ of this day is inexorable in its logic and in its justice.

We must protect our women and children. This is an age of cruel inventions, and if our enemies take advantage of them, so must we, unless we would wish to be as the archers of Edward the Third and the Black Prince would be if we sent them into the trenches to-day, forbidden for chivalrous reasons to use aught but their bows against modern artillery and high explosives. If Germany uses poison gas and liquid fire, so must we. If she drops bombs from airships upon innocent civilians, women, and children, we must follow suit. God forbid that it should be in the spirit of revenge; but what other deterrent is possible? “Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.” It is much that Lord Rosebery has lifted his voice in this sense.

Gallifet did not hesitate to adopt reprisals, and nobody can say that his methods failed. He knew that the crimes with which he had to deal could not be prevented in the future by the sprinklings of rose-water and soft-sawder. Reprisals in the sense of cruelty to prisoners and murders such as that of Nurse Cavell and Captain Fryatt, are, of course, quite another matter.

I could not help taking a great interest in Gallifet’s proceedings, because, although I had only had the very slightest acquaintance with him some ten years before, he was the intimate friend of many friends of my own, both English and French. The Prince of Wales, as he then was, had great regard for him, and never failed to send for him when he went to Paris.

It must have been about the year 1859 or 1860 that he, with Madame de Gallifet, the Sagans and the Pourtalès’s, came over to London for a week or ten days in the height of the summer season, and I was asked by Madame de Persigny, the French ambassadress, to do what I could to make their stay pleasant. The three ladies, with Madame de Metternich as a fourth, were at that time the recognized queens of Paris society, or, at any rate, of that part of it which bowed the knee at the Imperial Court. Madame de Gallifet was very good-looking, and the Princesse de Sagan handsome and distinguished, but neither of them could compare with the Comtesse de Pourtalès, who had all the subtle charm and teasing beauty of which the eighteenth century portrait painters are the celebrants.

Madame de Metternich, who did not come to London with them, was not a pretty woman; indeed, she spoke of herself as “le singe à la mode;” but she was witty and very attractive, and so became the high priestess of that religion of which Worth, the famous man-milliner, a former apprentice of Swan and Edgar’s, who had raised his temple in the Rue de la Paix, was the Pope, on the hierarchy of fashion. She was perhaps one degree greater than the other three ladies, but above them all was enthroned the Empress Eugénie, a divinity at whose altar all men and women were fain to fall down and worship.

These are strangely frivolous recollections of pretty women and smart dresses and coxcombry of men-milliners that came thrusting themselves into the midst of one of the great tragedies of history. But these are the tricks which memory plays us: the most grotesque ideas surging up in the midst of acute sorrow, the dance of death serving to accentuate the follies of a farce—so unstable are our minds. All this is conjured up by the recollection of Gallifet, before he became a famous cavalry general, when he was a brilliant young officer, the spoilt child of a court, the favourite officer of an emperor, popular with men and women, idolized by his soldiers, long before the cruel wounds of the Mexican campaign—when he showed what the man about town was worth when brought face to face with grim war—the last man in Europe of whom I should have thought that one day he would have to experience those emotions which cause the most callous judge’s voice to falter when he puts on the black cap.

Later in life, with his closely-cropped white hair and moustache dyed black, he was a picturesque figure in Paris—still a beau sabreur, still a soldier at every point—a name to conjure with had the opportunity presented itself.

TREES AND THEIR LEGENDS

Solitude, surrounded by memories of which I have spoken, and by the fanciful brood of thoughts to which they give birth, has a mystic power of banishing all trammels of time and of place. The plants in the garden begin to take strange forms: the bamboos are drawn up out of their puny Western stature into gracefully-waving plumes of Brobdingnagian growth, such as we see in the Peradeniya Gardens of Ceylon; the oak under which the great Buddha sits, solemnly holding up a warning hand, changes into a holy Bō-tree, its long-stalked, pointed leaves quivering in a gentle breeze, laden with the heavy perfume of the sacred Champak flower; the fleece of clouds sails away into space and the soft English sky hardens into the metallic blue of the glaring East.

All of a sudden a slight chilly gust chases away the whole illusion. Kapilavastu, Rajagriha, the deer forest, the Veluvana, with its crowd of yellow-robed monks carrying their begging bowls, fade away, and we are sobered into the commonplace realities of life on a spur of the Cotswold Hills. It is like the awakening after the intoxication of Hashish, or after the short death dealt by laughing gas.

The dream may have been fascinating, but there are glorious compensations in the awakening, for though our peaceful gardens are not so wildly fantastic, not such an orgy of colour, as those of the gorgeous tropics, our woodlands in their grave dignity are matchless: they touch the heart; the others stir the senses.

It was a lovely day in early summer, and the show of the Royal Horticultural Society was in full swing in the gardens of Chelsea Hospital. All the world was there—all the world, and everybody else’s wife. A few of us were standing looking at a grand display of orchids, when a charming lady turned round to me and said: “Oh! how delicate, how beautiful and how distinguished they are! Surely the very aristocracy of plant life!” “No,” I answered, “they are only the nouveaux riches. It is the old oaks of our parks and forests that are the aristocracy of plants.”

Surely there is nothing more proud, nothing more wonderful in nature, than the noble old age of those patriarchs which centuries ago chequered with their quivering shade the glades in which Robin Hood and Little John drew the bow, and holy Friar Tuck made his quarter-staff spin round his head like the sails of a windmill. Indeed, all our indigenous trees are glorious. The beech, the ash, the wych-elm, and even the so-called British elm, which, sooth to say, is only a naturalized alien that came to us from Italy and has been so long among us, living in trusty alliance with our natives, that we have come to treat him as our own—all these, in company with the oak, truly make up what Wordsworth called “a brotherhood of venerable trees.”

In Britain, and probably all over Europe, there is no tree which commands so much veneration as the oak. We talk of hearts of oak, and of the wooden walls of old England, and we endow our hoary, gnarled giants with all the attributes of stateliness and royal honour. One squire of high degree I once knew who, shortly before his death, thanking God for a long life, boasted, not that his eighty years had been spent in the practice of piety and virtue, as doubtless was the case, but that he had never cut down an oak. With the oaks we connect the stories of old British kings and the mysterious liturgies of the golden-sickled Druids, those Brahmans of the Cassiterides—the Tin Islands—who, if we may believe Cæsar and Pliny, who are our only authorities—for the priesthood, even if they could do so, might write down nothing—exercised power greater than those of popes. Woe to him who denied their authority or questioned their law! For their excommunication was more terrible than that of Rome, making a man an outcast, a pariah, a social leper, with whom no man might deal or hold intercourse; for if he did, he, too, would fall under the awful ban. After a lapse of two thousand years we have heard of something of the same kind in our sister island.

And our beloved Scotch fir! What of that true Briton? Happily there are still here and there in remote Highland glens a few of the old primeval forests of that great tree left. Probably the most picturesque of these is the King’s forest of Ballochbine, where you may see it in all the fullness of its nature—veterans borne down with age, stalwarts in full vigour, youngsters in their nonage, babies just born from the seed. Their red stems, glowing in the evening sun, spring out of a carpet of heather, blaeberries and ferns, among mossy rocks and lichen-starred stones. Close to them are their graceful consorts, the birches, which Lowell called “the most shy and ladylike of trees,” drooping their delicate plumes over the pools and musical rills of brown peat-stained burns. What a succession of pictures, hard to beat, does this old forest of Ballochbine give! And that is as it should be, for is it not the King’s own?

The happy union between the pine and the birch has been sung by some Scottish poet in a simple but touching Epithalamium:

“The Pine’s the King of Scottish glens: The Queen, ah! who is she? The fairest tree the forest kens. The bonnie birken tree!”

We may be asked, since we have so grand a pine of our own, why import from abroad so many aliens, many of which are certainly not its superiors in beauty? I suppose that the answer must be that of the daily partridge which the domestically faithless French king brought in argument against the remonstrances of his father-confessor. Besides, it can hardly be denied that many of them are exquisitely beautiful. One of the lovely blue spruces from Pike’s Peak in Colorado, looking as if it had been dyed in the mystic waters of the Grotto Azzurra of Capri,[9] strikes an altogether new note in our garden landscape; the steeple of a tapering cypress will give that perpendicular line which is so valuable to the painter, as we may see in Italian gardens, in the picturesque cemeteries of Constantinople, and all over the Levant. A blue cedar from the Atlas range in North Africa, its branches feathering down to the ground in graceful profusion, catches the slanting rays of the sun and sends them back to you as if its leaves were sprinkled with hoar-frost or wrought in some luminous metal. But it is idle to compile lists and catalogues. They make dull writing and duller reading. Suffice it to say that the intrinsic beauties of the many trees, shrubs, lianes and vines, which have been added to our own lovely flora, furnish an ample justification for their admission into our homes.

But apart from this there is the collector’s mania to be reckoned with. Most men take a pride in showing their friends some gem, some treasured rarity, and the gardener is as proud of his collection of unique plants as the Hertfords, the Rothschilds and the Pierpont Morgans have been of their pictures and miniatures, their Sèvres porcelain, or the masterpieces of Riesener, Gouthière and Caffieri. The plant collector has this advantage over those famous lovers of the living works of dead artists that he can gratify his whims and vanity so much more cheaply.

“What brought Sir Visto’s ill-got wealth to waste? Some Demon whispered—Visto, have a taste.”

Even orchids are cheap in comparison with Rembrandts, Vandycks, Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs. It stands to reason that the gathering together of such treasures as may be seen at Westonbirt, at Aldenham, at Frensham, and in one or two other collectors’ gardens, cannot be achieved without a considerable expenditure of money, guided by consummate knowledge; but, even so, the cost is relatively small. And the owners of lesser pleasaunces with small outlay can profit by the experience and public spirit of those gardening magnates, both professional and amateur, who combine to send out costly expeditions to new fields of adventure and discovery in order to add to the treasure stores of horticulture.

If there be any who are so jealous of the honour of our British forests and woods that they resent any competition with their beauty, and look upon all new-comers from over the sea as undesirable aliens, they should, at any rate, allow that, though they would be out of tune in a wild forest, they bring lovely harmonies of colour and form into the more artificial scenes with which we adorn the immediate surroundings of our country houses. They are no more foreign than the numberless flowers with which our predecessors used to furnish their beds and borders, and they have two great advantages over these, as I hope to show presently.

As to the question of fitness or unfitness, that is a matter of conditions and arrangement. I know a vast park in which the old oaks and beeches used to make up a sylvan scene of incomparable grandeur. Some years ago the owner, fired with a new and wholly uneducated enthusiasm, studded the stately forest with lovely little Japanese maples, but without any intervening masses of cultivation to make the garden blend with the primeval trees. The effect was deplorably ludicrous—nay, it was worse than ludicrous: it was an act of desecration. Had my friend been more judicious, what charming effects he might have conjured up in a suitable place with those same little crimson bushes which he condemned to play so silly a part in among his glorious secular oaks! What magical scenes have been called up with their help at Westonbirt! But those pictures were produced by knowledge.

There was a time when in spring and summer I used to look forward to the autumn, hailing its advent as the season of sport, when every day brought some new joy. Now that I have left the autumn of life far behind me and am deep in its winter, I have no love left for the shortening days, the rustle of falling leaves, and the cold patter of the rain on the dimmed panes of glass. And yet when the sun shines, how beautiful is the Indian summer! How lovely the dismissal of the haze floating away across the valley! Yes! Autumn has its consolations.

Foreigners who have never been in this country generally think that we live like newts and frogs in a land of marshes and dismal morasses, curtained by fogs through which the sun’s rays never pierce, a land sadly breeding a mysterious disease which they call “Le spleen.” In the fifties, as Disraeli once put it, they looked upon us as “an insular people subject to fogs, and possessing a powerful middle class,” both, in their eyes, equally objectionable. All the greater was their surprise and admiration when they came to realize the soft loveliness of our landscapes. Sixty years ago and more I was sent home from Eton for a few days’ change after some trifling ailment, and my father took me, and a French friend of his who was staying with him, to Richmond. Never shall I forget that man’s astonished enthusiasm when the view from Richmond Hill burst upon his sight.

It was, as good luck would have it, a rarely beautiful afternoon in October. The trees in the park were clothed in the golden russets of autumn. The sunlight was dancing upon the river running like a broad silver ribbon through the valley—a delicate blue mist threw an exquisitely diaphanous veil over the distance. Our friend, brought up in the fallacies of the French novelists of those days, lifted his hands in amazement and stood silent.

It was my first sight of Richmond. I have travelled far and wide since then, and have seen many more startling scenes, but the haunting beauty of that autumn evening remains one of my happiest dreams. There is a mysterious charm in that landscape, with the oaks which were veterans when Henry the Eighth hunted the deer under their boughs, the lush grass, and the Thames, that sacred river, for an Eton boy without its peer in the world. It is a scene which neither Alps nor Rockies, neither the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, nor the Great Wall of China, nor the wonders of the tropical jungle, can efface. And—it is home.

Some thirty years ago when, as I have said, autumn was still the welcome herald of sport, I, happily inspired, laid the foundation of what to-day robs it of some of its sadness. Now that the stalls in my stable are empty and the guns lie idle in the racks of the gun-room, I reap the reward. I sent to America for acorns, I bought seed of the giant Japanese vine (_Vini coignettia_) in Tokio. From Veitch (alas! for the death of a noble firm!) I procured specimens of all the species and varieties of Japanese maples: Thunberg’s berberis, the Persian parrottia—these, with the various forms of rhus and other choice plants, make up a palette of colours to cheer the dool of the dying year. In October one after another the maples begin to send up tongues of fire, setting the hill-side in flames.

It is a rare treat to see the sun shining through the leaves of some trees red as the pigeon’s-blood ruby; rare to see the fretted lace-work of others clothing them in a gorgeous panoply of old gold. Their neighbours are gleaming like the jewels in Oriental fable. The hollies and thorns and taller trees are draped with flamboyant curtains sent down by the huge vines—red, yellow, tawny orange, festoons falling in a riotous feast of colour.

Among all these proud foreigners the more modest yet no less beautiful native spindle-tree suffers no eclipse. A little later the American oaks begin to assert themselves. These, a little while before they turn crimson, assume all the quality of an old Chinese bronze which the patina of time has painted with the many hues of Joseph’s coat mysteriously blended together in an exquisite harmony. When we watch all these, we understand the poetry of the Japanese when they talk of their mountains and forests clothed in the brocade of the maples.

It must be obvious that gardening, the object of which is the production of a succession of varied pictures which, being inspired by the observation of Nature in her many moods, might appeal to the artistic taste of a painter or stir the emotion of a poet, presents difficulties undreamt of by the flower-bed manufacturers of fifty or sixty years ago. Their gardening was all done with compasses and straight-edge, and the geometrical result, the eccentric “knottes” worked out in alternantheras, ecneverias, golden feather and the like, savoured of nothing nearer to nature than the Tottenham Court Road.

Those were the days in which the garden, like the kitchen, was the special province of the mistress of the house. Of the latter she might know something, of the former generally nothing; and the consequence was that it was handed over to men, who, though they might be most admirable cultivators, had had no artistic training, had not had the opportunity of learning by travel, and were content to carry on certain rule-of-thumb traditions, which turned out every man’s garden in the likeness of that of every other man. In the uniformly unrelieved brilliancy of geraniums, verbenas and calceolarias, of imagination or poetry there was not a trace—not even the merit of invention.

In his brilliant book, “Form and Colour,” Mr. March Phillips divides the human mind into two great categories—the intellectual and the emotional. The intellectual faculty is characteristic of the West, the emotional faculty prevails in the East. Next comes the question of Form and Colour in Art. “Form,” he says, “has dominated Art whenever and wherever the intellectual faculty was dominant in life; colour has dominated Art whenever and wherever the emotional faculty has dominated life.” Later in the book, when speaking of the contrast between the Art of the West and the Art of the East, he proceeds: “Form, as we were saying, is chiefly a matter of the intellect. The arts which deal with form convey ideas. Their appeal is to the mind. _Colour, on the other hand, conveys no ideas._ [My italics.] It is emotional and appeals to the senses rather than to the intellect. And this being so, it seems natural that the Western temperament, intellectual rather than sensuous, should excel in form rather than in colour; while the Eastern, sensuous rather than intellectual, should excel in colour rather than in form.”

This theory of colour and form gives us much food for thought, and it is impossible not to be struck by the aptness with which it may be applied to the gardener’s craft. The gorgeous colour of the one school of gardening appeals directly to the senses, and, like other similar appeals where there is no relief from monotony, it soon satiates and wearies.

The kaleidoscopic beds which remind us of Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the brain of Zeus, are at the outset the same as they will be four months later, when their glory will be ignominiously wheeled away to the rubbish heap. Day after day you look out from your window and there is no change—nothing but an eternal Oriental glare of scarlet and yellow. How can such a garden create ideas? Compare with this the garden of form. Here there is plenty to excite ideas and fire the imagination, for here you have life with all its changes and accidents, from the tender birth of the bud to the vigour of the mature plant, the loves of the flowers, and the happy ripening of the fruit, which is the mystery of maternity.

No two days are alike; as they follow one another, each brings with it something new, some fresh beauty, some intimate revelation of Nature’s secrets. And when the year has nearly run its course, when the autumn leaves fall to the ground in a shower of gold such as that which broke through Danaë’s prison, there is no death or decay of the plant, no carting off to the _fosse commune_, but just a long, happy winter’s sleep, enviable as that of a dormouse resting in the sure hope of a glorious new birth when the first kiss of spring shall awaken the sleeping beauty in the wood.

Colour, then, is of the East sensuous; form is of the West intellectual. It is, of course, a mere coincidence, and not a rule capable of being laid down; but as I was walking to-day in a garden of form with Mr. Phillips’ theory seething in my brain, I could not but be struck by noting that, besides our own native trees, by far the greater number of those that have been naturalized here for the sake of their shape are of Western origin; while, with the exception of the American oaks, those that we value for their gorgeous colouring—such, for instance, as the Japanese maples and vines—come to us from the East.

It is hardly worth noticing, but it was certainly curious that, wherever I looked, there I saw form transported from the West. The caravans which crossed the Rocky Mountains in search of gold, not without leaving many skeletons by the way; the orchid hunters of the Amazon, braving sickness, fevers and poisoned arrows, have enriched our pleasaunces with treasures, not to speak of the brilliantly-coloured gems of which they were primarily in search, which, could our grandfathers, and even our fathers, come to life again, would make them open their eyes wide with astonishment, wondering whether some magician could have waved his wand over their cherished grounds, changing them into fairyland.

The diplomatists, who opened up Japan in 1858, the pioneers of trade, who have penetrated into the secret places of Western China, carrying their lives in their hands, have all added to our wealth of plants, both in form and colour, but chiefly in colour. When we see the glorious velvety shafts of Lawson’s Cypress, or _Libocedrous decurrens_, shooting up heavenward like church spires, when we look upon the great American conifers, so rich and so various, or among the lowlier plants, are startled by the huge leaves of the Chilian Gunneras, we cannot but admit that for form we have to thank the West.

In a later chapter, in the course of a fascinating disquisition on Byzantine architecture, Mr. Phillips goes on to say: “We must recognize that between these ideas of colour and softness there is something more than an accidental connection ... softness and colour go together as naturally as hardness and form.”

These are words which might be applied with special fitness to the garden. But although form is of its very essence hard, so far as outlines are concerned, we are not without one corrective which softens and subdues it. That corrective is atmosphere.

I hold, and I think that most fellow-craftsmen, if I may dare to reckon myself among gardeners, will agree with me, that background is absolutely essential to success; yet if you place a statue, or plant a specimen tree, immediately against the finest background that imagination could desire, it will remain hard and shorn of much of its charm, because it will lack the softening influence of atmosphere.

I know no better illustration of this than the way in which the Venus of Milo is shown at the Louvre. It is so skilfully placed that the air plays all round it, and the outlines of the marble melt, as it were, into the surrounding atmosphere. Were it pressed, as statues so often are, close against a curtain or a dead wall, the supreme beauty of the goddess would be cruelly sacrificed. The form, the inspiration of the sculptor, would be there, but the hardness of the material would be unredeemed; it would represent death instead of life. That is why so many photographic portraits fail to render beauty. The model is placed immediately in front of a screen—all sense of aerial perspective is lost—and the result is, from an artistic point of view, a deadly failure, even should the photograph be technically perfect, so far as optics and chemistry are concerned. No composition is good, or even tolerable, where aerial perspective is neglected, and that is as true in gardening as it is in the plastic arts.

It is the lack of aerial perspective—in other words, of atmosphere—which so fatally mars the very real beauty of Oriental art. In the paintings of the Chinese artists, and the extravagantly-admired coloured prints of the famous wood engravers of Japan, there is often a rare skill of colour and a firmness of hand worthy of Giotto, especially in the matchless drawing of flowing lines such as drapery. The birds and trees and grasses of the Kano school, the lovely outlines of the landscape painters, the monkeys and deer of Chōsen, are in many respects wonderful. But there is almost always something wanting. For want of aerial perspective the lines remain rigid; there is no soft atmospheric roundness, and on that account the pictures fail to satisfy. The result is like the fascinating work of very clever children.

Compare with the vaunted eighteenth-century art of Japan the contemporary work of the French painters, Watteau, Lancret, Fragonard, who, to my mind, have never been excelled in their rendering of the mystery of atmosphere. See how their woodland scenes melt into unfathomable distances like those of the great Dutchmen, such as Cuyp and others. There you have the poetry of nature and of gardens, and when you are laying out your domain and combining your succession of pictures and surprises, ask yourself this question: Would Watteau have found here anything worthy of his brush? To be sure you cannot have his pretty powdered dames, and his musical courtiers, with their viols and tabors and flutes. But they were mere accessories. That which so obviously gave him the greatest joy—that upon which he bestowed his supreme skill—was the scenery in which he placed them to give it life, even though that life should have something of a meretricious and theatrical character.

If it be true, according to Phillips, that softness and colour, hardness and form, go together, we can account for the prevalence of the garden of mere colour in the days when the lady of the house ruled the gardener. The garden of colour is feminine and emotional; the garden of form masculine and intellectual—it is the garden of the master.

And here we come to something akin to the Chinese doctrine of Yang and Yin, the male and female principles ruling creation. The garden of form belongs to Yang, the garden of colour to Yin. This is not intended in any way to undervalue the woman’s influence. It is only natural that a woman who is all softness and emotion should surround herself with effects which mirror her own sweet nature. The man, on the other hand, strong and hard, will be inclined to try and imitate the sterner pictures of creation. He will work in what Addison called the Pindaric style, “without affecting the nicer elegancies of Art.”

Take the books which have been written upon the subject; their name is legion. The women’s books, full of delicate charm, busy themselves for the most part with the marriage of colours, the blending of hues, the reconciliation of hostile shades. They are very clever, very ingenious, very attractive; but, setting on one side a few of the great lady writers, among whom Miss Willmott and Miss Jekyll are queens, they represent no more than the millinery of plants—the stockings to match the frock.

Set against these the rugged masculine vigour of a writer like William Robinson, the man to whom, above all others, is due the notable improvement which has grown in horticultural taste during the last forty years. From him you will learn much, for he knows much, and he can teach it. If you have his book, “The English Flower Garden,” you will need no other, for it will give you all the knowledge which you require. Among the women’s books, as I have said, there are, of course, delightful exceptions; but of the bulk of them the best that can be said is that they are gentle and morally innocuous. For all that is delicate and charming and alluring, joined to many of the highest and robust qualities which adorn mankind, I have been all my life a worshipper of the Yin principle; but when it comes to gardening and the writing of books on gardening, give me the Yang, give me William Robinson.

All men love trees, and it is small wonder that the sight of objects so beautiful should have led men to think of them with awe as under the special care, or even as the dwelling-places, of gods and goddesses; indeed, the connection of trees with religion is as old as the conception of the deity itself. North and south, east and west, we find the same idea.

In the Scandinavian Sagas the mystic Ash Ygdrasil is the tree of life, of time, and of space. Its branches spread over the whole world and its top reaches above the heavens. Its roots strike in three directions: the one down to Hvergelmer, the well of the dragon Nidhug; the second to the fountain of Mimer, the source of wisdom and wit, for a drink of which Odin pawned his eye with Mimer; the third is in Asgard, close to the fountain of Urd the Norn of the Past, where the gods, riding over the Bifrodh Bridge—the rainbow—assemble to sit in judgment. Here dwell the three Norns: Urd the Norn of the Past, Verdande the Norn of the Present, and Skuld the Norn of the Future; and here they weave the web of fate for you and me and all mankind.

It is strange how men have been fascinated by the rough and rugged Icelandic mythology born of ice and snow and rocks lashed by glacial winds; and nights that are light as day, days that are black as night; an existence which was one long fight against the elements, and struggle for life with bears and wolves. The Roman poets, on the other hand, born in the soft, voluptuous creed of the Greeks, a religion in which the gods and goddesses, much too human, were worshipped in temples built amid the enchanting fragrance of roseleaf islands, shuddered at the very idea of the North. For them there would have been nothing but terror in those strong Sagas, which in other countries gave birth to noble poetry and stately music.

As told by Ovid, the story of the punishment of Erisichthon, who mocked the gods and would not sacrifice at their altars, illustrates the worship of trees and also the dread of the inhospitable North, and yet a North that was no Arctic region; nothing, indeed, more terrible than the Caucasus.

In ancient Thessaly, in the midst of a wood sacred to Ceres, there stood an oak, a sturdy veteran, a grove in itself, covered with votive offerings, the tokens of the honour which was paid to it. Round it the Dryads, hand in hand, were wont to hold their choirs and dance in festive revelry. It was a holy tree, but in spite of all its sanctity, against it Erisichthon raised his sacrilegious axe and bade his men strike home, swearing, when they hesitated, that were the tree not merely dear to the goddess, but if it were the goddess herself, it should lie low and kiss the earth with its topmost boughs. Under the stroke of the axe the sacred tree groaned; its leaves and acorns, and even the branches turned pale. But when the impious hand inflicted the first cruel wound, blood flowed as from a bull at a sacrifice before the altars. Horrified, the men were stricken dumb, and one, bolder than the others, would fain have put a stop to the crime and stayed the falling axe.

“Be this the guerdon of thy piety?” cried the Thessalian, turning the weapon against the man; severed his head from his body, and repeated his attack upon the tree. From the heart of the oak there came a voice, saying, “Under this tree am I, a nymph beloved by Ceres, and my dying prophecy is that thy deeds shall be punished as the consolation for my death.” Nothing stops him from his crime; at last, under the many blows, and dragged by ropes, the tree collapses, and with its weight breaks down much of the grove.

The mourning Dryads, stricken by their loss, don black robes and pray to Ceres for the punishment of Erisichthon. The goddess nods assent; she shakes the fields heavy with crops, and contrives for him a punishment which would be pitiable had he not forfeited pity by his deeds, dooming him to be destroyed by pestilential hunger. But since this may not be attempted by the goddess herself, for the fates will not that Ceres and famine should co-exist, she charges one of the mountain nymphs to summon Famine from the cold and bleak shores of Scythia, that barren land where there is neither corn nor tree—the abode of dull frost, pallor, shivering and hunger. Thus does the goddess punish the impious sinner, and so she tortures him until he is driven to gnaw at his own limbs. (Ovid, Met. 740.) Ovid’s description of hunger as a distinct being called to wreak vengeance is as gruesome as anything that I know of in poetry.

The idea that trees are inhabited by supernatural beings, spirits or lesser gods, is common enough in the folk-lore of all countries, and that is what has given rise to the fables of trees which bleed and utter cries if they are cruelly treated. In Japan there are endless pretty and fanciful stories, in which the spirits of beautiful trees—often their matchless cherry trees—fall in love with and bewitch the sons or daughters of men. Nothing is prettier in that country, so rich in beauty, than the Shinto shrines nestling in choice spots among the forest-clad mountains. Around each temple are planted trees which are sacred to, and under the special protection of, the tutelary deity of the place. And in connection with them there is a custom called “Ushi no Toki Mairi” (“Going to worship at the hour of the ox”).[10] It is practised by jealous women who wish to be revenged on their faithless lovers or husbands, and reminds us of those waxen dolls with which the witches and adepts in black magic of the Middle Ages, and in ancient Greece, according to Theocritus, were wont to pretend that they could rid their patron of their enemies.

When the world is at rest, at two in the morning, the hour of which the ox is the symbol, the woman rises; she dons a white robe and high sandals or clogs; her coif is a metal tripod in which are thrust three lighted candles; round her neck she hangs a mirror, which falls upon her bosom; in her left hand she carries a small straw figure, the effigy of the lover who has deserted her, and in her right she grasps a hammer and nails, with which she fastens the figure to one of the sacred trees which surround the shrine. There she prays for the death of the traitor, vowing that if her petition be heard she will herself pull out the nails which now offend the god by wounding the mystic tree. Night after night she comes to the shrine, and each night she drives in two or more nails, believing that every nail will shorten her lover’s life, for the god, to save his beloved tree, will surely strike him dead.[11]

Whether this custom still prevails, I know not. Fifty years ago I was assured that it was “very much alive.” Habits have undergone a mighty change since then, but superstition dies hard, and there are many out-of-the-way places even in Japan into which the newness of things has hardly penetrated. It must have been a ghostly sight to meet a maiden thus harnessed in the grove of the god on a dark night.

Lafcadio Hearn, that wayward child of the muses, a prose poet if ever there was such an one, who, after wandering for many years through untold misery and suffering, at last found rest and his soul in Japan, has left to us as precious legacies many a rare conceit which would fit in well here. It would have been strange if he, a mystic himself, had not been willingly haunted by the folk-lore of the country which he loved, a country “fabulosa et externis miraculis adsimilata.” Sometimes, indeed, he was more Catholic than the Pope, living in a Japan that was almost a dreamland of his own wild fancy. And yet he was a creature of curious contradictions, for he seems to be half in earnest, half mocking, when he holds us spellbound with weird tales of goblin trees, luring men to love or to death; of a camellia tree which listens to the prayers of lovers; of other camellias which, like spectres, walk about at night, the terror of mankind. “There was one in the garden of a Matsné Samurai which did this so much that it had to be cut down. Then it writhed its arms and groaned, and blood spurted at every stroke of the axe.”

Like every other writer, native and foreign, Lafcadio Hearn is entranced by the loveliness of the cherry blossom, the emblem of all that is bodily delicate and spiritually beautiful. He quotes an old stanza, which says: “If one should ask you concerning the heart of a true Samurai, point to the mountain cherry flower gleaming in the morning sun.” Again: “As the cherry flower is first among flowers, so should the warrior be first among men.” By this nature-loving people, the highest form of female beauty and excellence is symbolized by the willow for grace, the cherry flower for youthful charm, the plum blossom for virtue and sweetness. I should add that the oval outline of the melon seed represents in the shape of the face the type of high breeding and aristocratic distinction. The poets are never weary of drawing upon the cherry flower for their metaphors. A Japanese gentleman, looking out upon a snow-storm, will say: “See how the petals of the cherries are drifting before the wind.”

The Yanagi—the weeping willow—is a much haunted tree. Here is a story told by Lafcadio Hearn which is worth quoting:

“There is a rather pretty legend—recalling the old Greek dream of Dryads—about a willow tree which grew in the garden of a Samurai of Kyōto. Owing to its weird reputation, the tenant of the homestead desired to cut it down; but another Samurai dissuaded him, saying: ‘Rather sell it to me, that I may plant it in my garden. That tree has a soul; it were cruel to destroy its life.’ Thus purchased and transplanted, the Yanagi flourished well in its new home, and its spirit, out of gratitude, took the form of a beautiful woman, and became the wife of the Samurai who had befriended it. A charming boy was the result of this union. A few years later the Daimio to whom the ground belonged gave orders that the tree should be cut down. Then the wife wept bitterly, and for the first time revealed to her husband the whole story. ‘And now,’ she added, ‘I know that I must die, but our child will live and you will always love him. This thought is my only solace.’ Vainly the astonished husband sought to retain her. Bidding him farewell for ever, she vanished into the tree. Needless to say, that the Samurai did everything in his power to persuade the Daimio to forgo his purpose. The prince wanted the tree for the reparation of a great Buddhist temple, the Sanjiusangendo.” (The Temple of the 33,333 images of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy.) “The tree was felled, but, having fallen, it suddenly became so heavy that three hundred men could not move it. Then the child, taking a branch in his little hand, said ‘Come,’ and the tree followed him, gliding along the ground to the court of the temple.”

You may bless the Yanagi for offering you a sure cure for the toothache. Haunted it is bound to be, and if you suffer, drive nails into it until the spirit of the tree, to save its home, relieves you of the pain. Are you a dreamer of dreams? Then if your climate be mild, without fail, see that you are not without a Nanten among your shrubs. Hide it away in some sheltered spot, both for its own sake and for yours, and let it be your trusted confidant. If the gods should send you evil and racking dreams, rise early and whisper the terror to your Nanten, and it shall come to naught. Science has corrupted the Japanese name Nanten into _Nandina_, and, for some reason best known to themselves, botanists have added the altogether ridiculous and senseless suffix _domestica_. Perhaps such an outrage may have robbed the plant of its virtues; we can but try it.

To go back to our cherries. In the grounds of an old Scottish castle, rich in ghostly stories and blood-curdling legends, there stands an old gean tree (wild cherry). It is the belief of the countryside that this old tree is haunted by the spirit of a former mistress of the castle, a lady who, as tradition has it, suffered much in her life-time and cannot rest in death. One day, some forty years ago, I started off from a neighbouring place to pay a visit at the castle with “Hang-theology” Rogers, the famous rector of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, than whom no brighter companion ever cheered a long, cold drive in a rather rickety dog-cart. We arrived just as the large party in the house were gathering together in the drawing-room after luncheon. We were met by long and rather pale faces. Obviously something had happened—nobody seemed at ease. At last an old lady, who was among the guests, took me on one side and told me what all this meant.

That morning, a visitor who was driving up to the house, when he came to the gean tree, saw the figure of a woman come out of it, glide for some distance beside him, and then vanish. Many of the people in the castle, who happened to be looking out of the drawing-room window at the time, saw the wonder, and the old lady added that she herself, having gone up to her bedroom to put on her bonnet, distinctly saw the apparition from her window, which was immediately over the drawing-room. All these people were absolutely convinced that, like the visitor in his dog-cart, they had seen the ghost which haunted the gean tree. I have told the story without addition or ornament, exactly as I heard it an hour or two after its occurrence and while the witnesses were still under the spell. It could not fail to remind me of the tales of Bakémono-zakura, the haunted cherry trees of Japanese legend, and it seemed worthy to be set down beside them.

The ancient Egyptians, though they worshipped onions and garlic, for which they were handsomely ridiculed by Juvenal, seem to have paid little respect to trees, probably because, besides the palm, so few were known to them. There is, however, according to that wonderful book, Sir James Fraser’s “Golden Bough,” some evidence to show that they believed that spirits haunted trees; at any rate, the tamarisk was sacred to Osiris—the god and ruler who represented the principle of good, as his brother Typho did that of evil. The story of the death of Osiris is curious as a contradiction of the idea of immortality with which deity is usually endowed. The god, having become King of Egypt, devoted himself to the civilization of his people, and to further that end, set out to travel over the world, leaving his wife Isis to reign in his place. When he came back, Typho, with other conspirators, among whom was an Ethiopian queen, named Aso, plotted to kill his brother. So, having procured the exact measurement of Osiris, he caused a box to be made to fit him, and having invited Osiris to a feast, he caused the box, which was of rare workmanship, to be brought in, saying he would give it to any one present whom it would fit. All the guests tried it in vain; at last Osiris laid himself down in it, and the conspirators, rushing forward, fastened down the lid with nails and molten lead. Then the box was carried to the riverside. It floated down the stream and was carried by the waves of the sea to the coast of Byblos, and lodged in the branches of a tamarisk bush. There is much more of this fable in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s great book—not all of it very edifying reading; but that is how the tamarisk became a sacred tree.

While treating of the superstitions and legends belonging to trees, it has been impossible to avoid touching upon the belief in ghosts. That faith exists in every part of the world. The fetichists of the African priests, the totemists of North America, the wildest savages of the South Seas with their uncouth idols, the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand—all stand in terror of ghosts. I long years ago translated a collection of Pekingese stories of haunted houses; but in many moves and journeys the manuscript has been lost—no great matter of regret, for these tales are always the same, the two leading causes for apparitions being remorse or revenge. The story of the ghost of Sakura Sōgorō, perhaps the most famous ghost story of the Far East, which I have translated in my “Tales of Old Japan,” has, apart from its local colouring, no feature differing from many such traditions which have been handed down in Europe. But the true interest of these superstitions, call them fables, myths—what you will—lies in the proof that all over the world there is implanted in man the instinctive conviction that death is not the end of all things—the mere return of dust to dust, of ashes to ashes; if that were so, there could be no thought of ghosts. The belief depends upon the existence of that mysterious intuitive feeling that when the thread of fate has been severed, there still remains another life which death itself cannot kill, and that other life is the soul.

* * * * *

But the fairies—where are they? Can it be that the Bakémono-zakura—the haunted cherry trees of Japan—when they were ruthlessly torn out of the soil of the country of the gods ten years ago, indignantly burst their barken bonds, and taking wing for refuge to the sacred groves of Mount Fugi, from some wild bird’s eyrie watched their beloved old homes being wafted away to new and uncertain climes across the terrors of the Pacific Ocean? And yet often, even here, I see a merry band of flaxen-haired dwarfs playing about the enchanted trees. Fairy-land is rich in surprises and mystifications. Who knows? Perhaps these little sprites are themselves fairies who have chosen for their abode the forsaken dwellings of the dark eastern Bakémono—“good folk” sent by a kindly Providence to shed a fleeting ray of the sunshine of poetry over the wintry prose of an octogenarian’s life.

QUEEN VICTORIA AND MARIE THERESIA

Rarely, indeed, does the student in history come across two personalities so entirely in unison at almost all points as those of the Austrian Empress Marie Theresia and our own Queen Victoria. Both were essentially great Sovereigns, both essentially good women. Our own Queen exercised an authority which was in one sense even more remarkable than that of the Empress; for whereas the latter was a commanding figure in an age when the glamour of autocracy had not yet faded away, Queen Victoria, by sheer force of character, maintained the prestige of royalty against the flowing tide of a democracy which was becoming daily more and more self-asserting. Indeed, she did more than maintain it—she summoned it from the dead; for in the two reigns which preceded hers it had perished, as men then thought, without hope of resurrection.

In all save their outward appearance the likeness between the two august ladies was such that it almost seemed as if the one was the reincarnation of the other; as if the soul of the mighty Austrian had passed into the Queen. An earnest and deep piety was the foundation of both characters, though they would have been utterly opposed in the form of its exercise. Marie Theresia was the faithful daughter of the Church of Rome, Queen Victoria the no less faithful and loving child of the Reformation. In both religion was a passion.

There has been a recent republication of the “Memoirs of Frau Pichler,” the Viennese poetess and authoress, whose _salon_ at the end of the eighteenth and during the early part of the nineteenth century was so famous that people said that there were two things which no stranger coming to Vienna could afford to miss seeing—St. Stephen’s Cathedral and Frau Pichler. Those memoirs, admirably edited and furnished with copious notes by one Emil Blümml, throw an interesting light upon the private and intimate life of Marie Theresia, and as we follow these reminiscences, we cannot but be struck by the many links in the chain of similarity of which I have spoken above.

Both Queen Victoria and the Empress were deeply penetrated with that sense of the Royal Caste which is too apt to raise an insurmountable boundary against social intercourse. But if Royalty itself stands apart, there is also an instinctive aloofness from it in those who are of high position but yet subjects; so that the intimacies of Sovereigns and royal personages are found rather among their personal attendants than among the nobles and powerful officials who form their courts. Especially is this bound to be the case where princesses are concerned. Their tirewomen and dressers are far more capable than chamberlains and secretaries of state of judging their private idiosyncrasies; so, in order to know what manner of woman this or that queen may have been, we are fain to climb the backstairs—where such a way is open to us, as it is in the case of Marie Theresia.

The adoption of Frau Pichler’s mother by the great Empress is just such a pathetic story, not without a pinch of the salt of romance, as would have touched the kind heart of Queen Victoria, and, indeed, we can well fancy her in like circumstances behaving exactly as Marie Theresia did.

In the month of May, 1744, the Wolfenbüttel Regiment of Infantry was moved from Hungary to Vienna. A poor old lieutenant, fifty years of age, named Friedrich Hieronymus, a widower, had contrived—with what pains and anxiety who can tell?—to take with him on the march his only child, a little daughter aged four. Hardly had he reached Vienna when he caught a chill, inflammation of the lungs set in and he died, full of terror for the future of his little Charlotte, whom he was to leave penniless and destitute in what was to him a foreign country, among strangers professing a religion which was abhorrent to him—for he was a Protestant. His last tender words were for her. “Poor child! what will become of thee?” Throughout her long life those painfully uttered words, torn from the dying man’s soul, remained graven in her heart, unforgettable. His brother officers, good charitable souls, probably themselves none too well furnished with this world’s goods, took charge of the babe, who became from thenceforth the “fille du Régiment.” The pathetic story came to the ears of Marie Theresia, who had a soft place in her heart for the Wolfenbüttel Regiment, which was named after the family of her mother, the Empress Elizabeth. She sent for the child, but the officers of the regiment, deeply imbued with a sense of loyalty to their dead comrade, did all that was in their power to hinder the babe from falling into the hands of an aggressively religious Catholic.

They hid her in a suburb of Vienna, but the Empress’s agents were too clever for them, and the child was brought to Court, where, as the Wolfenbüttlers had foreseen, she was brought up in the strictest doctrines of the Roman Church, under the charge of a Spanish lady, Isabella Duplessis, and was specially educated with a view to entering the Empress’s service as tirewoman. Her life was now very different from what might have been expected for the baby that followed the drum. She became the playmate of the Imperial children, amongst them of the unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette, and so the years went by in all the luxury of a sumptuous court.

Little Charlotte proved herself worthy of her good fortune; indeed, so quick and nimble-witted was she, that when she had reached the age of thirteen she was already deemed fit to enter upon her duties about her great mistress, not only as tirewoman, but also as reader. To this end she had been early handed over to the care of Gräfin Fuchs, the tenderly-loved nurse and governess of the Empress, who had such an affection for her that when she died she was buried in the vault of the Capucins, the last home of the Imperial Family.

In spite of the advice given by Hippolochus to Glaucus, it is not always an unmixed advantage so to excel as to make oneself indispensable. This little Charlotte soon found out, for her skill in hairdressing was such that the Empress, who was so particular about her hair that she would sometimes have it done and undone four or five times before she was satisfied, could not do without her. Marie Theresia, who was without a spark of coquetry and had neither eyes nor thought for any man but her husband, had all a woman’s instinctive love of display, and took a great delight in her beauty for its own sake.

None of the other tirewomen had Charlotte’s cunning fingers, and the same thing applied to her reading. German, French, Italian and Latin came to the child with equal facility, and all these were found in the dispatches which she had to read aloud to the Empress. French and Italian were the languages of the Opera and of the elegances of the Court. On one occasion when the Empress was expecting a baby, she had a bet with Count Dietrichstein as to the sex of the infant. She wagered for a girl, he for a boy—the Empress won. The Count sent her a piece of porcelain with a portrait of himself kneeling, and these words written by Metastasio, the Poet Laureate of the Court:

“Perdo, è ver, l’ augusta figlia A pagar m’ ha condannato, Ma s’ è ver che a te somiglia Tutto il mondo ha guadagnato.”

A pretty compliment! The babe, Marie Antoinette, born to be Queen of Beauty and of Sorrow, was worthy of it.

Talking of languages, it is strange to read of how small account German was at the Court of Vienna. The Emperor Francis I., as a Lorrainer, hardly understood it and never spoke it, and the people of his service were mostly Lorrainers or Netherlanders. The Empress herself did not speak correct German; she used the vulgarest Viennese patois, and Frau Pichler tells an amusing story of how a young Saxon lady, who had been appointed as one of her mother’s colleagues, came to her in despair one morning to beg her help. The Empress had ordered her to go and fetch “das blabe Buich.” What could her Majesty mean? Charlotte laughed, and told her to go and get “das blaue Buch.” The Saxon girl, Karoline Mercier, would not believe her—but the blue book it was. If she could not master German, the Empress, like Queen Victoria, was familiar with French and Italian. Our Queen was very fond of showing her fluency in German and French, and on her drives would often stop her carriage for the joy of a chat with some poor Italian organ-grinder in his own soft tongue. Latin, which the Empress knew intimately, was the means of communication with her Hungarian magnates. She loved the language and them, for so she was reminded of the day—the 11th of September, 1741—when she, threatened by half Europe with the loss of the states which the hostile Powers had once guaranteed, went to Pressburg, met the nobles of Hungary in their parliament, and appealed to them for protection for herself and her child, the future Emperor Joseph. Her cry for help was not in vain. Touched to the quick by the sight of the lovely weeping Empress, the proud Magyars, old and young, the flower of a noble chivalry, drew their swords and swore to die for the beautiful woman, who was their _King_. A universal conscription was decreed. It was a triple triumph, upon which she loved to look back—the triumph of Virtue, of Right, and last, but not least, of Beauty.

The service of Marie Theresia’s handmaidens was no sinecure. In summer she rose at five o’clock—in winter a little later—and rang for her girls, who had to appear fully dressed in hoop-petticoats, and with the marvellous edifices of hair which the fashion of the day exacted. To achieve this, the young ladies had to get up in the middle of the night, and this was especially hard upon Charlotte, who had night after night to read aloud for long hours after the Empress had gone to bed. But Charlotte was so quick, and knew the Empress’s taste so well that, whatever happened, she must be present at the morning toilette, and ready to attend upon her mistress during and after supper—a light meal, of which Her Majesty always partook in her private room. Busy worker as the Empress was, she seems to have depended entirely upon having her State papers read aloud to her, and so Charlotte became acquainted very early in life with many important State secrets. But she was a discreet little soul and knew how to hold her tongue, and so retained the confidence of her Imperial mistress so long as that wonderful woman lived.

The portrait which Frau Pichler has left behind her of the great lady, partly drawn from her mother’s stories of her, partly from her own memories of the days when as a little girl she used to be taken by special command to Schönbrunn or the Burg in Vienna, is fascinating. In her youth the Empress had been extremely beautiful, and though in middle life she grew large and unwieldy, and had to be taken up to her rooms in a lift—wafted through the air by fairies, as it seemed to the child whom she took with her—she retained to the end that wonderful gift of grace and of what is called “presence,” which is so keenly felt and so impossible to describe. Kindly she was, too, and of a motherly sweetness with children. Frau Pichler tells us how on one occasion, when the Empress had sent her to an adjoining room on some small errand, she slipped and fell, breaking her fan, and burst into tears. The kind Empress hurried after her, comforted her, and gave her a new fan—a precious relic, to be treasured as we may well believe for a lifetime.

Marie Theresia was the daughter of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, who, being without a male heir, named her as his successor by “pragmatic sanction”—a Byzantine term for an ordinance issued arbitrarily by the head of an empire or kingdom. She succeeded to the various thrones of her father on his death in 1740, and associated with herself as Emperor her husband, Duke Francis of Lorraine, who had been her play-fellow and whom she had married in 1736. In spite of his numerous infidelities, she adored him. Albeit, so far as politics were concerned, he was no great help to her; so though he bore the title of Emperor, she remained unaided at the helm. Hers was no easy task. In spite of scraps of paper and guarantees, a coalition between Prussia, France, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony, Sardinia, Naples and Spain—a pack of hungry war-dogs, all tearing at her on every side, each howling for his pound of flesh—threatened to devour her. She had only England and Hungary on her side; but, like Abdul Hamid in our own times, she could count upon the quarrels between her foes. Prussia was the arch-enemy. Prussia, which we are now told, was the original subject of the “Hymn of Hate,” written, _teste_ the _Morning Post_, by the revolutionary Herweg in 1841, for which Herr Lissauer, who substituted England for Prussia, has been decorated by a grateful Kaiser.[12] Prussia, of which Heine wrote: “I utterly loathe this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical, sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe among the nations.”[13]

Like our own Queen, Marie Theresia was essentially a woman of business. She personally directed the affairs of her Empire, issuing her commands to her ministers, and the little orphan Charlotte, as we have seen, for many years acted as her secretary and reader. The duties were no sinecure, and although no doubt the position of a young lady of the Court was one of great luxury in some respects and greatly coveted, there were also some hardships with which those chosen maids had to put up. The Empress was large and corpulent; she could not bear warmth, and so her ladies had to perform their duties in a thorough draught, even when snow was being driven in at the windows, falling on to the State papers which Charlotte was reading aloud to her.

In spite of her dread of heat, so long as her limbs would carry her, the Empress, devout and exact in all religious observances, would on Corpus Christi day, in the height of summer, piously accompany the sacred procession on foot. One broiling June day she came back from this ceremony violently heated and tired, having walked half across the town under the sun, had to be undressed, and have her hair taken down, and sat in a thorough draught, eating strawberries and drinking lemonade, while Charlotte brushed and combed out her hair, which was so wet that the poor girl had to keep wiping her hands. How Marie Theresia would have enjoyed one of Queen Victoria’s picnics on Lochnagar in a November blizzard!

One of the difficulties with which those responsible for the management of the public ceremonials in which our Queen took part had to deal, was the regulation of the temperature. The enduring of heat was to her as to Marie Theresia, a misery and an impossibility. She could put up with any other discomfort and fatigue; but heat was unbearable. The Emperor Joseph, who did not inherit his mother’s imperviousness to cold, had to visit her in furs. Kaunitz, a privileged minister, was the only person who dared to shut the window. “How do you manage when you go to Balmoral?” I once asked Lord Beaconsfield, who was a chilly mortal. “The Queen is very gracious,” was the answer, “she excuses me from going there.”

In dealing with the affairs of State both rulers showed themselves to be women of strong character and indefatigable industry. Their methods, of necessity, differed widely. The one, as I have said above, was an autocrat; the other, a constitutional Sovereign, deeply imbued with the sense of her own limitations, and yet such a mistress of public business, of constitutional law and of precedent, that she often dominated the councils of her ministers, many of whom recognized in her their guide and instructress in cases of difficulty. Nowhere was this more evident than in her treatment of foreign affairs. There she was no more a negligible quantity than Marie Theresia had been; no matter who might be Secretary of State, there was always a very real power in the background, and that power was the Queen. It would be easy to multiply instances, but we need only point to two cases: the Danish Duchies’ question in 1864, where, in obedience to what she believed to be the wishes of her dead husband, she took what is now shown to have been an unfortunate line; and, secondly, the dispute with the United States on the Trent question in 1861, where she, with the assistance of the Prince Consort, used all her influence to hinder what would have been a disastrous war, an unthinkable calamity.

The mention of the Prince Consort brings into strong relief two pictures, in which it is difficult to say whether we are more startled by the likeness or puzzled by the violence of the contrasts. In both cases we see a marriage of true love, in each of which a prince of a small reigning family was raised, not for reasons of State, but by pure affection, to share the glories of a vast empire and a throne before which countless peoples bowed. There the likeness between the two husbands comes to an end.

In Prince Albert Queen Victoria found not only a faithful and devoted lover, but a helpmate, who was ever at her side, and, young as he was, shared the heavy burthens which she had to bear, and brought to her councils all the store of wisdom and statesmanship with which he had been endowed by that astute mentor, Baron Stockmar. Not the least part of his merit was his self-effacement; yet in spite of it he aroused unreasoning jealousies, for which his intimacy and the Queen’s with the same old German physician was in no small measure accountable. The Emperor Francis, on the contrary, was of no assistance to Marie Theresia. Strikingly handsome, physically as grand a man perhaps as Prince Albert, he had none of the Prince’s serious qualities. He was essentially and fatally charming, but of politics and the affairs of State he took no heed; all that he cared for were his flirtations, his bric-à-brac, and his collection of coins and medals.

He was what is called “a dangerous man,” and when “a dangerous man” is an Emperor to boot—Well! But such as he was, his Empress loved him with all her soul, content to take upon her own shoulders the drudgery of sovereignty, and leaving to him its gewgaws and the enjoyment of a brilliant idleness. If she ever knew of them she forgave him his infidelities, and, like our Queen, worshipping the ground upon which her husband trod, she never looked at another man, nor cared for any admiration but his. As Frau Pichler rather quaintly observes, had she done so her maidens must have known of it. We are told that no man is a hero to his valet. For a woman to be virtuous to her Abigail, she must be as chaste as Diana before those compromising visits to Endymion, of which we may be sure that her nymphs were well aware.

No breath of scandal ever dimmed the mirror of the Empress’s fair fame. Queen Victoria herself was not more stern in the repression of anything approaching loose or unseemly talk. She considered it to be the duty of persons in high places to repress any lack of decorum, and their privilege to set an example to be followed by others. To her daughter, the Queen of Naples, she wrote: “It is our duty to remember that a word in season or a grave look will silence those who indulge in unlicensed speech, and have an excellent general effect.” Nothing better nails to the counter the lies of Frederic the Great, so characteristically Prussian, than the fact that the capital, which up to her time had been notorious for the laxity of its morals, was described by Sir John Moore towards the end of her reign in very laudatory language. “I can imagine,” he says, “no city in Europe where a young gentleman would see fewer examples, or have fewer opportunities of deep gaming, open profligacy, or gross debauchery than in Vienna.” This, as her biographer, Mary Maxwell Moffat, says, is a great testimony to the uplifting influence of the Empress-Queen. That the influence was personal is proved by the relapse of Vienna during the nineteenth century. By precept and example, she cast out the swine, but when she was gone they came back again.

It was the irony of fate that neither the Empress’s virtues, her great beauty, her sweet disposition, nor the prestige of her glorious position were able to clip the wings of her flighty and too attractive husband. That she had some inkling of her failure is clear from the advice that she once gave to her favourite maiden Charlotte: “Be warned and do not marry a man who has nothing to do.” Queen Victoria was more fortunate. Her marriage remained a union of hearts, of which time itself had no power to relax the bonds.

In all that concerns art Queen Victoria was essentially a woman of her own time, and it is in no sense derogatory to her to say that it was certainly not a happy time. In the plastic arts she had not the talent of her two brilliant daughters, the Empress Frederic and Princess Louise. It is true that her sketch-book was the constant companion of her holidays, and illustrated the diary of her travels; but her execution did not go much beyond the boundaries of the school-girl’s album. The painters whom she chose to employ as portraitists—Winterhalter, Landseer, Von Angeli—were unluckily chosen. She admired and patronized Leighton, but she would not hear of being painted by Millais or Watts. Music was her delight, and so it was with Marie Theresia; both ladies loved the Italian school, both were themselves gifted with lovely voices and had been well trained. Indeed, in the Hapsburg family the talent was hereditary; all the older members of it were capable musicians, and Charles the Sixth would himself accompany their chamber music on the harpsichord.

Mrs. Moffat quotes a letter of Marie Theresia, in which she writes: “As for dramatic music, I confess that I would rather have the slightest Italian thing than all the works of our composers, Gaisman, Gluck and others. For instrumental music we have a certain Haydn, who has good ideas, but he is just beginning to be known.” Strange words, coming from the Sovereign of the capital which was to be the home, above all others, of the greatest composers of the world. Mozart she knew as a child of six, when he sat upon her lap to play, and, tumbling down, was picked up by the little Archduchess Marie Antoinette, to whom in gratitude he at once proposed marriage!

The tender care and loving kindness with which Queen Victoria treated all those, from the highest to the humblest, who were in any sense dependent upon her, is a matter of common knowledge. She shared in their joys, she sympathized with their sorrows, interesting herself in all the everyday changes and chances of their lives. The unclouded happiness of her own all too brief married life had penetrated her soul with the belief that nothing could compare with the bliss of a loving union. This she showed even in a case where a young man in whom she took a deep interest, and for whom she had destined what would have been a very advantageous marriage, disappointed her by making an unsuitable match. Her answer to one who spoke unkindly of this was characteristic and touching. “After all,” she said, sweetly excusing him, “perhaps they loved one another.” That in her mind was obviously the essential.

The account of the marriage of the Austrian Empress’s favourite tirewoman is worth recording, not only as showing a parallel to this sweetly indulgent nature of our Queen, but also as giving us a curious picture of the formalities of the old Court of Vienna.

Upon her maidens the Empress spent an almost motherly care. When not on duty they might go out, but must tell Her Majesty whither they were bound, and then an Imperial carriage was placed at their disposal; when not on duty, they were always allowed to receive visitors—even men, but their names must be submitted to their mistress, and the privileged swains must be of unblemished repute. It was in that way, during the Seven Years’ War, when the detested Prussian Drill-Sergeant Frederic was pushing forward and yet further forward in Moravia and was besieging Olmütz, that Charlotte made the acquaintance of Herr von Greiner, at that time a secretary in the Bohemian-Austrian Chancellerie. He was accepted as a suitor, but must wait till he could offer his wife a better position.

In spite of what her daughter says, Charlotte, unless her portraits wickedly malign her, was no beauty, and she was tocherless to boot; but she was clever and the favourite protégée of the Empress. What could not a capable man of business in the public service hope from such an alliance? We are told that, doubtless in view of this advantage, there had been many suitors for her hand, but the Empress had always stood in the way. Charlotte was in terror lest in this case also she should interfere. She was too useful to her mistress to be lightly spared. There was nothing for it but patience.

Meanwhile, in the year 1765 the Court moved to Innsbruck for the marriage of the second prince, afterwards the Emperor Leopold II., and there suddenly the Emperor Francis fell a victim to an apoplectic stroke. The Empress was stricken dumb with grief. She could not weep, but passed the night in spasmodic sobbing, till at last in the morning the doctors, who were alarmed at her condition, bled her, and then the merciful tears came and brought relief. Charlotte was ordered to cut off all her mistress’s hair, and in her dress, as well as in the furniture of her apartments, the widow put on the trappings of woe. Of the beauty that largely remained to her, since her husband was no longer there to see, she took no account. On every 18th of August, the day of his death, she remained shut up in her room, confessed, fasted, and passed the day in sad remembrances, in prayer and in pious exercises. If the stones of Windsor Castle could prate, they might tell just such a story.

Now that the lovely fair hair, that crown of glory, had been shorn off, and the Empress no longer cared for her old elaborate toilette, there was less for the favourite tirewoman to do, and the wedding with Herr von Greiner was allowed. The future bridegroom was presented to the great lady, who was surprised to find in him a rather commonplace man, and said afterwards to Charlotte: “I thought that you would have chosen some gallant gentleman—a Chevalier.” However, the commonplace man was one in whom she later recognized a thoroughly honest and capable official, whom she respected and promoted for his worth.

The year of mourning for the dead Emperor was not yet at an end, and the Court had laid aside none of the trappings and the suits of woe. But Charlotte, as bride that was to be, was allowed to dress in colours. The wedding was celebrated with all the ceremonies which were at that time prescribed by Court etiquette. It was still the fashion to make a special function of the betrothal, which in Charlotte’s case was celebrated eight days before the marriage. On the wedding day she had to go and show herself in her bridal attire to the Empress, who added several presents of jewellery to what she was wearing, and lent her a priceless rope of pearls from the Imperial Treasury, to be returned after the ceremony, an ornament which was commonly used on such occasions.

The service was held in the private chapel, and the Mistress of the Robes led the bride to the altar. When the priest came to the place where the bride is told to answer “Yes,” she was compelled by etiquette to curtsey to the Mistress of the Robes and ask her permission to do so. Then the Mistress of the Robes stood up, turned herself round to face the chapel in which the Empress was, and in her turn curtsied, and in dumb show asked Her Majesty’s consent. This was also given by signs, and the Mistress of the Robes, in the same silent way, transmitted the pleasure of the Empress, who had taken upon herself the duties of mother, upon which the bride gratefully curtsied, turned to the priest and uttered the fateful “Yes.”

There is something touching in the way in which the Empress mothered the orphan whom she had almost kidnapped from the Wolfenbüttel officers. She surely did not perform her duty by halves! When I read the account of the wedding ceremony, my mind went back fifty-two years to another wedding, when in St. George’s Chapel another Queen, recently widowed, sat in a little gallery and acknowledged the curtsey of her new daughter-in-law, one of the loveliest brides that ever sun shone upon. At every step in this sketch of the Austrian Empress we are met by something that speaks of our own great Queen.

In this wise was the wedding of one of the Imperial handmaidens celebrated in the days of Marie Theresia. Charlotte, now Frau von Greiner, entered happily upon her new life. The change from the excitement and publicity of the brilliant Austrian Court, to the quiet and narrower society of the upper middle-class, for whom the Imperial surroundings were a thing of awe and mystery, must have been very striking. But the bride found her account in it, and, as we shall see, Herr von Greiner, being a man of quite exceptional talent and artistic gifts, was able to attract to his house all that was most brilliant among the literary and musical celebrities of that time.

In the year 1769 Caroline—afterwards Frau Pichler—was born. In the meantime the Empress had by no means relaxed her friendship for her mother. The von Greiners were not “hoffähig,” they could not go to court officially, but Frau von Greiner constantly visited her old mistress privately, and Von Greiner himself had, as I have said, won the great lady’s favour, and she not only kept him in her eye for advancement, but frequently sent for him and sought his advice. With a salary of four thousand gulden—two hundred pounds, I suppose—and a spacious official residence, the family was well able to maintain a good appearance, and Herr von Greiner’s exceptional attainments and artistic gifts as pastelist and poet made the house a trysting-place for all that was most notable in literature and music—especially music; for at Frau von Greiner’s weekly assemblies were frequently seen and heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Paesiello and Cimarosa. Painters and sculptors, poets and authors less known to fame than those great musicians, were welcome visitors, and the _salon_ became so popular that even a sprig of nobility—the condescension duly acknowledged—might now and then be found there. It is curious to see what a hard and fast line Vienna drew (and, to a certain extent, still draws) between the upper middle-class and the aristocracy—a line as deferentially recognized on the one side as it was haughtily imposed on the other. We know how to this day, in an Austrian ballroom, “die kleinen Komtessen” look with supercilious eyes upon any would-be partner who may be introduced to them unless his quarterings are fully satisfactory. The favour in which Frau von Greiner was held in high quarters had no doubt some effect in bridging over the gulf which was fixed between the noblesse and the bourgeoisie.

But I have been straying far away from the goal which I set before me. It would be fascinating to follow Frau Pichler’s story, for it is the story of a woman who lived through stirring times, who was present during the three attacks upon Vienna, who tells us the one story of courteous chivalry of the young Napoleon; who heard Haydn, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven play their own compositions, and, living on till near the middle of the last century, could compare their execution with that of Liszt and Thalberg. She knew and rather disliked Madame de Staël, despising her for tricking out the charms of a woman “fair, fat and forty” in a too youthful attire; but was charmed by the music of a speaking voice, her description of which reminds us of Sarah Bernhardt. She corresponded at least once with Goethe, and was snubbed by the Humboldts, which rankled not a little. But all this is beside the mark. I am only concerned to show how to the end the lives of the two great Queen-Empresses followed similar lines.

Life is like a drawing in black and white, in which, of necessity, the black predominates. The stronger the drawing, the darker are the shadows; as in an etching by Rembrandt—the more powerful the life, the more violent the contrasts. The high lights were high indeed in the early days of the two august ladies; the deep gloom of the long night of widowhood, which in each case followed some twenty years of ideal home sunshine, must have weighed all the more heavily for the glory of the mornings which had ushered in their young days; for true it is that “the sorrow’s crown of sorrow is the remembering happier things!” In facing the inevitable, women sometimes show higher courage than men. Nothing could be more brave than the way in which these two Queens bowed to the decrees of fate. The world’s work must be done, though hearts be broken and the joy of life extinguished. They felt that they had duties to their people, and they braced themselves to harness. The death of the Prince Consort was really a far heavier blow to the Queen than that of the Emperor Francis was to Marie Theresia—or, rather, perhaps I should say a more searching blow, with much further-reaching consequences. The Queen lost not only a tenderly worshipped husband and lover, but a mainstay upon which she leant, an adviser in all matters of State, a guiding hand in trouble. Marie Theresia lost a husband whom, little as he deserved it, she loved with all her soul; a man who was all in all to her in her home life, but who in her public life was a mere cypher, playing no part in her queendom. It was, therefore, a braver act of devotion for our great lady in that loneliest of all solitudes, the solitude of a widowed queen, immediately to take up the threads of her complicated statecraft without the assistance of her loving helper, than it was for the Empress to remain as pilot, bereaved indeed, but no more unaided than she had always been. Both laid aside their personal and poignant grief to devote themselves to their work. What remained to them of life—a cruel length of years: in the one case fifteen, in the other forty—was given without reserve to the promotion of the welfare of the fatherland. Duty was to them the supreme call, a voice that only became silent in death. Both are held in grateful and undying memory, for surely no women ever went to their rest with cleaner consciences or with better claim to be hailed as good and faithful servants.

THE WALLACE COLLECTION

One day, as I was talking to a friend in my garden of memory, he, looking round at the fine bronzes by which we were surrounded, remarked what a pity it was that Oriental art should be so poorly represented in the Wallace Collection; and how much it was to be regretted that no specimens of the work of the great Eastern metal-workers and famous potters were to be found at Hertford House. As a matter of fact, cheek by jowl with the glories of the English, French, Spanish and Dutch art, there are only some half-dozen very poor specimens of Chinese cloisonné enamel, practically no pottery, none of the grand old Chinese bronzes, and not a single example of the work of such masters as the Japanese Miyochin, Seimin, To-un, and others, men as famous in their way as Benvenuto Cellini. It is curious that three men so catholic in their tastes as the two Lords Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace should have paid no attention to the art of the Far East.

From the collections we naturally passed to discussing the men, and my friend began asking me many questions about the great legacy, of which I am a trustee, eager to gather something of the truth out of the network of fable and falsehood by which it is surrounded. Here is what I told him. There is, of necessity, some guesswork, but guesswork not unsupported by a reasonable foundation of fact and probability. The strange jumble of truth and lies is but one more proof of the danger of throwing over all those conventionalities which are but so much ballast to keep straight the family ship. There are plenty of wreckers in the world, and they are never slack in their dirty work; but, above all, they love breaking up the big ships.

When the ’seventies were still young, I, being at the time still in the Diplomatic Service, but “En disponibilité,” became a director of a foreign railway company, the business of which often took me to Paris, where our head offices were. One day, on the return journey to London—in 1872—I first met Sir Richard Wallace on board the steamer from Calais. The Duke of Sutherland, with whom I was travelling, knew him, and so we became acquainted—I little thinking that one day I should be brought into very intimate connection with the art treasures which he had inherited eighteen months earlier. Mr. Scott—afterwards Sir John—then a tall, slim, very pleasing youth, was with him as his secretary and confidential friend. Sir Richard was at that time a strikingly handsome man, about fifty-four years of age, with a very attractive expression, greyish hair, shaved, like his patron, Lord Hertford, more or less in the fashion set by the Emperor of the French. We had a good deal of talk, and, later, I got to know him pretty well. When he was Member for Lisburn, he was appointed to the Committee of the House of Commons which sat under Mr. Baillie Cochrane, afterwards Lord Lamington, to consider the question of new buildings to be erected for the accommodation of the various Government departments. He used often to come and see me at the Office of Works, in order to study the different plans, and very warmly took up a scheme which I put forward, and which, if it had been adopted, would have saved the country a huge sum of money.

Unfortunately, Sir Stafford Northcote, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was afraid of submitting the first expense to the House of Commons. He never realized how complete was the trust which the House placed in him, and so my proposals fell through, to the great disappointment of Sir Richard Wallace, and to the vastly increased cost which the country has ultimately had to pay. There has seldom been a more flagrant case of penny wisdom and pound folly. The value of the land went up by leaps and bounds, and the patient tax-payer has suffered, as usual, without a murmur.

My proposal, briefly stated, was to build a chain of Public Offices between Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, purchasing such land as did not already belong to the State. Drummond’s Bank was then pulled down, and Messrs. George and Edgar Drummond, as a favour to myself, very patriotically delayed rebuilding for six months, in order to give the Government time to consider the question. The Public Offices were at that time housed in a very haphazard manner, and it was evident that some comprehensive scheme must be initiated. My plan was generally approved, but it was not adopted owing to the costly timidity of Ministers.

Who and what was Sir Richard Wallace? That is a question which excited great interest forty-five years ago, an interest which has not altogether died out even now. That he was the private secretary and _âme damnée_ of Lord Hertford everybody knew.

How he came to occupy that position, and what led his patron to alienate from his family in Sir Richard’s favour so much of his great fortune as was in his power, together with the whole of the art treasures which he and his father and grandfather had collected during three-quarters of a century, at a time when beautiful things were to be had for what would now be considered an old song—that was a mystery to which no one had a clue, and which only now can be solved with absolute accuracy. Much that has been suggested is undoubtedly false, based upon conjecture without any knowledge of such facts as have been brought to light.

Having been a trustee of the so-called Wallace Collections since the death of Lady Wallace in 1897, and having lived in great intimacy with Sir John Scott, who was her heir and had been so long the fidus Achates of Sir Richard, I have come to the conclusion that such evidence as exists and was known to Sir John, to Lord Esher and others, entirely disposes of the scandalous story that he was the illegitimate son of Lady Hertford, and therefore half-brother to Lord Hertford.

The true story, vouched for by people who were intimately acquainted with the scandals of the first half of the last century, is that Richard Lord Hertford, when a mere boy, had an intrigue with a Scotch girl of low birth—Agnes Wallace, afterwards Jackson. The result was Sir Richard Wallace. As the girl was older than himself, Lord Yarmouth, as he then was, had been rather the seduced than the seducer, and soon tired of the whole connection. He was quite willing to pay, but he had no mind to start in life saddled with the dead weight of an uneducated mistress and a natural son. Lady Hertford, however, got wind of the affair through Colonel Gurwood, a brother officer and intimate friend of Lord Yarmouth. She took a fancy to the child, who responded with an affection that was almost filial. Lord Hertford, to whom his mother’s slightest wish was law, took up the boy at her bidding, and educated him until he grew up and became entirely indispensable. The lad was well known in Paris as “Monsieur Richard,” Lord Hertford’s shadow and agent, his representative at auctions and sales of works of art.

The name Richard seems to me to have some significance in confirmation of the above story. Is it likely that if the child had been Lady Hertford’s, she should have chosen the name of her eldest legitimate and deeply-loved son, to bestow it upon an inconvenient accident? To me it seems utterly incredible. Moreover, would it not have been far more likely that she should have tried to smuggle away an unnecessary infant of her own than that she should have dragged the child into all the publicity of the home about which there had already been too much slanderous gossip? Again, Lady Hertford was a woman possessed of great wealth in her own right. Why, if Sir Richard was her son, did she leave the whole of her fortune to her second son, Lord Henry Seymour, and a mere trifle to the favourite to whom she was so kind a patroness? Obviously she relied upon Lord Hertford, as his father, to do everything for him. Not only the facts, but even the whole probabilities, are against the preposterous and malicious story that he was her son.

That the old lady was devotedly attached to Sir Richard and made a great pet of him, and that he returned her affection with interest, was a matter of common knowledge. I have seen many letters of hers which attest the fact. When she travelled, he made all the arrangements for her, and took entire charge of her comfort, his bed being made outside her door when they slept at inns in the old posting days. He was her devoted slave, her most faithful watch-dog.

Upon his services as secretary, Lord Hertford, as I have said, placed entire reliance, but his office was not altogether a bed of roses. The great man, as a patron, was strict and sometimes severe. Sir Richard, with a taste for speculation on the Bourse, was sometimes in rather strait circumstances, out of which his patron helped him, not without reproof, to the tune of a good many thousand pounds. I have seen a document showing that Lord Hertford in 1854 paid twenty thousand pounds on this account through Messrs. Rothschild. There is in the Wallace Collection a certain engraved crystal tazza of Italian workmanship, a very lovely little gem. Sir Richard, in his poor days, picked it up for a few francs in an old sort of rag-and-bone shop in a street in the neighbourhood of the Temple. Some time afterwards, being rather hard up, he took it to Lord Hertford and asked him to buy it. “No,” was the answer, “I won’t have it. I will not encourage your extravagance; you must learn to be more economical.”

Sir Richard sold the tazza to a dealer for two hundred and fifty francs, and a year or two later had the luck to buy it back, but he had to pay ten times the price and more. Often he had hard times enough, as he himself said when he told the story, but when Lord Hertford died in 1870 his day had come. The fortune which he inherited was in those days considered colossal. It would look less now compared with the huge riches of American plutocrats, but in 1870 these were yet in the making. Two very rich marriages, the second and third marquesses having both married heiresses, had, in addition to great landed estates, placed the Hertfords in an altogether exceptional position.

The way in which the third and fourth lords elected to spend their wealth had woven round them a whole tissue of legends, chiefly founded upon mere vulgar gossip. Virtuous and highly-respectable London delighted in crowning them with a halo of ill-fame, and when Lord Yarmouth, afterwards fourth Marquess, bought Bagatelle, it was declared to be the scene of orgies compared with which the mysteries of the Bona Dea were as innocent as nursery teas. Many of the stories were started by the rather second-class, or even demirep, English Society which was gathered together at Paris, jealous at being kept out from the intimacy of a very exclusive man.

These stories when repeated, we may be sure, lost nothing in the telling, and so Bagatelle came to be looked upon as a sort of Parc aux Cerfs, while Bishop Luscombe’s congregation stalked with virtuously uplifted noses along the Rue d’Aguesseau, thanking Heaven that they were not as Lord Hertford. Such a reputation, even if it were a mere scandalous libel, was hardly such as would commend itself to General Sir Francis Seymour, the proud patrician who was to succeed to the title as fifth Marquess. Indeed, it must have been gall and wormwood to a man trained as he had been for many years in the solemn dignity of the staid Victorian Court. There could be no sympathy, still less affection, between the cousins. But there was more than all this to influence Lord Hertford when he made his will, which left his successor practically nothing but the broad acres of Warwickshire, with a great costly palace to keep up, at a moment when land was falling in value every day and agriculture was drifting no man could tell whither.

Whatever shape Richard Lord Hertford’s eccentricities may have taken, he had one redeeming virtue. He was a model son, and his love for his mother was the great passion of his life. To attack her, to be in any way wanting in respect for her, was in his eyes the one crime for which there was no forgiveness, and that was precisely the crime of which Sir Francis Seymour was guilty. It was a pity, to say the least of it, that the unkind things, sure to be repeated, of which he was so prodigal in speaking of Lady Hertford, should ever have been uttered. However much he might disapprove of Lord Hertford’s way of life, it would have been wise to remember that a man is not responsible for his grandmother’s indiscretions, and the shady parentage of Maria Fagnani might well have been allowed the benefit of silence. At any rate, it was not the business of Sir Francis to trumpet that or any other scandal about her.

Her story was curious. All the actors in the play have long been dead, but it is so intimately connected with the history of the Wallace Collection that, while there is no one left to whom its relation could give pain, it still retains a special interest. Anything that can throw light upon the passing of all those treasures into the possession of the nation is worth recording; and it is, moreover, an act of justice to clear the memory of a lady who has been somewhat roughly—and, as I believe, without foundation—handled in the “Dictionary of National Biography.”

Under the blessing of the law, Maria was the daughter of the Marchese and Marchesa Fagnani, and the adopted child of George Selwyn. But the Marchesa, who was said to have been a ballet-dancer, must have been none too faithful to her husband; for, as a matter of fact, George Selwyn was said to dispute with the Duke of Queensberry, the wicked “Old Q,” the honour of being her father. As to that there seems to be no certain evidence, but one would have thought that such a rivalry, or partnership—whichever it might be—would have bred a jealousy between the two men. Not a bit of it! They remained fast friends, were constantly together, and, when apart, wrote to one another in the most affectionate terms.

At George Selwyn’s death in 1791 he left thirty-three thousand pounds to Maria and the rest of his fortune to “Old Q.” When the Duke, in his turn, came to an end of his stormy life, dying in the odour of iniquity in 1810, he bequeathed to Maria, who had married Lord Yarmouth in 1798, a fortune of between three and four hundred thousand pounds, together with the famous house opposite the Green Park in Piccadilly, in the window of which, when he was too old to walk, he used to sit ogling the pretty women as they passed below him. That window, with its leering old tenant, was one of the sights of London.

The Marchese Fagnani (Fagniani is a misspelling in all the English books) belonged to an old Milanese family. In the sixteenth century there was a poet of the name who gained some literary fame; others of the family were well-known lawyers, archæologists, mathematicians and churchmen in the seventeenth century—all men of good repute; and as Maria was undoubtedly born in holy wedlock, the _mésalliance_ was not so very great.

In spite of this there must have been some doubt as to the desirability of alliance with the Fagnanis, for the marriage with Lord Yarmouth was a hole-and-corner affair, hustled through at Southampton on the 18th of May, 1798. Southampton was then quite a small country town, very different from what it is now, just the sort of place where a marriage could be celebrated without fuss and in some secrecy. Indeed, when I remember it fifty years later it was still in its infancy and very primitive, with at least one delightful old house standing in its own grounds in the High Street above Bar. Altogether it was not the sort of wedding that certainly would have been arranged for the heir of the proud and royal Seymours had the magnates of the family not disapproved of the match. The French writers in newspapers, who made great capital out of the whole romance at the time of Lord Hertford’s death in 1870, went out of their way to associate the Prince Regent with the Fagnani mystery. They hinted that the prince also claimed the paternity of Maria, and that he even attended the marriage. But that is an utter absurdity, for which there was no foundation. Immediately after the marriage Lord and Lady Yarmouth made their home in Piccadilly, next door to “Old Q,” who did not die till twelve years later.

It is pretty clear that the marriage with Maria did not lower Lord Yarmouth’s social position, otherwise Lord Castlereagh would hardly have chosen him as his second in his famous duel with Mr. Canning, for whom Mr. Charles Ellis, afterwards Lord Seaford, acted. Both men missed their first shots; in the second shot Mr. Canning was grazed in the leg. A duel between the Minister of War and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was a matter of too great importance to be entrusted to a gentleman who was under a cloud. After Lord Yarmouth succeeded to the Marquisate in 1822, he received the Garter himself, and was sent by George the Fourth as special ambassador to carry the same order to the Emperor Nicholas in 1827.

At the time of her marriage the bride was no longer in her first youth; she was at least twenty-seven years old. For the correspondence between George Selwyn and the Duke of Queensberry shows that in 1772 she was already teething, and under the care of the former at Paris as his adopted child; and he was fretting himself into bad health lest the mother should take the little creature—Mie Mie, as she was called—away from him. The Duke, then Lord March, while abounding in good advice to his friend, promised his good offices, saying at the time that the Marchesa was sure to act in opposition to his (the Duke’s) wishes and advice. The child was taken away by her mother for a time, but ultimately and permanently given back to her adoring guardian or father. From that time forth the noble Italian lady seems to have troubled herself about her baby no more.

As I have already said, there is no certainty as to Maria’s parentage; indeed, the published letters leave the whole story in a state of confusion which is perfect. Robinson, in his Life of “Old Q” (page 143), says:

“Jesse, who was privileged to go over Selwyn’s correspondence, though refusing as a false affectation of delicacy to pass over in complete silence the mysterious reports respecting the true parentage of Selwyn’s infantine charge, asserts that although references occur in the most private papers of Selwyn which unquestionably lead to the supposition that either Lord March (Old Q) or Selwyn was, or, rather, that each severally believed himself to be, the father of the child, yet no certain proofs exist. Further, a letter addressed by Madame Fagnani to Selwyn, July 31st, 1772 (of which Jesse gives a translation), does not express any but the most polite feelings of friendship for the guardian of her child. Lest I may be misrepresented in alluding to a matter that a faithful record of established facts incident to my subject warrants, Madame Fagnani’s letter is inserted in justice to all concerned:

“‘MY VERY DEAR AND RESPECTABLE FRIEND,

“‘I cannot find terms sufficiently expressive to thank you for all your kindness, and more particularly for the pains you take in regard to my daughter. I can assure you that nothing is more sensibly felt by me than the proofs of friendship which I have received from you on this occasion. The more I know the world, the more I perceive the difficulty of finding a person who resembles you, and I consider myself the happiest of mortals solely from the happiness I have had in forming your acquaintance and obtaining your friendship.

“‘I am enchanted in learning that my daughter is in good health, though I fear she will suffer much in cutting her teeth. I venture to beg of you to continue to give me tidings of her, as without your kindness in writing to me from time to time, I should have been ignorant for the last three months of the fate of _ma petite_. My lord,[14] on his part, is a little indolent, but I forgive him this little fault on account of the many good qualities of his heart which he has to counterbalance it.

“‘I hope that your health is good. Pray present my compliments to Lord March, and tell him that I expect to hear from him. Preserve your friendship for me, and do not forget the most grateful and affectionate of all your friends, who makes it her duty and pleasure to be,

“‘Your very sincere servant and friend,

“‘COSTANZA FAGNANI.’”

Surely that is a letter which must have been written without any idea that it would ever be published, and it certainly gives no sunlight to clear away the clouds of the story. To add to the mystery of Maria’s parentage, Roscoe, in his book on Selwyn, publishes two letters, one from Dr. Warner, the witty Chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris in 1780, when she was nine years old, in which, writing to Selwyn, he makes no disguise of his belief in the paternity of the Duke. The letter is also interesting as giving some slight idea of the impression which the child created:

“That freshness of complexion I should have great pleasure in beholding. It must add to her charms, and cannot diminish the character, sense and shrewdness which distinguish her physiognomy, and which she possesses in a great degree, with a happy engrafting of a high-bred foreign air upon an English stock. But how very pleasant to me was your honest and naïve confession of the joy your heart felt at hearing her admired. It is, indeed, most extraordinary that a certain person who has great taste (would he had as much nature)[15] should not see her with very different eyes from what he does. I can never forget that naïve expression of Madame de Sévigné: ‘Je ne sais comment l’on fait de ne pas aimer sa fille.’”

The other letter to which I allude is one from George Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, written at a time when complaining that he was “le jouet des autres,” and was being annoyed beyond all bearing by the way in which Madame Fagnani behaved to him about Maria, threatening to take her away from him altogether. In that letter he writes: “Hélas! rende mi figlia mis!” That may have meant no more than that the child was very dear to him, and need not necessarily imply that he believed himself to be her father. That he did so believe, however, is pretty certain. He educated her, placed her at school with Mrs. Terry at Campden House in Kensington, then a beautiful old house almost in the country, and having finally succeeded in getting rid of the mother’s importunities, kept her with him until his death in 1791, introducing her into the best society. Gainsborough painted her portrait, as did Sir Joshua Reynolds, but the pictures no longer exist, or, at any rate, are lost.

Of the legal father, the Marquis Fagnani, we hear very little. The only notice I have found of him is in a letter from Selwyn to Lord Carlisle dated June 19th, 1781:

“Belgiojoso told me last night that he had had letters from Milan, by which he was informed that the M. [Marquis] Fagnani was gone quite mad. He has been stone blind for a considerable time, and I take it for granted that both these misfortunes are come from the same cause—that is, mercury. His experiments to ease the one probably occasioned the other. I never hear one syllable from any of the family. I hope in God that I never shall, nor poor Mie Mie either. It grows every day less likely, and yet when I am out of spirits, that dragon, among others, comes across me and distresses me, and the thought of what must happen to that child if I am not alive to protect her.”

George Selwyn was no further molested in the possession of the child. He lived for ten years after that letter was written, and by that time Maria had grown to woman’s estate. She was twenty years of age, and had, under George Selwyn’s will, a snug little fortune of her own, besides expectations, amply to be realized, of further benefits from the Duke of Queensberry. He doubtless took paternal care of the young lady who was to inherit all that he could alienate from the Douglas family. She became one of the greatest heiresses, if not the greatest, of her day.

In her youth Maria Fagnani must have been a very fascinating girl. To George Selwyn, as we have seen, she was as the apple of his eye. He simply adored her. If she had a cold in the head, or an infantile ailment, however trivial, it was torture to him, provoking sympathy from his correspondents, who themselves seemed to be quite under the spell of the delightful child; and as he apparently never destroyed a note, there are plenty of these condolences in the budget of letters published by Jesse. To have won the heart of Thackeray’s Marquess of Steyne, if that fastidious personage ever possessed such an organ, was another feather in her cap, and in her old age we know how tenderly her son and Richard Wallace both loved her.

In 1803 Lord and Lady Yarmouth were detained in France—he interned at Verdun—when war was again declared after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, and their second son, Lord Henry Seymour, was born in Paris in 1805. Scandal declared that he was the son of Junot, Duc d’Abrantès, with whom Lady Yarmouth was very intimate. There is a note in Roscoe, page 8, which says: “She led a life of pleasure (1802-1807), travelling on the Continent with the Marshal Andoche.” That was Junot’s Christian name—but that he never was a marshal was his great grievance against Napoleon.

This Lord Henry is not to be confounded, as is commonly done, with the Lord Henry Seymour, son of the first Marquess, who lived at Norris Castle, near Cowes, and spent a fortune in building the famous sea-wall. The Lord Henry with whom we have to deal was a very eccentric personage. Unlike his brother, Richard Lord Hertford, who was a handsome man, and in his youth a dandy of the 10th Hussars, Lord Henry was singularly ugly, even grotesque. There was in the Rue Lafitte a sketch or caricature of him, which I have seen, in which he was represented as a sort of Quilp, stunted, misshapen, and of prodigious strength. He was a hero of the various Salles d’Armes, a famous fencer and athlete, and the founder, or, at any rate, one of the founders, of the French Jockey Club. A kindly man withal, for by his will, in which his horses appeared as legatees—never to be crossed again—he left the bulk of his fortune to the hospitals of Paris. He died in 1859, three years after the loss of his mother. It used to be said that he never even set foot in England, but that was probably only one of the many fables set afloat about the two brothers. So curious a quartet as the mother, the two sons, and the enigma that was M. Richard, afterwards Sir Richard Wallace, furnished fine food for eavesdroppers and gossip-mongers.

For twenty-eight years after the death of his father in 1842, Richard Lord Hertford lived practically altogether in Paris, passing his time between the Rue Lafitte and Bagatelle, the little toy house on the outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, which in 1780 was built by Bellanger in a few weeks at the order of the Comte d’Artois (Charles the Tenth), for a bet, in order to entertain Queen Marie Antoinette on a fixed day. The repetition in one of the rooms of the decoration of peacocks with spread tails in the boudoir of the Queen at Versailles was probably a delicate compliment—a little surprise—addressed to her on her visit. When I first saw it some fifteen years ago, although the house was empty and the famous statues had been removed and sold, it was still instinct with a certain eighteenth-century charm. The daintily laid-out grounds were still beautifully kept, and I should hardly have been surprised had I suddenly come upon one of Fragonard’s idylls, with shepherdesses powdered and hooped, and gentle shepherds to match, appropriately dressed in spotless pink and blue silk.

In that house, as in those idylls, there are tears when we remember how soon so many of those pretty, frivolous, powdered heads were to fall into the basket of Monsieur de Paris. Although the famous “Nelly O’Brien” of Sir Joshua, and perhaps Romney’s “Perdita,” were bought by the second Marquess, the foundation of the collection of art treasures which, since the militant ladies three or four years ago took to fighting pictures in the National Gallery, have been stored away in the cellars of Hertford House, was laid by Francis, third Lord Hertford, who bought the glorious “Perseus and Andromeda” by Titian, which the keen eyes of Sir Claude Phillips rescued from a bath-room, where it had been stored away and forgotten, a number of the Dutch pictures and two of the Vandycks. But by far the greater part of it was acquired by his son Richard, the fourth Marquess.

Very important additions, especially in the armoury, were made by Sir Richard Wallace, who was himself a born collector, and had acquired no little experience, both on his own account, and as Lord Hertford’s representative at the great auction sales of Paris. His taste in Oriental art was distinctly bad. He bought a few very inferior specimens of Chinese cloisonné enamel, and two porcelain bowls of the Chia Ching reign, 1796-1821, a period when the art of China reached almost its lowest level, with very inferior mounts by some English bungler. Of these he was inordinately proud. There are two or three very fine céladon vases, with exquisitely chiselled French mounts, in one of the glass cases, but there is no evidence as to who bought them.

The reason of the fourth Lord Hertford’s self-condemned exile in Paris, when he owned five palatial houses in London, besides Ragley, Sudbourne and other places, is not easy to ascertain. There was a story, firmly believed in my youth, and confirmed by Sir Richard Wallace to Sir John Scott, that his father tried to force him into a cruel marriage with the daughter of one of his mistresses, with whom he conspired to make it appear that Lord Yarmouth, as he then was, had compromised the girl. The young man deeply resented this outrage, and took refuge in Paris, where his mother was living. Certainly he had established himself there during his father’s lifetime, for it was as Lord Yarmouth that he bought Bagatelle in 1830, and he did not succeed to the marquisate until twelve years later.

Yriarte’s story that he left London on account of a quarrel with the parish over the rates of his house in Piccadilly, is hardly to be accepted. It is far more likely that he left England in order to free himself from his father, for whom he had no love or respect, and made Paris his home that he might be with his mother, whom he adored. She, with Lord Henry Seymour and Monsieur Richard, lived at No. 1, Rue Taitbout, Lord Hertford’s head-quarters being hard by at No. 2, Rue Lafitte. There he lived the life of an invalid and sybarite, hardly to be called happy in spite of his great possessions—a recluse, the darkness of whose hypochondria was only cheered by his correspondence with Mr. S. Mawson, who was his agent in London for the purchase, restoration and care of pictures, or by some brilliant triumph at Christie’s or in the Paris auction-rooms.

Few people saw him, and still fewer knew him. And yet he had all the qualifications which would have enabled him to shine among his fellows. Yriarte said of him: “Causeur célèbre, très spirituel, très lettré, d’une politesse accomplie, d’un raffinement rare, ses goûts personnels l’éloignaient cependant de la société, et il a vécu toute sa vie dans un milieu inférieur. Il y apportait même avec ses intimes une manière d’être dissimulée, peu conforme avec le cant anglais, et il affichait une sorte de cynisme que les deux ou trois amis intimes qu’il a conservés jusqu’à sa mort regardaient comme son masque d’emprunt.” His wit, if sometimes a little cynical, or even a little risky, was undeniable, and what are called “good stories” of him were the joy of clubs.

That he suffered acutely there can be no doubt, for Sir Richard Wallace once told me that he went with him to Contrexéville—we know what that means—which fifty years ago was a very different place from what it is now, and where all the sordid details of life at that time must have been torture to a man of his exquisite refinement. With public life he had no concern. As a young man he was for a few years in the House of Commons, and on succeeding to the title, he delivered a maiden speech in the House of Lords, and that was all. His one and only participation in affairs was in 1855, when he consented to act as one of the jury at the Exhibition of Paris.

Upon this subject he wrote a characteristic letter to Mawson:

“Only think of my being at the Champs-Elysées every morning at nine o’clock. Hard work for an old fellow who has very different habits. I am obliged to get up every morning between six and seven o’clock to be at the exhibition in proper time to preside over a group composed of four classes. I remain there almost all day doing my work, and as I am not accustomed to this sudden activity, I am very tired, and, in consequence, neglect my own affairs.”

It was, of course, his intimacy with Louis Napoléon which caused him to accept such a violent break in his habits, but he owed the Emperor some gratitude, for it was by his friendly help that he was enabled to add to the grounds of Bagatelle, and again to employ Dasson to copy the famous bureau in the Louvre. Apropos to Bagatelle, Mr. MacColl, in his introduction to the catalogue of pictures at Hertford House, to which I owe great obligation, has a good story. It is said “that two acquaintances asked leave to fight a duel in the grounds. The Marquess politely replied that he had not the slightest objection to their shooting one another, but could not trust their skill so far as to risk his statues.” Perhaps most people would have endorsed his view of the comparative value of masterpieces by Pigalle, Lemoyne and Houdon, and the lives or limbs of the would-be Bobadils. Hardly could they be worth Houdon’s famous “Baigneuse.”

Lord Hertford’s letters to Mawson, which were sold to the trustees by Mr. Mawson’s daughter, show how keenly he watched the great sales both in London and Paris. The English sales he, of course, very rarely attended, and when he did so, it was Mawson who did the bidding, guided by a code of signals given by motions of Lord Hertford’s hat. Nor was he personally more active if he was present at a French sale; he seems to have carried his dislike of all publicity into every phase of life, and to have conducted all his business by agents.

The correspondence with Mawson, of which many extracts are given by Mr. MacColl in his catalogue of the pictures, is interesting, not only as showing Lord Hertford’s great personal interest in art and the extraordinary difference in prices between now and then, but also as revealing at least one charming side in a character which, owing to its eccentricity, was, I honestly believe, cruelly maligned. No mere selfish voluptuary, such as Lord Hertford was described by the evil tongues of those who did not know him, could have inspired the affection which was felt for him by those who did. Sir Richard Wallace more than once spoke to me of him in terms of the strongest respect and affection, and, on the other hand, his gratitude to Sir Richard is expressed with pathetic feeling in the codicil to his will of June 7th, 1850: “To reward as much as I can Richard Wallace for all his care and attention to my dear mother, and likewise for his devotedness to me during a long and painful illness I had in Paris in 1840, and on all other occasions, I give such residue to the said Richard Wallace now living at the Hôtel des Bains, Boulogne-sur-Mer, in France, and whose domicile previous to the Revolution of 1848 was in my mother’s house, Rue Taitbout No. 3, formerly No. 1, absolutely.”

The man who wrote those words had a heart. The letters to Mawson are often worded as if he—Mawson—were conferring the most signal favours upon his employer. The most formal commissions of the earlier days of their connection soon grew to be letters of absolute affectionate gratitude. Lord Hertford had the most complete confidence in the judgment, taste and good faith of his agent. Well might he trust him, for Aladdin was not more faithfully served by the slaves of the ring and the lamp. But it is only a kindly nature and sweet disposition which is capable of dealing with a subordinate without the slightest tinge of patronizing condescension. Two or three examples will suffice to show the nature of the intimacy between the employer and the employed.

The Duke of Buckingham’s sale at Stowe, in 1848, created an immense sensation. I remember it well, for although I was only eleven years old, I used to hear much art talk even in those days between my father and his friends. It is the subject of a characteristic letter from Lord Hertford to Mawson, quoted by Mr. MacColl, dated September 10th, 1848; it was written from Boulogne:

“I intended being at Stowe on the fifteenth, but I find that it is not certain whether I shall be able to attend the sale on that day. I think we must have the ‘Unmerciful Servant,’ by Rembrandt, and hope the price will not be as unmerciful as the subject; but you know that I place all confidence in you, and depend upon your kindness on this occasion.

“The Rembrandt and the Domenichino are my favourites, and I depend upon you for doing the best. Pray have the kindness not to mention to anybody that you buy on my account. I am very anxious my name should not appear. In the event of my being in time for the sale, you would see me there, and my hat would play the same part it has already acted in similar circumstances.”

On September 24th, Lord Hertford wrote to thank Mr. Mawson for the transaction, adding: “I hope and trust we have not paid our pictures much too dear. I am very glad you like them, as I have a very high opinion of your judgment.”

The great Rembrandt was bought for two thousand three hundred pounds. What would it fetch to-day?

In July, 1855, the contents of St. Dunstan’s, in the Regent’s Park, were sold, and were the subject of the enclosed letters:

“Rue Lafitte, Paris. “July 5th, 1855.

“There are a few things I should like to have at the sale of my father’s villa in the Regent’s Park on the 9th inst.”

* * * * *

“Paris, July 6th, 1855.

“In anticipation that you will have the kindness to attend the sale at the Regent’s Park for me, and having no time to spare, I send you the list of things I wish to have, and that I hope you will have the kindness to buy for me:

“PICTURES.

“118. P. Veronese—Not more than £40 or £50.

“120. Ruysdael—What you think it is worth and a little more.

“122. Northcote—‘Portrait of George IV. when Prince of Wales.’

I am anxious to have it.”

* * * * *

“Paris, July 20th, 1855.

“I am extremely obliged to you for having had the kindness to buy my ‘caprices’ at the Regent’s Park sale. You did it all beautifully and just what I wished. I depend on your usual kindness for having the ‘Prince of Wales’’ portrait repaired for me. I rather regret the landscape (_i.e._, the Ruysdael), though an indifferent picture, because it was in my room when I was a boy a few years ago. What prices people give now for all these old affairs! It is ridiculous!”

Only once does Lord Hertford sound a note of disquiet at the price paid by his commissioner, and that was for the famous portrait by Velasquez of “Don Baltasar Carlos in Infancy,” which fetched £1,680 at the Louis Philippe sale at Christie’s in May, 1853. He writes:

“As for the Velasquez, I do not remember it at all, _ainsi je ne puis rien dire_. What frightens me is that it appears never to have struck me at the Louvre, as I do not remember it at all. You gave a _prodigious_ price for it, but as I have great confidence in your taste and judgment, as well as in everything else, I dare say I shall like it, and I long to have a look at it, which I hope soon to be able to do.”

It was certainly not a bad investment at the _prodigious_ price.

Other letters are full of the most flattering expressions:

“April 11th, 1856.

“I have only a moment to thank you a thousand times for your great kindness in giving me some details of the Sibthorpe sale.”

* * * * *

“April 23rd, 1856.

“A thousand thanks for your kindness.”

But these expressions are too numerous to quote; still, I will give one more because it really testifies to something like friendship.

Writing from Paris, December 11th, 1863, Lord Hertford says:

“I was in hopes that I should have had the pleasure of seeing you in Brussels something like a couple of months ago. There was a goodish portrait by Rubens that I bought. I shall be delighted to show it you some day, and I hope you will like it.”

Certainly Lord Hertford was a great gentleman, one whom it must have been a pleasure to serve.

It is easy to imagine the _sava indignatio_ of Lord Hertford if he could come to life again and see “the prices which people give now for these old affairs.” Money could hardly have been better invested than it was by himself, his father and his grandfather, when they paid what were deemed wild sums for their works of art. Fancy Sir Joshua’s “Nellie O’Brien” being bought by the second Marquess for £64 1s. at the Caleb Whitefoord sale. Think of the third Marquess buying Vandyck’s “Young Italian Nobleman,” a glorious portrait of the Genoese period, for £409 10s. In the second half of the nineteenth century prices went up madly, but, even so, Lord Hertford, when he gave £1,795 10s. for “Mrs. Carnac,” was purchasing gold for silver. Why, the first state of the mezzotint engraving of that picture by J. R. Smith was sold a few years ago, if I remember aright, for eleven hundred guineas. For the “Strawberry Girl” the price paid at the Rogers sale was £2,205. “No man,” said Sir Joshua, “could ever produce more than half a dozen original works, and that is one of mine.”

Lord Hertford was delighted with the acquisition. He wrote to Mawson:

“You have done admirably, and I return you most sincere thanks for your kindness. The ‘Strawberry,’ is dear. I should be sorry to have a large basket at _that_ price; but it seems it is beautiful, and in this affair, as in others, I have completely followed your good advice, and you have added to my collection pictures I have never seen, which shows, more than words can express, the great and friendly confidence I have in you. I am sure I shall be delighted with what you have acquired. I am very sorry your honourable name was not coupled with our ‘Girl’ when she was knocked down. It is not fair that you should not enjoy the little glory of having secured in a gallant manner the gem of this interesting sale, so you are at full liberty to use my name with yours respecting this painting. Was it not an immense price? I don’t regret it at all; on the contrary, I am delighted to have so fine a Sir Joshua, as I am extremely fond of them, and they cannot always be had when wanted.”

Another notable picture bought at the Rogers sale was the “Don Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School,” by Velasquez, for which Mawson paid £1,210 1s. A wonderful bargain at the Stowe sale was Murillo’s “Assumption of the Virgin,” knocked down for £58 16s.

I have no space to go into details, but we can form some idea of the value of these purchases when we see that Lord Hertford bought five of the very finest Sir Joshuas for £7,974 5s. The six finest Rembrandts cost him £5,453 15s.; five of the best Watteaus, £2,037. What superb investments—to speak of no others!

It is something of an anti-climax to find Lord Hertford giving £4,000, and Sir Richard Wallace £2,400, for works by Ary Scheffer. Well might Lord Hertford write to Mawson in 1853: “You know, fancy has a great deal to do with pictures as with anything else.” £1,680—a “_prodigious_ price” for a Velasquez! £4,000—given without hesitation for a picture by that most namby-pamby of artists, Ary Scheffer!

The desire to surround himself with beautiful works of art was one of the crimes laid to the charge of Lord Hertford. He was extravagant, he was selfish. As to the first of these accusations, the prices which he paid were surely no more than what was permissible to a man with an income of nearly a quarter of a million sterling; and, as I have shown, from the mere investor’s point of view the money was well laid out. As for the cry of selfishness, what could be more natural than that a man endowed with the most refined taste and judgment, debarred by health no less than by inclination, from the more active relaxations in which rich men find pleasure—the turf, sport of all kinds, hunting, and, of late years certainly, shooting, should be captivated by the excitement of the auction-rooms. It was in them that he found the pleasures of the chase. He was deprived of much, and it were scurvy treatment to reproach him for what harmed no living being at the time, but has ended by giving joy to millions of his countrymen. The amusement with which he solaced long days and years of physical pain, aching under a complaint which notoriously affects the spirits perhaps more than any other, has borne fruit for which we should be grateful, even though it be only indirectly that we owe it to him. He might fairly have written in his will like Bacon: “For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches and to foreign nations, and to the next age.” We are “the next age”; it behoves us to be not only just but generous. To our shame we have been neither.

There can be very few men now alive who knew Richard Lord Hertford personally. From Lord Esher, who as a youth did know him, I have a letter, which he very kindly allows me to quote, giving more than one of those little intimate touches which lend a spice to narration. But it does more than that. It furnishes direct evidence of the truth of what I have written about the calumnies by which Lord Hertford’s character was poisoned by people for whom his chief crime was that he did not choose to know them. Is it likely, is it even possible, that two ladies in a high position like Lord Esher’s grandmother and mother should have visited him in the Rue Lafitte and in the much-talked-of Bagatelle had those vile slanders been true? The story of Sir Richard Wallace’s birth and upbringing is conclusive.

Let the letter speak for itself.

“Roman Camp, Callander. “March 17th, 1916.

“MY DEAR REDESDALE,

“I remember being taken, by my grandmother, to tea with Richard Marquis of Hertford. He lived at the corner of the Rue Lafitte, and his fine rooms were crowded with objets d’art—although not smothered in _clocks_, as they afterwards became when Wallace and Scott occupied them. Everything was most sumptuous, but I recollect perfectly that when the tea was brought in by a very solemn major-domo, whose long grey whiskers I can see to this day, Lord Hertford went to a beautiful Louis XVI. secrétaire, which he unlocked, and brought out the sugar-basin, which he carefully put away again after tea. (Lord Hertford was a very handsome man, but frail and delicate.) Not long afterwards my mother and I were invited to spend an afternoon at Bagatelle, where Richard Wallace entertained us, as Lord Hertford was engaged—so he sent word—in Paris. The gardens were beautiful—as they still are—but the house was not so full as the Rue Lafitte.

“My grandfather, Colonel Gurwood, who had served through the Peninsular War in the Light Division, was given a captaincy in the 10th Hussars in 1814, and Richard Seymour joined the regiment when he was seventeen years old and ten years’ junior to my grandfather, who became much attached to him. This friendship lasted through life.

“I possess three volumes of bound letters to Colonel Gurwood from Lord Yarmouth, by which name Lord Hertford was know from 1822 to 1842, when he succeeded his father, Francis, the third Marquess of Steyne of ‘Vanity Fair.’

“These letters are interesting, as they contain many references to the collection of bric-à-brac which Lord Yarmouth and Wallace, his secretary, had already commenced to form. Many fine things which belonged to my grandfather, and are now the property of my sister, were purchased by Lord Yarmouth and Wallace or by their advice. In return, my grandfather always bought for Lord Yarmouth his riding and driving horses. He used to send them to Paris, where Lord Yarmouth lived with his mother, Lady Hertford, Maria Fagnani.

“Many times have I heard my grandmother and my mother tell the story of Sir Richard Wallace’s adoption by Lord Hertford. Wallace was the son of Lord Yarmouth by a girl, Agnes Jackson by name, who was a kind of _fille du régiment_ of the 10th Hussars, and young Seymour made a home for her in Paris while the liaison lasted. There Wallace was born, and when Seymour parted from his mistress, the child was placed with a concierge in the Rue de Clichy, where he ran wild under a _porte cochère_ until he was about six years old.

“My grandfather, who had known Agnes Jackson and all about her short-lived liaison with Lord Yarmouth, hunted up the boy, and finding he was a smart child, showed him to Lady Hertford, Maria Fagnani, and induced her to bring him up, much against the inclination of her son.

“There is, and never was, the slightest foundation for the absurd legend that Maria Fagnani was Sir Richard Wallace’s mother, although the writer in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ who cannot possibly know anything of the facts, adopts it.

“One of the reasons sometimes given for assuming that Lord Hertford could not be Wallace’s father was that there was not more than eighteen or nineteen years between their ages. On the other hand, it was overlooked that Maria Fagnani was very nearly, if not quite, fifty years of age when Wallace was born. Anyway, I have no doubt whatever that the facts are as I have stated them.

“They were corroborated, as far as I am concerned, by the evidence of Madame O—— de B——, a lady who for forty years lived on the _deuxième étage_ of the Rue Lafitte and in a beautiful villa, called St. James, close to Bagatelle.

“She was a lady of irreproachable life, and virtue as stern as that of Madame de Maintenon, whom she resembled in many ways. I inherited some of the gifts which she had received from Lord Hertford; among them a fine ‘Garter George,’ which belonged to Prince Charles Edward, and was acquired by Francis, third Marquis, from the collection of Cardinal York.

“It was destined for my grandfather and his children, and Madame O—— fulfilled her obligation.

“I perfectly remember Sir Richard Wallace’s son, whose liaison with a French girl bitterly offended Sir Richard, although, as he was told by the young man when the quarrel was irremediable, he had only followed his father’s example.

“Young Wallace came once or twice to London after 1870. He died of typhoid fever when still a young man. But Wallace would never recognize his son’s children or their mother; the former were amply provided for by Lady Wallace. Madame O—— de B—— had no children of her own, but she showed great kindness to her connections _de la main gauche_. I perfectly remember the advent of Sir John Scott into the Wallace household, and the subsequent course of a lifelong devotion to the interests of his employers that deserved and obtained its reward.

“There is no need to enter into the story of Lady Wallace, a very refined, shy and excellent lady, although the facts were well known to my family.”

“My French relations were intimate with Lord Hertford, Sir Richard Wallace and Sir John Scott, over a period extending from 1817 to Scott’s death.”

“Yours ever,

“ESHER.”

In a further letter to me Lord Esher very justly calls attention to the remarkable likeness between Lord Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. The busts at Hertford House demonstrate this.

Richard, fourth Marquess of Hertford, who never married, died at Paris on the 25th of August, 1870. His successor in the title, Sir Francis (or, as his familiars called him, “Franco”) Seymour, as was natural, hurried over to Paris, not yet beleaguered by the Prussians, to look after his interests. He was accompanied by his eldest son and his solicitor. The fortune at stake in lands and money was great, but, if the value of the works of art be taken into account, enormous even in these days of plutocratic dominion. The real estate and the personalty, taken together, would have reached a sum “beyond the dreams of avarice;” indeed, by comparison, the boilers and vats of Mr. Thrale would have represented no more than a modest competence.[16]

It must have been a rude shock for the new Lord Hertford when the will was read at Bagatelle after the funeral, and he found that, barring the settled estates, which without the money were almost a white elephant, there was nothing for him. The wealth which had given his two predecessors such power that, in spite of manifest drawbacks, they were propitiated with the Garter, had vanished like Alnaschar’s dream, and he was left with the unredeemed anxieties and responsibilities of a country squire. Equally, it must have been a startling shock for Sir Richard to find that he was the heir to all that wealth.

With the exception of a handsome property which Lord Hertford bequeathed to his cousin, Sir Hamilton Seymour, the famous ex-Ambassador, or rather Minister, to Russia, practically everything was left to the future Sir Richard Wallace.

Sir Richard (I call him “Sir” for convenience’ sake, though he was not created a baronet until the following year) lost no time in turning his newly-acquired wealth to good account. He was one of the most generous men that ever lived. Bravely he stood by Paris and the French in their troubles, started ambulances, founded the Hertford Hospital for poor Englishmen, and set money flowing like water in aid of all sufferers by the war. His charities in France were boundless, and continued throughout his life, and indeed beyond it. But he felt it his duty to come to England, and for thirteen years represented Lisburn in Parliament—Lisburn, which he made the headquarters of his vast Irish domain.

In recognition of the great services which he had rendered to the English in Paris during the siege he was created a baronet in 1871, when he married a French lady, Mademoiselle Castelnau, with whom he had lived for many years, and by whom he had one son who was an officer in the French Army. That son, now long since dead, was the great sorrow of Sir Richard’s life. The breach between them was irreparable, and it made the father miserable. He told a friend of mine, an Italian gentleman, who was breakfasting with him one day and found him in a state of utter dejection, how it irked him that people should look upon him as one of the happiest of men, when in truth he was the most wretched. The sympathy of a good son was the solitary thing wanting, and that he never had.

One friend he had in Mr. Scott, afterwards Sir John, who became his private secretary, and whose affection stood to him almost in lieu of that of a son. Sir John’s father was a distinguished physician, a great personal friend of Sir Richard’s. One day this gentleman’s father-in-law, Mr. Murray, was calling upon him, shortly after his inheritance of Lord Hertford’s possessions, and he happened to say that he was badly in need of a private secretary, and did not know whom to choose. The post would require some unusual qualifications—amongst others, a perfect knowledge of French. Mr. Murray said that perhaps his grandson, a very young barrister just called, might fulfil the conditions. Sir Richard jumped at the offer, and the young man was sent to be looked at. The result was that he found favour in Sir Richard’s eyes, and, after probation, was appointed. No happier choice could have been made, no more devoted and faithful friend could have been found; he remained with Sir Richard until his death at Paris in 1890, and continued to keep watch over Lady Wallace until her end came seven years later.

The nation hardly knows how much it owes to the chivalrous self-effacement of Sir John Scott. When Lady Wallace, to whom Sir Richard had left everything, was about to make her will, she was anxious to bequeath her whole property to Sir John in gratitude for the devotion with which he had managed her affairs and cared for her interests. Sir John persuaded her that it would be a good thing if she were, at any rate, to leave the contents of Hertford House to the nation, and, moreover, that if he were to inherit the entire fortune, there might be some suspicion of undue influence. If, on the other hand, she gave her chief art treasures to England, her memory would be venerated as perhaps the country’s greatest benefactress, while he could gratefully and honourably accept whatever else she might be pleased to bequeath to him. The lady followed his advice. He was a large-minded and generous man, and though, as it turned out, he became the heir to a great fortune, it must never be forgotten that he might have inherited property worth at that time, according to the late Mr. Charles Davis’s computation, at least seven millions sterling, and now, in view of the amazing rise in the value of all works of art, perhaps as much more. It was a most courageous and loyal piece of self-sacrifice. One day, when I said this to a man who was inclined to scoff, his answer was: “Yes, but look at the Death Duties that he would have had to pay.” He could have met those by the sale of half a dozen pictures. Nothing, to my mind, can detract from the patriotic wisdom and generosity of Sir John’s conduct.

When the greatest collection of art treasures that ever was in any private hands became the property of the nation, the next question was how and where to house it. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, and he appointed a Committee, of which he asked me to be a member, to consider the matter. Lord Lansdowne was our chairman, and, after careful discussion, we came to the conclusion that the best plan to adopt would be, if possible, to purchase the freehold of Hertford House from the Portman Estate, and house the collection in its old home, turning the bedrooms on the first floor and the stables into galleries.

There was an idea favoured by Sir Edward Poynter that it would be wise to separate some of the pictures—the Spanish paintings, for example—and place them in the National Gallery; but that scheme would have been against the provisions of the will, which insisted upon nothing being taken from, and nothing added to, the collection as it stood, so the proposal could not be entertained. Sir Edward would have wished the whole collection placed in a building to be erected adjoining the National Gallery; this was also overruled.

Upon this subject Lord Esher writes:

“The Committee to which you allude was appointed under a Treasury Minute of the 3rd of May, 1897.

“The opponents of the Hertford House scheme, headed by Sir Edward Poynter, made a very determined resistance. Lord Chilston was First Commissioner of Works, and I, as you know, occupied the post which you had filled with so much distinction and permanent advantage to the nation.

“We, who were fighting for the retention of Hertford House, owe a heavy debt of gratitude to King Edward, then Prince of Wales, who, with unerring instinct in such matters, grasped at once the historical and æsthetic advantages of keeping the collections intact and _in situ_.

“We were also largely indebted to Sir Francis Mowatt, then Secretary to the Treasury, who afforded us unfailing and generous support.

“The purchase of the leasehold and freehold interest in the house cost £74,620.

“The structural alterations about £28,000, and electric light, heating and painting, £259 16s.

“In August, 1898, at your instance, I took the decorative work, to a very great extent, out of the hands of the Office of Works’ contractor. I remember that the paper used in the large picture gallery, the selection of which had given us a great deal of trouble, was copied from a piece of Italian silk which we borrowed from Bertram, who lived in Dean Street, Soho. Alfred Rothschild then, as always, took a deep interest in Hertford House, and his advice was invaluable to us all.”

A Board of Trustees was then appointed, consisting of Lord Rosebery, as chairman, who gave way to Sir John Scott, Sir Edward Malet, Sir John Stirling Maxwell, Sir Arthur Ellis, Mr. Alfred de Rothschild and myself. Mr.—now Sir—Claude Phillips, that distinguished connoisseur and critic, was appointed keeper. The Office of Works constructed the new Galleries according to our plan, and a Committee of the Trustees undertook the arrangement of the collection. Sir John Scott, Mr. Alfred de Rothschild and myself, with Sir Claude Phillips, worked day after day for many months, evolving kosmos out of a chaos of packing-cases. It was a huge task, but when the Galleries were finally thrown open, we were rewarded by a chorus of approbation, and the praise of foreign critics was no less loud than that of our own friends. Our leading idea was, as far as possible, to avoid the museum aspect, and to show the pictures, clocks, furniture, porcelain, etc., as the collection of a great connoisseur set out as if he were still living in the house. The trustees were fortunate in securing the generous co-operation of Sir Guy Laking in the arrangement and cataloguing of the armour. It may readily be believed that it was no small sorrow to us when, owing to the war, all our work had to be undone in order to stow away our treasures in safety. I, for one, can hardly expect to live to see the reawakening of the old glory. I can only hope that when that time comes something of the former order may be restored.

One morning—it was the 17th of January, 1912—I received an urgent message by telephone, begging me to go to Hertford House at once. Sir John Scott had died there suddenly. When I reached Manchester Square, I found him lying in the Trustees’ room. He had been discussing business with Mr. MacColl, who had succeeded Sir Claude Phillips as keeper, when all of a sudden he began to have a difficulty in breathing. He said it was nothing, but he grew worse. Doctors were sent for, but there was nothing to be done. That large-hearted man died in the house where he had lived so long, and surrounded by all the beautiful things which he loved and which he had been the means of securing for the nation when he might have had them for himself. The Government had made him a baronet. Lord Rosebery, with a keen appreciation of what he had done, said to me in righteous jest: “They have made him a baronet when they ought to have made him a duke.”

A NOTE ON RUSSIAN STUDIES

A few days ago—I am writing on the 7th of August, 1916—I read in the _Times_ a long speech by one of our preter-pluperfect rulers, announcing the determination of the Government to encourage the study of Russian, on account of its glorious literature. I think the adjective was “glorious,” but, at any rate, it was some such word. Was there ever a better example of the danger of giving reasons? Had this illustrious gentleman deigned to glance at some such easily accessible book as Mr. Maurice Baring’s delightful little “Outline of Russian Literature,” he would have been saved from talking such nonsense.

We are told that upon one occasion Dr. Johnson declared that he could quote by heart a whole chapter of the Natural History of Iceland from the Danish of Horreboro, and immediately proceeded to show that it was no vain boast.