Part 12
There was Lord John, who began life as the fool of the family; and this character in the Alabama business reached its highest pitch. He was a sprig of the dukedom, so he did not like that Mr. Delane (the editor of the _Times_), and would not invite him to his receptions. So _that Mr. Delane_, who knew his own value, ordered the lord-John speeches in Parliament to be only indicated in brief, not reported. On this Lord John did like that Mr. Delane, and sent him invitations; so his speeches were reported once more in full.
He, too, must be an earl, and what are these beggars on England-back going to do with their titles after all? One would think that a true man would shrink from being mylorded by his filthy valet; but they can bear it!
Charles Buller was a man for every one to love, and he died too soon.
On the whole, Samuel Rickards’s parsonage was the most literary house to be at, though his knowledge was a good deal confined. But he and his wife were open to everything, botany especially, and antiquities. I recollect their showing me an iron ring that had been dug up on the glebe, which had an inscription on it that Rickards could not interpret. It was _Bertus beriori_. I suggested that it was monkish latin, and might signify _A greatest to a greater warrior_, assuming it to be derived from _berus_, _berior_, _bertus_, and this pleased him much.
Who, belonging to the days of which I write, does not remember the cheery voice and the bright, handsome face of Tom Thornhill, the son of the first winner of the Derby, and the inheritor of the Norfolk estate, Riddlesworth Hall! Who has forgotten his hospitality, and the famous still champagne, the bountiful stock of which was left by the father, and kept up by the son!
I often stayed at Riddlesworth with the Thornhills; they saw a good deal of company there, both from Norfolk and from town. Lord Sandwich was very fond of talking to doctors, so they said; and he often talked to me. I recollect his saying that his father-in-law, Lord Anglesey, forgot, not unfrequently, that he had only one leg (for the sensation of every part of the body is cerebral), and he would sometimes jump out of bed in the morning as if he had two, and fall on the floor.
I once accidentally met Colonel Keppel, the late Earl of Albemarle, at the same house. I was then staying at Riddlesworth, but there was no company there, when Colonel Keppel was announced. This caused some perturbation, as only a family dinner was prepared. It appeared that the colonel was to be of a party there on the morrow, but had mistaken the day. All, however, went off well; and since, when I heard of the homage paid him on his almost last birthday, as almost the last survivor of the battle, on the field of Waterloo, it recalled to me the charm of his manner and conversation.
At the time his father and brother were still alive, residing at Quiddenham Hall.
What one missed in these great houses was the company of one’s own class, men in the pursuit of literature or science; but such things are of no use in the patrician circles, they would only be in the way. These lords of the soil love horses, carriages, plate, all of which one can see in great perfection in the parks, and at the silversmiths’, as well as in private houses, and the pleasure in any case is but momentary. In justice, however, it must be said that high-class people are often capable of conversing with those who have little to show besides their brains; and are not slow in eliciting information from them. Lord Sandwich was a good example of such; but Lord Albemarle had a _naïveté_ and an intelligence so delightful as to need nothing at another’s hands. Then, a rich aristocracy has opportunities which do not belong to the men who have their money to make. The one class has not to consider in his dealings with others how he can make the most out of them, but is able to be generous; this alone has an ennobling influence. An American made the remark that, many as are the faults of the English nobility, they always kept their promise.
The reason why authors, deserving of encouragement from the intrinsic value of their work, are no longer patronized and brought into notice by the great, is that the influence of the nobility has wholly died out. The literary leaders, great editors, and the like, play but a minor part; they are not enough looked up to by the people at large, who do not understand them. They can confer fame on men among their own select class, but that fame cannot over-leap its boundary, and reach even the intelligent vulgar.
Even the Royal Society, begun by a king, was long afraid to venture in its career with anything less than a royal or noble president, and this within the memory of man; but happily it now runs alone, as do all the other learned bodies in its track.
The truth may lie here—though scientific men are not growing rich, rich men are growing scientific.
I must not leave Riddlesworth without a tribute to Mrs. Thornhill, a lady so conscientious; and that means gentle, kind and full of charity. She was the daughter of Mr. Waddington, of Cavenham Hall, the county member; a devoted mother, a constant friend.
I suppose, like everybody else, except myself, she is dead; that class of people live too luxuriously to last very long.
Mrs. Thornhill’s mother, Mrs. Waddington, was a lady of extraordinary beauty. She was of the Milnes family of which Moncton Milnes was the recent head, a wit and writer who tried to legitimize bad grammar on the liberal principle that every one had a right to do what he liked with his own language. He, too, like the brewers, could not do without being a lord, though already a patrician, which is greater, and which a king cannot create. He was called the “Cool of the Evening,” which must imply that he was a very pleasant guest on a hot summer’s night.
Our country parishes, with their resident squires, are really little republics with the squire himself at their head as president, and the clergyman acting as his prime minister. It is a form of paternal government without the despotism. The parish clerk, humble as he is, fills the office of a secretary of state, the rest are the people. Where the squire lives on his estate, how many of these happy republics may be seen! All the parishes, pretty much, that I have described are of this category, and I hold it beyond human wit to improve them. All are free!
Mrs. Newton of Elvedon was the sister of Mrs. Waddington. The place of that name has since become the property of Duleep Singh. In the time of the Newtons it was no exception to the happily-governed squirearchies of East Anglia.
Two or three places of mark remain to be mentioned, and as many to be omitted, before quitting the subject. One is the seat of the Duke of Grafton, Euston Hall, inherited by the family from Lord Arlington, in the time of Charles II. The duke, who was Earl of Euston when I first knew him, lived much on his Northamptonshire property, but was a good deal in Norfolk too, where his interests were large. He showed me the principal rooms in his fine mansion, which, though large, bespoke great comfort. The drawing-room, which was very long, had bay-windows, with a daïs under each for seats. There is a grand staircase; on one wall of this was hung a portrait of the duchess, mother of the first duke, then seven or eight generations ago, a lapse of time when the bar-sinister had ceased to cross the shield; nevertheless, it was retained in the armorial bearings of the house, and this may be regarded as a proper pride.
I was shown a picture of the hall as it was originally, with gilded pinnacles, but these had disappeared.
The usual entrance was at the back of the building, flanked by the stables; the front entrance was approached through the park gates, which, as was an old custom, were never opened except to royalty.
The duke, regardless of the example set by his ancestors in contenting themselves with a life interest in so fine a property, for the good of those to come, was quite willing to sell Euston if he could have got his price, but it did not change hands.
I was not acquainted with the duke in fashionable life, so I know little of his character there; but I believe he was thought to be eccentric. All I know is that he was a benevolent and kind-hearted president of his village republic. He was married to the daughter of the last Earl of Berkeley—a sister of the famed colonel of that name—a lady of great worth. My acquaintance with the family was professional only; in this way. I had to advise several members of the house, and this sufficed to confirm me in the opinion that the higher you go the greater is the amiability you encounter. It may be good breeding only, but whatever its source may be, it is deserving of admiration.
One more place I will mention in Norfolk to which I was summoned, the seat of Mr. Angerstein. In point of decoration, it was a gilded palace, the most superb in its interior that I had ever seen. I remained there for the night, and had a most agreeable conversation with the head of the house and his two sons, the general and the member for Greenwich.
Some very fine pictures remain in the mansion. The one I was most gratified in seeing was a Rembrandt, the finest almost of that artist’s work; it was a Charles I., on horseback, under an archway. I never met with the equal of this fine painting, except in the equestrian figure of the Duke of Galiere,—Brignole Sale,—by the same hand, in the palazzo Rosso at Genoa.
I remember being told by General Angerstein that his father had always regretted the sale of the pictures to the nation, which was, however, made compulsory by the terms of his predecessor’s will.
XLVII.
As the Lady Abbess of St. Albans might have said, there was an abomination of parsons in the county town; some schoolmasters who were not in clerical practice, but cleric; some in actual service. They did not in those days wear livery as servants, not necessarily apostles, of I.H.S. Two of them I still see talking automatically, faster than they could think; one of these with the nose and mouth of Punch. I still see another, a pale-faced pulpiteer and a screamer; the confidence-reservoir of single ladies turned forty odd; a man who met you with a twirl of his glove by its finger, and a sort of whistling smile that seemed to say to itself, “I have done him before I have begun.” The men did not care for him because what gossip is to some was censoriousness in him; still the women liked him, and thought five of his ten toes were already in heaven.
The parsonics are the only professionals who do not seem able to get their own living by going into practice—they like to be endowed. Some are glad to get a hundred pounds per annum for life; some, doing the same work as they do, bid for two, four, six, eight, and ten hundred; others, with yet less work, accept much more than this; but they have uncles. Why don’t these guaranteed rats set up for themselves in practice like the nonconformists? They would be found churches. Doctors do so, and lawyers. They should obtain the licence like these, then preach what they liked within limits, prescribed by the Royal Church. Doctors do all this within the rules of their royal colleges.
Imagine the great profession of physic endowed, and its baronets, arch-doctors of Canterbury and York, giving away livings to their nephews and nieces: the doctor of St. James’s £1000 per annum, the doctor of St. Giles’s £150. It is a little so with the law—the chancellors, attorney-generals, and judges are endowed, but not so the barristers, except with wit; and what poor creatures would these be compared to what they are, if they had to begin on curacies, and, perhaps, end on them, say of £100 per annum, unless they had influence enough to get themselves made vicars of law, rectors of law, as well as deans of arches?
But no Church has ever reformed itself: _non possumus_ is the motto of them all.
But the Church has got its large fortune safely invested, and in the best order, as if to make confiscation easy. Its proprietary consists of human beings not differing from others, and rich in worldly wisdom. If they really wished to save the Church, they would do their utmost to throw off the State and take their money with them, and reform themselves on the model of the civil service and the army, dividing the revenues into livings of equal amount, to be gained by competitive examinations. But human nature must have its way; it will last their time, and after them the deluge. In two or three more new parliaments they will be too late.
In the present condition of clericism, many do not know what to be at. An intimate of mine who would have liked to steal a spiritual march on me, which no man ever did yet, was a curate of twenty years’ standing, and so far a perpetual one in the sense of being the hireling of vicars and subject to a month’s warning, like the moon. He had subscribed his mite of belief to the doctrine of eternal punishment.
This good personification of humanity had a vivid notion, together with an unwholesome fear, of our modern Hades, formed originally out of a few metaphors of Scripture, and improved by Dantesque and Miltonic talent, though its latitude and longitude is still undiscovered among the heavenly bodies.
This well-meaning teacher, some two or three years after my accident (a leg divided against itself so that it could not stand, and made into two unequal halves at the socket), suggested persuasively that I must have felt very grateful to the Almighty at not being killed outright. But he was so much at fault that I avoided the discussion, and answered, “I am my own chaplain, and transact all my spiritual business myself, under my own frontal bone (_os frontis_); but should I be in want of spiritual assistance, my inclination would be to apply to the Archbishop of Canterbury or to the Bishop of London as the best authorities in Divine practice. However, not to be over reticent, I may tell you that no sense of future favours as regards gratitude arose in my mind; for we cannot entertain two ideas at once, and mine was to ask myself, as a scientific physician would do, whether my leg was as I last left it, or whether the head of the femur and the shaft had parted company. As to thankfulness at not having lost my life, that would have involved an emotion functionally incompatible with the faintness and pain that got hold of me. The pain has continued; I am taken prisoner by it, and condemned to an armchair for life. Not unfrequently, therefore, I think how much better it would have been for me had I been killed off at once. So you must perceive that your forecast is made without any knowledge of the facts.”
A doctor never gives his opinion of another without being called in; why, then, should a parson? But it was well meant, though deficient in the greatest of delicacies, called tact.
XLVIII.
Among the clergy of Bury was a curate, I think of St. Mary’s, who was named Cookesley. His mother was a school-fellow of my mother at Exeter, now about a hundred years ago! He became intimate with me, and was often my guest. He was a son of Dr. Cookesley, D.D., and a brother of a well-known man who was long an assistant-master at Eton, and was as such spoken of with great favour by Beaconsfield in his novel of “Coningsby.” Afterwards he had a church at Hammersmith, St. Peter’s, and lived in that place, where I knew him, and attached much interest to his acquaintance. He used to dine with me at Alton Lodge, Roehampton, which was within a walk of his house. Cookesley was, above all things, a good fellow, besides being a good scholar and a most amusing companion. He was a sturdy Churchman, and much mixed up with the writers of “Essays and Reviews”—Dr. Temple (now Bishop of London), Dr. Williams, and their set.
I introduce the name here on account of Cookesley having attacked Donaldson’s work, by pamphlet, on the subject of “Jashar,” the name of a Latin book of great pretensions and no authority.
Donaldson, previously mentioned by me, was in many things a good fellow too, but owing to his overweening vanity, which had no repose, he was incapable of the higher virtues. That vanity which stands in the way of friendship, even of truth itself, was his to a degree that may be pronounced abnormal. He wanted to be thought the greatest of Bentleys, the cleverest of Christian Voltaires, the choicest of wits; but a man who is now two-thirds a scholar and one-third a wit may, if very vain, conceive himself to be a Dr. Parr.
I liked Donaldson much, not very much, and as character is of no use after a man is dead, it no longer subserving his human interests, I wish to do him justice, for better as well as for worse, since he was a man to be biographized for the common good. For some years I associated with him almost daily, walked and talked with him, dined with him in many houses, in his as well as my own, knew his thoughts, his opinions, and was conversant with whatever he was about.
His disposition was candid, genial, good-natured. He was a child in his love of fun, and had laughter enough in him to respond to all the humour ever uttered by word of mouth, from Rabelais to Molière. I was going to say he had not a bad heart; I will go further, and say that I am sure he had a good one for an occasion, but not one of a serious and responsible order.
But these excellent qualities were marred in him, not unfrequently, by a vanity which was incommensurable.
I would not undertake to pronounce him blamable in anything he did, said, or wrote; I am a physiologist in judging of good deeds, a pathologist in judging of bad. When I call up Donaldson’s head and face, and see a large, wide, overhanging forehead, big enough to be hydrocephalic, a forehead such as one meets with in cases of epilepsy and in cases of genius alike, I pause before criticising its function; and such was Donaldson’s forehead, while his mouth was the mouth of Punch. Its laugh, almost always silent, seemed loud, and suppressed only to make it last the longer. There was more going on always under that forehead of his than in any half-dozen brains of the common type. Fortunate for him was it that the mental workings are inaudible, or he would have been stunned by his own thoughts; so busy were they at all times, and so noisy.
He was a work of Nature, a thinking and sensitive machine, which set going must work on like the rapidest wheel moved by steam; so rapid sometimes as to acquire invisibility as it revolved before your eyes.
The fly-wheel—that wonderful invention of machinery that carries the largest wheel over the dead point—in him was vanity, and it never allowed its machinery to pause; it was, therefore, quite impossible for it to ask itself if it went wrong when it never stopped. All Donaldson knew about right and wrong was that what he achieved was perfect—that, even if a little wrong, the reason was not quite within reach of vulgar scrutiny.
Cookesley was the first to take unfavourable notice of his “Jashar;” Perowne was the next. Neither wrote of it dispassionately, but this was in no very unkind spirit. Their criticism was as they felt to be just. The origin of “Jashar” was partly told by Donaldson in his reply, but he was not over-candid in his details. From his account he was only going to pursue a course that others had taken: Welcker, in collecting the fragments of Æschylus; Meinche, in doing the same for the Comœdians; and so on for Alcæus and the Lyric Poets, without a thought, he said, on their part of also doing what he had done for Jashar—an omission at which he expressed his great surprise.
Now, the surprise he here expresses is not a real transcript from his memory; the labours of which he speaks he had been long acquainted with. He had himself edited the works of Pindar, _with the fragments of his lost compositions_; which circumstance would have included him among those at whose shortcomings his astonishment was expressed. But I may say he only imagined himself so astonished, on writing his _Præfatio_; for I know perfectly well that one evening, when dining with Sir Thomas Cullum, the worthy baronet showed him Knights’s volume, with plates, “On the Worship of Priapus,” and that it so attracted his fancy that he borrowed it and took it home. He showed it to me soon after—it might have been the next day—and told me that he had caught from it an interpretation of a certain text of Scripture, viz. Genesis iii. 8-15.
Out of this, and a certain plate, came “Jashar,” which, whether true or false, scholarly or unscholarly, is a wonderful intellectual feat; and if the subject is susceptible of treatment under new accretions of knowledge, justice must be accorded it as a first and bold attempt. The part relating to the worship of Priapus, which immediately follows the Prolegomena, is a marvellous evolution of the verses cited.
The details would be in place if printed in an anatomical work; perhaps next to that they are best buried in Latin.
XLIX.
It was an easy task for a scholar like Perowne to penetrate Donaldson’s plot, but the marvel is that it should have deceived its author, who had so acute a mind. The pointing out of its obvious fallacies was a vexation, but the replying was a pleasure, and was intended for a fresh literary feat. The worst of it for Donaldson was that the day of invective had gone by; the finest satire that could be written would have remained unread. It was therefore a poor substitute in the case for a sound refutation, which alone could have extricated the offending scholar from his dilemma.
Perowne almost justly accused Donaldson of maliciousness; but I believe that it was boast, an attempt of the criticised to establish his superiority to criticism itself, unaware of the weakness of his weapon, the use of which a century before might have led to his being called the greatest controversionalist of his day; and, though his invective was powerless, he believed that he should be so esteemed in a century to come.
Donaldson had immense merit. While an articled clerk he attended lectures at University College, and, so disclosing a facility in acquiring Greek, went to Cambridge instead of pursuing law any further; and, in the short period of his terms, not only did the work necessary for the examinations, but came out the second classic, beaten only by Kennedy.
Such men should reap all their fame in their lifetime, like men of science. Their names are soon lost in the history of the knowledge wherein alone they survive, unless they are Scotts and Liddells, to be hourly referred to. Donaldson was a lifelong student, impelled by vanity, the motor-power of all noble work, but which, as in his case, often breaks up the brain prematurely. By his “Jasher” and his “Varronianus,” he was accused of striking a blow at the Church. He may have done so against its dogmatists and bigots, but he broke his knuckles even in that slight aim. They would have liked to have received him as Professor of Greek at Cambridge; they told him so, but they did not dare elect him.
Donaldson, as the world goes, was a good citizen, and unexceptionable as a husband and parent. He was not sympathetic; the advancement of friends delighted him as gossip, but did not touch him much within.