Part 10

It is much to be regretted that Lord Houghton did not write his own biography. Those who know his delightful _Monographs, Social and Personal_, can form some idea of how he would have treated it. From his early years he lived in society—not merely the society to which his birth naturally opened the door, but a varied society of his own creating. He had an insatiable curiosity. It is hardly too much to say that in his long life he was present at every ceremony of importance, from the Eglinton Tournament to the Œcumenical Council; he knew everybody who was worth knowing, both at home and abroad—not merely as chance acquaintances, but as friends with whom he maintained a correspondence; he was both a politician and a man of letters, a friend of the unwashed and the associate of princes. What a book might have been written by such a man on such a subject! But, alas! though he often spoke of writing his own life, he died before he had leisure even to begin it; and, instead, we have to content ourselves with the volumes before us. They are good—unquestionably good; they abound with amusing stories and brilliant witticisms; but we confess that we laid them down with a sense of disappointment which it is hard to define. Perhaps it was beyond the writer’s ability to draw so complex a character—a man of many moods, a creature of contradictions, a master of what _not_ to do and _not_ to say, as a lady of fashion told him to his face; perhaps he was overweighted by a wish to bring into prominence those solid qualities in his hero which society often failed to discover, while judging only ‘the man of fashion, whose unconventional originality had so far impressed itself upon the popular mind that there was hardly any eccentricity too audacious to be attributed to him by those who knew him only by repute[78].’ We are not so presumptuous as to suppose that we can paint a portrait of Lord Houghton that will satisfy those who were his intimate friends; but we hope to present to our readers at least a faithful sketch of one for whom we had a most sincere admiration and respect.

Richard Monckton Milnes was born in London, June 19, 1809. His father, Robert Pemberton Milnes, then a young man of twenty-five, and M.P. for the family borough of Pontefract, had just flashed into sudden celebrity in the House of Commons by a brilliant speech in favour of Mr Canning, which saved the Portland Administration, and would have made Mr Milnes’s political fortune, had he been so minded. But when Mr Perceval offered him a seat in the Cabinet, either as Chancellor of the Exchequer or as Secretary of War, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, no: I will not accept either; with my temperament, I should be dead in a year.’ That he had entered Parliament with high hopes, and confidence in his own powers to win distinction there, is plain from the well-known story (which his son evidently believed) that he laid a bet of 100_l._ that he would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in five years. But, when the time came, he declined to ‘take occasion by the hand,’ and sat down under the oaks of Fryston to spend the rest of his life, just half a century, in the placid uniformity of a country gentleman’s existence. His abandonment of public life, and his refusal to return to it in any form, even when, late in life, Lord Palmerston offered him a peerage, were unsolved riddles to his contemporaries. Those who read these volumes will have but little difficulty in finding the answer to it. He was endowed with a proud independence of judgment which could never bind itself to any political party, and a critical fastidiousness which made him hesitate over every question presented to him. These two qualities of mind were conspicuous in his son, and barred to some extent his advancement, as they had barred his father’s. It must not, however, be imagined that the elder Milnes was an indolent man. Far from it. He was a daring rider to hounds, a scientific agriculturist, an active magistrate, a stimulator of the waning Toryism of Yorkshire by speeches which showed what the House of Commons had lost when he left it, and ardently curious about men of note and events of interest—another characteristic which descended to his son. Occasionally, too, he yielded to a love of excitement which Yorkshire could not gratify, and revisited London, to tempt the fickle goddess who presides over high play—a taste which cost him dear, for it compelled him to pass several years of his life in comparative obscurity abroad, while the rents in his fortune, due to his own and his brother’s extravagance, were being slowly repaired. We have been told, by one who knew him late in life, that he was a singularly loveable person—the delight of children and young people—full of jokes, and fun, and _persiflage_. ‘You could never be sure whether he spoke in jest or in earnest,’ said our informant. Here again one of the most obvious characteristics of his son makes its appearance.

The boyhood of Richard Milnes may be passed over in a sentence. A serious illness when he was ten years old put an end to his father’s intention of sending him to Harrow, and he was educated at home, or near it, till he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1827. He was entered as a fellow-commoner—a position well suited to the training he had received, for it gave him the society of men older than himself, while he was looking out for congenial friends among men of his own age. His college tutor was Mr Whewell, and it was doubtless at his suggestion that he went to read classics with Thirlwall, then one of the resident Fellows. On one of his later visits to Cambridge Lord Houghton told an interesting story of their relations as pupil and instructor. After a few days’ trial Thirlwall said to him: ‘You will never be a scholar. It is no use our reading classics together. Have you ever read the Bible?’ ‘Yes, I have read it, but not critically,’ was the reply. ‘Very well,’ said Thirlwall, ‘ then let us begin with Genesis.’ And so the rest of the term was spent in the study of the Old Testament. Mr Reid is, no doubt, right in saying that, for ‘the making of his mind,’ Milnes was more deeply indebted to Thirlwall than to any other man. But Thirlwall was not merely the Gamaliel at whose feet Milnes was willing to sit; he became the chosen friend of his heart. Lord Houghton was once asked to name the most remarkable man whom he had known in his long experience. Without a moment’s hesitation he replied ‘Thirlwall’; and the numerous letters which Mr Reid has printed show that the friendship was equally strong on both sides.

The most picturesque of Roman historians said of one of his heroes that he was _felix opportunitate mortis_; it might be said of Milnes, with regard to Cambridge, that he was _felix opportunitate vitæ_. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a period in which so many men who afterwards made their mark in the world have been gathered together there; and, with a happy facility for discovering and attracting to himself whatever was eminent and worth knowing, it was not long before he became intimate with the best of them. Nearly forty years afterwards, in 1866, on the occasion of the opening of the new rooms of the Union Society, he commemorated these friends of his early years in a speech of singular beauty and sincerity:

‘There was Tennyson, the Laureate, whose goodly bay-tree decorates our language and our land; Arthur, the younger Hallam, the subject of _In Memoriam_, the poet and his friend passing, linked hand in hand, together down the slopes of fame. There was Trench, the present Archbishop of Dublin, and Alford, Dean of Canterbury, both profound Scriptural philologists who have not disdained the secular muse. There was Spedding, who has, by a philosophical affinity, devoted the whole of his valuable life to the rehabilitation of the character of Lord Bacon; and there was Merivale, who—I hope by some attraction of repulsion—has devoted so much learning to the vindication of the Cæsars. There were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and of our latest war—Kemble as interesting an individual as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion. There was Venables, whose admirable writings, unfortunately anonymous, we are reading every day, without knowing to whom to attribute them; and there was Blakesley, the “Hertfordshire Incumbent” of the _Times_. There were sons of families which seemed to have an hereditary right to, a sort of habit of, academic distinction, like the Heaths and the Lushingtons. But I must check this throng of advancing memories, and I will pass from this point with the mention of two names which you would not let me omit—one of them, that of your Professor of Greek, whom it is the honour of Her Majesty’s late Government to have made Master of Trinity; and the other, that of your latest Professor, Mr F. D. Maurice, in whom you will all soon recognize the true enthusiasm of humanity’ (vol. ii. p. 161).

Mr Reid tells us that Tennyson sought Milnes’s acquaintance because ‘he looks the best-tempered fellow I ever saw.’ Hallam proclaimed him to be ‘a kindhearted fellow, as well as a very clever one, but vain and paradoxical.’ Milnes himself put Hallam at the head of those whom he knew. ‘He is the only man of my standing,’ he wrote, ‘before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’

It was hardly to be expected that Milnes, with his taste for the general in literature rather than the particular, would achieve distinction in the Cambridge of 1830. We have seen how Thirlwall disposed of his classical aspirations, and in mathematics he fared no better. He read hard, and hoped for distinction in the college examination. But he had overtaxed his energies; his health gave way, and he was forced to give up work altogether for some days. Happily, the benefit a man derives from his three years at a university need not be measured by his honours, and we may be sure that the experience of men and books that Milnes gained there was of greater service to him than a high place in any Tripos would have been. He roamed in all directions over the fields of knowledge; phrenology, anatomy, geology, political economy, metaphysics, by turns engaged his attention; he dabbled in periodical literature; he acted Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_, and Mrs Malaprop in _The Rivals_; he made an excursion in a balloon with the celebrated aeronaut, Mr Green; he wrote two prize-poems, _Timbuctoo_ and _Byzantium_, but only to be beaten by Tennyson and Kinglake; he obtained a second prize for an English declamation, and a first prize for an English essay, _On the Homeric Poems_; he became a member of the club known as ‘The Apostles,’ in which he maintained a kindly interest to the end of his life; and last, but by no means least, he was a constant speaker at the Union.

It is impossible, at a distance of just sixty years, to form an exact estimate of the success of Milnes in those debates. But that it was something more than ordinary, is, we think, certain; for otherwise he would not have ventured to present himself at the Oxford Union in December 1829, in the character of a self-selected missionary, who hoped to carry light and leading into the dark places of the sister University. As this expedition has been twice described by Milnes himself, first in a letter to his mother soon after his return to Cambridge, and secondly in a speech at the opening of the new building of the Cambridge Union Society in 1866; and also, more or less fully, by four of his contemporaries, Sir Francis Doyle, Mr Gladstone, Cardinal Manning, and Dean Blakesley, it is clear that it was regarded by himself and his friends, both at the time and afterwards, as something uncommon and remarkable, and we feel sure that we shall be excused if we try to give a connected narrative of what really took place.

Doyle had ‘brought forward a motion at the Oxford Union that Shelley was a greater poet than Byron[79].’ According to Blakesley, ‘the respective moral tendency of the writings of Shelley and Byron[80]’ was the subject under debate. Doyle states that he acted ‘under Cambridge influences’; and that his motion was ‘an echo of Cambridge thought and feeling,’ words which probably refer to the then recent reprint of Shelley’s _Adonais_ at Cambridge. The debate, he proceeds, ‘was attended by three distinguished members of the Cambridge Union, Arthur Hallam, Richard Milnes, and Sunderland’; or, to use the words of what may be called his second account, taken from a lecture on Wordsworth delivered forty-three years afterwards, ‘friends of mine at Cambridge took the matter up and appeared suddenly on the scene of action.’ That this was the true state of the case, and that there was little or no premeditation about the excursion, is made still clearer by Milnes’ first account. After mentioning that he had been to Oxford, he proceeds:

‘I wanted much to see the place and the men, and had no objection to speak in their society; so, as they had a good subject for debate (the comparative merits of Shelley and Byron), and Sunderland and Hallam were both willing to go—and the Master, when he heard what was our purpose, very kindly gave us an _Exeat_—we drove manfully through the snow, arriving in time to speak that evening....

‘Sunderland spoke first after Doyle, who opened, then Hallam, then some Oxonians, and I succeeded. The contrast from our long, noisy, shuffling, scraping, talking, vulgar, ridiculous-looking kind of assembly, to a neat little square room, with eighty or ninety young gentlemen, sprucely dressed, sitting on chairs or lounging about the fire-place, was enough to unnerve a more confident person than myself. Even the brazen Sunderland was somewhat awed, and became tautological, and spoke what we should call an inferior speech, but which dazzled his hearers. Hallam, as being among old friends, was bold, and spoke well. I was certainly nervous, but, I think, pleased my audience better than I pleased myself[81].’

In his second account, written thirty-six years afterwards, Milnes gives greater prominence to the Union Society than, we think, is consistent with the facts. It might easily be argued, after reading it, that the three Cambridge undergraduates had been selected by the Society to represent it. This exaggeration of the part played by the Union was perhaps only natural on an occasion when the speaker must have felt almost bound to magnify the influence of that Society on all departments of Cambridge life. After mentioning Arthur Hallam and Sunderland, he says:

‘It was in company with Mr Sunderland and Arthur Hallam that I formed part of a deputation sent from the Union of Cambridge to the Union of Oxford; and what do you think we went about? Why, we went to assert the right of Mr Shelley to be considered a greater poet than Lord Byron. At that time we in Cambridge were all very full of Mr Shelley. We had printed the _Adonais_ for the first time in England, and a friend of ours suggested that as Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, and greatly ill-treated, it would be a very grand thing for us to go to Oxford and raise a debate upon his character and powers. So, with full permission of the authorities[82] we went....

We had a very interesting debate ... but we were very much shocked, and our vanity was not a little wounded, to find that nobody at Oxford knew anything about Mr Shelley. In fact, a considerable number of our auditors believed that it was Shenstone, and said that they only knew one poem of his, beginning, “My banks are all furnished with bees.” We hoped, however, that our apostolate was of some good...[83].’

Sir Francis Doyle is provokingly brief in his account of the performances of his Cambridge allies. Sunderland, he tells us, ‘spoke with great effect, though scarcely, I believe, with the same fire that he often put forth on more congenial subjects. Then followed Hallam, with equal if not superior force.’ Of Milnes he says but little. After recounting the discomfiture of a speaker from Oriel, who while declaiming against Shelley suddenly caught sight of him, he adds: ‘Lord Houghton then stood up, and showed consummate skill as an advocate.... After him there was silence in the Union for several minutes, and then Mr Manning of Baliol rose.’ He was on the side of Byron; and when the votes were taken the members present agreed with him.

Mr Gladstone, in a conversation with the author of the life of Cardinal Manning, has given a rather different account of the matter:

‘There was an invasion of barbarians among civilized men, or of civilized men among barbarians. Cambridge men used to look down upon us at Oxford as prim and behind the times. A deputation from the Society of the Apostles at Cambridge, consisting of Monckton Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam, and Sunderland, came to set up among us the cult of Shelley; or at any rate, to introduce the School of Shelley as against the Byronic School at Oxford—Shelley that is, not in his negative, but in his spiritual side. I knew Hallam at Eton, and, I believe, was the intermediary in bringing about the discussion[84].’

This view, that the commission of the three knights-errant emanated from the Apostles, and not from themselves, or from the Union Society, is borne out to some degree by Blakesley’s account. But for this we have no space. We will conclude with Manning’s admirable description of the scene. It occurs in a letter dated 3 November, 1866—just after Lord Houghton had made his speech at the Cambridge Union.

‘I do not believe that I was guilty of the rashness of throwing the javelin over the Cam. It was, I think, a passage of arms got up by the Eton men of the two Unions. My share, if any, was only as a member of the august committee of the green baize table. I can, however, remember the irruption of the three Cambridge orators. We Oxford men were precise, orderly, and morbidly afraid of excess in word or manner. The Cambridge oratory came in like a flood into a mill-pond. Both Monckton Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam took us aback by the boldness and freedom of their manner. But I remember the effect of Sunderland’s declaration and action to this day. It had never been seen or heard before among us; we cowered like birds, and ran like sheep.... I acknowledge that we were utterly routed. Lord Houghton’s beautiful reviving of those old days has in it something fragrant and sweet, and brings back old faces and old friendships, very dear as life is drawing to its close.’

Mr Milnes had always wished that his son should become distinguished in that House of Commons where he had himself made so brilliant a _début_. With this object in view, he had urged him to cultivate speaking in public, and probably the only part of his Cambridge career which he viewed with complete satisfaction was his interest in, and success at, the Union Debating Society. But even in this they did not quite agree. Mr Milnes urged his son to take a decided line, and to lead the Union. But the only answer he could get was, ‘If there is one thing on which I have ever prided myself, it is on having no politics at all, and judging every measure by its individual merits. A leader there must be a violent politician and a party politician, or he must have a private party. I shall never be the one or have the other.’ Again, they were at variance on the burning question of the day, the Reform Bill. Mr Milnes, though a Conservative, was in favour of it; his son described it as ‘the curse and degradation of the nation.’ Further, while exhorting his son to prepare himself for public life, with a singleness of purpose that, if adhered to, would have excluded other and more congenial pursuits, Mr Milnes warned him that his circumstances would not allow him to enter parliament. No wonder, therefore, that the young man became perplexed and melancholy, and more than ever anxious to find a refuge for his aspirations in literature.

While these questions were pending between father and son, the pecuniary embarrassments to which we have already alluded entered upon an acute stage, and in 1829 the whole family left England for five years. If Mr Milnes ever submitted his own actions to the test of rigorous examination, he must have concluded that he had himself brought about the very result which he was most anxious to prevent; for it was this enforced residence on the Continent which, more than any other influence, shaped the character of his son. Mr Milnes evidently wished him to become a country gentleman like himself, and, if he must write, to be ‘a pamphleteer on guano and on grain.’ Instead of this, while he kept his loyalty to England with unbroken faith, he divested himself of English narrowness, and acquired that intimate knowledge of the other members of the European family, and, we may add, that catholicity of taste, for which he was so conspicuous. Probably no public man of the present century understood the Continent so well as Milnes. In many ways he was a typical Englishman; but he was also a citizen of the world.

The first resting-place of the family was Boulogne, and there Milnes made his first acquaintance with Frenchmen and their literature. The romantic school was beginning to engross public attention, and Victor Hugo—then, as afterwards, the ‘stormy voice of France’—became his favourite French poet. But, great as was the interest which Milnes felt in France, he was too eager for knowledge to be content with one language and one literature, and, rejecting his father’s suggestion that he should spend some time in Paris, he spent most of the summer and autumn of 1830 at Bonn, in order to learn German. We suspect that he must have taken this step at the suggestion of Thirlwall, for it was he who introduced him to Professor Brandis, and probably also to the veteran Niebuhr. Thence, his family having migrated to Milan, he crossed the Alps, and made his first acquaintance with Italy, which became, we might almost say, the country of his adoption. He felt a deep sympathy for the Italian people in their aspirations for liberty, and though, as was natural at his age, he enjoyed the society of the Austrian vice-regal Court, he longed to see the foreigner expelled from Italy. Other Italian cities were visited in due course, and, lastly, Rome. Where-ever he went, he managed, with a skill that was peculiarly his own, to know the most interesting people, and to be welcomed with equal warmth by persons of the most opposite opinions. It was no small feat to have known both Italians and Austrians at Milan; but at Rome, besides his English acquaintances, he formed lasting friendships with the Chevalier Bunsen and his family, and with Dr Wiseman, M. Rio, M. Montalembert, and other catholics of distinction. The Church of Rome must always have great attractions for a young man of deep feeling and with no settled principles of faith, and we gather that Milnes was at one time not indisposed to join it. His feelings in that time of unrest and perplexity are well indicated in the following lines, written at Rome in 1834:

‘To search for lore in spacious libraries, And find it hid in tongues to you unknown; To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies, Watch every action, but not catch one tone; Amid a thousand breathless votaries, To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone— Are images of that which, hour by hour, Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.