Part 11

‘The Beauty of the past before my eyes Stands ever in each fable-haunted place, I know her form in every dark disguise, But never look upon her open face; O’er every limb a veil thick-folded lies, Showing poor outline of a perfect grace, Yet just enough to make the sickened mind Grieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.

‘O Thou! to whom the wearisome disease Of Past and Present is an alien thing, Thou pure Existence! whose severe decrees Forbid a living man his soul to bring Into a timeless Eden of sweet ease, Clear-eyed, clear-hearted—lay thy loving wing In death upon me—if that way alone Thy great creation-thought thou wilt to me make known[85].’

An interesting picture of Milnes at about this period has been drawn by Mr Aubrey de Vere, whom he visited in Ireland during one of his brief absences from Italy.

‘He remained with us a good many days, though when he left us they seemed too few. We showed him whatever of interest our neighbourhood boasts, and he more than repaid us by the charm of his conversation, his lively descriptions of foreign ways, his good-humour, his manifold accomplishments, and the extraordinary range of his information, both as regards books and men. He could hardly have then been more than two-and-twenty, and yet he was already well acquainted with the languages and literatures of many different countries, and not a few of their most distinguished men, living or recently dead. I well remember the vivid picture which he drew of Niebuhr’s profound grief at the downfall of the restored monarchy in France, at the renewal of its Revolution in 1830. He was delivering a series of historical lectures at the time, and Milnes was one of the young men attending the course. One day they had long to wait for their Professor; at last the aged historian entered the lecture-hall, his form drooping, and his whole aspect grief-stricken. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have no apology for detaining you; a calamity has befallen Europe which must undo all the restorative work recently done, and throw back her social and political progress—perhaps for centuries. The Revolution has broken out again’ (vol. i. p. 115).

One episode of these foreign experiences deserves a separate notice. In 1832 Milnes spent some months in Greece with his friend Mr Christopher Wordsworth, a scholar whose _Athens and Attica_ has long been a classical text-book. But Milnes was more powerfully attracted by the sight of Grecian independence than by the relics of her ancient glory. The volume which he published on his return, called _Memorials of a Tour in some parts of Greece, chiefly Poetical_ (his first independent literary venture, it may be remarked), contains but scanty references to antiquity. He was keenly interested in the efforts of Greece to obtain a settled government of her own, and through all the drawbacks and discomforts which, as a traveller, he had to endure from the Greeks, he firmly adhered to the cause of freedom. He even advocated the immediate restoration of the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon. But Milnes had a mind which was singularly free from prejudice, and even in those early days he had learnt to consider both sides of every question, and to keep his sympathies controlled by his judgment. He probably approached Greece with the enthusiasm for a liberated nation which had so deeply stirred even the most indifferent in England; but he left it ‘with an affection for the Turkish character which he never entirely lost, and which enabled him in very different days, then far distant, to understand the political exigencies of the East better than many politicians of more pretentious character and fame.’

We have dwelt on Milnes’s early years at some length, because their history throws considerable light on his subsequent career, and accounts for most of the difficulties that he experienced when he made his first entrance into London society. ‘Conceive the man,’ said Carlyle: ‘a most bland-smiling, semi-quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianised little man, who has long olive-blonde hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society!’ If the rough Scotch moralist was not in an unusually bad humour when he wrote these words, it is not to be wondered at that Milnes was regarded for a time as a dangerous person, ‘anxious to introduce foreign ways and fashions into the conservative fields of English life.’ But this dislike of him was very transient, and in less than a year after his return to England he had ‘made a conquest of the social world.’ That he was still looked upon as an oddity seems certain, and even his intimate friend Charles Buller could exclaim: ‘I often think how puzzled your Maker must be to account for your conduct;’ but people soon became willing to accept him on his own terms for the sake of his wit and brilliancy, and, we may add, of his kind heart. Some nicknames that survived long after their application had lost its point, are worth remembering as illustrations of what was once thought of him; perhaps still more for the sake of the letter which Sydney Smith wrote on being accused, quite groundlessly, of having invented them.

‘DEAR MILNES,—Never lose your good temper, which is one of your best qualities, and which has carried you hitherto safely through your startling eccentricities. If you turn cross and touchy, you are a lost man. No man can combine the defects of opposite characters. The names of “Cool of the evening,” “London Assurance,” and “In-I-go Jones,” are, I give you my word, not mine. They are of no sort of importance; they are safety-valves, and if you could by paying sixpence get rid of them, you had better keep your money. You do me but justice in acknowledging that I have spoken much good of you. I have laughed at you for those follies which I have told you of to your face; but nobody has more readily and more earnestly asserted that you are a very agreeable, clever man, with a very good heart, unimpeachable in all the relations of life, and that you amply deserve to be retained in the place to which you had too hastily elevated yourself by manners unknown to our cold and phlegmatic people. I thank you for what you say of my good-humour. Lord Dudley, when I took leave of him, said to me: “You have been laughing at me for the last seven years, and you never said anything that I wished unsaid.” This pleased me.

‘Ever yours,

‘SYDNEY SMITH[86].’

When we read that Milnes ‘made a conquest of society,’ it must not be supposed that he was a mere pleasure-seeker. On the contrary, as Mr Reid says in another place, ‘he had too great a reverence for what was good and pure and true, too consuming a desire to hold his own with the best intellects of his time, and, above all, too deep a sympathy with the suffering and the wronged to allow him to fall a victim to these temptations.’ From the first, then, he ‘sought to combine the world of pleasure and the world of intellect.’ A list of his friends would contain the names of the best-known men of the day, but, at the same time, men who had but little in common: Carlyle, Sterling, Maurice, Spedding, Thackeray, Tennyson, Landor, Hallam, Rogers, Macaulay, Sydney Smith. ‘He became an intimate member of circles differing so widely from each other as those of Lansdowne House, Holland House, Gore House, and the Sterling Club’; and as a host he was notorious for mingling together the most discordant social elements. Disraeli sketched him in _Tancred_ under a disguise so thin that nobody could fail to penetrate it:

‘Mr Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr Vavasour’s breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or merit—one might almost add, your character—you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced. He prided himself on figuring as the social medium by which rival reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust’ (vol. i. p. 337).

When some one asked if a celebrated murderer had been hanged, the reply he got was: ‘I hope so, or Richard will have him at his breakfast-table next Thursday;’ and Thirlwall, when his friend was on the brink of marriage, thus alludes to past felicity:

‘It is very likely, nay certain, that you will still collect agreeable people about your wife’s breakfast-table; but can I ever sit down there without the certainty that I shall meet with none but respectable persons? It may be an odd thing for a Bishop to lament, but I cannot help it’ (vol. i. p. 448).

After all it seems probable that Milnes himself, and not the lion of the hour, was the chief attraction at those parties. He delighted in the best sort of conversation—that which he called ‘the rapid counterplay and vivid exercise of combined intelligences,’ and he did his best to revive the practice of that almost forgotten art—_l’art de causer_. As Mr Reid says:

‘How brilliant and amusing he was over the dinner-table or the breakfast-table was known to all his friends. Overflowing with information, his mind was lightened by a bright wit, whilst his immense stores of appropriate anecdotes enabled him to give point and colour to every topic which was brought under discussion’ (vol. i. p. 189).

At the same time he did not fall into the fatal error of taking the talk into his own hands, and delivering a monologue, as too many social celebrities have done before and since. He had the happy art of making his guests talk, while he listened, and threw in a remark from time to time, to give new life when the conversation seemed to flag. Carlyle, in a letter written to his wife during his first visit to Fryston, gives us a lifelike portrait of Milnes when thus engaged:

‘Richard, I find, lays himself out while in this quarter to do hospitalities, and of course to collect notabilities about him, and play them off one against the other. I am his trump-card at present. The Sessions are at Pontefract even now, and many lawyers there. These last two nights he has brought a trio of barristers to dine, producing champagne, &c.... Last night our three was admitted to be a kind of failure, three greater blockheads ye wadna find in Christendee. Richard had to exert himself; but he is really dexterous, the villain. He pricks you with questions, with remarks, with all kinds of fly-tackle to make you bite, does generally contrive to get you into some sort of speech. And then his good humour is extreme; you look in his face and forgive him all his tricks’ (vol. i. p. 256).

As a pendant to this we will quote Mr Forster’s description of Milnes and Carlyle together:

‘Monckton Miles came yesterday and left this morning—a pleasant, companionable little man—delighting in paradoxes, but good-humoured ones; defending all manner of people and principles in order to provoke Carlyle to abuse them, in which laudable enterprise he must have succeeded to his heart’s content, and for a time we had a most amusing evening, reminding me of a naughty boy rubbing a fierce cat’s tail backwards, and getting in between furious growls and fiery sparks. He managed to avoid the threatened scratches’ (vol. i. p. 387).

Milnes entered Parliament in 1837 as Conservative member for Pontefract. His friends were rather surprised at his selection of a party, for even then his views on most subjects were decidedly Liberal. Thirlwall, for instance, wrote:

‘I can hardly bring myself now to consider you a Tory, or indeed as belonging to a party at all; and although I am aware how difficult, and even dangerous, it is for a public man to keep aloof from all parties, still my first hope as well as expectation as to your political career is that it may be distinguished by some degree of originality’ (vol. i. p. 199).

These hopes were realized to an extent that none of Milnes’s friends would have expected or perhaps desired. From the outset he maintained an independence of thought and action which did him the utmost credit as a man of honour, but which ruined his chances of obtaining that success which is measured by the attainment of official dignity. And yet, as Mr Reid tells us, he was more ambitious of political than of literary distinction. But the fates were against him. In the first place, his oratorical style did not suit the House, though as an after-dinner speaker he was conspicuously successful. He ‘had modelled himself on the old style of political oratory, and gave his hearers an impression of affectation.’ Then he would not vote straight with his party. He took a line of his own about Canada and the Ballot; he voted on the opposite side to Peel on the question of a large remission of capital punishments; and he wrote _One Tract More_, ‘an eloquent and earnest plea for toleration for the Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm,’ which shocked the Protestants in general, and the electors of Pontefract in particular. Perhaps he was too much in earnest; perhaps he was not a sufficiently important person to be silenced by office; perhaps, as Mr Reid says, ‘public opinion in England always insists upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the man of letters and the man of affairs;’ but, whatever might be the reason, Sir Robert Peel passed him over when forming his Administration in 1841—nay, rather, appears never to have turned his thoughts in his direction. Milnes was grievously disappointed, but with characteristic lightheartedness set at once to work to make himself more thoroughly fit for the post he specially coveted, the Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs. He went to Paris, got intimate with Guizot, De Tocqueville, Montalembert—‘that English aristocrat foisted into the middle of French democracy’—and other leading statesmen. Through them, and by help of his natural gift of knowing everybody he wished to know, he managed to include Louis Philippe among those by whom he was accepted as a sort of unaccredited English envoy. He kept Peel informed of the views of Guizot and the King, and Peel replied with a message to the former in a letter which shows that he was quite ready to make use of Milnes, though not to reward him. On his return he gave Peel a general support on the Corn Laws, while regretting that his ‘measures were not of a more liberal character;’ he interested himself in the passing of the Copyright Bill, a measure in respect of which he was accepted as the representative of men of letters; and he travelled in the East, no doubt to study Oriental politics on the spot. A letter he wrote to Peel from Smyrna is full of shrewd observation and far-reaching insight into the Eastern Question; but, on his return, he published a volume of poems called _Palm Leaves_. Now Peel, like a certain Hanoverian monarch who hated ‘boetry and bainters,’ hated literature; and, as Milnes’s father told him, ‘every book he wrote was a nail in his political coffin.’ Again, Milnes was in favour of the endowment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and had written a pamphlet called _The Real Union of England and Ireland_, on which, we may note, in passing, Mr Gladstone’s remark, that he had ‘some opinions on Irish matters that are not fit for practice.’ With these views he supported Peel’s grant to Maynooth, a step which brought him into such disgrace at Pontefract that he thought seriously of giving up parliamentary life altogether. In fact he applied for a diplomatic post, but without success. Before long we find him again running counter to his chief’s policy, supporting Lord Ashley against the Government, and seconding a motion of Charles Buller’s against Lord Stanley. After this it cannot excite surprise that Peel passed him over when he rearranged his Administration in 1845. With his second disappointment Milnes’s career as a professional politician came to an end. Ten years later Palmerston offered him a lordship of the Treasury, but he declined it. As he said himself in a letter written shortly afterwards:

‘_Via media_ never answers in politics, and somehow or other I never can get out of it. My Laodicean spirit is the ruin of me. From having lived with all sorts of people, and seen good in all, the broad black lines of judgment that people usually draw seem to me false and foolish, and I think my own finer ones just as distinct, though no one can see them but myself’ (vol. i. p. 360).

Before long Milnes found a more congenial position on the opposite side of the House. But it must not be supposed that he rushed into sudden and rancorous opposition to his old leader. So long as Peel remained in office, he allowed no personal considerations to interfere with his support of him; and he steadily refused to join those who rebelled when he announced his conversion to Free Trade. Meanwhile, his interest in the burning question of the day being little more than formal, he turned his attention to a social question in which he had long been interested, and introduced a Bill for the establishment of reformatories for juvenile offenders. Among the many combinations of opposite tastes and tendencies with which Milnes was fond of startling the world, could one more curious be imagined than this—the literary exquisite and the criminal unwashed? But in fact this is only a single instance out of many which could be produced to show that the cynical selfishness he affected was only a mask which hid his real nature; perhaps assumed for the sake of concealing from his left hand what his right hand was doing so well. The proposal, we are told, ‘was scoffed at by many politicians of eminence when it was first put forward.’ But Milnes was not to be daunted by rebuffs, and ‘he persevered with his proposal, until he had the great happiness of seeing reformatories established under the sanction of the law, and of becoming himself the president of the first and greatest of these noble institutions, that at Redhill.’ His very genuine sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, especially when young, is testified to by one of his intimate friends, Miss Nightingale:

‘His brilliancy and talents in tongue or pen—whether political, social, or literary—were inspired chiefly by good-will towards man; but he had the same voice and manners for the dirty brat as he had for a duchess, the same desire to give pleasure and good. Once, at Redhill, where we were with a party, and the chiefs were explaining to us the system in the court-yard, a mean, stunted, villainous-looking little fellow crept across the yard (quite out of order, and by himself), and stole a dirty paw into Mr Milnes’s hand. Not a word passed; the boy stayed quite quiet and quite contented if he could but touch his benefactor who had placed him there. He was evidently not only his benefactor, but his friend’ (vol. ii. p. 7).

Milnes had been called a Liberal-Conservative during the first ten years of his parliamentary life. He now became a Conservative-Liberal; but the transposition of the adjective made little, if any, change in his political conduct. He was as insubordinate in the latter position as he had been in the former. He took Lord Palmerston as his leader and chosen friend; but he did not always side with him. In the debates on the Conspiracy Bill, after the attempt of Orsini to assassinate Napoleon III., Milnes spoke and voted against his chief; and on the measure for abolishing the East India Company he was equally indifferent to the claims of party. As time went on, he drifted out of party politics altogether; and both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which he entered in 1863, it was to measures of a private character, or to measures of social reform, that he gave his attention. He advocated help to Lady Franklin in her expedition to clear up the mystery of her husband’s fate; he was in favour of female suffrage; of the abolition of public executions; and he led the agitation for legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. At the same time he cordially supported the Liberal party on all great occasions. Speaking of the abortive Reform Bill of 1866, Mr Reid remarks:

‘Houghton held strongly to the Liberal side throughout the movement, and again afforded proof of the fact that his elevation to the House of Lords had strengthened, rather than weakened, his faith in the people and in popular institutions. Early in April he presided at one of the great popular meetings in favour of Reform. The scene of the meeting was the Cloth Hall at Leeds—a spot famous in the political history of the West Riding—and Lord Houghton’s speech was as advanced in tone as the most thoroughgoing Reformer could have wished it to be. He was, indeed, one of the very few peers who took an open and pronounced part in the agitation of the year’ (vol. ii. p. 151).

This is only one instance, out of many that could be adduced. It would be interesting to know what he would have thought of some of the later developments of his party. It is almost needless to say that he never regarded Lord Beaconsfield as a serious politician. On the eve of his return from Berlin in 1878, he writes: ‘I hope to be in my place on Thursday, to see the reception of the Great Adventurer. Whether from knowing him so well, or from the sarcastic temperament of old age, the whole thing looks to me like a comedy, with as much relation to serious politics as Punch to real life.’ At the same time he had not been a thoroughgoing supporter of Mr Gladstone’s agitation against the Turks, and he had warned that statesman so far back as 1871, that ‘a demon, not of demagoguism, but of demophilism, is tempting you sorely.’

Advancing years and disappointed hopes caused no abatement in his interest in foreign affairs. The events of 1848 had been specially interesting to him; and at the close of that year he produced what Mr Reid well describes as ‘a striking and instructive’ pamphlet, entitled _A Letter to the Marquis of Lansdowne_. The author reviews the events of the year, and supports the thesis that ‘the Liberals of the Continent had not proved themselves unworthy of the sympathy of England.’ We have no room for an analysis of this masterly work, but we cannot refrain from quoting one remarkable passage in which he foreshadows French intervention in Italy. After describing measures by which Austria intended to make the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom a second Poland, he proceeds:

‘And France, whatever be her adventures in government, will not easily have so dulled her imagination or quelled her enthusiasm as to be unmoved by appeals to the deeds of Marengo and Lodi, and to suffer an expiring nation at her very door to cry in vain for help and protection, not against the restraints of an orderly authority, but against fierce invaders intent upon her absolute destruction’ (vol. i. p. 413).