Part 15

But soldiers are not much in my way, and my military signatures are few. My collection is rich in politicians. Here comes, first in date though in nothing else, that Duke of Bedford who negotiated the Treaty of Fontainebleau and got trounced by Junius for his pains. It is written in 1767, just as the writer is "setting out from Woburn Abbey to consult his Shropshire oculist" (why Shropshire?), and has the small, cramped character which is common to so many conditions of shortened sight. (I find exactly the same in a letter of Lord Chancellor Hatherley, 1881.) Thirty-nine years pass, and William Pitt writes his last letter from "Putney Hill, the 1st of January, 1806, 2 P.M.," the writing as clear, as steady, and as beautifully formed as if the "Sun of Austerlitz" had never dawned. And now the Statesmen pass me in rapid succession and in fine disregard of chronological order. Lord Russell writes a graceful, fluent, rather feminine hand; Charles Villiers's writing is of the same family; and the great Lord Derby's a perfect specimen of the "Italian hand," delicate as if drawn with a crow-quill, and slanted into alluring tails and loops. Lord Brougham's was a vile scrawl, with half the letters tumbling backwards. John Bright's is small, neat, and absolutely clear; nor is it fanciful to surmise that Mr. Chamberlain copied Mr. Bright, and were they not both short-sighted men? And Lord Goschen's writing, from the same cause, is smaller still. The Duke of Argyll wrote a startling and imperious hand, worthy of a Highland chief whose ancestors not so long ago exercised the power of life and death; Lord Iddesleigh a neat and orderly hand, becoming a Private Secretary or Permanent Official. Lord Granville's and Mr. Forster's writings had this in common, that they looked most surprisingly candid and straightforward. The present Duke of Devonshire's writing suggests nothing but vanity, self-consciousness, and ostentation. We all can judge, even without being caligraphists, how far these suggestions conform to the facts. By far the most pleasing autograph of all the Statesmen is Lord Beaconsfield's, artistically formed and highly finished--in his own phrase, "that form of scripture which attracts." With the utmost possible loyalty to a lost leader, I would submit that Mr. Gladstone wrote an uncommonly bad hand--not bad in point of appearance, for it was neat and comely even when it was hurried; but bad morally--a kind of caligraphic imposture, for it looks quite remarkably legible, and it is only when you come to close quarters with it and try to decipher an important passage that you find that all the letters are practically the same, and that the interpretation of a word must depend on the context.

From my pile of Statesmen's autographs I extract yet another, and I lay it side by side with the autographs of a great author and a great ecclesiastic. All three are very small, exquisitely neat, very little slanted, absolutely legible. Well as I knew the three writers, I doubt if I could tell which wrote which letter. They were Cardinal Manning, Mr. Froude, and Lord Rosebery. Will the experts in caligraphy tell me if, in this case, similarity of writing bodied forth similarity of gifts or qualities? Another very close similarity may be observed between the writing of Lord Halsbury and that of Lord Brampton (better known as Sir Henry Hawkins), which, but for the fact that Lord Brampton uses the long "s" and Lord Halsbury does not, are pretty nearly identical.

If there is one truth which can be deduced more confidently than another from my collection of autographs, it is that there is no such thing as "the literary hand." Every variety of writing which a "Reader's" fevered brain could conceive is illustrated in my bundle of literary autographs. _Seniores priores._ Samuel Rogers was born in 1763, and died in 1855. A note of his, written in 1849, and beginning, "Pray, pray, come on Tuesday," is by far the most surprising piece of caligraphy in my collection. It is so small that, except under the eyes of early youth, it requires a magnifying-glass; yet the symmetry of every letter is perfect, and, when sufficiently enlarged, it might stand as a model of beautiful and readable writing. I take a bound of sixty years, and find some of the same characteristics reproduced by my friend Mr. Quiller-Couch; but between the "Pleasures of Memory" and "Green Bays" there rolls a sea of literature, and it has been navigated by some strange crafts in the way of handwriting. I have spoken on another occasion of Dean Stanley, Lord Houghton, and James Payn; specimens of their enormities surround me as I write, and I can adduce, I think, an equally heinous instance. Here is Sydney Smith, writing in 1837 to "Dear John," the hero of the Reform Act, "No body wishes better for you and yours than the inhabitants of Combe Florey." Perhaps so; but they conveyed their benedictions through a very irritating medium, for Sydney Smith's writing is of the immoral type, pleasing to the eye and superficially legible, but, when once you have lost the clue, a labyrinth. Perhaps it is due to this circumstance that his books abound, beyond all others, in uncorrected misprints.

But there are other faults in writing besides ugliness and illegibility. A great man ought not to write a poor hand. Yet nothing can be poorer than Ruskin's--mean, ugly, insignificant--only redeemed by perfect legibility. Goldwin Smith's, though clear and shapely, is characterless and disappointing. Some great scholars, again, write disappointing hands. Jowett's is a spiteful-looking angular, little scratch, perfectly easy to read; Westcott's comely but not clear; Lightfoot's an open, scrambling scrawl, something like the late Lord Derby's. These great men cannot excuse their deficiencies in penmanship by pleading that they have had to write a great deal in their lives. Others before them have had to do that, and have emerged from the trial without a stain on their caligraphy. For example--"Albany, December 3, 1854," is the heading of an ideally beautiful sheet, every letter perfectly formed, all spaces duly observed, and the whole evidently maintaining its beauty in spite of breakneck speed. The signature is

"Ever yours truly, T. B. MACAULAY."

Here is a letter addressed to me only last year by a man who was born in 1816. In my whole collection there is no clearer or prettier writing. As a devotee of fine penmanship, I make my salutations to Sir Theodore Martin.

XXXV

MORE AUTOGRAPHS

My suggestive friend has suddenly been multiplied a hundredfold. Handwriting is a subject which apparently makes a wide appeal. Each post brings me corrections or corroborations of what I wrote last Saturday. Fresh instances of enormity in the way of illegible writing are adduced from all quarters; nor are there wanting acrid critics who suggest that reform should begin at home, and that "the Author of Collections and Recollections" would do well to consult a writing-master, or to have his copy typed before it goes to the printers. Waiving these personalities, I turn again to my letter-case, and here let me say in passing that I committed a fearful indiscretion when I spoke of my "Collection" of autographs. That fatal word brought down an avalanche of "Collectors," who, hailing me as a man and a brother, propose all sorts of convenient exchanges. A gentleman who cherishes a postcard from Mr. Rudyard Kipling would exchange it for an unpublished letter of Shelley; and a maiden-lady at Weston-super-Mare, whose great-aunt corresponded with Eliza Cook, will refuse no reasonable offer.

But all these handsome propositions must be brushed aside, for I have no collection of autographs, if "collection" implies any art or system in the way in which they have been brought together, or any store of saleable duplicates. Mine are simply letters addressed to myself or to my kinsfolk, plus just a very few which have come into my hands in connexion with public business; but, such as they are, they are full of memories and morals.

Why did very old people write so well? I have already described the writing of Samuel Rogers, of the Waterloo Lord Albemarle, and of Sir Theodore Martin. Pretty well for octogenarian penmanship; but I can enlarge the gallery. A bundle of octogenarian letters lies before me as I write. Oliver Wendell Holmes sends a tribute to Matthew Arnold. Charles Villiers accepts an invitation to dinner. Lord Norton invites me to stay at Hams. Archdeacon Denison complains of "his first attack of gout at eighty-five." Mr. Leveson-Gower at eighty-six thanks me for a review of his first book. I protest that there is not an ungraceful line--scarcely a misshaped letter--in any of these five manuscripts. Here is a small, elegant, and "taily" hand, rather like an old-fashioned lady's. The signature is

"Yours sincerely, EVERSLEY,"

better known as Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, the most authoritative Speaker the House of Commons ever had. Note that this was written in his eighty-eighth year, and he lived to buy a new pair of guns after he was ninety. Here is a strong, clear, well-defined writing, setting forth with precision and emphasis the reasons why the last Duke of Cleveland, then in his eighty-fifth year, will not give more than £5 for an object which he has been asked to help. The writing of the beloved and honoured Duke of Rutland, always graceful and regular, becomes markedly smaller, though not the least less legible, till he dies at eighty-seven. There is no more vigorous, even dashing, signature in my store than "G. J. Holyoake," written in July 1905. Close to the imperial purple of the Agitator's ink nestles, in piquant contrast, a small half-sheet of rose-pink paper bearing a Duchess's coronet and cypher. The writing is distinct and ornamental; the letter was written in 1880, and the writer was born in 1792. But the mere fact of attaining to eighty or ninety years will not absolutely guarantee, though it seems to promote, legibility of writing. My venerable friend Dean Randall, who was born in 1824, ends a letter, which certainly needs some such apology, with a disarming allusion to the "dreadful scrawl" of his "ancient MS."; and four sides of tantalizing hieroglyphics, drawn apparently with a blunt stick, are shown by external evidence to be a letter from Canon Carter of Clewer when he had touched his ninetieth birthday.

On similarity, approaching to identity, between the writings of very dissimilar persons I have already remarked, and a further illustration comes to light as I turn over my papers. Here are two letters in the graceful and legible script of the early nineteenth century, with long S's, and capitals for all the substantives. Both are evidently the handiwork of cultivated gentlemen; and both the writers, as a matter of fact, were clergymen. But there the resemblance stops. The one was "Jack" Russell, the well-known Sporting Parson of Exmoor; the other was Andrew Jukes, the deepest and most influential Mystic whom the latter-day Church has seen.

When I praise gracefulness in writing I mean natural and effortless grace, such as was displayed in the writing of the late Duke of Westminster. But, if we admire writing artificially fashioned and coerced into gracefulness like a clipped yew, it would be difficult to excel the penmanship of the late George Augustus Sala, who was an engraver before he was an author; or that of Sir A. Conan Doyle, who handles a pen as dexterously as in his surgical days he wielded the lancet. I praised just now the late Duke of Westminster's writing, and of him one might say what Scott said, in a different sense, of Byron--that he "managed his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality"; but there is another kind of grace than that--the grace which is partly the result of mental clearness and partly of a cultured eye. Here are two specimens of such writing, the letters so alluringly fashioned that they look, as some one said, like something good to eat; and spaced with a care which at once makes reading easy, and testifies to clear thinking in the writer. Both are the writings of Scholars, and both of men who wrote a vast deal in their lives--Bishop Creighton and Dean Vaughan. It must have been a joy to read their Proofs. The late Dean Farrar was the only Public-School Master I ever knew who took pains with his pupils' writing and encouraged them to add grace to legibility. His own writing, small, upright, and characterful, was very pretty when he took time and pains; but the specimen which lies before me shows sad signs of the havoc wrought by incessant writing against time.

Grace and legibility are the two chief glories of penmanship, but other attributes are not without their effect. A dashing scrawl, if only it is easy to read, suggests a soaring superiority to conventional restraints, and rather bespeaks a hero. Here are two scrawls, and each is the work of a remarkable person. One is signed "Yours truly, Jos. Cowen," and I dare say that some of my readers would see in it the index to a nature at once impetuous and imperious. But Mr. Cowen's scrawl was crowquill-work and copperplate compared with its next-door neighbour. "Accept the enclosed, dear Mr. Russell," covers the whole of one side of a sheet of letter-paper; the ink is blue; the paper is ribbed; the signature, all wreathed in gigantic flourishes and curling tails, is "Laura Thistlethwaite," and the enclosed is one of the Evangelistic Addresses of that gifted preacher who once was Laura Bell. Odd incongruities keep turning up. As I pass from the Evangelical lady-orator, I come to Father Ignatius, an Evangelical orator with a difference, but with a like tendency to scrawl. Lord Leighton's writing is also a scrawl, and, it must be confessed, an egotistical scrawl, and a very bad scrawl to read. An illegible scrawl, too, is the writing of Richard Holt Hutton, but his is not a vainglorious or commanding scrawl, but rather humble and untidy. "Henry Irving" is a signature quite culpably illegible, but "Squire Bancroft" is just irregular enough to be interesting though not unreadable.

_Per contra_, I turn to one of the most legible signatures in my possession. The writing is ugly and the letters are ill-formed, looking rather like the work of a hand which has only lately learned to write and finds the act a difficulty. But it is as clear as print, and it shows no adventitious ornamentation or self-assertive twirls. The signature is

"Yours most sincerely, RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL."

In this case, if in no other, the oracles of Caligraphy are set at naught. Here is a fine, twisty, twirling hand, all tails and loops, but not at all unsightly. The signature reads like "Lincoln," and only a careful study would detect that the "L" of "Lincoln" is preceded by a circular flourish which looks like part of the L but is really a capital C. It is the signature of that great scholar, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln; and I remember that, in days of ecclesiastical strife, it was once imputed to that apostolic man for vanity that he signed his name "Lincoln" like a Temporal Peer. From that day he defined the "C" more carefully.

To the last letter which I bring to light to-day a different kind of interest attaches. It is dated

"DINGLE BANK, LIVERPOOL, _April 13, 1888_."

The writing is small and clear, with the upstrokes and downstrokes rather long in comparison with the level letters; but some small blurs and blots show that the letter was written in unusual haste. It ends with these words: "Smalley has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again.

"Ever yours, M. A."

This was the last letter which Matthew Arnold ever wrote, and it closed a friendship which had been one of the joys and glories of my life.

XXXVI

CHRISTMAS

"Christmas, now," as Mr. Brooke in "Middlemarch" might have said--"I went a good deal into that kind of thing at one time; but I found it would carry me too far--over the hedge, in fact." That, I imagine, pretty well represents the attitude of the adult world towards the feast which closes the year. We all loved it when we were young. Now, it is all very well for once in a way; it might pall if frequently repeated; even recurring only annually, it must be observed temperately and enjoyed moderately. Anything resembling excess would carry one too far--"over the hedge, in fact." But, within these recognized and salutary limits, Christmas is an institution which I would not willingly let die. In the days of my youth a Jewish lady caused me not a little consternation by remarking that it seemed very odd for Christians to celebrate the Feast of Redemption with gluttony and drunkenness. She lived, I am bound to say, in a very unregenerate village in a remarkably savage part of the country, and as, of course, she did not go to church, I dare say that Gluttony and Drunkenness were the forms of Christmas observance which most obtruded themselves on her notice. Even Cardinal Newman seems to have remarked the same phenomenon in his youth, though he satirized it more delicately. "Beneficed clergymen used to go to rest as usual on Christmas-eve, and leave to ringers, or sometimes to carollers, the observance which was paid, _not without creature comforts_, to the sacred night." Now all that is changed. Churches of all confessions vie with one another in the frequency and heartiness and picturesque equipment of their religious services. Even the _Daily Telegraph_ preaches Christmas sermons; and I very much question whether the populace gets more drunk at Christmas than at Easter. But, though we may have learnt to celebrate the festival with rites more devout and less bibulous, we have not yet escaped my Jewish friend's reproach of gluttony. The Christmas Dinner of the British Home is still a thing imagination boggles at. The dreadful pleasantries of the aged--their sorry gibes about the doctor and the draught; hoary chestnuts about little boys who stood up to eat more--remain among the most terrible memories of the Christmas dinner. And they were quite in keeping with the dinner itself. I say nothing against the Turkey, which (as my medical friends well know) was found, by practical experiment in the case of Alexis St. Martin, to be the most easily digested of all animal foods, except venison; but surely, as a nation, we eat quite beef enough in the course of the year without making Christmas an annual orgy of carnivorous excess. I protest that the very sight of the butchers' shops at this season of the year is enough to upset a delicately balanced organization. Rightly said the Shah, in that immortal Diary which he kept during his visit to England in 1873--"Meat is good, but it should not be hung up in windows." Macaulay used to say that Thackeray, in his famous description of the Clapham sect in "The Newcomes," made one blunder--he represented them as Dissenters, whereas, in fact, they were rather dogged Church-people. The only exception to the rule was a Baptist lady, who, living on Clapham Common, testified against the superstitions of the Established Church by eating roast veal and apple-pie on Christmas-day instead of more orthodox dainties. Churchman though I am, I protest that I think the Baptist lady was right: and I believe that the Puritans were wiser than they knew when they denounced Plum-Pudding and Mince Pies as inventions of the Evil One. Yet the love of these vindictive viands is one of the root-instincts of our English nature. Forty-eight years ago the British Army was keeping its Christmas in the Crimea, amid all the horrors and hardships of a peculiarly grim campaign. An English Sister of Mercy, who was nursing under Miss Nightingale in the Hospital at Scutari, thus described the melancholy festivity: "The 'Roast Beef of Old England' was out of the question, but with the aid of a good deal of imagination, it seemed possible at least to secure the Plum Pudding. I think I might with safety affirm that as the doctor left the ward every man drew from under his pillow a small portion of flour and fat, with an egg and some plums, and began to concoct a Christmas pudding. I assisted many to make the pudding, whom nothing short of a miracle would enable to eat it; still they must have the thing. For some days previously I had been asked for pieces of linen, which, without dreaming of the use to which they were to be applied, I supplied. Thus were the pudding cloths provided."

It can scarcely be conceived that these unhappy soldiers, maddened by wounds and fever or perishing by frost-bite and gangrene, can have had much physical enjoyment in Christmas puddings made of materials which had been concealed under their sick pillows; in such circumstances the value of the pudding is spiritual and symbolic. A few Christmases ago I was assisting (in the literal sense) at a dinner for starving "Dockers." A more broken, jaded, and dejected crew it would be difficult to picture. They had scarcely enough energy to eat and drink, but lumbered slowly through their meal of meat-pies and coffee without a smile and almost without a word. All at once an unrehearsed feature was introduced into the rather cheerless programme, and a huge Plum Pudding, wreathed with holly and flaming blue with burnt brandy, was borne into the hall. A deep gasp of joy burst from the assembled guests, and the whole company rose as one man and greeted the joyous vision with "Auld Lang Syne." The eating was yet to come, so the exhilaration was purely moral. The Pudding spoke at once to Memory and to Hope.

There are other adjuncts of Christmas which must by no means be overlooked--Christmas presents, for instance, and Christmas amusements. As to Christmas presents, I regard them as definite means of grace. For weeks--sometimes months--before Christmas returns we concentrate our thought on our friends instead of ourselves. We reflect on people's likes and dislikes, habits, tastes, and occupations. We tax our ingenuity to find gifts suitable for the recipients, and buy objects which we think frankly hideous in the hope of gratifying our unsophisticated friends. Happily the age of ormolu and malachite has passed. We no longer buy blotting-books made unusable by little knobs of enamel on the cover; nor gilt-paper weights which cost a hundred times more than the overweighted letters of a lifetime could amount to. Christmas gifts of this type belong to an unreturning past, and, as Walter Pater said of the wedding-present which he was expected to admire, "Very rich, very handsome, very expensive, I'm sure--but they mustn't make any more of them." Nor will they. The standard of popular taste in the matter of nick-nacks has improved as conspicuously as in that of furniture; and the fancy shops, when spread for the Christmas market, display a really large choice of presents which one can buy without sacrificing self-respect, and give without the appearance of insult.

But Christmas presents, even at a moderate rate of charge, may, if one has a large circle of acquaintance, carry one over the hedge, as Mr. Brooke said; and here is the scope and function of the Christmas Card. Few people have bought more Christmas cards in a lifetime than the present writer; and, out of a vast experience, he would offer one word of friendly counsel to the card-sender. Do not accumulate the cards which you receive this Christmas and distribute them among your friends next Christmas, for, if you do, as sure as fate you will one day return a card to the sender; and old friendships and profitable connexions have been severed by such miscarriages.