Part 4

"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year--not that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." This was the verdict of Horace Walpole, who, as Sir George Trevelyan antithetically says, "lived in the country and on the country during more than half a century, doing for the country less than half a day's work in half a year." Talleyrand said that no one could conceive how enjoyable a thing existence was capable of being who had not belonged to the _Ancienne Noblesse_ of France before the Revolution; but really the younger son of an important Minister, General, Courtier, or Prelate under our English Georges had a good deal to be thankful for. It is pleasant to note the innocent candour with which, in Walpole's manly declaration, one enormity is made to justify another. A father who held great office in Church or State or Law gave, as a matter of course, all his most desirable preferments to his sons. These preferments enabled the sons to live in opulence at the public charge, their duties being performed by deputy. The Clerk of the Rolls and the Clerk of the Hanaper had no personal contact with the mysterious articles to which they are attached. The Clerk of the Irons, the Surveyor of the Meltings, and the Accountant of Slops lived far remote from such "low-thoughtéd cares." The writer of this book deduces his insignificant being from a gentleman who divided with a brother the lucrative sinecure of Scavenger of Dublin, though neither ever set foot in that fragrant city. A nephew of Lord-Chancellor Thurlow (who survived till 1874) drew pensions for abolished offices to the amount of £11,000 a year; and a son of Archbishop Moore was Principal Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from his boyhood till the abolition of his Court in 1858, when he was pensioned off with £10,000 a year.

When the sands of life were running in the glass, it was customary for a filial placeman to obtain further pensions for his sons and daughters, on the obvious plea that it was cruel to cast young men and women, who had been reared in comfort on the mercies of a rough world. Thus the golden chain of Royal bounty held at least three lives together. The grandfather was First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of the Exchequer or Paymaster-General, and into his personal profits it would be invidious, even indecent, to enquire. He might make his eldest son, while still a boy at Eton, Clerk of the Estreats, and his second, before he took his degree at Cambridge, Usher of the Exchequer. Thus Lord-Chancellor Erskine made his son Secretary of Presentations when he was eighteen, and Charles Greville was appointed Secretary of Jamaica (where he never set his foot) before he was twenty. And then when, after fifty or sixty years of blameless enjoyment, the amiable sinecurist was nearing his last quarter-day, a benevolent Treasury intervened to save his maiden daughters or orphan nieces from pecuniary embarrassment. It was of such "near and dear relations" of a public man that Sydney Smith affirmed that their "eating, drinking, washing, and clothing cost every man in the United Kingdom twopence or threepence a year"; and, to the critics who deprecated this commercial way of regarding the situation, he replied, with characteristic vigour: "I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it?" In thus writing of the Pension List as it stood in 1807, the admirable Sydney was at once the successor of Burke and the forerunner of Lord Grey. In 1780 Burke had addressed all the resources of his genius to the task of restoring the independence of Parliament by economical reform. It was, as Mr. Morley says, the number of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which "furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever." Burke found that "in sweeping away those factitious places and secret pensions he would be robbing the Court of its chief implements of corruption and protecting the representative against his chief motive in selling his country." His power of oratory was reinforced by a minute knowledge of all the shady and shabby abuses, all the manifold and complicated corruptions, which had accumulated under the protection of the Royal name. The reformer's triumph was signal and complete. Vast numbers of sinecures were swept away, but some remained. The Pension List was closely curtailed, but pensions were still conferred. No public servant ever more richly earned a provision for his old age and decrepitude than Burke himself; but when, broken by years and sorrows, he accepted a pension from the Crown, a Whig Duke of fabulous wealth, just thirty years old, had the temerity to charge him with a discreditable departure from his former principles of economic reform. The Duke was a booby: but his foolhardiness enriched English literature with "A Letter to a Noble Lord on the Attacks made on Mr. Burke and his Pension." To read that Letter, even after the lapse of 110 years, is to realize that, in spite of all corruption and all abuse, pecuniary rewards for political service need not be dishonourable or unreasonable.

But corruption and abuse there were, and in sufficient quantities to justify all the bitter fun which "Peter Plymley" poured upon the Cannings, the Jenkinsons, and the Percevals. The reform of the Pension List became a cardinal object of reforming Radicals; and politicians like Joseph Hume, publicists like Albany Fonblanque, pursued it with incessant perseverance,

"Till Grey went forth in 'Thirty-two to storm Corruption's hold."

In 1834 the first Reformed Parliament overhauled the whole system and brought some curious transactions into the light of day. Whereas up to that time the Pension List amounted to £145,000 a year, it was now reduced to £75,000; and its benefits were restricted to "servants of the Crown and public, and to those who by their useful discoveries in science or attainments in literature and the arts had merited the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country." Vested interests were, of course, respected; for had we not even compensated the slaveholders? Two years ago one of these beneficiaries survived in a serene old age, and, for all I know, there may be others still spared to us, for, as Mr. G. A. Sala truly remarked, it never is safe to say that any one is dead, for if you do he is sure to write from the country and say he is only ninety-seven and never was better.

A typical representative of the unreformed system was John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), whose literary efforts Macaulay trounced, and whose political utterances were thus described by Lord Beaconsfield:--

"There never was a fellow for giving a good hearty kick to the people like Rigby. Himself sprung from the dregs of the populace, this was disinterested. What could be more patriotic and magnanimous than his jeremiads over the fall of the Montmorencis and the Crillions, or the possible catastrophe of the Percys and the Seymours? The truth of all this hullabaloo was that Rigby had a sly pension which, by an inevitable association of ideas, he always connected with the maintenance of an aristocracy. All his rigmarole dissertations on the French Revolution were impelled by this secret influence; and, when he moaned like a mandrake over Nottingham Castle in flames, the rogue had an eye all the while to quarter-day."

It was an evil day for those who love to grow rich upon the public money when Mr. Gladstone became the controller of the National Purse. One of his first acts was to revise the system of political pensions, which by an Act of 1869 was reconstituted as it stands to-day. There are now three classes of persons entitled to pensions for services rendered in political office; and the scale is arranged on that curious principle which also regulates the "tips" to servants in a private house--that the larger your wage is, the larger your gratuity shall be. Thus a Minister who has drawn £5000 a year is entitled after four years' service to a pension of £2000 a year; he who has drawn £3000 a year for six years is entitled to £1200 a year; while he who has laboured for ten years for the modest remuneration of £1000 a year must be content with a pittance of £800 a year. _Qui habet, dabitur ei_; but with this restriction--that only four pensions of any one class can run concurrently.

Politicians who had been brought up in the "spacious days" and generous methods of the older dispensation were by no means enamoured of what they used to call "Gladstone's cheeseparing economies." Sir William Gregory used to relate how, when, as a child, he asked Lord Melbourne for a fine red stick of official sealing-wax, that genial Minister thrust it into his hand, together with a bundle of quill pens, saying, "You can't begin too early. All these things belong to the public, and your business in life must be to get out of the public all you can." An eminent statesman, trained in these traditions, had drawn from very early days a pension for an abolished office in Chancery. In due course he became a Cabinet Minister, and, when he fell from that high estate, he duly pocketed his £2000 a year. Later he came into a very large income, but this he obligingly saved for his nephews and nieces, living meanwhile on his twofold pension.

I will conclude with a pleasanter anecdote. Until half-way through the last century it was customary to give a Speaker on retiring from the House of Commons a pension of £2000 a year for two lives. It is related that in 1857 Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre, on his elevation to the peerage as Lord Eversley, said that he could not endure the thought of imposing a burden on posterity, and would therefore take £4000 a year for his own life instead of £2000 a year for two. This public-spirited action was highly commended, and, as he lived till 1888, virtue was, as it ought always to be, its own reward.

IX

THE SEASON AS IT WAS

The subject is worthy to be celebrated both in verse and in prose. Exactly sixty years ago Bulwer-Lytton, in his anonymous satire "The New Timon," thus described the nocturnal aspect of the West End in that choice period of the year which to us Londoners is pre-eminently "The Season":--

"O'er Royal London, in luxuriant May, While lamps yet twinkle, dawning creeps the day. Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals; Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels; From fields suburban rolls the early cart; So rests the Revel--so awakes the Mart."

Twenty-four years later Lord Beaconsfield, in "Lothair," gave a vivid sketch of the same scenes as beheld by daylight:--

"Town was beginning to blaze. Broughams whirled and bright barouches glanced, troops of social cavalry cantered and caracolled in morning rides, and the bells of prancing ponies, lashed by delicate hands, gingled in the laughing air. There were stoppages in Bond Street--which seems to cap the climax of civilization, after crowded clubs and swarming parks."

It is curious that of the two descriptions the earlier needs much less revision than the later. Lamps still "twinkle" (though, to be sure, they are electric, whereas when Bulwer-Lytton wrote gas had barely ousted oil from its last fastness in Grosvenor Square). "Hells," though more euphemistically named, still invite the domiciliary visits of our much-aspersed police. "Beauty" dances even more vigorously than in 1846, for Waltzes and Kitchen-Lancers and Washington Posts have superseded the decorous quadrilles which our mothers loved. And still the market-gardens of Acton and Ealing and Hounslow send their "towering squadrons" of waggons laden heavens-high with the fruits and vegetables for to-morrow's luncheon. In this merry month of May 1906 an observer, standing at Hyde Park Corner "when the night and morning meet," sees London substantially as Bulwer-Lytton saw it.

But, when we turn to Lord Beaconsfield's description, the changes wrought by six-and-thirty years are curiously marked. "Bright barouches glanced." In the present day a Barouche, the handsomest and gracefullest of all open carriages, is as rare as an Auk's Egg or an original Folio of Shakespeare. Only two or three survive. One, richly dight in royal crimson, bears the Queen, beautiful as Cleopatra in her barge. In another, almost imperially purple, Lady Londonderry sits enthroned; a third, palely blue as the forget-me-not, carries Lady Carysfort; but soon the tale of barouches ends. Victorias and landaus and "Clarences" and "Sociables" make the common throng of carriages, and their serried ranks give way to the impetuous onrush of the noxious Motor or the milder impact of the Electric Brougham.

"Troops of social cavalry" were, when Lord Beaconsfield wrote "Lothair," the characteristic glories of Rotten Row; but horses and horsemanship alike have waned. Men take their constitutional canter in costumes anciently confined to rat-catching, and the general aspect of Rotten Row suggests the idea of Mounted Infantry rather than of "Cavalry." Alongside the ride forty years ago ladies drove their pony-phaetons--a pretty practice and a pretty carriage; but both have utterly disappeared, and the only bells that "gingle in the laughing air" are the warning signals of the Petrol Fiend, as, bent on destruction, he swoops down from Marble Arch to Piccadilly. Does a captious critic gaze enquiringly on the unfamiliar verb to "gingle"? It was thus that Lord Beaconsfield wrote it in "Lothair"; even as in the same high romance he described a lady with a rich bunch of "Stephanopolis" in her hand. It is not for the ephemeral scribbler to correct the orthography of the immortal dead. As to "stoppages in Bond Street," they were isolated and noteworthy incidents in 1870; in 1906, thanks to the admission of omnibuses into the narrow thoroughfare, they are occurrences as regular as the postman's knock or the policeman's mailed tread.

We have seen the aspects in which the London Season presented itself to two great men of yore. Let me now descend to a more personal level. We will imagine ourselves transported back to the year 1880, and to the month of May. A young gentleman--some five-and-twenty summers, as Mr. G. P. R. James would have said, have passed over his fair head--is standing near the steps of St. George's Hospital between the hours of eleven and midnight. He is smartly dressed in evening clothes, with a white waistcoat, a gardenia in his button-hole, and a silver-crutched stick in his hand. He is smoking a cigarette and pondering the question where he shall spend his evening, or, more strictly, the early hours of next day. He is in a state of serene contentment with himself and the world, for he has just eaten an excellent dinner, where plovers' eggs and asparagus have reminded him that the Season has really begun. To the pleasure-seeking Londoner these symptoms of returning summer mean more, far more, than the dogrose in the hedgerow or the first note of the nightingale in the copse. Since dinner he has just looked in at an evening party, which bored him badly, and has "cut" two others where he was not so likely to be missed. And now arises the vital question of the Balls. I use the plural number, for there will certainly be two, and probably three, to choose from. Here, at St. George's Hospital, our youth is at the centre of the world's social concourse. A swift and unbroken stream of carriages is pouring down from Grosvenor Square and Mayfair to Belgrave Square and Eaton Square and Chesham Place, and it meets as it goes the ascending procession which begins in Belgravia and ends in Portman Square. To-night there is a Royal Ball at Grosvenor House, certainly the most stately event of the season; a little dance, exquisitely gay and bright, in Piccadilly; and a gorgeous entertainment in Prince's Gate, where the aspiring Distiller is struggling, with enormous outlay, into social fame. All these have solicited the honour of our young friend's presence, and now is the moment of decision. It does not take long to repudiate Prince's Gate; there will be the best band in London, and ortolans for supper, but there will be no one there that one ever saw before, and it is too sickening to be called "My boy" by that bow-windowed bounder, the master of the house. There remain Grosvenor House and Piccadilly, and happily these can be combined in a harmonious perfection. Grosvenor House shall come first, for the arrival of the Prince and Princess is a pageant worth seeing--the most gracious host and the most beautiful hostess in London ushering the Royal guests, with courtly pomp, into the great gallery, walled with the canvases of Rubens, which serves as the dancing-room. Then the fun begins, and the bright hours fly swiftly, till one o'clock suggests the tender thought of supper, which is served on gold plate and Sèvres china in a garden-tent of Gobelins tapestry. And now it is time for a move; and our youth, extricating himself from the undesired attentions of the linkmen, pops into a hansom and speeds to Piccadilly, where he finds delights of a different kind--no Royalty, no pomp, no ceremony; but a warm welcome, and all his intimate friends, and the nicest girls in London eager for a valse.

As day begins to peep, he drinks his crowning tumbler of champagne-cup, and strolls home under the opalescent dawn, sniffing the fragrance from pyramids of strawberries as they roll towards Covent Garden, and exchanging a friendly "Good night" with the policeman on the beat, who seems to think that "Good morning" would be a more suitable greeting. So to bed, with the cheerful consciousness of a day's work well done, and the even more exhilarating prospect of an unbroken succession of such days, full of feasting and dancing and riding and polo and lawn-tennis, till August stifles the Season with its dust and drives the revellers to Homburg or the moors.

But I awake, and lo! it is a dream, though a dream well founded on reality. For I have been describing the London Season as it was when the world was young.

"When all the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down; Creep home, and take your place there, The spent and maimed among: God grant you find one face there, You loved when all was young."

X

THE SEASON AS IT IS

That delicate critic, the late Mr. William Cory, observes in one of his letters that Virgil's

"Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt"

has its modern equivalent in Wordsworth's

"Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade Of that which once was great is passed away."

The full luxury of that grief is reserved for those who, a decade hence, shall moralize on "the London Season," for the thing which now we so describe will then have utterly perished, and its name will only arouse a tender and regretful emotion. Even now we have seen its glories fade, and soon it will have shared the fate of those Venetian splendours which Wordsworth mourned. But in the meantime it still exists, though in a vastly different form from that which it wore in mid-Victorian years. Just now I was describing some of the changes which have occurred since the distant days when Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield described London in May; and, following humbly in their wake, I endeavoured to depict it as it was when I had my part in it. But change only yields place to change. Society, like the individuals who compose it, passes onward in perpetual vicissitude. As Shelley says, "Naught may endure but mutability." So the London Season of 1906 differs as notably from the Season of 1880 as the Season of 1880 from that of 1846. Let me catalogue some of the changes and try to account for them. In the first place, the Season is much less exactly circumscribed by dates. In days gone by, it began with the Opening of Parliament, which was always about the 7th of February, and it lasted, with its regular intermissions for Easter and Whitsuntide, till the last week of July. Then Society transported itself in turn to Goodwood, to Cowes, and to a German watering-place or a Scotch moor, according to its physical condition, and it was darkly rumoured that, if people found themselves compelled by domestic or financial reasons to remain in London during August, they sought to escape detection by keeping the windows fronting the street closely shuttered, and lived in their back rooms in unbroken contemplation of the leads and the mews. If you chanced to meet a man in Piccadilly in September, you might be sure that he would be wearing country clothes and would assure you that he was only "passing through" between Doncaster and Scotland. Nowadays the Season has no particular limits. London is nearly as full in December as it is in May. Dinners and plays and suppers at restaurants are as frequent, and, barring the fogs, as bright, at Christmas as at Midsummer. Even in September Clubland is not deserted; and there are people bold enough to defy the world by returning from their summer exodus as early as October. The reason for the change, as for many others like it, is the reduction of territorial incomes. 1880 may be taken as, roughly, the last of the good years for agriculture. The incessant rains of 1879 had even then begun to tell their tale. Tenants were asking for big reductions, and farms hitherto eagerly sought were becoming unlettable. I know a landowner on a great scale who, a year or two later, only pocketed 10 per cent. of his income from land, whereas five years before he would have thought an abatement of 10 per cent. disastrous. All this has told increasingly on social life, for people found themselves unable to keep both a country house and a London house going at the same time, and, being driven to choose between the two, often decided to let the country house and its shooting and make London their headquarters for the whole year. So, by degrees, autumn faded imperceptibly into winter, winter into spring, and spring into summer. Each season in its turn found people dwelling peaceably in their urban habitations, entertaining and being entertained; and so "_the_ Season" lost its sharp edges. The meeting of Parliament brought no perceptible change in the aspect of the town. "High Midsummer Pomps" were no longer so "high" as in former years, but, _per contra_, there was much more gaiety in the autumn and winter and early spring.

Another cause which has contributed to the effacement of the ancient time-marks is that the Court tends to disregard them. Under the present reign, Windsor Castle has become as much a social centre as Buckingham Palace. There are banquets in St. George's Hall in December, as well as garden-parties on the the Slopes in June; and so, under the action of Royal influence, the social seasons melt into one another, like the hues of the prism. Then, again, the practice of the "Weekend," imported from Lancashire and sanctioned by Westminster, helps to denude the town in summer; for the "end" tends naturally to prolong itself till it overlaps the beginning, and Friday-to-Tuesday parties, treading on the heels of Whitsuntide and to be followed in quick succession by Ascot, make mish-mash of what was aforetime "an entire and perfect chrysolite"--a complete and continuous whole.