Chapter 16

Lord Cromer was very much annoyed with Napoleon for having laid it down that _apres soixante ans, un homme ne vaut rien_. The rash dictum had certainly no application to himself. It is true that, under the strain of the long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he approached the age of sixty. But his mental activity, his marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but seemed steadily to advance. He continued to be consumed by that lust for knowledge, _libido sciendi_, which he admired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians forbade him, four years ago, to expend his failing strength any longer on political and social propaganda, instead of retiring, as most men of his age would have done, to dream in the recesses of his library, he plunged with renewed ardour into the one occupation still permitted to him: literature. The accident of his publishing a criticism which excited wide popular attention led to his becoming, when past his seventieth birthday, a "regular reviewer" for the _Spectator_, where the very frequent papers signed "C." became a prominent feature. Those articles were, perhaps, most remarkable for the light they threw on the writer's own temperament, on his insatiable desire for knowledge. Lord Cromer's curiosity in all intellectual directions was, to the last, like that of a young man beginning his mental career; and when he adopted the position, so uncommon in a man of his experience and authority, of a reviewer of current books, it was because he wished to share with others the excitement he himself enjoyed in the tapping of fresh sources of information.

III

THE LAST DAYS OF LORD REDESDALE

The publication of Lord Redesdale's _Memories_--which was one of the most successful autobiographies of recent times--familiarised thousands of readers with the principal adventures of a very remarkable man, but, when all was said and done, left an incomplete impression of his taste and occupations on the minds of those who were not familiar with his earlier writings. His literary career had been a very irregular one. He took up literature rather late, and produced a book that has become a classic--_Tales of Old Japan_. He did not immediately pursue this success, but became involved in public activities of many kinds, which distracted his attention. In his sixtieth year he brought out _The Bamboo Garden_, and from that time--until, in his eightieth year, he died in full intellectual energy--he constantly devoted himself to the art of writing. His zeal, his ambition, were wonderful; but it was impossible to overlook the disadvantage from which that ambition and that zeal suffered in the fact that for the first sixty years of his life the writer had cultivated the art but casually and sporadically. He retained, in spite of all the labour which he expended, a certain stiffness, an air of the amateur, of which he himself was always acutely conscious.

This did not interfere with the direct and sincere appeal made to general attention by the 1915 _Memories_, a book so full of geniality and variety, so independent in its judgments and so winning in its ingenuousness, that its wider popularity could be the object of no surprise. But, to those who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it must always appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from what we may call the subjective point of view. It tells us of his adventures and his friendships, of the strange lands he visited and of the unexpected confidences he received, but it does not reveal very distinctly the character of the writer. There is far more of his intellectual constitution, of his personal tastes and mental habits, in the volume of essays of 1912, called _A Tragedy in Stone_, but even here much is left unsaid and even unsuggested.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redesdale was the redundant vitality of his character. His nature swarmed with life, like a drop of pond-water under a microscope. There cannot be found room in any one nature for all the qualities, and what he lacked in some degree was concentration. But very few men who have lived in our complicated age have done well in so many directions as he, or, aiming widely, have failed in so few. He shrank from no labour and hesitated before no difficulty, but pushed on with an extraordinary energy along many various lines of activity. But the two lines in which he most desired and most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are scarcely to be discerned, except below the surface, in his _Memories_. Next to his books, what he regarded with most satisfaction was his wonderful garden at Batsford, and of this there is scarcely a word of record in the autobiography. He had always intended to celebrate this garden, and when he was preparing to return to Batsford in 1915 he wrote to me that he was going to write an _Apologia pro Horto meo_, as long before he had composed one _pro Banibusis meis_. A book which should combine with the freest fancies of his intellect a picture of the exotic groves of Batsford was what was required to round off Lord Redesdale's literary adventures. It will be seen that he very nearly succeeded in thus setting the top-stone on his literary edifice.

One reason, perhaps, why Batsford, which was ever present to his thoughts, is so very slightly and vaguely mentioned in Lord Redesdale's _Memories_, may be the fact that from 1910 onwards he was not living in it himself, and that it was irksome to him to magnify in print horticultural beauties which were for the time being in the possession of others. The outbreak of the war, in which all his five sons were instantly engaged, was the earliest of a series of changes which completely altered the surface of Lord Redesdale's life. Batsford came once more into his personal occupation, and at the same time it became convenient to give up his London house in Kensington Court. Many things combined to transform his life in the early summer of 1915. His eldest son, Major the Hon. Clement Mitford, after brilliantly distinguishing himself in battle, was received by the King and decorated, to the rapturous exultation of his father. Major Mitford returned to the French front, only to fall on May 13th, 1915.

At this time I was seeing Lord Redesdale very frequently, and I could not but be struck by the effect of this blow upon his temperament. After the first shock of sorrow, I observed in him the determination not to allow himself to be crushed. His dominant vitality asserted itself almost with violence, and he seemed to clench his tooth in defiance of the assault on his individuality. It required on the part of so old a man no little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great and heroic bereavement than to resist the wearing vexation of seeing one's system of daily occupation crumbling away. Lord Redesdale was pleased to be going again to Batsford, which had supplied him in years past with so much sumptuous and varied entertainment, but it was a matter of alarm with him to give up all, or almost all, the various ties with London which had meant so much to his vividly social nature.

Meanwhile, during the early months of 1915 in London, he had plenty of employment in finishing and revising his _Memories_, which it had taken him two years to write. This was an occupation which bridged over the horrid chasm between his old active life in London, with its thousand interests, and the uncertain and partly dreaded prospect of exile in the bamboo-gardens of a remote corner of Gloucestershire, where he foresaw that deafness must needs exclude him from the old activities of local life.

He finished revising the manuscript of his _Memories_ in July, and then went down, while the actual transference of his home was taking place, to the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle, Cowes, where he had been accustomed to spend some of the most enjoyable hours of his life. But this scene, habitually thronged with people, and palpitating with gaiety, in the midst of which Lord Redesdale found himself so singularly at home, was now, more than perhaps any other haunt of the English sportsman, in complete eclipse. The weather was lovely, but there were no yachts, no old chums, no charming ladies. "It is very dull," he wrote; "the sole inhabitant of the Club besides myself was Lord Falkland, and now he is gone." In these conditions Lord Redesdale became suddenly conscious that the activity of the last two or three years was over, that the aspect of his world had changed, and that he was in danger of losing that hold upon life to which he so resolutely clung. In conditions of this kind he always turned to seek for something mentally "craggy," as Byron said, and at Cowes he wonderfully found the writings of Nietzsche. The result is described in a remarkable letter to myself (July 28th, 1915), which I quote because it marks the earliest stage in the composition of his last unfinished book:--

"I have been trying to occupy myself with Nietzsche, on the theory that there must be something great about a man who exercised the immense influence that he did. But I confess I am no convert to any of his various moods. Here and there I find gems of thought, but one has to wade through a morass of blue mud to get at them. Here is a capital saying of his which may be new to you--in a letter to his friend Rohde he writes: 'Eternally we need midwives in order to be delivered of our thoughts,' We cannot work in solitude. 'Woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend's presence.'

"How true that is! When I come down here, I think that with so much time on my hands I shall be able to get through a pile of work. Not a bit of it! I find it difficult even to write a note. To me it is an imperative necessity to have the sympathetic counsel of a friend."

The letter continued with an impassioned appeal to his correspondent to find some definite intellectual work for him to undertake. "You make me dare, and that is much towards winning a game. You must sharpen my wits, which are blunt enough just now." In short, it was a cry from the island of boredom to come over the water and administer first-aid.

Accordingly, I started for Cowes, and was welcomed at the pier with all my host's habitual and vivacious hospitality. Scarcely were we seated in our wicker-chairs in face of the Solent, not twinkling as usual with pleasure-sails, but sinister with strange instruments of warfare, than he began the attack. "What am I to do with myself?" was the instant question; "what means can I find of occupying this dreadful void of leisure?" To which the obvious reply was: "First of all, you must exhibit to me the famous attractions of Cowes!" "There are none," he replied in comic despair, but we presently invented some, and my visit, which extended over several radiant days of a perfect August, was diversified with walks and excursions by land and water, in which my companion was as active and as ardent as though he had been nineteen instead of seventy-nine. In a suit picturesquely marine, with his beautiful silver hair escaping from a jaunty yachting cap, he was the last expression of vivacity and gaiety.

The question of his intellectual occupation in the future came, however, incessantly to the front; and our long talks in the strange and uncanny solitude of the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle always came to this: What task was he to take up next? His large autobiography was now coming back to him from the printers in packets of proof, with which he was closeted night and morning; and I suggested that while this was going on there was no need for him to think about future enterprises. To tell the truth, I had regarded the _Memories_ as likely to be the final labour of Lord Redesdale's busy life. It seemed to me that at his advanced age he might now well withdraw into dignified repose. I even hinted so much in terms as delicate as I could make them, but the suggestion was not well received. I became conscious that there was nothing he was so little prepared to welcome as "repose"; that, in fact, the terror which possessed him was precisely the dread of having to withdraw from the stage of life. His deafness, which now began to be excessive, closed to his eager spirit so many of the avenues of experience, that he was more than ever anxious to keep clear those that remained to him, and of these, literary expression came to be almost the only one left. In the absence of a definite task his path in this direction led through darkness.

But it was not until after several suggestions and many conversations that light was found. The friend so pressingly appealed to returned to London, where he was stern in rejecting several projects, hotly flung at his head and then coldly abandoned. A study of the Empress Maria Theresa, suggested by a feverish perusal of Pechler, was the latest and least attractive of these. Lord Redesdale then frankly demanded that a subject should be found for him. "You have brought this upon yourself," he said, "by encouraging me to write." What might prove the scheme of a very pleasant book then occurred to me, and I suggested to the fiery and impatient author, who had by this time retired for good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of essays dealing with things in general, but bound together by a constantly repeated reference to his wild garden of bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The author was to suppose himself seated with a friend on the terrace at the top of the garden, and to let the idea of the bamboo run through the whole tissue of reflections and reminiscences like an emerald thread. Lord Redesdale was enchanted, and the idea took fire at once. He replied:--

"You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the rocks and stones! I shall work all my conceits into your plan, and am now proceeding to my garden shrine to meditate on it. I will try to make a picture of the VELUVANA, the bamboo-garden which was the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha and his disciples. There I will sit, and, looking on the great statue of Buddha in meditation, I shall begin to arrange all sorts of wild imaginings which may come into my crazy brain."

In this way was started the book, of which, alas! only such fragments were composed as form the earlier part of the volume published after his death. It is, however, right to point out that for the too-brief remainder of his life Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a hint has just been given. The _Veluvana_ was to be the crowning production of his literary life, and it was to sum up the wisdom of the East and the gaiety of the West. He spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation. "That will do to go into _Veluvana_," was his cry when he met with anything rare or strange. For instance, on September 15th, 1915, he wrote to me:--

"To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that plants, having many human qualities, may also in some degree have human motives--that they are not altogether mere automata--and as I thought, I began to imagine that I could detect something resembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. I have jotted down a few notes, and you will see when I expand them that at any rate the idea calls attention to the movements themselves, some of which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings in the bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the scheme of _Veluvana_."

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism, which he had visited long before in the neighbourhood of Kioto, now recurred to his memory, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary interest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to his Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary. He wrote to me:--

"No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was a valuable asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and force of character, would never have succeeded as he did without Satow. Aston was another very strong man."

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of _Veluvana_, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in this direction proved to be too slight for publication. He met with some expressions of extremely modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, and to which he was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. It began to be obvious that the enterprise was one for which great concentration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was not to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he was not content, and no one could have wished him to be willing, to break abruptly all the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of the National Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occupied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he did not abate his interest in these directions. They made it necessary that he should come up to town every other week. This made up in some measure for the inevitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire his deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly duties which had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life. He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of the Cotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any useful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen and his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably good letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fed with the apples of correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):--

"Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a part any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country Mouse--even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the cellars of the great--would still be out of all communion with the mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know."

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. "I hate the autumn," he said, "for it means the death of the year, but I try to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible." Among his plants, and up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could no longer hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies, his activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes, the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit of such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him by the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time become almost impenetrable to sound.

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mental force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and curiosity of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. He wrote to me from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):--

"I have been busy for the last two months making a close study of Dante. I have read all the _Inferno_ and half of the _Purgatorio_. It is hard work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, W.W. Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now within the last week or two has appeared Hoare's Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge University Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries were practically useless except for courier's work. How splendid Dante is! But how sickening are the Commentators, Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them! They won't let the poet say that the sun shone or the night was dark without seeing some hidden and mystic meaning in it. They always seem to _chercher midi a quatorze heures_, and irritate me beyond measure. There is invention enough in Dante without all their embroidery. But this grubbing and grouting seems to be infectious among Dante scholars--they all catch the disease."

He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his accustomed ardour. He corresponded with the eminent veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable W.W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted, and Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote to me again:--

"This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of course, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I never before attempted to read him. The difficulty scared me."

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. He worked away for hours at a time, braving the monotonies of the _Purgatorio_ without flagging, but he broke down early in the _Paradiso_. He had no sympathy whatever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely bored by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. I confess I took advantage of this to recall his attention to _Veluvana_, for which it was no longer possible to hope that the author would collect any material out of Dante.

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian history during the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment to the value of the Russian chapters of his _Memories_, but it was another distraction. It took his thoughts away from _Veluvana_, although he protested to me that he could prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal his fancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, for he wrote (March 17th, 1916):--

"You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking part in society, the Three R's alone remain to me, and, indeed, of those only two--for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arithmetic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide! I am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time."

He was really composing more actively than he himself realised. About this time he wrote:--

"Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford--not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible--but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris--all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he had many admirable points."