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Title: Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays
Author: Strachey, Giles Lytton (1880-1932)
Date of first publication: 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Chatto & Windus, 1933
   [Phoenix Library]
Date first posted: 13 September 2013
Date last updated: 13 September 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #988

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






PORTRAITS

IN MINIATURE

AND OTHER ESSAYS


_By_

LYTTON STRACHEY



  _Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se
  Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures._
                              HOR. I. SAT. X.




CHATTO AND WINDUS

LONDON




  First published 1931
  First issued in the Phoenix Library
  1933


  Printed in Great Britain: all rights reserved




  A list
  of further titles in the Phoenix Library,
  including other works by Lytton Strachey,
  will be found at the end
  of this book




  To
  MAX BEERBOHM

  WITH GRATITUDE
  AND ADMIRATION




_These essays are reprinted by kind permission of the Editors of the
New Statesman and Nation, and Life and Letters._




  CONTENTS


  Sir John Harington
  Muggleton
  John Aubrey
  The Life, Illness, and Death of Dr. North
  Congreve, Collier, Macaulay, and Mr. Summers
  Madame de Svign's Cousin
  The Sad Story of Dr. Colbatch
  The Prsident de Brosses
  James Boswell
  The Abb Morellet
  Mary Berry
  Madame de Lieven

  Six English Historians:
    Hume
    Gibbon
    Macaulay
    Carlyle
    Froude
    Creighton




SIR JOHN HARINGTON

An old miniature shows a young man's face, whimsically Elizabethan,
with tossed-back curly hair, a tip-tilted nose, a tiny point of a
beard, and a long single earring, falling in sparkling drops over a
ruff of magnificent proportions.  Such was John Harington, as he
appeared in the happy fifteen-eighties, at Greenwich, or at Nonesuch--a
courtier, a wit, a scholar, a poet, and a great favourite with the
ladies.  Even Gloriana herself usually unbent when he approached her.
She liked the foolish fellow.  She had known him since he was a child;
he was her godson--almost, indeed, a family connection, for his
father's first wife had been a natural daughter of her own
indefatigable sire.  Through this lady the young man had inherited his
fine Italian house at Kelston, in Somersetshire, where one day
Elizabeth, on her way to Bath, paid him the honour of an extremely
expensive visit.  He had felt himself obliged to rebuild half the house
to lodge his great guest fittingly; but he cared little for that--he
wrote a rhyming epigram about it all, which amused the ladies of the
bedchamber.  He wrote, he found, with extraordinary ease and pleasure;
the words came positively running off the end of his pen; and so--to
amuse the ladies again, or to tease them--he translated the
twenty-eighth book of Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, in which the far
from decorous history of the fair Fiametta is told.  The Queen soon got
wind of this.  She read the manuscript and sent for the poet.  She was
shocked, she said, by this attempt to demoralize her household; and she
banished the offender from Court until--could there be a more proper
punishment?--he should have completed the translation of the whole
poem.  Harington hurried off to Kelston, worked away for a month or
two, and returned with a fine folio containing the entire _Orlando_ in
English, together with notes, a life of Ariosto, "a general allegory of
the whole," and "apologie of Poetrie," an "epistle dedicatorie to the
Queenes Majestie," and an engraved title-page with the portrait of
himself and his dog Bungay.  The book was printed in 1591.  The
exquisite elegance and mature serenity of the original are nowhere to
be found in it; but Harington himself, bringing with him the natural
abundance, the charming ingenuousness, the early morning freshness of
his wonderful generation, comes to us delightfully on every page.

The translation was well received, and the gay young man looked about
for new worlds to conquer.  Not to be talked of was his only fear.  A
curious notion struck him.  His nose was sensitive as well as impudent,
and he had been made to suffer agonies by the sanitary arrangements in
the houses of the great.  Suddenly inspired, he invented the
water-closet.  Then, seizing his pen, he concocted a pamphlet after the
manner of Rabelais--or, as he preferred to call him, "the reverent
Rabbles"--in which extravagant spirits, intolerable puns, improper
stories, and sly satirical digs at eminent personages were blended
together into a preposterous rhapsody, followed by an
appendix--written, of course, by his servant--could a gentleman be
expected to discuss such details?--containing a minute account, with
measurements, diagrams and prices, of the new invention.  _The
Metamorphosis of Ajax_--for so the book, with a crowningly deplorable
pun, was entitled--created some sensation.  Queen Elizabeth was amused.
But then some malicious courtier told her that one of the satirical
digs was aimed at the memory of Leicester, whereupon her smiles changed
to frowns, the Star Chamber was talked of, and Harington made a
strategic retreat to Somersetshire.  "The merry poet, my godson," the
Queen declared, "must not come to Greenwich, till he hath grown sober
and leaveth the ladies' sports and frolics."  But before very long she
relented.  With her supreme sense of the practical, she saw that, as
she put it, "the marrow of the book" was not entirely ludicrous; she
sent down word to the poet that she approved of his invention; and
eventually she set the fashion for the new contrivances by installing
one of them in Richmond Palace, with a copy of the _Ajax_ hanging from
the wall.

Harington's next adventure was more serious.  He was summoned by Essex
to join his ill-fated expedition to Ireland, in command of a troop of
horse.  In Ireland, with a stretch of authority which was bitterly
resented by the Queen, Harington was knighted by the rash Lord Deputy,
and afterwards, when disaster came thick upon disaster, he followed his
patron back to London.  In fear and trembling, he presented himself
before the enraged Elizabeth.  "What!" she cried, "did the fool bring
you too?"  The terrified poet fell upon his knees, while the Queen, as
he afterwards described it, "chafed much, walked fastly to and fro, and
looked with discomposure in her visage."  Then, suddenly rushing
towards him, she caught hold of his girdle.  "By God's Son," she
shouted, "I am no Queen, and that man is above me!"  His stammering
excuses were cut short with a "Go back to your business!" uttered in
such a tone that Sir John, not staying to be bidden twice, fled out of
the room, and fled down to Kelston, "as if all the Irish rebels had
been at his heels."

It is clear that poor Harington never quite recovered from the shock of
that terrific scene.  The remainder of his life passed in
ineffectiveness and disillusionment.  In the bosom of his family he did
his best to forget the storms and shipwrecks of "the Essex coast"; he
wrote incessantly; he cracked scandalous jokes with his mother-in-law,
old Lady Rogers; he busied himself over the construction of a curious
lantern for King James of Scotland.  But his happy vein had deserted
him.  His _Discourse shewing that Elyas must personally come before the
Day of Judgment_ could never get finished, and he threw aside his
_Treatise on Playe_ as a failure.  His epigrams, no doubt, were more
successful; he scribbled them down on every possible occasion, and the
most scurrilous he invariably dispatched to old Lady Rogers.  She
roared with laughter, but omitted to leave him a legacy.  He dashed
into her house as she was dying, broke open the chests, tried to get
possession of everything, and was at last ignominiously ejected by his
brother-in-law.  King James was equally disappointing.  Even the
curious lantern, even a learned, elaborate, and fantastic dissertation
_On the Succession to the Crown_, failed to win him.  After he had been
a year in London, the new King granted Sir John an interview, but,
though his Majesty was polite, he was not impressed.  "Sir John," he
said, with much gravity, "do you truly understand why the Devil works
more with ancient women than others?" And, unluckily, on that, Sir John
"could not refrain from a scurvy jest."  Nevertheless, though he felt
that he had made no headway, he would not despair; a little later, the
Lord Chancellorship of Ireland and the Archbishopric of Dublin fell
vacant, and the author of _Ajax_ bravely requested that he should be
appointed to both offices.  Oddly enough, his application received no
answer.  He solaced himself with an endeavour to win the good graces of
the young Prince Henry, to whom he addressed a discourse, full of
pleasant anecdotes, concerning all the bishops of his acquaintance,
followed by a letter describing "the good deedes and straunge feats" of
his "rare Dogge," Bungay--how he used to carry messages from London to
Kelston, and how, on one occasion, he took a pheasant from a dish at
the Spanish Ambassador's table, and then returned it to the very same
dish, at a secret sign from his master.

But in truth the days of Bungay were over, and the new times were
uncomfortable and strange.  "I ne'er did see such lack of good order,
discretion, and sobriety."  There had been jollities and junketings, no
doubt, in his youth, but surely, they were different.  He remembered
the "heroicall dames," the "stately heroyns" whom he had celebrated
aforetime--

  These entertayn great Princes; these have learned
    The tongues, toys, tricks of Rome, of Spayn, of Fraunce;
    These can correntos and lavoltas daunce,
  And though they foote it false 'tis ne'er discerned.

More and more his thoughts reverted to his old mistress.  "When she
smiled, it was a pure sunshine, that everyone did choose to bask in, if
they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds,
and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike."  Yes!  Those
were great times indeed!  And now ... he was "olde and infirme"; he was
forty-five; he must seek a quiet harbour and lay up his barque.  He
lingered at Kelston, impoverished, racked by various diseases; he
vainly took the Bath waters; he became "stricken of a dead palsy";
until, in 1612, at the age of fifty-one, he passed into oblivion.  And
in oblivion he has remained.  Nobody reads his _Orlando_; his letters
are known to none but a few learned historians; his little books of
epigrams lie concealed in the grim recesses of vast libraries; and
Englishmen to-day, reflecting on many things, as they enjoy the
benefits of a sanitary system unknown to the less fortunate inhabitants
of other countries, give never a thought to Sir John Harington.




MUGGLETON

Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of
self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650.  Then it was that
the disintegration of religious authority which had begun with Luther
reached its culminating point.  The Bible, containing the absolute
truth as to the nature and the workings of the Universe, lay open to
all; it was only necessary to interpret its assertions; and to do so
all that was wanted was the decision of the individual conscience.  In
those days the individual conscience decided with extraordinary
facility.  Prophets and prophetesses ranged in crowds through the
streets of London, proclaiming, with complete certainty, the
explanation of everything.  The explanations were extremely varied: so
much the better--one could pick and choose.  One could become a
Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskite,
a Tryonist, a Philadelphian, a Christadelphian, or a Seventh Day
Baptist, just as one pleased.  Samuel Butler might fleer and flout at

        petulant, capricious sects,
  The maggots of corrupted texts;

but he, too, was deciding according to the light of his individual
conscience.  By what rule could men determine whether a text was
corrupted, or what it meant?  The rule of the Catholic Church was gone,
and hence-forward Eternal Truth might with perfect reason be expected
to speak through the mouth of any fish-wife in Billingsgate.

Of these prophets the most famous was George Fox; the most remarkable
was Lodowick Muggleton.  He was born in 1609, and was brought up to
earn his living as a tailor.  Becoming religious, he threw over a
charming girl, with whom he was in love and whom he was engaged to
marry, on the ground that her mother kept a pawnbroker's shop and that
usury was sinful.  He was persuaded to this by his puritan friends,
among whom was his cousin, John Reeve, a man of ardent temperament,
fierce conviction, and unflinching holiness.  Some years later, in
1650, two peculiar persons, John Tawny and John Robins, appeared in
London.  Tawny declared that he was the Lord's high priest, that it was
his mission to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem, and that, incidentally,
he was the King of France.  Robins proclaimed that he was something
greater: he was Adam, he was Melchizedek, he was the Lord himself.  He
had raised Jeremiah, Benjamin, and many others from the dead, and did
they not stand there beside him, admitting that all he said was true?
Serpents and dragons appeared at his command; he rode upon the wings of
the wind; he was about to lead 144,000 men and women to the Mount of
Olives through the Red Sea, on a diet of dry bread and raw vegetables.
These two men, "greater than prophets," made a profound impression upon
Muggleton and his cousin Reeve.  A strange melancholy fell upon them,
and then a more strange exaltation.  They heard mysterious voices; they
were holy; why should not they too be inspired?  Greater than
prophets....?  Suddenly Reeve rushed into Muggleton's room and declared
that they were the chosen witnesses of the Lord, whose appearance had
been prophesied in the Book of Revelation, xi. 3.  Muggleton agreed
that it was so.  As for Tawny and Robins, they were devilish impostors,
who must be immediately denounced.  Sentence of eternal damnation
should be passed upon them.  The cousins hurried off on their mission,
and discovered Robins in gaol, where he had been lodged for blasphemy.
The furious embodiment of Adam, Melchizedek, and the Lord glared out at
them from a window, clutching the bars with both hands.  But Reeve was
unabashed.  "That body of thine," he shouted, pointing at his victim,
"which was thy heaven, must be thy hell; and that proud spirit of
thine, which said it was God, must be thy Devil.  The one shall be as
fire, and the other as brimstone, burning together to all eternity.
This is the message of the Lord."  The effect was instantaneous:
Robins, letting go the bars, fell back, shattered.  "It is finished,"
he groaned; "the Lord's will be done."  He wrote a letter to Cromwell,
recanting; was released from prison, and retired into private life, in
the depths of the country.  Tawny's fate was equally impressive.  Reeve
wrote on a piece of paper, "We pass sentence upon you of eternal
damnation," and left it in his room.  The wretched man fled to Holland,
in a small boat, _en route_ for Jerusalem, and was never heard of again.

After this the success of the new religion was assured.  But Reeve did
not live long to enjoy his glory.  In a few months his fiery spirit had
worn itself away, and Muggleton was left alone to carry on the work.
He was cast in a very different mould.  Tall, thick-set, vigorous, with
a great head, whose low brow, high cheekbones, and projecting jowl
almost suggested some simian creature, he had never known a day's
illness, and lived to be eighty-eight.  Tough and solid, he continued,
year after year, to earn his living as a tailor, while the words flowed
from him which were the final revelation of God.  For he preached and
he wrote with an inexhaustible volubility.  He never ceased, in
sermons, in letters, in books, in pamphlets, to declare to the world
the divine and absolute truth.  His revelations might be
incomprehensible, his objurgations frenzied, his argumentations
incoherent--no matter; disciples gathered round him in ever-thickening
crowds, learning, to their amazement and delight, that there is no
Devil but the unclean Reason of men, that Angels are the only beings of
Pure Reason, that God is of the stature of a man and made of flesh and
bone, that Heaven is situated beyond the stars and six miles above the
earth.  Schismatics might arise, but they were crushed, cast forth, and
sentenced to eternal damnation.  Inquiring magistrates were browbeaten
with multitudinous texts.  George Fox, the miserable wretch, was
overwhelmed--or would have been had he not obtained the assistance of
the Devil--by thick volumes of intermingled abuse and Pure Reason.  The
truth was plain--it had been delivered to Muggleton by God; and
henceforward, until the Day of Judgment, the Deity would hold no
further communication with his creatures.  Prayer, therefore, was not
only futile, it was blasphemous; and no form of worship was admissible,
save the singing of a few hymns of thanksgiving and praise.  All that
was required of the true believer was that he should ponder upon the
Old and the New Testaments, and upon "The Third and Last Testament of
Our Lord Jesus Christ," by Muggleton.

The English passion for compromise is well illustrated by the attitude
of Charles the Second's Government towards religious heterodoxy.  There
are two logical alternatives for the treatment of heretics--to let them
alone, or to torture them to death; but English public opinion
recoiled--it still recoils--from either course.  A compromise was the
obvious, the comfortable solution; and so it was decided that heretics
should be tortured--not to death, oh no!--but ... to some extent.
Accordingly, poor Muggleton became a victim, for years, to the small
persecutions of authority.  He was badgered by angry justices, he was
hunted from place to place, his books were burnt, he was worried by
small fines and short imprisonments.  At last, at the age of
sixty-eight, he was arrested and tried for blasphemy.  In the course of
the proceedings, it appeared that the prosecution had made a serious
blunder: since the publication of the book on which the charge was
based an Act of Indemnity had been passed.  Thereupon the Judge
instructed the jury that, as there was no reason to suppose that the
date on the book was not a false imprint, the Act of Indemnity did not
apply; and Muggleton was condemned to the pillory.  He was badly
mauled, for it so happened that the crowd was hostile and pelted the
old man with stones.  After that, he was set free; his tribulations
were at last over.  The Prophet spent his closing years writing his
autobiography, in the style of the Gospels; and he died in peace.

His doctrines did not die with him.  Two hundred and fifty
Muggletonians followed him to the grave, and their faith has been
handed down, unimpaired through the generations, from that day to this.
Still, in the very spot where their founder was born, the chosen few
meet together to celebrate the two festivals of their religion--the
Great Holiday, on the anniversary of the delivery of the Word to Reeve,
and the Little Holiday, on the day of Muggleton's final release from
prison.

  I do believe in God alone,
  Likewise in Reeve and Muggleton.

So they have sung for more than two hundred years.

  This is the Muggletonians' faith,
  This is the God which we believe;
  None salvation-knowledge hath,
  But those of Muggleton and Reeve.
  Christ is the Muggletonians' king,
  With whom eternally they'll sing.

It is an exclusive faith, certainly; and yet, somehow or other, it
disarms criticism.  Even though one may not be of the elect oneself,
one cannot but wish it well; one would be sorry if the time ever came
when there were no more Muggletonians.  Besides, one is happy to learn
that with the passage of years they have grown more gentle.  Their
terrible offensive weapon--which, in early days, they wielded so
frequently--has fallen into desuetude: no longer do they pass sentence
of eternal damnation.  The dreaded doom was pronounced for the last
time on a Swedenborgian, with great effect, in the middle of the
nineteenth century.




JOHN AUBREY

If one were asked to choose a date for the beginning of the modern
world, probably July 15, 1662, would be the best to fix upon.  For on
that day the Royal Society was founded, and the place of Science in
civilization became a definite and recognized thing.  The sun had risen
above the horizon; and yet, before that, there had been streaks of
light in the sky.  The great age of Newton was preceded by a curious
twilight period--a period of gestation and preparation, confused, and
only dimly conscious of the end towards which it was moving.  It might
be called, perhaps, the age of Hobbes, whose half-medival, half-modern
mind was the dominating influence over intellects which came to
maturity in the middle years of the century.  Another even more
typical, though less eminent, representative of this embryonic
generation was John Aubrey (1626-1697).  Aubrey was among those chosen
by the first President and Council to be the first Fellows of the Royal
Society; and he was extremely proud of the distinction.  But in reality
the scientific movement which gave the Royal Society its significance
did not mean very much to him.  His mind moved in a circle of ideas
which was rapidly becoming obsolete, and which, so long as our
civilization lasts, can never come into existence again.

His life was not a fortunate one.  Born a country gentleman, with
estates in Brecknockshire, Herefordshire, and Wiltshire, and educated
at Trinity College, Oxford, his happy studies at the University were
interrupted by the Civil Wars, and his considerable possessions were
dissipated in a long series of unsuccessful lawsuits.  In 1666, he
tells us, "all my businesses and affaires ran kim kam; nothing tooke
effect"; and the words are applicable to the whole of his life.  It was
not only luck that was against him; he was by nature an amiable
muddler; in love and in literature, no less than in business, it was
always the same--"nothing tooke effect."  Neither Madam Jane
Codrington, nor "that incomparable good conditioned gentlewoman, Mris.
M. Wiseman, with whom at first sight I was in love," would smile upon
him; and though "domina Katherina Ryves," with a dowry of 2,000, was
kinder, just as she was about to marry him she died.  He sought
distraction abroad, but without success.  "1664, in August," he noted,
"had a terrible fit of the spleen, and piles, at Orleans."  Yet worse
was to follow: "In an ill howre," he began to make his addresses to
Joan Sumner, whose cruelty was more than negative.  She had him
arrested in Chancery Lane, and for three years pursued him with
lawsuits.  His ruin followed; all his broad lands vanished; even Easton
Piers, the house of his birth, with its terraced gardens, its "jedeau,"
its grotto and "volant Mercury," had to be sold; even his books went at
last.  By 1670 poor Aubrey had lost everything.  But then,
unexpectedly, happiness descended upon him.  Free at last from the
struggles of love and law and the tedious responsibilities of property,
he found himself in a "sweet _otium_."  "I had never quiett, nor
anything of happiness till divested of all," he wrote.  "I was in as
much affliction as a mortall could bee, and never quiet till all was
gone, and I wholly cast myselfe on God's providence."

God's providence, in Aubrey's case, took the form of a circle of kindly
friends, who were ready enough to give him food and shelter in town and
country, in return for the benefit of his "most ingeniose
conversation."  He would spend the winter in London--often with Sir
William Petty or Sir Christopher Wren,--and then, with the spring, he
would ride off on a round of visits--to Lord Thanet's in Kent, to the
Longs in Wiltshire, to Edmund Wylde in Shropshire--until the autumn
came, and he would turn his horse's head back to London.  Grumpy
Anthony Wood might write him down "a shiftless person, roving and
magotieheaded, and sometimes little better than crazed"; but his boon
companions thought otherwise.  They relished to the full the
extraordinary quantity and the delightful variety of his information,
and could never tire of his engaging manner of presenting it.  "My
head," he said himself, "was always working; never idle, and even
travelling did glean som observations, of which I have a collection in
folio of 2 quiers of paper and a dust basket, some whereof are to be
valued."  His inquiries were indeed indefatigable; he was learned in
natural history, geology, Gothic architecture, mineralogy, painting,
heraldry; he collected statistics, he was a profound astrologer, and a
learned geometrician; he wrote a treatise on education; even the
mysteries of cookery did not elude him, and he compiled "a collection
of approved receipts."  Before he died he had written sufficient to
fill several volumes; but, characteristically enough, he brought only
one book to the point of publication: his _Miscellanies_, in which he
briefly discussed such fascinating subjects as "Apparitions, Impulses,
Knockings, Blows Invisible, Prophecies, Marvels, Magic, Transportation
in the Air, Visions in a Bevil or Glass, Converse with Angels and
Spirits, Corps-Candles in Wales, Glances of Love and Envy, and
Second-Sighted Persons in Scotland."  It is in this book, in the
chapter on Apparitions, that the sentence occurs which so much
delighted Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns: "_Anno_ 1670, not far from
_Cirencester_, was an Apparition; Being demanded, whether a good
Spirit, or a bad?  Returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious
Perfume and most melodious Twang."

Certainly the learned Ray was right when he said of his friend that he
was "a little inclinable to credit strange relations."  Yet it would be
an error to dismiss Aubrey as a mere superstitious trifler; he was
something more interesting than that.  His insatiable passion for
singular odds and ends had a meaning in it; he was groping towards a
scientific ordering of phenomena; but the twilight of his age was too
confusing, and he could rarely distinguish between a fact and a
fantasy.  He was clever enough to understand the Newtonian system, but
he was not clever enough to understand that a horoscope was an
absurdity; and so, in his crowded curiosity-shop of a brain, astronomy
and astrology both found a place, and were given equal values.  When
fortune favoured him, however, he could make real additions to
knowledge.  He was the first English archologist, and his most
remarkable achievement was the discovery of the hitherto unknown
Druidical temple of Avebury.  Encouraged by Charles II, he made a
careful survey of the great stone circle, writing a dissertation upon
it and upon Stonehenge, and refuting the theory of Inigo Jones, who, in
order to prove that the latter was Roman, had given an entirely
factitious account of it.  As he rode over the Wiltshire downs, hawking
with Colonel Long, he had ample opportunities for these antiquarian
investigations.  "Our sport," he wrote, "was very good, and in a
romantick countrey, for the prospects are noble and vast, the downs
stockt with numerous flocks of sheep, the turfe rich and fragrant with
thyme and burnet; nor are the nut-brown shepherdesses without their
graces.  But the flight of the falcons was but a parenthesis to the
Colonell's facetious discourse, who was _tam Marti quam Mercurio_, and
the Muses did accompany him with his hawkes and spaniells."

The country was charming; but London too was full of pleasures, and the
winter nights passed swiftly with wine and talk.  For the company was
excellent.  There was Robert Hooke "that invented the Pendulum-Watches,
so much more useful than the other watches," and a calculating machine,
and hundreds of other contrivances--"he believes not fewer than a
thousand"--and who declared he had forestalled Mr. Newton; and there
was Dr. Tonge, who had first taught children to write by means of
copper-plates, and left behind him "two tomes in folio of alchymy"; and
Francis Potter, the first to practise the transfusion of blood, who, at
10 o'clock in the morning of December 10, 1625, as he was going
upstairs, had discovered "the mysterie of the Beaste"; and John Pell,
the inventor of the division-sign in arithmetic, who "haz sayd to me
that he did believe that he solved some questions _non sine divino
auxilio_."  And then the gentle gossip went back to earlier days--to
old Mr. Oughtred, Sir Christopher's master, who "taught all free," and
was an astrologer, though he confessed "that he was not satisfied how
it came about that one might foretell by the starres, but so it was,"
and whose "wife was a penurious woman, and would not allow him to burne
candle after supper, by which meanes many a good notion is lost, and
many a problem unsolved"; and so back to a still more remote and
bizarre past--to Dr. John Dee, of Queen Elizabeth's time, "who wore a
gowne like an artist's gowne, with hanging sleeves and a slit," made
plates of gold "by projection," and "used to distil egge-shells."

Aubrey lived on into old age--vague, precise, idle, and busy to the
last.  His state of life, he felt, was not quite satisfactory.  He was
happy; but he would have been happier still in some other world.  He
regretted the monasteries.  He wished "the reformers had been more
moderate on that point."  It was "fitt there should be receptacles and
provision for contemplative men"; and "what a pleasure 'twould have
been to have travelled from monastery to monastery!"  As it was, he did
the next best thing--he travelled from country house to country house.
In the summer of 1697, when he was over seventy, as he was riding
through Oxford on his way to Lady Long's, he was seized with sudden
illness, and his journeying was ended for ever.

In the great mass of papers that he left behind him it was hardly to be
supposed that there could be anything of permanent value.  Most of the
antique science was already out of date at his death.  But it so
happened that Aubrey's appetite for knowledge had carried him into a
field of inquiry which, little explored in his own day, attracts the
greatest interest in ours.  He was an assiduous biographer.  Partly to
help the ungrateful Anthony Wood in the compilation of his _Athenae
Oxonienses_, but chiefly for his own delight, Aubrey was in the habit
of jotting down on scraps of paper every piece of information he could
acquire concerning both his own contemporaries and the English worthies
of previous generations.  He was accurate, he had an unfailing eye for
what was interesting, and he possessed--it was almost inevitable in
those days--a natural gift of style.  The result is that his _Short
Lives_ (which have been admirably edited for the Clarendon Press by Mr.
Andrew Clark) are not only an authority of the highest importance upon
seventeenth-century England, but one of the most readable of books.  A
biography should either be as long as Boswell's or as short as
Aubrey's.  The method of enormous and elaborate accretion which
produced the _Life of Johnson_ is excellent, no doubt; but, failing
that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure essentials--a
vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions,
commentaries, or padding.  This is what Aubrey gives us; this, and one
thing more--a sense of the pleasing, anxious being who, with his odd
old alchemy, has transmuted a few handfuls of orts and relics into
golden life.




THE LIFE, ILLNESS, AND DEATH OF DR. NORTH

John North was a man of eminence in his day--a prebend of Westminster,
Professor of Greek at Cambridge, Master of Trinity College, and Clerk
of the King's Closet: now totally forgotten.  Only the curious
inquirer, chancing on the obscure and absurd memoir of him by his
admiring younger brother, Roger, catches a glimpse of the intense
individual existence of this no longer distinguished man.  In the sight
of God, we used to be told, a thousand years are as a day; possibly;
but notions of the deity are not what they were in the days of King
David and Sir Isaac Newton; Evolution, the Life Force, and Einstein
have all intervened; so that whether the dictum is still one to which
credence should be attached is a problem that must be left to Professor
Whitehead (who has studied the subject very carefully) to determine.
However that may be, for mortal beings the case is different.  In their
sight (or perhaps one should say their blindness) a thousand years are
too liable to be not as a day but as just nothing.  The past is almost
entirely a blank.  The indescribable complexities, the incalculable
extravagances, of a myriad consciousnesses have vanished for ever.
Only by sheer accident, when some particular drop from the ocean of
empty water is slipped under the microscope--only when some Roger North
happens to write a foolish memoir, which happens to survive, and which
we happen to open--do we perceive for an amazed moment or two the
universe of serried and violent sensations that lie concealed so
perfectly in the transparency of oblivion.

Born in 1645, the younger son of an impecunious peer, John North was
one of those good little boys who, in the seventeenth century, were
invariably destined to Learning, the Universities, and the Church.  His
goodness, his diligence, his scrupulosity, were perhaps, it is true,
the result of a certain ingrained timidity rather than anything else;
but that could not be helped.  Fear is not easily exorcised.  As an
undergraduate at Cambridge the youth was still afraid of ghosts in the
dark, and slept with the bedclothes over his head.  "For some time," we
are told, "he lay with his Tutor, who once, coming home, found the
Scholar in bed with only his Crown visible.  The Tutor, indiscreetly
enough, pulled him by the Hair; whereupon the Scholar sunk down, and
the Tutor followed, and at last, with a great Outcry, the Scholar
sprung up, expecting to see an enorm Spectre."  But in spite of such
contretemps the young man pursued his studies with exemplary industry.
He was soon a Fellow of his college and a Doctor of Divinity.  He
continued to work and work; collected a vast library; read the Classics
until "Greek became almost vernacular to him"; wrestled with Hebrew,
dived deep into Logic and Metaphysics, and was even "a Friend to,
though no great Scholar in, the Mathematicks."  Unwilling to waste a
moment of time, the Doctor found means for turning the most ordinary
conversations into matter for improvement, but "he could not be pleased
with such insipid Pastime as Bowls, or less material Discourse, such as
Town Tales, Punning, and the Like."  At last his fame as a prodigy of
learning spread over the land.  He preached before King Charles II, and
the great Duke of Lauderdale became his patron.  At the early age of
twenty-seven, his talents and virtues were rewarded by the
Professorship of Greek in the University of Cambridge.

His talents and virtues were indeed great; but still they were informed
and dominated by an underlying apprehensiveness.  Meticulous, in the
true sense of the word, was the nature of the Doctor.  An alarmed
exactitude kept him continually on the stretch.  He was in fear alike
for the state of his soul and for his reputation with posterity.  He
published only one small volume--a commentary on some of Plato's
Dialogues; all the rest of the multitudinous fruits of his
labours--notes, sermons, treatises, lectures, dissertations--were
burnt, by his direction, after his death.  A small note-book alone
survived by accident, containing the outline of a great work against
Socinians, Republics, and Hobbes.  But the Doctor had taken care to
write on the first page of it--"I beshrew his heart, that gathers my
opinion from anything he finds wrote here."  Nor was this strange
diffidence merely literary; it extended to his person as well.  He
would never allow his portrait to be painted, in spite of the
entreaties of Sir Peter Lely; "and, what was very odd, he would not
leave the Print in his Bed, where he had lain, remain undefaced."

Curiously enough, his appearance seemed to belie his character.  His
complexion was florid, his hair flaxen, and, "as some used to jest, his
Features were scandalous, as showing rather a Madam _entravestie_ than
a Book-Worm."  At times, indeed, it almost appeared as if his features
were a truer index to his soul than the course of his life.  His
friends were surprised to see that, among his pupils, he "affected to
refresh himself with the society of the young Noblemen," who gathered
round him, in fits of laughter, "like Younglings about old _Silenus_."
He was arch, too, with the ladies, plying them with raillery.  "Of all
the Beasts of the Field," he said, "God Almighty thought Woman the
fittest Companion for Man"; and the ladies were delighted.  But
unfortunately no corresponding specimen of his jests with the young
noblemen has been preserved.

In 1677, when he was thirty-two, his career reached its climax, and he
was made Master of Trinity.  The magnificent appointment proved to be
his ruin.  Faced with the governance of the great college over which
the omniscient Barrow had lately ruled and which the presence of Newton
still made illustrious, the Doctor's sense of responsibility, of duty,
and of inadequacy became almost pathological.  His days and his nights
passed in one ceaseless round of devotion, instruction, and
administration, reading, writing, and abstemiousness.  He had no longer
any time for the young and the fair; no time for a single particle of
enjoyment; no time even for breakfast.  His rule was strict beyond all
measure and precedent.  With relentless severity he pursued the
undergraduates through their exercises and punished them for their
peccadilloes.  His unpopularity became intense: he was openly jeered at
in the Cloisters, and one evening a stone came whizzing through the
window of the room in the Lodge where he was sitting, and fell in the
fire at his feet.  Nor was he consoled by the friendship of his equals.
The Senior Fellows were infuriated by his sour punctilio; a violent
feud sprang up; there were shocking scenes at the council meetings.
"Let me be buried in the ante-chapel," exclaimed the Master in his
desperation, "so that they may trample on me dead as they have living."

And death was always before his eyes; for now a settled hypochondria
was added to his other miseries.  He was a prey to constant nightmare.
He had little doubt that he would perish of the stone.  Taking upon
himself the functions of the Wise Woman, he displayed before his
embarrassed friends the obvious symptoms of fatal disorder.  "Gravel!
Red gravel!" he gasped.  In reality his actual weakness lay in quite
another direction.  One day he caught cold, it grew worse, his throat
was affected, his uvula swelled.  The inflammation continued, and
before long the unhappy Doctor became convinced that his uvula would
have to be cut off.  All the physicians of the University were
summoned, and they confessed that the case was grave.  It was the age
of Molire, and the practitioners of Cambridge might well have figured
in the "Malade Imaginaire."  Their prescriptions were terrific and
bizarre: drenches, "enough to purge a strong man from off his legs,"
accompanied by amber, to be smoked like tobacco in pipes, with
astringent powders blown into the mouth through quills.  The Doctor,
who, with all his voluminous reading, had never heard of Diafoirus,
believed every word he was told, and carried out the fearful orders
with elaborate conscientiousness.  The result was plain to all; in a
few weeks his health was completely shattered, and his friends, to
their amazement, saw him "come helmeted in Caps upon Caps, and meagre
as one newly crope out of a Fever."  They privately consulted the great
Dr. Lower in London.  He threw up his hands.  "I would undertake," he
said, "by the smoak of Amber alone, to put the soundest Man in the
World into Convulsion Fits."  But it was too late to intervene; the
treatment was continued, while the Doctor struggled on with the duties
of his office.  Two scholars were to be publicly admonished for
scandalous conduct; the fellows assembled; the youths stood trembling;
the Master appeared.  Emaciated, ghastly, in his black gown, and with a
mountain of caps upon his head, the extraordinary creature began a
tirade of bitter and virulent reproof; when suddenly his left leg
swerved beneath him, and he fell in a fit upon the ground.  It was
apoplexy.  He was carried to his bed, where the physicians clustered
round him.  The one thing, they declared, that was essential was that
he should never lose consciousness; if he did he would never regain it;
and they therefore ordered that a perpetual noise should be made about
his ears.  Whereupon "there was a Consort of Tongs, Firegrate,
Wainscote-Drum, and dancing of Curtains and Curtain Rings, such as
would have made a sound Man mad."  At that moment, old Lady North, the
patient's mother and a formidable dowager, appeared upon the scene.
She silenced the incredible tintinnabulation; she even silenced the
faculty; and she succeeded in nursing her son back from death.

Yet there were some who averred that it would have been better had she
never done so.  For now the strangest of the Doctor's transformations
came upon him.  His recovery was not complete; his body was paralyzed
on the left side; but it was in his mind that the most remarkable
change had occurred.  His fears had left him.  His scrupulosity, his
diffidence, his seriousness, even his morality--all had vanished.  He
lay on his bed, in reckless levity, pouring forth a stream of flippant
observations, and naughty stories, and improper jokes.  While his
friends hardly knew which way to look, he laughed consumedly, his
paralyzed features drawn up into a curiously distorted grin.  He sent
for a gay young scholar of the college, Mr. Warren, to sit by him and
regale him with merry tales and readings from light romances.  And
there was worse still to follow.  Attacked by epileptic seizures, he
declared that the only mitigation of his sufferings lay in the
continued consumption of wine.  He, who had been so noted for his
austerities, now tossed off, with wild exhilaration, glass after glass
of the strongest sherry; the dry ascetic had become a convert to the
golden gospel of _la dive bouteille_.  In the depth of the night, the
studious precincts of the Great Court of Trinity were disturbed by
peculiar sounds--the high, triumphant, one-sided cackle of the Master,
as he lay, with his flagon in his hand and young Mr. Warren beside him,
absorbed in the abandoned, exuberant fantasies of the Cur of Meudon.

After four years of this strange existence, the Doctor died in his
sleep.  He was buried, as he had directed, in the ante-chapel of the
college, where, under a small square stone, engraved with the initials
"J.N.," so many singular agitations came to their final rest.  In his
brother Roger's opinion, "the Consciousness of a well-spent Life was of
great service to him," for otherwise he "might have fallen into
Melancholy, Dejections, Despair, and Misconstructions of Providence."
And probably Roger was right; conscientiousness is apt, in however
devious a manner, to have its reward in this world.  Whether it also
has it in any other is another of those questions that must be referred
to Professor Whitehead.




CONGREVE, COLLIER, MACAULAY, AND MR. SUMMERS

As the Victorian Age grows dim on the horizon, various neglected
luminaries re-emerge--among others the comic dramatists of the
Restoration.  The work of Sheridan begins to be taken at its true
value--as a clever but emasculated _rifacimento_; the supreme master of
prose comedy in English is seen to be Congreve.  At least, let us hope
so.  To those who are still in doubt, or in ignorance, the new complete
edition of Congreve's works, published by the Nonesuch Press, and
edited by Mr. Montague Summers, should bring conviction or conversion.
Congreve now appears for the first time as he should have appeared long
ago--as a classic.  The get-up of these four quarto volumes--though it
cannot be said to equal the perfect amenity of the Baskerville edition
of 1761--is admirable; and the critical prefaces, notes, and
commentaries are a monument of erudition and exactitude.  Mr. Summers
prints the plays, probably rightly, from the original editions, and not
from the last edition published during the author's lifetime, which has
formed the basis of all subsequent texts.  He thus restores to life
several excellent jokes, deleted by Congreve owing to the attacks of
Jeremy Collier, though he does so at the cost of relegating various
small improvements and polishings to the list of variants; but no
doubt--if one must choose--polishings are less valuable than jokes.
Another decided gain is the reversion to the original arrangement of
the scenes, which had been unnecessarily Frenchified by Congreve
himself, and had subsequently undergone a process of serious
degradation--still unfortunately visible in the current "Mermaid"
edition.  Mr. Summers's interesting introduction is full of learning,
argument, and feeling--in fact, perhaps too full.  There is an
idiosyncratic exuberance about it, which sorts ill with the exquisite
impersonality of Congreve.  To speak of "the disastrous Revolution of
1688," for instance, and to describe the Lollards as "Wyclif's gang,"
is odd; and oddity should not appear in Congreve's editor.  One small
point may be mentioned, as an illustration of the dangers which attend
an excess of zeal: "'Tis true we found you and Mr. Fainall in the blue
garret," says Mincing, the lady's maid, to Mrs. Marwood; "by the same
token, you swore us to secrecy upon Messalina's Poems." Mr. Summers has
the following note: "'Messalina's Poems.'  Considerable research has
failed to trace this book.  It is alluded to before as 'a Book of
Verses and Poems,' and I would suggest that it was a collection of
obscene lyrics and songs clandestinely printed."  Alas, for Mr.
Summers's "considerable research"!  A word with Millamant would have
brought light in a moment.  For the explanation is as simple as it is
delightful: Mincing had got the title of the "Book of Verses and Poems"
just a little wrong; instead of "Messalina's," she should have said
"Miscellaneous."

The difficulty of distinguishing between what is Miscellaneous and what
is Messalina's is not confined to Mincing.  The dividing line has never
been absolutely drawn, and learned Magistrates are worried with the
question to this hour.  But at the end of the seventeenth century
discussions upon ethics and sthetics were even more confused and
confusing than they are at the present day.  For one thing, there were
more red herrings on the track.  The divine and mysterious requirements
of dogmatic theology had to be attended to--so had the almost equally
divine and mysterious pronouncements of Aristotle.  Jeremy Collier,
however, was troubled with no doubts.  He saw Messalina everywhere;
and, in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the
English Stage_, published in 1698, he singled out the dramatists of the
time for a violent castigation.  To a modern reader, Collier's book is
nothing but a curiosity, its only merit being, oddly enough, an
sthetic one--it is written in good plain English.  The arguments
throughout are grotesque, and it is clear that Collier had never
stopped for two minutes to consider the general questions at issue.  He
supports his contentions by appeals to Tertullian, Minutius Felix, St.
Chrysostom, and "the Bishop of Arras"; the ancient drama, he gravely
maintains, was less scurrilous than the modern--did not Sophocles show
the deepest respect for oracles?  As for his conception of what
constitutes stage immorality, it is most extraordinary.  Any opinion
held by any character in a play is assumed to be the author's.
Congreve is seriously pronounced to be obscene and blasphemous because
he makes his gentlemen say "Pox on't," and his ladies "Jesu!" while
Dryden is savagely hectored for "abusing the clergy" because in one of
his plays an Egyptian Princess rails at the priests of Apis.
Obviously, this absurd volume lay open to more than one crushing
rejoinder.  Several rejoinders were made; but their ineptitude is
symptomatic of the age; and the most inept of all was Congreve's.  With
a strange perversity the wittiest man alive made a complete fool of
himself by rushing into the one position that was untenable.  He
maintained that his plays were not indecent, but that, on the contrary,
they were written to subserve the highest ends of virtue.  He, too,
actually appealed to the Early Fathers.  It is impossible to decide
which of the two antagonists is the more ridiculous--Collier when he
fiercely anathematizes Congreve for calling a coachman Jehu, or
Congreve when he blandly assumes that there is nothing improper in Lady
Plyant and Mr. Scandal.

Unluckily, the true nature of this preposterous controversy has become
obscured by Macaulay.  In an essay, written in that style which, with
its metallic exactness and its fatal efficiency, was certainly one of
the most remarkable products of the Industrial Revolution, Macaulay has
impressed upon the mind of the ordinary reader his own version of the
affair.  Wishing to make a dramatic story of it, with a satisfactory
moral, he has presented Collier as a hero--not, to be sure, without his
little shortcomings, but still a hero--who, in the twinkling of an eye,
purged not only the English theatre, but English literature itself, of
the deplorable and reprehensible grossness which had been disgracing
the country for the last forty years.  A few inconvenient facts are
forgotten--the fact, for instance, that the Restoration Comedies
continued to be acted unceasingly throughout the eighteenth century.
But, no doubt, it is to the moral revolution effected by the _Short
View_ that we owe the exquisite propriety of the farces of Fielding and
the chaste refinements of _Gulliver's Travels_ and the _Dunciad_.

One of the wildest of Macaulay's aberrations is his picture of Collier
as a great humorist.  As Mr. Summers observes, an utter--a
devastating--a positively unnerving lack of humour is the most
conspicuous feature of the _Short View_.  Yet Macaulay has the
effrontery to mention Pascal in connection with this egregious jackass.
He was gambling heavily on none of his readers having the curiosity to
open the book.

Whether Mr. Summers's account of the dispute will supersede Macaulay's
seems to be a little doubtful.  He is, perhaps, too much of a partisan.
His unwillingness to admit the weakness of Congreve's arguments
diminishes the force of his denunciation of Collier's.  In truth, the
question is not so simple.  No doubt, as Mr. Summers says, art and life
are different things; but wherein precisely lies the difference?
Later, Mr. Summers justifies the comedies of the Restoration on the
ground that they were a truthful representation of life as it was lived
in the high society of the time.  "A close parallel," he adds, "may be
found in the decadence of Venice."  Surely he might have pushed the
comparison a little further--as far as the present day.  One can easily
think of a Mr. Tattle in Bloomsbury, and a Lady Froth in Mayfair.
Nevertheless, it is plainly paradoxical to find in _The Double Dealer_
or _The Way of the World_ a faithful presentment of any state of
society; it is not in that fashion that real life is lived.  What,
then, is the explanation of this close resemblance combined with this
obvious unlikeness?  How is it that we are well acquainted with Mrs.
Frail, without for a moment supposing that either she or ourselves are
figuring in a Congreve comedy?  Perhaps the truth is that pure Comedy,
unlike Tragedy and Drama and most forms of fiction, depends for its
existence on the construction of a conventional world in which, while
human nature and human actions are revealed, their consequences are
suspended.  The characters in Comedy are real; but they exist _in
vacuo_.  They are there neither to instruct us nor to exalt us, but
simply to amuse us; and therefore the effects which would in reality
follow from their conduct must not appear.  If they did, the comedy
would cease to exist: the jealous husband would become a tragic
personage; the heavy father a Galsworthy character; the rake would be
revealed as a pest, and the old bore as ... an old bore.  By the magic
of Comedy, what is scabrous, what is melancholy, what is vicious, and
what is tiresome in the actual life of society is converted into
charming laughter and glittering delight.

This being so, it is as futile for the comic writer to pretend that he
is, in reality, a moralist in disguise, as it is for the moralist to
blame the comic writer for ignoring morality.  The true weight of the
moral objection lies in a very different consideration.  It is
perfectly possible that the presentation of such spectacles as Comedy
presents may prove, in certain circumstances, undermining to the virtue
of the spectators.  But it is obvious that here no general rule can be
laid down; everything depends upon contingencies.  The time, the place,
the shifting significations of words, the myriad dispositions of the
audience or the reader--all these things are variables which can never
be reduced to a single formula.  Queen Caroline's meat was Queen
Victoria's poison; and perhaps Lord Macaulay's poison was Mr. Aldous
Huxley's pap.  Every case must be considered on its own merits; but,
after all, in any case, such considerations have no bearing upon the
intrinsic excellence of works of art.  Fireworks do not cease to be
exhilarating and beautiful because it is dangerous for inexperienced
governesses to play with them.  The comedies of Congreve must be ranked
among the most wonderful and glorious creations of the human mind,
although it is quite conceivable that, in certain circumstances, and at
a given moment, a whole bench of Bishops might be demoralized by their
perusal.




MADAME DE SVIGN'S COUSIN

Madame de Svign was one of those chosen beings in whom the forces of
life are so abundant and so glorious that they overflow in every
direction and invest whatever they meet with the virtue of their own
vitality.  She was the sun of a whole system, which lived in her
light--which lives still for us with a kind of reflected immortality.
We can watch--with what a marvellous distinctness!--the planets
revolving through that radiance--the greater and the less, and the
subordinate moons and dimmest asteroids--from Madame de Grignan herself
to the dancing gypsies at Vichy.  But then, when the central luminary
is withdrawn, what an incredible convulsion!  All vanish; we are dimly
aware for a little of some obscure shapes moving through strange
orbits; and after that there is only darkness.

Emmanuel de Coulanges, for instance.  He lived a long life, filled his
own place in the world, married, travelled, had his failures and his
successes ... but all those happenings were mere phenomena; the only
reality about him lay in one thing--he was Madame de Svign's cousin.
He was born when she was seven years old, and he never knew a time when
he had not loved her.  She had petted the little creature when it was a
baby, and she had gone on petting it all her life.  He had not been
quite an ordinary child: he had had strange fancies.  There was a
fairy, called _Cafut_, so he declared, to whom he was devoted; this was
not approved of--it looked like incipient madness; and several
whippings had to be administered before _Cafut_ was exorcized.  In
reality, no one could have been saner than the little Emmanuel; but he
had ways of amusing himself which seemed unaccountable to the grandly
positive generation into which he had been born.  There was something
about him which made him no fit contemporary of Bossuet.  Madame de
Svign, so completely, so magnificently, a child of her age, while she
loved him, could never take him quite seriously.  In her eyes, though
he might grow old, he could not grow up.  At the age of sixty,
white-haired and gouty, he remained for her what, in fact, his tiny
pink-cheeked rotundity suggested--an infant still.  She found him
adorable and unimportant.  Even his sins--and in those days sins were
serious--might, somehow or other, be disregarded; and besides, she
observed that he had only one--it was _gaudeamus_; she scolded him with
a smile.  It was delightful to have anything to do with him--to talk
with him, to laugh at him, to write to him.  "Le style qu'on a en lui
crivant," she said, "ressemble  la joie et  la sant."  It was true;
and some of her most famous, some of her most delicious and
life-scattering letters were written to her cousin Coulanges.

He married well--a lady who was related to the great Louvois; but the
connection did him little good in the world.  For a moment, indeed, an
important public office was dangled before his eyes; but it was snapped
up by somebody else, and Coulanges, after a few days of disappointment,
consoled himself easily enough--with a song.  He was very fond of
songs, composing them with elegant rapidity to the popular airs of the
day; every circumstance of his existence, however grave or however
trivial--a journey, a joke, the world's cruelties, his wife's
infidelities--he rigged them all out in the bows and ribbons of his
little rhymes.  His wife was pretty, gay, fashionable, and noted for
her epigrams.  Her adorers were numerous: there was the Comte de
Brancas, famous--immortal, even, as he has his niche in La Bruyre's
gallery--for his absentmindedness; there was the Abb Ttu, remarkable
for two things--for remaining the friend both of Madame de Montespan
and of Madame de Maintenon, and for being the first person who was ever
afflicted by the vapours; and there was the victorious--the
scandalously victorious--Marquis de la Trousse.  Decidedly the lady was
gay--too gay to be quite to the taste of Madame de Svign, who
declared that she was a leaf fluttering in the wind.  "Cette feuille,"
she said, "est la plus frivole et la plus lgre marchandise que vous
ayez jamais vue."  But Coulanges was indifferent to her lightness; what
he did feel was her inordinate success at Court.  There she gadded, in
a blaze of popularity, launching her epigrams and hobnobbing with
Madame de Maintenon; he was out of it; and he was growing old, and the
gout attacked him in horrid spasms.  At times he was almost sad.

Then, gradually and for no apparent reason, there was a change.  What
was it?  Was the world itself changing?  Was one age going out and
another coming in?  From about the year 1690 onwards, one begins to
discern the first signs of the petrifaction, the _rigor mortis_ of the
great epoch of Louis XIV; one begins to detect, more and more clearly
in the circumambient atmosphere, the scent and savour of the eighteenth
century.  Already there had been symptoms--there had been the fairy
_Cafut_, and the Abb Ttu's vapours.  But now there could be no more
doubt about it; the new strange tide was flowing steadily in.  And upon
it was wafted the cockleshell of Coulanges.  At fifty-seven, he found
that he had come into his own.  No longer was he out of it--far from
it: his was now the popularity, the inordinate success.  He was asked
everywhere, and he always fitted in.  His songs particularly, his
frivolous neat little songs, became the rage; they flew from mouth to
mouth; and the young people, at all the fashionable parties, danced as
they sang them.  At last they were collected by some busybody and
printed, to his fury and delight; and his celebrity was redoubled.  At
the same time a wonderful rejuvenation came upon him; he seemed to grow
younger daily; he drank, he guzzled, with astonishing impunity; there
must have been a mistake, he said, in his birth certificate--it was
ante-dated at least twenty years.  As for his gout, it had gone for
ever; he had drowned it by bathing, when he was over sixty, all one
summer in the Seine.  Madame de Svign could only be delighted.  She
had given a great deal of thought to the matter, she told him, and she
had come to the conclusion that he was the happiest man in the world.
Probably she was right--she almost always was.  But, oddly enough,
while Coulanges was undergoing this transformation, a precisely
contrary one had befallen his wife.  She had, in sober truth, grown
old--old, and disillusioned, and serious.  She could bear the Court no
longer--she despised it; she wavered between piety and stoicism;
quietly, persistently, she withdrew into herself.  Madame de Svign,
philosophizing and quoting La Fontaine, found--it was surprising---that
she admired her--the poor brown leaf; and, on her side, Madame de
Coulanges grew more and more devoted to Madame de Svign.  Her husband
mildly amused her.  As she watched him flying from country-house to
country-house, she suggested that it would save time and trouble if he
lived in a swing, so that he might whirl backwards and forwards for the
rest of his days, without ever having to touch the earth again.  "C'est
toujours son plaisir qui le gouverne," she observed, with an ironical
smile; "et il est heureux: en faut-il davantage?"  Apparently not.
Coulanges, adored by beautiful young Duchesses, disputed over by
enormously wealthy Dowagers, had nothing left to wish for.  The
gorgeous Cardinal de Bouillon took him up--so did the Duc de Bouillon,
and the Chevalier--all the Bouillons, in fact; it was a delightful
family.  The Cardinal carried him off to his country palace, where
there was music all day long, and the servants had the air of noblemen,
and the _ragouts_ reached a height of ecstatic piquancy--_ragouts_ from
every country in Europe, it seemed--how they understood each other when
they came together on his plate, he had no idea--but no matter; he ate
them all.

In the midst of this, the inevitable and the unimaginable happened:
Madame de Svign died.  The source of order, light, and heat was no
more; the reign of Chaos and Old Night descended.  One catches a
hurried vision of Madame de Grignan, pale as ashes, elaborating
sentences of grief; and then she herself and all her belongings--her
husband, her son, her castle, with its terraces and towers, its Canons,
its violins, its Mistral, its hundred guests--are utterly abolished.
For a little longer, through a dim penumbra, Coulanges and his wife
remain just visible.  She was struck down--overwhelmed with grief and
horror.  Was it possible, was it really possible, that Madame de
Svign was dead?  She could hardly believe it.  It was a reversal of
nature.  Surely it could not be.  She sat alone, considering life and
death, silent, harrowed, and sceptical, while her husband--ah! even her
husband felt this blow.  The little man wrote a piteous letter to
Madame de Grignan's daughter, young Madame de Simiane, and tears
blotted the page.  He was only a shadow now--all too well he knew it;
and yet even shadows must obey the law of their being.  In a few weeks
he wrote to Madame de Simiane again; he was more cheerful; he was
staying with Madame de Louvois in her house at Ghoisy, a truly
delicious abode; but Madame de Simiane must not imagine that he did not
pass many moments, in spite of all the company, in sad remembrance of
his friend.  A few weeks more, and he was dancing; the young people
danced, and why should not he, who was as young as the youngest?  All
the Bouillons were in the house.  The jigging vision grows fainter; but
a few years later one sees him at the height of his felicity, having
been provided by one of his kind friends with a room in the Palace at
Versailles.  More years pass, he is very old, he is very poor, but what
does it matter?--

  Je connais de plus en plus
  En faisant trs-grande chre,
  Qu'un estomac qui digre
  Vaut plus de cent mille cus.

On his seventy-sixth birthday he sings and dances, and looks forward to
being a hundred without any difficulty at all.  Then he eats and
drinks, and sings and dances again.  And so he disappears.

But Madame de Coulanges, ever sadder and more solitary, stayed in her
room, thinking, hour after hour, over the fire.  The world was nothing
to her; success and happiness nothing; heaven itself nothing.  She
pulled her long fur-trimmed taffeta gown more closely round her, and
pushed about the embers, wondering, for the thousandth time, whether it
was really possible that Madame de Svign was dead.




THE SAD STORY OF DR. COLBATCH

The Rev. Dr. Colbatch could not put up with it any more.  Animated by
the highest motives, he felt that he must intervene.  The task was
arduous, odious, dangerous; his antagonist most redoubtable; but Dr.
Colbatch was a Doctor of Divinity, Professor of Casuistry in the
University of Cambridge, a Senior Fellow of Trinity College, and his
duty was plain; the conduct of the Master could be tolerated no longer;
Dr. Bentley must go.

In the early years of the eighteenth century the life of learning was
agitated, violent, and full of extremes.  Everything about it was on
the grand scale.  Erudition was gigantic, controversies were frenzied,
careers were punctuated by brutal triumphs, wild temerities, and
dreadful mortifications.  One sat, bent nearly double, surrounded by
four circles of folios, living to edit Hesychius and confound Dr. Hody,
and dying at last with a stomach half-full of sand.  The very names of
the scholars of those days had something about them at once terrifying
and preposterous: there was Graevius, there was Wolfius, there was
Cruquius; there were Torrentius and Rutgersius; there was the gloomy
Baron de Stosch, and there was the deplorable De Pauw.  But Richard
Bentley was greater than all these.  Combining extraordinary knowledge
and almost infinite memory with an acumen hardly to be distinguished
from inspiration, and a command of logical precision which might have
been envied by mathematicians or generals in the field, he revivified
with his dmonic energy the whole domain of classical scholarship.  The
peer of the mightiest of his predecessors--of Scaliger, of
Casaubon--turning, in skilful strength, the magic glass of science, he
brought into focus the world's comprehension of ancient literature with
a luminous exactitude of which they had never dreamed.  His prowess had
first declared itself in his _Dissertation upon the Epistles of
Phalaris_, in which he had obliterated under cartloads of erudition and
ridicule the miserable Mr. Boyle.  He had been rewarded, in the year
1700, when he was not yet forty, with the Mastership of Trinity; and
then another side of his genius had appeared.  It became evident that
he was not merely a scholar, that he was a man of action and affairs,
and that he intended to dominate over the magnificent foundation of
Trinity with a command as absolute as that which he exercised over
questions in Greek grammar.  He had immediately gathered into his own
hands the entire control of the College; he had manipulated the
statutes, rearranged the finances, packed the Council; he had compelled
the Society to rebuild and redecorate, at great expense, his own Lodge;
he had brought every kind of appointment--scholarships, fellowships,
livings--to depend simply upon his will.  The Fellows murmured and
protested in vain; their terrible tyrant treated them with scant
ceremony.  "You will die in your shoes!" he had shouted at one
tottering Senior who had ventured to oppose him; and another fat and
angry old gentleman he had named "The College Dog."  In fact, he
treated his opponents as if they had been corrupt readings in an old
manuscript.  At last there was open war.  The leading Fellows had
appealed to the Visitor of the College, the Bishop of Ely, to remove
the Master; and the Master had replied by denying the Bishop's
competence and declaring that the visitatorial power lay with the
Crown.  His subtle mind had detected an ambiguity in the Charter; the
legal position was, indeed, highly dubious; and for five years, amid
indescribable animosities, he was able to hold his enemies at bay.  In
the meantime, he had not been idle in other directions: he had
annihilated Le Clerc, who, ignorant of Greek, was rash enough to
publish a Menander; he had produced a monumental edition of Horace; and
he had pulverized Freethinking in the person of Anthony Collins.  But
his foes had pressed upon him; and eventually it had seemed that his
hour was come.  In 1714 he had been forced to appear before the
Bishop's court; his defence had been weak; the Bishop had drawn up a
judgment of deprivation.  Then there had been a _coup de thtre_.  The
Bishop had suddenly died before delivering judgment.  All the previous
proceedings lapsed, and Bentley ruled once more supreme in Trinity.

It was at this point that the Rev. Dr. Colbatch, animated by the
highest motives, felt that he must intervene.  Hitherto he had filled
the role of a peacemaker; but now the outrageous proceedings of the
triumphant Master--who, in the flush of victory, was beginning to expel
hostile Fellows by force from the College, and had even refused to
appoint Dr. Colbatch himself to the Vice-Mastership--called aloud for
the resistance of every right-thinking man.  And Dr. Colbatch flattered
himself that he could resist to some purpose.  He had devoted his life
to the study of the law; he was a man of the world; he was acquainted
with Lord Carteret; and he had written a book on Portugal.
Accordingly, he hurried to London and interviewed great personages, who
were all of them extremely sympathetic and polite; then he returned to
Trinity, and, after delivering a fulminating sermon in the chapel, he
bearded the Master at a College meeting, and actually had the nerve to
answer him back.  Just then, moreover, the tide seemed to be turning
against the tyrant.  Bentley, not content with the battle in his own
College, had begun a campaign against the University.  There was a
hectic struggle, and then the Vice-Chancellor, by an unparalleled
exercise of power, deprived Bentley of his degrees: the Master of
Trinity College and the Regius Professor of Divinity was reduced to the
status of an undergraduate.  This delighted the heart of Dr. Colbatch.
He flew to London, where Lord Carteret, as usual, was all smiles and
agreement.  When, a little later, the College living of Orewell fell
vacant, Dr. Colbatch gave a signal proof of his power; for Bentley,
after refusing to appoint him to the living, at last found himself
obliged to give way.  Dr. Colbatch entered the rectory in triumph; was
it not clear that that villain at the Lodge was a sinking man?  But,
whether sinking or no, the villain could still use a pen to some
purpose.  In a pamphlet on a proposed edition of the New Testament,
Bentley took occasion to fall upon Dr. Colbatch tooth and nail.  The
rector of Orewell was "a casuistic drudge," a "plodding pupil of
Escobar," an insect, a snarling dog, a gnawing rat, a maggot, and a
cabbage-head.  His intellect was as dark as his countenance; his "eyes,
muscles, and shoulders were wrought up into the most solemn posture of
gravity"; he grinned horribly; he was probably mad; and his brother's
beard was ludicrously long.

On this Dr. Colbatch, chattering with rage, brought an action against
the Master for libel in the Court of the Vice-Chancellor.  By a cunning
legal device Bentley arranged that the action should be stopped by the
Court of King's Bench.  Was it possible that Dr. Colbatch's knowledge
of the law was not impeccable?  He could not believe it, and forthwith
composed a pamphlet entitled _Jus Academicum_, in which the whole case,
in all its bearings, was laid before the public.  The language of the
pamphlet was temperate, the references to Bentley were not indecently
severe; but, unfortunately, in one or two passages some expressions
seemed to reflect upon the competence of the Court of King's Bench.
The terrible Master saw his opportunity.  He moved the Court of King's
Bench to take cognizance of the _Jus Academicum_ as a contempt of their
jurisdiction.  A cold shiver ran down Dr. Colbatch's spine.  Was it
conceivable? ... But no!  He had friends in London, powerful friends,
who would never desert him.  He rushed to Downing Street; Lord
Townshend was reassuring; so was the Lord Chief Justice; and so was the
Lord Chancellor.  "Here," said Lord Carteret, waving a pen, "is the
magician's wand that will always come to the rescue of Dr. Colbatch.'"
Surely all was well.  Nevertheless, he was summoned to appear before
the Court of King's Bench in order to explain his pamphlet.  The judge
was old and testy; he misquoted Horace--"Jura negat sibi nata, nihil
non abrogat"; "_Arrogat_, my lord!" said Dr. Colbatch.  A little later
the judge once more returned to the quotation, making the same error.
"_Arrogat_, my lord!" cried Dr. Colbatch for the second time.  Yet once
again, in the course of his summing-up, the judge pronounced the word
"abrogat"; "_Arrogat_, my lord!" screamed, for the third time, Dr.
Colbatch.  The interruption was fatal.  The unhappy man was fined 50
and imprisoned for a week.

A less pertinacious spirit would have collapsed under such a dire
misadventure; but Dr. Colbatch fought on.  For ten years more, still
animated by the highest motives, he struggled to dispossess the Master.
Something was gained when yet another Bishop was appointed to the See
of Ely--a Bishop who disapproved of Bentley's proceedings.  With
indefatigable zeal Dr. Colbatch laid the case before the Bishop of
London, implored the Dean and Chapter of Westminster to interfere, and
petitioned the Privy Council.  In 1729 the Bishop of Ely summoned
Bentley to appear before him; whereupon Bentley appealed to the Crown
to decide who was the Visitor of Trinity College.  For a moment Dr.
Colbatch dreamed of obtaining a special Act of Parliament to deal with
his enemy; but even he shrank from such a desperate expedient; and at
length, in 1732, the whole case came up for decision before the House
of Lords.  At that very moment Bentley published his edition of
_Paradise Lost_, in which all the best passages were emended and
rewritten--a book remarkable as a wild aberration of genius, and no
less remarkable as containing, for the first time in print, "tow'ring
o'er the alphabet like Saul," the great Digamma.  If Bentley's object
had been to impress his judges in his favour, he failed; for the House
of Lords decided that the Bishop of Ely was the Visitor.  Once more
Bentley was summoned to Ely House.  Dr. Colbatch was on tenterhooks;
the blow was about to fall; nothing could avert it now, unless--he
trembled--if the Bishop were to die again?  But the Bishop did not die;
in 1734 he pronounced judgment; he deposed Bentley.

So, after thirty years, a righteous doom had fallen upon that proud and
wicked man.  Dr. Colbatch's exultation was inordinate: it was only
equalled, in fact, by his subsequent horror, indignation, and fury.
For Bentley had discovered in the Statutes of the College a clause
which laid it down that, when the Master was to be removed, the
necessary steps were to be taken by the Vice-Master.  Now the
Vice-Master was Bentley's creature; he never took the necessary steps;
and Bentley never ceased, so long as he lived, to be Master of Trinity.
Dr. Colbatch petitioned the House of Lords, he applied to the Court of
King's Bench, he beseeched Lord Carteret--all in vain.  His head
turned; he was old, haggard, dying.  Tossing on his bed at Orewell, he
fell into a delirium; at first his mutterings were inarticulate; but
suddenly, starting up, a glare in his eye, he exclaimed, with a strange
emphasis, to the utter bewilderment of the bystanders, "_Arrogat_, my
lord!" and immediately expired.




THE PRSIDENT DE BROSSES

A charming and sometimes forgotten feature of the world as it used to
be before the age of trains and telephones was the provincial capital.
When Edinburgh was as far from London as Vienna is to-day, it was
natural--it was inevitable--that it should be the centre of a local
civilization, which, while it remained politically and linguistically
British, developed a colour and a character of its own.  In France
there was the same pleasant phenomenon.  Bordeaux, Toulouse,
Aix-en-Provence--up to the end of the eighteenth century each of these
was in truth a capital, where a peculiar culture had grown up that was
at once French and idiosyncratic.  An impossibility to-day!  It is hard
to believe, as one whisks through Dijon in a tram, that here, a hundred
and fifty years ago, was the centre of a distinct and vigorous
civilization--until, perhaps, one leaves the tram, and turns aside into
the rue de la Prfecture.  Ah!  One has come upon a vanished age.  The
houses, so solid and yet so vivacious, with their cobbled courts and
coloured tiles, seem to be withdrawn into an aristocratic resignation.
Memory and forgetfulness are everywhere.  It is the moment to reflect
upon the Prsident de Brosses.

Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, had become in the eighteenth century
pre-eminently a city of magistrates.  There the provincial _parlement_
assembled and the laws were administered by the hereditary judges, the
nobility of the long robe, whose rule was more immediate, more
impressive, and almost more powerful, than the King's.  Charles de
Brosses was born into this aristocracy, and grew up to be a perfect
representative of its highest traditions.  He was extremely
intelligent, admirably conscientious, and crammed full of life.  He was
at once a wit, a scholar, a lawyer, and a man of the world.  He
resembled the generous wine of the country in his combination of gay
vitality with richness and strength.  His tiny figure and his satirical
face lost in the forest of a judicial wig might prompt to
laughter--"the corners of one's mouth," said Diderot, "couldn't help
going up when one looked at him"; but he was impressive on the bench;
and, late in life, was to prove his patriotism by his intrepid
resistance when the privileges of his province were attacked by the
royal authority.  In his leisure, he devoted himself to every kind of
literary and scientific work.  A tour in Italy produced a series of
amusing letters, which, published posthumously, are still read and
remembered; his book on the newly discovered Herculaneum (1750) was the
first on the subject; his _Histoire des navigations des Terres
Australes_ (1756) was of use to both Cook and Bougainville; his _Culte
des Dieux Ftiches_ (1760) contained a curious speculation on the
origin of the religion of Egypt; his _Trait de la formation mcanique
des langues_ (1765) was the earliest attempt at a science of etymology;
and his labours were concluded with an elaborate edition of _Sallust_
(1777) upon which he had worked for thirty years.  The growth of
knowledge has converted his researches and his speculations into mere
curiosities; but it was natural that the citizens of Dijon should have
honoured him as one of their most splendid luminaries, and that the
Prsident de Brosses should have been compared in his day to that other
great provincial figure of a previous generation--the Prsident de
Montesquieu.  Of course, though Dijon was select and Dijon was
magnificent, it had to be admitted that there did exist a higher
tribunal, at whose bar taste, learning, and behaviour received their
final doom or their crowning approbation: the drawing-rooms of Paris
reigned supreme.  In those drawing-rooms the Prsident was well thought
of; he had powerful friends at Court; was it not to be expected that at
last, in the fullness of time, his worth would be completely recognized
and receive its due reward in the highest honour that could fall to a
man of his pretensions--a seat in the Academy?  A prize, indeed, that
it was impossible not to hope for!  The promises of other worlds had
grown dim and dubious; but here, among the glorious forty, was a
definite, an indisputable immortality--and one, moreover, that
possessed the singular advantage of being enjoyable here and now, while
the eighteenth-century sun still shone on the rue de la Prfecture.

The Prsident was at the height of his exuberant manhood--he was not
yet fifty--when something occurred which had a strange and unexpected
effect upon his history.  Voltaire, having quarrelled with Frederick
the Great and shaken the dust of Potsdam from his feet, had been
wandering for some years in uncertainty among the minor states that lay
between France and Germany.  He had settled for a time at Colmar; he
had moved to Lausanne; then he had gone to Geneva and taken a country
house in its neighbourhood.  But the Calvinism of the townspeople, who
frowned at his passion for private theatricals, annoyed him; and his
eye fell on the house and territory of Ferney, which was just inside
the borders of France, but, lying on the eastern slopes of the Jura
mountains, was so remote as to be almost independent of French control
and within a drive of the free city of Geneva.  This was exactly what
he wanted--a secluded abode, where he would have elbow-room for his
activities, and from which he could bolt at any moment, if things
became too hot for him.  Accordingly, in 1758, he bought Ferney, where
he lived for the rest of his life; and at the same time he entered into
negotiations for the purchase of a neighbouring property--that of
Tournay--which belonged to the Prsident de Brosses.  The Prsident,
who already had a slight acquaintance with the great man--his wife, a
Crvecoeur, was the daughter of one of Voltaire's oldest
friends--declared that he would be delighted to oblige him.  There was
some stiff haggling, for each party prided himself on his business
capacity, but eventually Voltaire, for 35,000 francs, became possessed
of the domain of Tournay--which included the right to the title of
Count--on a life-tenancy.  The bargain, obviously, was something of a
gamble; the new Comte de Tournay was sixty-four, and, so he declared,
on the point of death; but then he had been on the point of death ever
since any one could remember.  When it was all over, the Prsident had
an uneasy feeling that he had been done.  The feeling increased as time
went on, and his agent informed him that the estate was being allowed
to go to rack and ruin.  He complained; but the poet replied with a
flat denial, declared--what was quite true--that he had built a theatre
at Tournay, and begged the Prsident to come and see his latest tragedy
performed in it.  A little later, a new manoeuvre began: Voltaire
proposed that he should buy the property outright.  The Prsident was
not altogether averse; but this time he was far more cautious; as the
negotiations proceeded, he became privately convinced that an attempt
was being made to cheat him; but he said nothing, and the proposal
lapsed.  Voltaire, on his side, was none too pleased with his bargain.
The land of Tournay was poor, and the Countship had brought with it
various responsibilities and expenses not at all to his taste.  He was
vexed; and his vexation took the form of bothering the Prsident, in
letter after letter, with a multitude of legal questions upon points
connected with the property.  The Prsident was also vexed; but he
answered every letter and every question with extreme civility.

In this way two years passed--two years during which the Prsident
published his _Culte des Dieux Ftiches_ and Voltaire his _Candide_.
The old creature at Ferney was at last beginning to settle down to the
final and by far the most important period of his immense and
extraordinary career.  Free, rich, happy, with his colossal reputation
and his terrific energy, he was starting on the great adventure of his
life--his onslaught upon Christianity.  Meanwhile his vitality and his
pugnacity were satisfying themselves in a multitude of minor ways.  He
was belabouring Rousseau, torturing Frron, annihilating le Franc de
Pompignan; he was corresponding with all the world, he was composing
half a dozen tragedies, he was writing the life of Peter the Great, he
was preparing a monumental edition of Corneille.  When, in the midst of
these and a hundred other activities, he received a bill for 281 francs
from a peasant called Chariot Baudy for fourteen loads of wood from
Tournay, he brushed the matter on one side.  More bother from Tournay!
But it was ridiculous--why should he pay for wood from his own estate?
And besides, he remembered quite well that the Prsident, before the
sale was completed, had told him that he could have as much wood as he
wanted.  He did nothing, and when Chariot Baudy pressed for the money,
refused to pay.  Then, early in 1761, a letter arrived from the
Prsident.  "Agreez, Monsieur," he began, "que je vous demande
l'explication d'une chose tout--fait singulire."  Chariot Baudy, he
continued, had, _before the sale of Tournay_, bought from the Prsident
the cut wood on the estate; Baudy had now sent in his account of what
he owed the Prsident, and had subtracted from it the sum of 281 francs
for wood supplied to M. de Voltaire; his reason for this was that M. de
Voltaire had told him that the wood was a gift from the Prsident.  "Je
vous demande excuse," the letter went on, "si je vous rpte un tel
propos: car vous sentez bien que je suis fort loign de croire que
vous l'ayez tenu, et je n'y ajoute pas la moindre foi.  Je ne prends
ceci que pour le discours d'un homme rustique fait pour ignorer les
usages du monde et les convenances; qui ne sait pas qu'on envoie bien 
son ami et son voisin un panier de pches, mais que si on s'avisait de
lui faire la galanterie de quatorze moules de bois, il le prendrait
pour une absurdit contraire aux biensances."  The sarcasm was clear
and cutting, and the Prsident proceeded to give his own account of
what had occurred.  He distinctly remembered, he said, that Voltaire,
at the time of the negotiations about Tournay, had in the course of
conversation, complained of a lack of firewood, and that he had
thereupon recommended Baudy as the man who would supply Voltaire with
as much as he wanted.  That was all; the offensive notion of a present
had never entered his head.  "J'espre," he concluded, "que vous
voudrez bien faire incontinent payer cette bagatelle  Chariot, parce
que, comme je me ferai certainement payer de lui, il aurait
infailliblement aussi son recours centre vous; ce qui ferait une
affaire du genre de celles qu'un homme tel que vous ne veut point
avoir."

It was obvious to anyone in his senses that the Prsident was right:
that his account of the matter was the true one, and that, as he had
said, the only reasonable thing for Voltaire to do was to pay Baudy the
money--the miserable sum of money!--and finish the business.  But
Voltaire was not in his senses--he never was when even the most
miserable sum of money was concerned.  He could not bear to think of
parting with 281 francs.  It was monstrous; the land and everything on
it was his; the wood had been given him; he would not be set down; and
this wretched man had dared to be ironical!  At any rate, he had had
the wood and burnt it, and the Prsident de Brosses might do what he
liked.  Accordingly, in his next letter, he airily dismissed the
subject.  "It is no longer a question," he said, "of Charles Baudy and
four loads of wood"--and proceeded to discuss an entirely different
matter.  The Prsident replied in detail, and then reverted for a
moment to Baudy--"Four loads--read _fourteen_; you dropped a figure; we
call this a _lapsus linguae_";--and he begged Voltaire once more to
avoid the painful publicity of a lawsuit.  Voltaire made no reply; he
hoped the whole thing was over; but he was wrong.  In June, the
Prsident sued Baudy for 281 francs, and in July Baudy sued Voltaire
for the same sum.  The cases came on at the local court, and were
adjourned.

And now the fury of the frantic old desperado flamed up sky-high.
Seizing his pen, he poured out, in letter after letter to all the
lawyers in Dijon, his account of what had happened--the swindling to
which he had been subjected--the insults to which he had been exposed.
To a particular friend, the Prsident de Ruffey, he sent a long formal
statement of his case, followed by a private sheet of enraged
argumentation.  As for his enemy, he was no longer a president--the
little bewigged monster--he was a fetish.  He would see to it that the
nickname stuck.  "Le Ftiche," he shrieked, "demande de l'argent de ses
moules et de ses fagots....  Le misrable m'accable d'exploits."  He
had put up Baudy, who was a man of straw, to do his dirty work.
"Songez qu'il faisait cette infmie dans le temps qu'il recevait de moi
47 mille livres! ... Qu'il tremble!  Il ne s'agit pas de le rendre
ridicule: il s'agit de le dshonorer.  Cela m'afflige.  Mais il payera
cher la bassesse d'un procd si coupable et si lche."  Finally he
addressed the Fetish himself in a letter composed in his most
magnificent style.  "Vous n'tes donc venu chez moi, Monsieur, vous ne
m'avez offert votre amiti, que pour empoisonner par des procs la fin
de ma vie."  In great detail he went over the whole dispute.  With
singular violence, and no less singular obtuseness, he asserted the
hopelessly contradictory propositions, both that the wood was his own
and that the Prsident had given it him; he hinted that his enemy would
make use of his position to pervert the course of justice; and he ended
with threats.  "S'il faut que M. le Chancelier, et les Ministres, et
tout Paris, soient instruits de votre procd, ils le seront; et, s'il
se trouve dans votre Compagnie respectable une personne qui vous
approuve, je me condamne."

The Prsident's moment had come--the testing moment of his life.  What
was he to do?  It was still not too late to withdraw, to pay the money
with a shrug of the shoulders and put an end to this fearful hubbub and
this terrifying enmity.  For a short space, he wavered.  It was true
that Voltaire was the greatest writer of the age, and perhaps he
deserved some allowances on that score.  In any case, he was an
extremely dangerous antagonist--a man who had made mincemeat of all his
literary opponents and fought on equal terms with Frederick the Great.
But no!  It was intolerable!  His Burgundian blood boiled, and the
proud traditions of aristocracy and the judicial habits of a lifetime
asserted themselves.  "L-dessus on dit":--so he explained later to a
friend--"c'est un homme dangereux.  Et  cause de cela, faut-il done le
laisser tre mchant impunment?  Ce sont au contraire ces sortes de
gens-l qu'il faut chtier.  Je ne le crains pas....  On l'admire,
parce qu'il fait d'excellents vers.  Sans doute il les fait excellents.
Mais ce sont ses vers qu'il faut admirer."  And so, taking Voltaire's
letter, he wrote upon the margin of it a reply, in which he not only
rebutted his arguments but told him exactly what he thought of him.
Point by point he exposed the futility of Voltaire's contentions.  He
showed that there was actually a clause in the lease, by which the cut
wood on the estate was specifically excepted from the sale.  He offered
to drop the matter if Voltaire would send him a receipt in the
following terms: "Je soussign, Franois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire,
chevalier, seigneur de Ferney, gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du
Roi, reconnois que M. de Brosses, prsident du Parlement, m'a fait
prsent de ... voies de bois de moule, pour mon chauffage, en valeur de
281 f., dont je le remercie."  He pointed out that otherwise he had
nothing to do with the business, that Voltaire owed the money to
Chariot Baudy, and that it was indeed extraordinary to see "un homme si
riche et si illustre se tourmenter  tel excs pour ne pas payer  un
paysan 280 livres pour du bois de chauffage qu'il  fourni."  His
incidental remarks were nothing if not outspoken.  "En vrit," he
wrote, "je gmis pour l'humanit de voir un si grand gnie avec un
coeur si petit sans cesse tiraill par des misres de jalousie et de
lsine.  C'est vous-mme qui empoisonnez une vie si bien faite
d'ailleurs pour tre heureuse."  As for the suggestion that he would
bring undue influence to bear upon the case,--"il ne convient pas de
parler ainsi: soyez assez sage  l'avenir pour ne rien dire de pareil 
un magistral."  "Tenez vous pour dit," the letter concluded, "de ne
m'crire plus ni sur cette matire ni surtout de ce ton.  Je vous fais,
Monsieur, le souhait de Perse: _Mens sana in corpore sano_."

It is difficult indeed to imagine the scene at Ferney while Voltaire
was deciphering, on the edges of his own letter, this devastating
reply.  But there was worse to follow.  A note came from the Prsident
de Ruffey, in which, with infinite politeness, he made it clear that in
his opinion Voltaire had no case, and that he had better pay.  At the
same time Ruffey wrote to Madame Denis, Voltaire's niece, advising her
to give the money privately to Baudy.  Madame Denis had not the courage
to do so; she showed the letter to her uncle, who, in a dictated reply,
still tried to keep up an appearance of self-confidence.  "Je ne crains
point les Ftiches," he added in his own hand.  "Et les Ftiches
doivent me craindre."  And again, at the bottom of the paper, he
scribbled, "N.B.  Il n'y a qu'une voix sur le Ftiche."  But such
screams were useless; the game was up.  The Prsident's letter remained
unanswered; Voltaire swallowed in silence the incredible affront; and
when, a little later, the Prsident, feeling that he could afford to be
magnanimous, informed a common friend that he would cancel his account
with Baudy if Voltaire gave 281 francs to the poor of Tournay, the
great man was glad enough to fall in with the suggestion.

The Prsident had triumphed; but could he really have supposed that he
would escape from such an antagonist unscathed?  The sequel came ten
years later, when the Prsident Hnault died and left a seat vacant at
the Academy.  There was a strong movement in favour of electing the
Prsident de Brosses.  There appeared to be no other very suitable
candidate; his friends rallied round him; and D'Alembert, writing to
Voltaire from Paris, assured him that there was every likelihood that
"ce plat Prsident" would be chosen for the vacant place.  The serious
feature of the case was that the old Marchal de Richelieu, who, after
a lifetime of fighting and gallantry, amused his decrepitude by making
his influence felt in affairs of this kind, supported him.  What was to
be done?  Voltaire was equal to the occasion: his letters flew.  At all
costs the Fetish must be kept out.  He wrote repeatedly to Richelieu,
in that tone of delicate cajolery of which he was a master, touching
upon their ancient friendship, and spinning a strange tale of the
perfidies committed by "ce petit perscuteur nasilloneur," until the
Marechal melted, and promised to withdraw his support.  Finally
Voltaire despatched to D'Alembert a signed declaration to the effect
that he would himself resign from the academy if Brosses was elected.
This settled the matter, and no more was heard of the candidature of
the Prsident.  It seems likely that he never knew what it was that had
baulked him of the ambition of his life.  For 281 francs he had lost
the immortality of the Academy.  A bad bargain, no doubt; and yet,
after all, the transaction had gained him another, and in fact a
unique, distinction: he would go down to history as the man who had got
the better of Voltaire.




JAMES BOSWELL

It would be difficult to find a more shattering refutation of the
lessons of cheap morality than the life of James Boswell.  One of the
most extraordinary successes in the history of civilization was
achieved by an idler, a lecher, a drunkard, and a snob.  Nor was this
success of that sudden explosive kind which is frequent enough with
youthful genius--the inspired efflorescence of a Rimbaud or a
Swinburne; it was essentially the product of long years of accumulated
energy; it was the supreme expression of an entire life.  Boswell
triumphed by dint of abandoning himself, through fifty years, to his
instincts.  The example, no doubt, is not one to be followed rashly.
Self-indulgence is common, and Boswells are rare.  The precise
character of the rarity we are now able, for the first time, to
estimate with something like completeness.  Boswell's nature and inner
history cannot be fully understood from the works published by himself.
It is only in his letters that the whole man is revealed.  Professor
Tinker, by collecting together Boswell's correspondence and editing it
with scholarly exactitude, has done a great service to English
literature.[1]  There is, in fact, only one fault to be found with this
admirable book.  Professor Tinker shows us more of Boswell than any
previous editor, but he does not show us all that he might.  Like the
editors of Walpole's Letters and Pepys's Diary, while giving himself
credit for rehabilitating the text of his author, he admits in the same
breath that he has mutilated it.  When will this silly and barbarous
prudery come to an end?


[1] "Letters of James Boswell."  Collected and edited by Chauncey
Brewster Tinker.  2 vols.  (Oxford: Clarendon Press.)


Boswell's career was completely dominated by his innate
characteristics.  Where they came from it is impossible to guess.  He
was the strangest sport: the descendant of Scotch barons and country
gentlemen, the son of a sharp lowland lawyer, was an artist, a
spendthrift, a buffoon, with a passion for literature, and without any
dignity whatever.  So he was born, and so he remained; life taught him
nothing--he had nothing to learn; his course was marked out, immutably,
from the beginning.  At the age of twenty-three he discovered Dr.
Johnson.  A year later he was writing to him, at Wittenberg, "from the
tomb of Melancthon": "My paper rests upon the gravestone of that great
and good man....  At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected
friend!  I vow to thee an eternal attachment."  The rest of Boswell's
existence was the history of that vow's accomplishment.  But his
connection with Dr. Johnson was itself only the crowning instance of an
overwhelming predisposition, which showed itself in a multitude of
varied forms.  There were other great men, for instance--there was Mr.
Wilkes, and General Paoli, and Sir David Dalrymple.  One of Professor
Tinker's most delightful discoveries is a series of letters from the
youthful Boswell to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in which all the writer's
most persistent qualities--his literary skill, his psychological
perspicacity, his passion for personalities, and his amazing aptitude
for self-revelation--are exquisitely displayed.  "Dites-moi," he asked
the misanthropic sentimentalist, "ne ferai-je bien de m'appliquer
vritablement  la musique, jusques  un certain point?  Dites-moi quel
doit tre mon instrument.  C'est tard je l'avoue.  Mais n'aurai-je le
plaisir de faire un progrs continuel, et ne serai-je pas capable
d'adoucir ma vieillesse par les sons de ma lyre?"  Rousseau was
completely melted.  The elder Pitt, however, was made of sterner stuff.
When Boswell appeared before him in the costume of a Corsican
chieftain, "Lord Chatham," we are told, "smiled, but received him very
graciously in his Pompous manner"--and there the acquaintance ended; in
spite of Boswell's modest suggestion that the Prime Minister should
"honour me now and then with a letter....  To correspond with a Paoli
and with a Chatham is enough to keep a young man ever ardent in the
pursuit of virtuous fame."

Fame--though perhaps it was hardly virtuous--Boswell certainly
attained; but his ardent pursuit of it followed the track of an
extraordinary zigzag which could never have had anything in common with
letters from Lord Chatham.  His own letters to his friend Temple lay
bare the whole unique peregrination, from start to finish.  To confess
is the desire of many; but it is within the power of few.  A rare
clarity of vision, a still rarer candour of expression--without these
qualities it is vain for a man to seek to unburden his heart.  Boswell
possessed them in the highest degree; and, at the same time, he was
untroubled by certain other qualities, which, admirable though they be
in other connections, are fatal for this particular purpose.  He had no
pride, no shame, and no dignity.  The result was that a multitude of
inhibitions passed him by.  Nevertheless he was by no means detached.
His was not the method of the scientific observer, noting his
introspections with a cold exactness--far from it; he was intimately
fascinated by everything to do with himself--his thoughts, his
feelings, his reactions; and yet he was able to give expression to them
all with absolute ingenuousness, without a shade of self-consciousness,
without a particle of reserve.  Naturally enough the picture presented
in such circumstances is full of absurdities, for no character which
had suppressed its absurdities could possibly depict itself so.
Boswell was _ex hypothesi_ absurd: it was his absurdity that was the
essential condition of his consummate art.

It was in the description of his love affairs that this truly
marvellous capacity found its fullest scope.  The succession of his
passions, with all their details, their variations, their agitations,
and their preposterousnesses, fill the letters to Temple (a quiet
clergyman in the depths of Devonshire) with a constant effervescence of
delight.  One progresses with wonderful exhilaration from Miss W----t
("just such a young lady as I could wish for the partner of my soul")
to Zelide ("upon my soul, Temple, I must have her"), and so to the
Signora, and the Moffat woman ("can I do better than keep a dear
infidel for my hours of Paphian bliss?"), and the Princess ("here every
flower is united"), and the gardener's daughter, and Mrs. D., and Miss
Bosville, and La Belle Irlandaise ("just sixteen, formed like a Grecian
nymph, with the sweetest countenance, full of sensibility,
accomplished, with a Dublin education"), and Mrs. Boswell ("I am fully
sensible of my happiness in being married to so excellent a woman"),
and Miss Silverton ("in the fly with me, an amiable creature who has
been in France.  I can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal
love"), and Miss Bagnal ("_a Ranelagh girl_, but of excellent
principles, in so much that she reads prayers to the servants in her
father's family, every Sunday evening.  'Let me see such a woman,'
cried I"), and Miss Milles ("_d'une certaine ge_, and with a fortune
of 10,000"), and--but the catalogue is endless.  These are the pages
which record the sunny hours of Boswell's chequered day.  Light and
warmth sparkle from them; but, even in the noon of his happiness, there
were sudden clouds.  Hypochondria seized him; he would wake in the
night "dreading annihilation, or being thrown into some horrible state
of being."  His conscience would not leave him alone; he was attacked
by disgraceful illnesses; he felt "like a man ordered for ignominious
execution"; he feared that his infidelities to Mrs. Boswell would not
be excused hereafter.  And then his vital spirits rushed to his rescue,
and the shadow fled.  Was he not the friend of Paoli?  Indeed he was;
and he was sitting in a library forty feet long, dressed in green and
gold.  The future was radiant.  "My warm imagination looks forward with
great complacency on the sobriety, the healthfulness, and the worth of
my future life."  As for his infidelities, were they so reprehensible
after all?  "Concubinage is almost universal.  If it was morally wrong,
why was it permitted to the pious men under the Old Testament?  Why did
our Saviour never say a word against it?"

As his life went on, however, the clouds grew thicker and more
menacing, and the end was storm and darkness.  The climax came with the
death of his wife.  Boswell found himself at the age of fifty alone in
the world with embarrassed fortunes, a family of young children to
bring up, and no sign that any of the "towering hopes" of his youth had
been realized.  Worse still, he had become by this time a confirmed
drunkard.  His self-reproaches were pitiable; his efforts at amendment
never ceased; he took a vow of sobriety under "a venerable yew"; he
swore a solemn oath that he would give up drinking altogether--that he
would limit himself to four glasses of wine at dinner and a pint
afterwards; but it was all in vain.  His way of life grew more and more
disorderly, humiliating, and miserable.  If he had retired to Scotland,
and lived economically on his estate, he might have retrieved his
position; but that was what he could not do; he could not be out of
London.  His ambitions seemed to multiply with his misfortunes.  He
exchanged the Scotch bar for the English, and lost all his professional
income at a blow.  He had wild hopes of becoming a Member of
Parliament, if only he toadied Lord Lonsdale sufficiently; and Lord
Lonsdale promised much, asked him to his castle, made a butt of him,
hid his wig, was gravely concerned, and finally threw him off after
"expressing himself in the most degrading manner in presence of a low
man from Carlisle and one of his menial servants."  Consolations now
were few indeed.  It was something, no doubt, to be able to go to
Court.  "I was the _great man_ at the late drawing-room in a suit of
imperial blue lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich
gold-wrought buttons.  What a motley scene is life!"  And at Eton,
where he was "carried to dine at the Fellows' table," it was pleasant
enough to find that in spite of a Scotch education one could still make
a creditable figure.  "I had my classical quotations very ready."  But
these were fleeting gleams.  "Your kindness to me," he burst out to
Temple, in April, 1791, "fairly makes me shed tears.  Alas, I fear that
my constitutional melancholy, which returns in such dismal fits and is
now aggravated by the loss of my valuable wife, must prevent me from
any permanent felicity in this life.  I snatch _gratifications_; but
have no _comfort_, at least very little....  I get bad rest in the
night, and then I brood over all my complaints--the _sickly mind_ which
I have had from my early years--the disappointment of my hopes of
success in life--the irrevocable separation between me and that
excellent woman who was my cousin, my friend, and my wife--the
embarrassment of my affairs--the disadvantage to my children in having
so wretched a father--nay, the want of _absolute certainty_ of being
happy after death, the _sure prospect_ of which is _frightful_.  No
more of this."

The tragedy was closing; but it was only superficially a sordid one.
Six weeks later the writer of these lines published, in two volumes
quarto, the _Life of Dr. Johnson_.  In reality, Boswell's spirit had
never failed.  With incredible persistence he had carried through the
enormous task which he had set himself thirty years earlier.
Everything else was gone.  He was burnt down to the wick, but his work
was there.  It was the work of one whose appetite for life was
insatiable--so insatiable that it proved in the end self-destructive.
The same force which produced the _Life of Johnson_ plunged its author
into ruin and desperation.  If Boswell had been capable of retiring to
the country and economizing we should never have heard of him.  It was
Lord Lonsdale's butt who reached immortality.




THE ABB MORELLET

Talleyrand once remarked that only those who had lived in France before
the Revolution had really experienced _la douceur de vivre_.  The Abb
Morellet would have agreed with him.  Born in 1727 at Lyons, the son of
a small paper merchant, how was it possible, in that age of caste and
privilege, that Andr Morellet should have known anything of life but
what was hard, dull, and insignificant?  So one might have supposed;
but the contrary was the case.  Before he was thirty this young man,
without either fortune or connections, and without taking very much
trouble about it, found himself a member of the most brilliant society
in Paris, the close friend of the famous and the great, with a rosy
future before him.  The secret of it was simple: he had shown that he
was intelligent; and in those days a little intelligence went a long
way.  So, indeed, did a little--a very little--money.  A thousand
francs from a generous cousin had opened Paris to him, by enabling him
to go to the Sorbonne, whence, after five years, he had emerged an Abb
and an infidel.  A chance meeting with Diderot did the rest.  The great
_philosophe_, forty years of age and at the height of his intellectual
power, completely captivated a youth whose eager mind was only waiting
for new ideas and new activities.  Every Sunday morning the Abb scaled
the stairs to Diderot's lodging, to sit entranced for hours, while the
Master poured forth the irresistible floods of his amazing
conversation.  "J'ai prouv peu de plaisirs de l'esprit au-dessus de
celui-l," wrote Morellet long afterwards; "et je m'en souviendrai
toujours."  One can well believe it.  The young man listened so
intelligently that Diderot soon saw he would do; enrolled him among his
disciples; introduced him to all his friends; and set him to write
articles for his great Encyclopdia.  _La douceur de vivre_ had begun.

Thirty delightful years followed--years of exciting work, delicious
friendship, and ever-growing optimism.  The great battle for liberty,
tolerance, reason, and humanity was in full swing; the forces of
darkness were yielding more and more rapidly; and Morellet was in the
forefront of the fight.  He wrote with untiring zeal.  Besides his
Encyclopdia articles, he produced pamphlets in favour of the
Protestants, he brought out a _Manuel des Inquisiteurs_ exposing the
methods of the Inquisition, he translated Beccaria's great work.  But
his principal interest was political economy.  A close friend of
Turgot, he was one of the earliest believers in Free Trade.  He
translated _The Wealth of Nations_; though the cast of his mind
contrasted curiously with Adam Smith's.  The Abb, like most of the
_philosophes_, preferred the _a priori_ mode of argument.  The reasons
which led him to favour Free Trade are characteristic.  The rights of
property, he argued, are fundamental to the very existence of civilized
society; now to interfere with the freedom of exchange is to attack one
of the rights of property; therefore Protection and civilization are
incompatible.  This extremely complete argument seems to have escaped
the notice of Tory Free Traders.

But the Abb was not merely enlightened and argumentative; he had
another quality which was essential in those days if one was to make
any figure at all: he was malicious--though only, of course, at the
expense of "the enemies of reason."  Some particularly biting little
fly-sheets of his actually brought a word of praise from the mighty
Patriarch of Ferney.  "Embrassez pour moi l'Abb Mords-les," wrote
Voltaire to a common friend; "je ne connais personne qui soit plus
capable de rendre service  la raison."  This was a testimonial indeed!
Morellet's reputation went up with a bound, and he himself declared
that the sentence was all he wanted by way of an epitaph.

Only one thing more was needed to make his success complete; and that a
kindly fate provided.  Palissot, a protg of a certain great lady, the
Princesse de Robecq, attacked the _philosophes_ in a satirical farce.
Morellet, among the rest, replied with a stinging pamphlet; but he was
unwise enough to direct some of his sharp remarks, not at Palissot, but
at the Princess.  This could not be allowed.  Madame de Robecq had been
the mistress of the Duc de Choiseul, who was all-powerful with Madame
de Pompadour and, through her, with the King.  A _lettre de cachet_
sent Morellet to the Bastille.  One can imagine no more striking
example of the corruption and tyranny of the _ancien rgime_--if only
the poor Abb had been treated properly--thrown into an underground
dungeon, let us say, loaded with chains, and fed on bread and water.
Unfortunately, nothing of the sort occurred.  The victim was given a
comfortable room, plenty of excellent food, a bottle of wine a day,
provided with writing materials, and allowed all the books he asked
for, besides being given the run of the Bastille library, which was
especially strong in novels.  He spent three months in peaceful study;
and returned to liberty with the added glory of martyrdom.

Liberty and martyrdom--one hardly knew which was the pleasanter.  In
Paris one's mornings passed in reading and writing--the quill dashing
over the paper with a heavenly speed; and one's afternoons and evenings
were spent in company.  There were dinners at D'Holbach's; there were
the nightly gatherings in the little rooms of Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse; there were lunches with Madame Geoffrin; and everywhere and
always the conversation was copious and audacious to an intoxicating
degree.  Madame Geoffrin, indeed, insisted upon limits.  "Voil qui est
bien!" she used to exclaim, when the talk grew too wild and high.  Then
the more reckless spirits, headed by D'Alembert, would go out into the
Tuileries Gardens, and, sitting under the trees, continue the discourse
until the exploded ruins of religions, philosophies, and conventions
fell in showers about their ears.  If Paris grew too hot or too noisy,
there was always, close at hand, Auteuil.  There lived Madame
Helvtius, the widow of one of the leading _philosophes_, in a charming
little villa, with a garden and all the simple pleasures of a country
life.  A curious _mnage_, highly typical of the nation and the age,
was gathered together between those friendly walls.  Morellet spent
every summer and all his week-ends there; another clever Abb also had
rooms in the house; and so had a younger man, Cabanis, to whom Madame
Helvtius was particularly attached.  The elements of sentiment and
friendship were so perfectly balanced between the four that their
harmony and happiness were complete.  Year after year the summers waxed
and waned in the Auteuil garden, while Morellet lingered there, with
peace, wit, kindness, and beauty around him.  What was there left to
wish for?  Well! it would be nice, he sometimes thought, to have a
little--a very little--more money.  His income--made up of a few small
pensions and legacies--was about 100 a year.

A most pleasant interlude was a visit to England, where Morellet spent
several months as the guest of Lord Shelburne.  Shelburne was a failure
at politics (he was a Prime Minister and a man of intellect--a
hazardous combination); but he made an admirable host.  Garrick and
Franklin were asked down to Bowood to meet the Abb, and then he was
carried off on a driving tour all over England.  One day, near
Plymouth, there was a picnic on the banks of the Tamar.  After the
meal, as the company lay on the grass, and the evening fell, three
country girls made their appearance; on which the Abb, offering them a
basket of cherries, asked them, in his broken English, for a song.
They smiled, and blushed; but sing they did, in unison, with the
sweetest voices.  The description of the scene in Morellet's _Mmoires_
reads like a page from the _Vicar of Wakefield_.

Even affluence came at last.  The incumbent of a priory, the reversion
of which had been given to Morellet by Turgot twenty years before,
died, and the Abb found himself in the possession of a spacious
country house, with land, and an income of 600 a year.  This was in
1788.  In less than a year all was over.  The Abb never lived in his
priory.  The tempest of the Revolution engulfed both him and it.  The
rights of property were violated, and the priest was deprived of a
sinecure that he was enjoying as a member of a Church in which he
disbelieved.  Morellet's surprised indignation at this catastrophe--his
absolute unconsciousness that the whole effort of his life had been in
reality directed towards this very goal--makes comic reading--comic,
and pathetic too.  For still worse was to follow.  The happy _mnage_
at Auteuil was broken up.  Cabanis and the other Abb believed in the
Revolution; Madame Helvtius agreed with them; and Morellet, finding
himself in a minority of one, after a violent scene left the villa for
ever.  His plight was serious; but he weathered the storm.  A
revolutionary tribunal, before which he was haled, treated him gently,
partly because it transpired in the course of the proceedings that he
had been a friend of Turgot, "_ce bon citoyen_"; he was dismissed with
a caution.  Then, besides saving his own neck, he was able to do a good
turn to the _Acadmie Franaise_, of which he was the Director.  When
that body was broken up, the care of its valuable possessions--its
papers and its portraits--fell to him.  He concealed everything in
various hiding-places, from which he drew forth the precious relics in
triumph, when the days of order returned.

For they did return; and the Abb, very old and very tired, found his
way, with one or two others, to young Madame de Rmusat's drawing-room.
There he sat dozing by the fire, while the talk sped on around him;
dozing, and nodding; then suddenly waking up to denounce Monsieur de
Chteaubriand and lament the ruin of French prose.  He was treated with
great respect by everybody; even the First Consul was flattering; even
the Emperor was polite, and made him a Senator.  Then the Emperor
vanished, and a Bourbon ruled once more on the throne of his fathers.
With that tenacity of life which seems to have been the portion of the
creatures of the eighteenth century, Morellet continued in this world
until his ninety-second year.  But this world was no longer what it
used to be: something had gone wrong.  Those agitations, those
arrangements and rearrangements, they seemed hardly worth attending to.
One might as well doze.  All his young friends were very kind
certainly, but did they understand?  How could they?  What had been
their experience of life?  As for him, ah! _he_ had listened to
Diderot--used to sit for hours talking in the Tuileries Gardens with
D'Alembert and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse--mentioned by Voltaire--spent
half a lifetime at Auteuil with dear Madame Helvtius--imprisoned in
the Bastille ... he nodded.  Yes!  _He_ had known _la douceur de vivre_.




MARY BERRY

"Amore, che a nullo amato amar perdona": there could be no better
summary of the tragic romance of Madame du Deffand, Horace Walpole, and
Mary Berry.  For Love moves in a mysterious way, and the Paolos and
Francescas of this world, though they may be the most attractive of his
victims, are not the most remarkable.  Madame du Deffand was blind and
nearly seventy when, after a long career of brilliant dissipation and
icy cynicism, she was suddenly overwhelmed by a passion which
completely dominated her existence, until she died, fifteen years
later, at the age of eighty-three.  Horace Walpole, the object of this
extraordinary adoration, was a middle-aged man of fashion, a
dilettante, whose heart, like hers, had never felt a violent emotion,
and, naturally enough, was not induced to do so by this strange
catastrophe.  He was flattered, he was charmed; but he was obsessed by
a terror of ridicule; his enemies--worse still, his friends--would
laugh if they ever got wind of this romantic aberration; and so he
mixed kindness and severity, ruthlessness and attentions, in so fatally
medicinal a potion that the unhappy creature in Paris died at last less
of old age than a broken heart.  But "the whirligig of Time brings in
his revenges."  Walpole himself, when he was over seventy, suffered the
same fate as Madame du Deffand.  The egotism of a lifetime suddenly
collapsed before the fascinations of Mary Berry.  It was in vain that
the old wit sought to conceal from himself and the world the nature of
the feelings which had seized upon him.  He made game of his
vicissitude; he was in love--ah, yes!--but with both the charming
sisters--with Agnes as well as Mary; they were his "twin wives," and
might share his coronet between them if they liked.  For a short space,
indeed, he was almost entirely happy.  Mary was gentle, intelligent,
and appreciative; Agnes, gay and sprightly, made a perfect chaperon.
They were his near neighbours at Twickenham, and night after night they
would sit with him in his Strawberry Hill drawing-room, while, from his
sofa, with an occasional pinch of snuff, he discoursed to them for
endless magical hours, pouring out before them his whole treasury of
anecdotes and reflections and quips and fancies and memories--old
scandals, old frolics, old absurdities, old characters--the darling
sixty years' accumulation of the most rapacious gossip who ever lived.

It was during these happy days--the spring-time of his passion--that he
wrote down for the sisters his _Reminiscences_, which have now been
republished, from the original manuscripts, by the Clarendon Press.[1]
The volume, elegantly printed, with elucidations by Mr. Paget Toynbee,
two portraits, and some interesting "Notes of conversations with Lady
Suffolk," now produced for the first time, is as delightful in its form
as in its matter--delightful to handle, to look at, to browse over for
an evening by the fire.  In its polished, delicate pages the English
eighteenth century is reflected for us, as in a diminishing mirror--St.
James's, Sir Robert, a King or two, Mrs. Howard, old Sarah, Queen
Caroline--miraculously small and neat; while Dance's admirable drawing
shows us the author, almost, one might imagine, in the act of
composition, with his face so full of subtlety, experience, reticence,
and sly urbanity.


[1] "Reminiscences, written by Mr. Horace Walpole in 1788, for the
amusement of Miss Mary and Miss Agnes Berry."  With Notes and Index by
Paget Toynbee.  (Oxford: Clarendon Press.)


But the happy days were not to last.  Love grows cruel as he grows old;
the arrow festers in the flesh; and a pleasant pang becomes a torture.
Walpole could not be blinded for ever to the essential impossibility of
his situation, and at last he was obliged to plumb his feelings to
their depths.  A dreadful blow fell when the sisters, accompanied by
their father, left England on the grand tour.  Their decision to do so
had stunned him; their departure plunged him in grief; he was very old,
and they were to be away for more than a year; would he ever see Mary
again?  Yet he bore up bravely, and his inimitable letters flowed over
Europe in an unceasing stream.  The crisis came when, on their return
journey, the Berrys arranged to go back through France.  It was in
1791, and the country was seething with the ferment of the Revolution.
Walpole was terrified, and implored Mary to return by Germany; in vain.
Then the old man's self-control utterly gave way.  Fear, mortification,
anger, and solicitude mastered him by turns; his agitation was
boundless; he could talk of nothing but the Berrys, rushing from person
to person, pouring out, everywhere, to anybody, the palpitating tale of
his terrors and his griefs.  London shrugged its shoulders: Lord Orford
was ridiculous.  The grim ghost of Madame du Deffand must have smiled
sardonically at the sight.

It was not merely the incompatibility of age that made his case
desperate; there was another more fatal circumstance.  Mary Berry
herself was passionately in love--with General O'Hara.  He was a
middle-aged soldier of an old-fashioned type, abounding in Irish
energy, with a red and black face and shining teeth; and when, in 1795,
he was made Governor of Gibraltar, she became engaged to marry him.
The marriage itself was postponed, at her wish.  She might have left
Walpole in his misery; and even her father, who was helpless without
her; but she could not leave her sister, who was in the middle of a
difficult love-affair, and was every moment in need of her advice.  "I
_think_ I am doing right," she told O'Hara.  "I am _sure_ I am
consulting the peace and happiness of those about me, and not my own."
The General sailed, and she never saw him again.  At first their
correspondence was all that was most fitting.  The General poured out
his gallantries, and Mary indulged in delightful visions of
domesticity.  She sketched in detail the balance-sheet of their future
"establishment."  Reducing their expenditure to a minimum, she came to
the conclusion that 2,263 a year would be enough for them both.  Of
this sum, 58 would cover "the wages of four women servants--a
housekeeper, a cook under her, a housemaid, and lady's maid"; while
"liveries for the three men servants and the coachman" would cost 80 a
year, and wine 100.  But Mary's castle was all too truly in Spain.
Before the year was out, it had vanished into thin air.  She discovered
that the "Old Cock of the Rock," as his military comrades called him,
was keeping a couple of mistresses; expostulations followed, mutual
anger, and finally a complete severance.  She believed to the end of
her life that if they could have met for twenty-four hours every
difficulty would have disappeared; but it was not to be.  The French
War prevented O'Hara from turning to England, and in 1802 he died at
his post.

Mary Berry was to live for half a century more, but she never recovered
from this disaster.  There, for the rest of her life, at the very basis
of her existence, lay the iron fact of an irremediable disappointment.
Thus her fate was the very reverse of Madame du Deffand's; the
emotional tragedy, coming at the beginning of a long life instead of at
the end, gave a sombre colour to the whole; and yet, in the structure
of their minds, the two were curiously similar.  Both were remarkable
for reason and good sense, for a certain intellectual probity, for a
disillusioned view of things, and for great strength of will.  Between
these two stern women, the figure of Horace Walpole makes a strange
appearance--a creature all vanity, elegance, insinuation, and
finesse--by far the most feminine of the three.

He died, leaving the sisters a house at Little Strawberry Hill and the
interest on 4,000 for each of them for their lives.  By a cruel irony
of circumstance, her sister's love-affair, which had led Mary, so
fatally, to postpone her marriage, turned out no less unfortunately
than her own.  Agnes had become engaged to a wealthy young cousin; but,
at the last moment, the match had been broken off.  The sisters never
separated for the whole of their long lives.  Agnes was cheerful, but a
little vague in the head; she painted.  Old Mr. Berry was cheerful, but
quite incompetent; he did nothing at all.  Mary was intelligent, with
enough character for three at the very least; and she did everything
that had to be done, with consummate ease.  Friends surrounded her.
Walpole had launched the family into the highest society, where they
had at once become very popular.  His cousin, Mrs. Darner, was Mary's
intimate and confidante.  The Berry sisters--Blackberry and Gooseberry
they were nicknamed by the malicious--were seen at every social
function, and gradually became a social centre themselves.  Among her
other gifts Mary possessed a marvellous capacity for the part of
hostess.  Wherever she went--and she was constantly on the move--in
North Audley Street, in Bath, in Paris, in Italy--it always happened
that the most fashionable and the cleverest people grouped themselves
about her.  One winter, in Genoa, she seemed to create a civilization
out of nothing; the little community gave a gasp of horror when she
went away.  Apparently there was nothing that she could not bring about
in her drawing-room: she could even make Frenchmen hold their tongues;
she could even make Englishmen talk.

But these were not her only accomplishments.  Her masculine mind
exercised itself over higher things.  She read eagerly and long; she
edited Walpole's papers; she studied political economy, appreciating
Malthus and Free Trade.  In Madame de Stal's opinion she was "_by far_
the cleverest woman in England."  She had literary ambitions, and
brought out a book on "Social Life in England and France"; but her
style failed to express the force of her mentality, so that her careful
sentences are to-day unreadable.  Had she been a man, she would not
have shone as a writer, but as a political thinker or an administrator;
and a man she should have been; with her massive, practical
intelligence, she was born too early to be a successful woman.  She
felt this bitterly.  Conscious of high powers, she declaimed against
the miserable estate of women, which prevented her from using them.
She might have been a towering leader, in thought or action; as it was,
she was insignificant.  So she said--"insignificant!"--repeating the
word over and over again.  "And nobody," she added, "ever suffered
insignificance more unwillingly than myself."

Yet it was a mitigated insignificance, after all.  In 1817 old Mr.
Berry died, and for another thirty years all that was distinguished in
England and in France passed through the sisters' room in Curzon
Street.  As time went on, Mary grew ever grander and more vigorous.
With old age, something like happiness seemed to come to her--though it
was a happiness without serenity.  Agnes chirped blithely by her side.
Mrs. Darner had vanished, but her place was taken by Lady Charlotte
Lindsay, who remained a faithful follower till her death.  We catch a
glimpse of the three ladies in Paris in 1834, when they were all in the
neighbourhood of seventy.  "The Berrys," Lady Granville tells us, "run
up and down."  Mary was the leader, prepotent, scolding, loud-voiced,
and dressed in a pink sash.  Agnes and Lady Charlotte fluttered along
behind her.  There was some laughter, but there was more admiration:
Miss Berry was impossible to resist.  Everyone flocked to her evenings,
as usual, and even critical Lady Granville was at her feet.  She was
friendly and true, said the Ambassadress, in spite of her frowns and
hootings, and her departure would be regretted very much.

The _salon_ in Curzon Street lasted on into the Victorian age, and
Thackeray would talk for hours with the friend of Horace Walpole.  The
lady was indeed a fascinating relic of an abolished world, as she sat,
large and formidable, bolt upright, in her black wig, with her rouged
cheeks, her commanding features, and her loud conversation, garnished
with vigorous oaths.  When, in 1852, both sisters died, aged
eighty-nine and eighty-eight, the eighteenth century finally vanished
from the earth.  So much was plain to the _habitus_ of Curzon Street;
but they had failed to realize the inner nature, the tragic
under-tones, of that spirit which had delighted them so wonderfully
with its energy and power.  It was only when Mary Berry's papers came
to be examined that the traces of her secret history appeared.  Among
them was a description of a dream, dreamt when she was nearly eighty,
in which she had found herself walking with Mrs. Damer by a Southern
shore, young again, and married to General O'Hara.  She was perfectly
happy--so happy that she prayed to die "before this beautiful vision of
life fades, as fade it must from my senses."  Yet no!--she was about to
have a child; she must live to give him a child, she told Mrs. Damer,
and then she might die, "convinced that I have exhausted everything
that can make life desirable....  Here I awoke with my eyes suffused
with tears, to find myself a poor, feeble old soul, never having
possessed either husband or child, and having long survived that friend
whom my waking as well as my sleeping thoughts always recall to me, as
the comfort and support of nearly thirty years of my sadly
insignificant existence."




MADAME DE LIEVEN

Aristocrats (no doubt) still exist; but they are shorn beings, for whom
the wind is not tempered--powerless, out of place, and slightly
ridiculous.  For about a hundred years it has been so.  The stages in
the history of nobility may be reckoned by the different barricades it
has put up to keep off the common multitude.  The feudal lord used
armour to separate him from the rest of the world; then, as
civilization grew, it was found that a wig did almost as well; and
there was a curious transition period (_temp._ Marlborough) when armour
and wigs were worn at the same time.  After that, armour vanished, and
wigs were left, to rule splendidly through the eighteenth century,
until the French Revolution.  A fearful moment!  Wigs went.
Nevertheless the citadel still held out, for another barrier
remained--the barrier of manners; and for a generation it was just
possible to be an aristocrat on manners alone.  Then, at last, about
1830, manners themselves crumbled, undermined by the insidious
permeation of a new--a middle-class--behaviour; and all was over.
Madame de Lieven was one of the supreme examples of the final period.
Her manners were of the genuinely terrific kind.  Surrounded by them,
isolated as with an antiseptic spray, she swept on triumphantly, to
survive untouched--so it seemed--amid an atmosphere alive with the
microbes of bourgeois disintegration.  So it seemed--for in fact
something strange eventually happened.  In her case, aristocracy, like
some viscous fluid flowing along, when it came to the precipice did not
plunge over the edge, but--such was its strength, its inherent force of
concentration--moved, as it had always moved, straight onward, until it
stuck out, an amazing semi-solid projection, over the abyss.  Only at
long last was there a melting; the laws of nature asserted themselves;
and the inevitable, the deplorable, collapse ensued.

Born in 1785, a Russian and a Benckendorf, Madame de Lieven was by
blood more than half German, for her mother had come from Wrtemberg
and her father's family was of Prussian origin.  From the first moment
of her existence she was in the highest sphere.  Her mother had been
the favourite companion of the Empress Marie, wife of Paul I, and on
her death the Empress had adopted the young Benckendorfs and brought
them up under her own care.  At the age of fifteen, Dorothea was taken
from a convent and married to the young Count de Lieven (or, more
correctly, Count Lieven without the "particule"; but it would be
pedantry to insist upon an accuracy unknown to contemporaries) whose
family was no less closely connected with the Imperial house.  His
mother had been the governess of the Emperor Paul's children; when her
task was over, she had retained the highest favour; and her son, at the
age of twenty-eight, was aide-de-camp to the Emperor and Secretary for
War.  Paul I was murdered; but under the new Czar the family fortunes
continued to prosper--the only change being the transference of the
Count de Lieven from the army to the diplomatic service.  In 1809 he
was appointed Russian ambassador at Berlin; and in 1812 he was moved to
London, where he and his wife were to remain for the next twenty-two
years.

The great world in those days was small--particularly the English one,
which had been kept in a vacuum for years by the Napoleonic War.  In
1812 a foreign embassy was a surprising novelty in London, and the
arrival of the Lievens produced an excitement which turned to rapture
when it was discovered that the ambassadress was endowed with social
talents of the highest order.  She immediately became the fashion--and
remained so for the rest of her life.  That she possessed neither
beauty nor intellect was probably a positive advantage; she was
attractive and clever--that was enough.  Her long gawky figure and her
too pronounced features were somehow fascinating, and her
accomplishments were exactly suited to her _milieu_; while she hated
reading, never opening a book except Madame de Svign's letters, she
could be very entertaining in four languages, and, if asked, could play
on the pianoforte extremely well.  Whenever she appeared, life was
enhanced and intensified.  She became the intimate friend of several
great hostesses--Lady Holland, Lady Cowper, Lady Granville; she was
successfully adored by several men of fashion--Lord Willoughby, Lord
Gower, and (for a short time--so it was whispered) the Prince Regent
himself.  She was made a patroness of Almack's--the only foreign lady
to receive the distinction.  Exclusive, vigorous, tart, she went on her
way rejoicing--and then there was a fresh development.  The war over,
the era of conferences opened.  In 1818, at Aix-la-Chapelle, where all
the ministers and diplomats of Europe were gathered together, she met
Metternich, then at the beginning of his long career as the virtual
ruler of Austria, and a new and serious love-affair immediately began.
It lasted during the four years that elapsed between the Congress of
Aix-la-Chapelle and that of Verona; and in Metternich's
love-letters--extremely long and extremely metaphysical--the earlier
stages of it may still be traced.  The affair ended as suddenly as it
had started.  But this close relationship with the dominating figure in
European politics had a profound effect on Madame de Lieven's life.

Henceforward, high diplomacy was to be her passion.  She was nearly
forty; it was time to be ambitious, to live by the head rather than the
heart, to explore the mysteries of chanceries, to pull the strings of
cabinets, to determine the fate of nations; she set to work with a
will.  Besides her native wits, she had two great assets--her position
in English society, and the fact that her husband was a nonentity--she
found that she could simply step into his place.  Her first triumph
came when the Czar Alexander entrusted her personally with an overture
to Canning on the thorny question of Greece.  Alexander's death and the
accession of Nicholas was all to the good: her husband's mother
received a princedom, and she herself in consequence became a Princess.
At the same time Russia, abandoning the traditions of the Holy
Alliance, drew nearer to England and the liberal policy of Canning.
Madame de Lieven became the presiding genius of the new orientation; it
was possibly owing to her influence with George IV that Canning
obtained the Premiership; and it was certainly owing to her efforts
that the Treaty of London was signed in 1827, by which the independence
of Greece became an accomplished fact.  After Canning's death, she
formed a new connection--with Lord Grey.  The great Whig Earl became
one of the most ardent of her admirers.  Sitting up in bed every
morning, he made it his first task to compose an elaborate epistle to
his Egeria, which, when it was completed, he carefully perfumed with
musk.  The precise nature of their relationship has never transpired.
The tone of their correspondence seems to indicate a purely platonic
attachment; but tones are deceitful, and Lord Grey was a man of many
gallantries; however, he was sixty-eight.  It is also doubtful who
benefited most by the connection: possibly the lady's influence was
less than she supposed.  At any rate it is certain that when, on one
occasion, she threatened a withdrawal of her favours unless the Prime
Minister adopted a particular course, she was met with a regretful, an
infinitely regretful, refusal; upon which she tactfully collapsed.
But, on another occasion, it seems possible that her advice produced an
important consequence.  When Lord Grey took office, who was to be
Foreign Minister?  Lady Cowper was Madame de Lieven's great friend, and
Palmerston was Lady Cowper's lover.  At their request, Madame de Lieven
pressed the claims of Palmerston upon the Premier, and Palmerston was
appointed.  If this was indeed the result of her solicitations, the
triumphant Princess was to find before long that she had got more than
she had bargained for.

In the meantime, all went swimmingly.  There was always some intriguing
concoction on the European table--a revolution in Portugal--the affairs
of Belgium to be settled--a sovereign to be found for Greece--and
Madame de Lieven's finger was invariably in the pie.  So we see her, in
the Memoirs and Letters of the time, gliding along in brilliant
activity, a radiating focus of enjoyment, except--ah! it was her one
horror!--when she found herself with a bore.  If it was her highest
felicity to extract, in an excited _tte--tte_, the latest piece of
diplomatic gossip from a Cabinet Minister, her deepest agony was to be
forced to mark time with undistinguished underlings, or--worst of
all!--some literary person.  On such occasions she could not conceal
her despair--indeed she hardly wished to--even from the most
eminent--even from the great Chteaubriand himself.  "Quand elle se
trouve avec des gens de mrite," he acidly noted, "sa strilit se
tait; elle revt sa nullit d'un air suprieur d'ennui, comme si elle
avait le droit d'tre ennuye."  She only admitted one exception: for
royal personages very great allowances might be made.  A royal bore,
indeed, was almost a contradiction in terms; such a flavour of
mysterious suavity hovered for ever round those enchanted beings.  She
was always at her best with them, and for her own particular
royalties--for the Czar and the whole imperial family--no
considerations, no exertions, no adulations could be too great.  She
corresponded personally with her imperial master upon every twist and
turn of the international situation, and yet there were tedious
wretches ... she would not bear it, she would be ruthless, they should
be crass--and she lifted her black eyebrows till they almost vanished
and drew herself up to her thinnest height.  She looked like some
strange animal--what was it?  Somebody said that Madame Appony, another
slender, tall ambassadress, was like a giraffe, and that she and Madame
de Lieven were of the same species.  "Mais non!" said Madame Alfred de
Noailles, "ce n'est pas la mme classe: l'une mangera l'autre et n'aura
qu'un mauvais repas "--"One sees Lieven," was Lady Granville's comment,
"crunching the meek Appony's bones."  Everyone was a little afraid of
her--everyone, that is to say, except Lady Holland; for "Old
Madagascar" knew no fear.  One day, at a party, having upset her
work-basket, she calmly turned to the ambassadress with, "Pick it up,
my dear, pick it up!"  And Madame de Lieven went down on her knees and
obeyed.  "Such a sight was never seen before," said Lady Granville.

Lady Holland--yes; but there was also somebody else; there was
Palmerston.  Madame de Lieven, having (so she was convinced) got him
his appointment as Foreign Secretary, believed that she could manage
him; he was, she declared, "un trs-petit esprit"; the mistake was
gross, and it was fatal.  In 1834, Palmerston appointed Stratford
Canning ambassador to Russia; but the Emperor disliked him, and let it
be known, through Madame de Lieven, that he was unwilling to receive
him.  Palmerston, however, persisted in his choice, in spite of all the
arguments of the ambassadress, who lost her temper, appealed to Lord
Grey--in vain, and then--also in vain--tried to get up an agitation in
the Cabinet.  Finally, she advised the Czar to stand firm, for
Palmerston, she said, would give way when it came to the point.
Accordingly, it was officially stated that Stratford Canning would not
be received in Russia.  The result, however, was far from Madame de
Lieven's expectations.  Palmerston had had enough of female
interferences, and he decided to take this opportunity of putting an
end ta them altogether.  He appointed no ambassador, and for months the
English business in St. Petersburg was transacted by a _charg
d'affaires_.  Then there happened precisely what the wily minister had
foreseen.  The Emperor could support the indignity no longer; he
determined to retort in kind; and he recalled the Lievens.

So ended the official life of the Princess.  The blow was severe--the
pain of parting was terrible--but, as it turned out, this was only the
beginning of misfortune.  In the following year, her two youngest sons
died of scarlet fever; her own health was broken; stricken down by
grief and illness, she gave up the Court appointment with which her
services had been rewarded, and went to live in Paris.  Suddenly she
received a peremptory order of recall.  Nicholas, with autocratic
caprice, had flown into a fury; the Princess must return!  Her husband,
seeing that a chance of self-assertion had at last come to him, fell in
with the Emperor's wishes.  A third son died; and the Prince was
forbidden to communicate the fact to his wife; she only learnt it,
months later, when one of her letters to her son was returned to her,
with the word "mort" on the envelope.  After that, there was a hectic
correspondence, the Prince at one moment actually threatening to cut
off his wife's supplies if she remained in Paris.  She would not budge,
however, and eventually the storm blew over; but the whole system of
Madame de Lieven's existence had received a terrible shock.  "Quel
pays!" she exclaimed in her anguish.  "Quel matre!  Quel pre!"

The instinct which had kept her in Paris was a sound one; for there, in
that friendly soil, she was able to strike fresh roots and to create
for herself an establishment that was almost a home.  Her irrepressible
social activities once more triumphed.  Installed in Talleyrand's old
house at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue St. Florentin,
with an outlook over the Place de la Concorde, she held her nightly
_salon_, and, for another twenty years, revived the glories of her
London reign.  Though no longer in any official situation, she was
still perpetually occupied with the highest politics, was still the
terror of embassies, still the delight of the worldly and the great.
Still, in her pitiless exclusiveness, she would _craser_ from time to
time some wretched creature from another sphere.  "Monsieur, je ne vous
connais pas," she said in icy tones to a gentleman who presented
himself one evening in her _salon_.  He reminded her of how often they
had met at Ems, in the summer--had taken the waters together--surely
she must remember him.  "Non, Monsieur," was the adamantine reply, and
the poor man slunk away, having learnt the lesson that friendship at
Ems and friendship in Paris are two very different things.

Such was the appearance; but in fact something strange had happened:
Madame de Lieven's aristocracy was trembling over the abyss.  The crash
came on June 24, 1837--the date is significant: it was four days after
the accession of Queen Victoria--when, worn out by domestic grief,
disillusioned, embittered, unable to resist any longer the permeations
of the Time Spirit, the Princess fell into the arms of Monsieur Guizot.
Fate had achieved an almost exaggerated irony.  For Guizot was the
living epitome of all that was most middle-class.  Infinitely
respectable, a Protestant, the father of a family, having buried two
wives, a learned historian, he had just given up the portfolio of
public instruction, and was clearly destined to be the leading spirit
of the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe.  He was fifty years old.
His first wife had been a child of the _ancien rgime_, but he had
tamed her, turned her thoughts towards duty and domesticity, induced
her to write improving stories for the young, until at last, suddenly
feeling that she could bear it no longer, she had taken refuge in death
while he was reading aloud to her a sermon by Bossuet on the
immortality of the soul.  His second wife--the niece of the first--had
needed no such pressure; naturally all that could be wished, she wrote
several volumes of improving stories for the young quite of her own
accord, while reflections upon the beneficence of the Creator flowed
from her at the slightest provocation; but she too had died; his eldest
son had died; and the bereaved Guizot was left alone with his
high-mindedness.  Madame de Lieven was fifty-two.  It seemed an
incredible love-affair--so much so that Charles Greville, who had known
her intimately all his life, refused to believe that it was anything
but a "social and political" _liaison_.  But the wits of Paris thought
otherwise.  It was noticed that Guizot was always to be found in the
house in the Rue St. Florentin.  The malicious Mrime told the story
of how, after a party at the Princess's, he had been the last to
leave--except Guizot; how, having forgotten something, he had returned
to the drawing-room, and found that the Minister had already taken off
the ribbon (the "grand cordon") of the Legion of Honour.  A chuckle--a
chuckle from beyond the tomb--reached the world from Chteaubriand.
"Le ridicule attendait a Paris Madame de Lieven.  Un doctrinaire grave
est tomb aux pieds d'Omphale: 'Amour, tu perdis Troie.'"  And the wits
of Paris were right.  The _liaison_, certainly, was strengthened by
political and social interests, but its basis was sentimental passion.
The testimony of a long series of letters puts that beyond a doubt.  In
this peculiar correspondence, pedantry, adoration, platitudes, and
suburban _minauderies_ form a compound for which one hardly knows
whether smiles or tears are the appropriate reaction.  When Guizot
begins a love-letter with--"Le Cardinal de Retz dit quelque part," one
can only be delighted, but when Madame de Lieven exclaims, "Ah! que
j'aurais besoin d'tre gouverne!  Pourquoi ne me gouvernez-vous pas?"
one is positively embarrassed.  One feels that one is committing an
unpardonable--a deliciously unpardonable--indiscretion, as one
overhears the cooings of these antiquated doves.  "Si vous pouviez
voir," he says, with exquisite originality, "tout ce qu'il y a dans mon
coeur, si profond, si fort, si ternel, si tendre, si triste."  And she
answers, "Maintenant, je voudrais la tranquillit, la paix du cottage,
votre amour, le mien, rien que cela.  Ah! mon ami, c'est l le vrai
bonheur."  La paix du cottage!  Can this be really and truly Madame de
Lieven?

Yet there was a point at which she did draw the line.  After the death
of the Prince in 1839, it was inevitable that there should be a
suggestion of marriage.  But it faded away.  They were never united by
any other vows than those which they had sworn to each other in the
sight of heaven.  It was rumoured that the difficulty was simply one of
nomenclature.  Guizot (one would expect it) judged that he would be
humiliated if his wife's name were not his own; and the Princess,
though wishing to be governed, recoiled at that.  "Ma chre, on dit que
vous allez pouser Guizot," said a friend.  "Est-ce vrai?"  "Oh! ma
chre," was the reply, "me voyez-vous annonce Madame Guizot!"  Was
this the last resistance of the aristocrat?  Or was it perhaps, in
reality, the final proof that Madame de Lieven was an aristocrat no
longer?

The idyll only ended with death--though there were a few interruptions.
In 1848, revolution forced the lovers to fly to England; it also
precipitated the aged Metternich, with a new young wife, upon these
hospitable shores.  The quartet spent a fortnight together at Brighton;
until their discreet conversations were ended for ever by the
restoration of order; and the _salon_ in the Rue St. Florentin was
opened again.  But a new dispensation was beginning, in which there was
no place for the old minister of Louis-Philippe.  Guizot stood aside;
and, though Madame de Lieven continued to wield an influence under the
Second Empire, it was a gradually declining one.  The Crimean War came
as a shattering blow.  She had made it up with the Czar; their
correspondence was once more in full swing; this was known, and, when
war came, she was forced to leave Paris for Brussels.  Her misery was
complete, but it only lasted for eighteen months.  She crept back on
the plea of health, and Napoleon, leniently winking at her presence,
allowed her to remain--allowed her at last to re-open, very gingerly,
her _salon_.  But everything now was disappearing, disintegrating,
shimmering away.  She was in her seventy-second year; she was ill and
utterly exhausted; she was dying.  Guizot, a veteran too, was
perpetually at her bedside; she begged him at last to leave her--to go
into the next room for a little.  He obeyed, and she was dead when he
returned to her.  She had left a note for him, scribbled in pencil--"Je
vous remercie des vingt annes d'affection et de bonheur.  Ne m'oubliez
pas.  Adieu, Adieu."  At the last moment, with those simple and
touching words, the old grandeur--the original essence that was
Dorothea Benckendorf--had come into its own again.




SIX ENGLISH HISTORIANS




HUME

In what resides the most characteristic virtue of humanity?  In good
works?  Possibly.  In the creation of beautiful objects?  Perhaps.  But
some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment.
To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no
mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the
personal and the particular, none ever practised with a more consummate
success the divine art of impartiality.  And certainly to have no axe
to grind is something very noble and very rare.  It may be said to be
the antithesis of the bestial.  A series of creatures might be
constructed, arranged according to their diminishing interest in the
immediate environment, which would begin with the amoeba and end with
the mathematician.  In pure mathematics the maximum of detachment
appears to be reached: the mind moves in an infinitely complicated
pattern, which is absolutely free from temporal considerations.  Yet
this very freedom--the essential condition of the mathematician's
activity--perhaps gives him an unfair advantage.  He can only be
wrong--he cannot cheat.  But the metaphysician can.  The problems with
which he deals are of overwhelming importance to himself and the rest
of humanity; and it is his business to treat them with an exactitude as
unbiased as if they were some puzzle in the theory of numbers.  That is
his business--and his glory.  In the mind of a Hume one can watch at
one's ease this super-human balance of contrasting opposites--the
questions of so profound a moment, the answers of so supreme a calm.
And the same beautiful quality may be traced in the current of his
life, in which the wisdom of philosophy so triumphantly interpenetrated
the vicissitudes of the mortal lot.

His history falls into three stages--youth, maturity, repose.  The
first was the most important.  Had Hume died at the age of twenty-six
his real work in the world would have been done, and his fame
irrevocably established.  Born in 1711, the younger son of a small
Scottish landowner, he was very early dominated by that passion for
literary pursuits which never left him for the rest of his life.  When
he was twenty-two one of those crises occurred--both physical and
mental--which not uncommonly attack young men of genius when their
adolescence is over, and determine the lines of their destiny.  Hume
was suddenly overcome by restlessness, ill-health, anxiety and
hesitation.  He left home, went to London, and then to Bristol, where,
with the idea of making an independent fortune, he became a clerk in a
merchant's office.  "But," as he wrote long afterwards in his
autobiography, "in a few months I found that scene totally unsuitable
to me."  No wonder; and then it was that, by a bold stroke of
instinctive wisdom, he took the strange step which was the
starting-point of his career.  He went to France, where he remained for
three years--first at Rheims, then at La Flche, in Anjou--entirely
alone, with only just money enough to support an extremely frugal
existence, and with only the vaguest prospects before him.  During
those years he composed his _Treatise of Human Nature_, the masterpiece
which contains all that is most important in his thought.  The book
opened a new era in philosophy.  The last vestiges of theological
prepossessions--which were still faintly visible in Descartes and
Locke--were discarded; and reason, in all her strength and all her
purity, came into her own.  It is in the sense that Hume gives one of
being committed absolutely to reason--of following wherever reason
leads, with a complete, and even reckless, confidence--that the great
charm of his writing consists.  But it is not only that: one is not
alone; one is in the company of a supremely competent guide.  With
astonishing vigour, with heavenly lucidity, Hume leads one through the
confusion and the darkness of speculation.  One has got into an
aeroplane, which has glided imperceptibly from the ground; with
thrilling ease one mounts and mounts; and, supported by the mighty
power of intellect, one looks out, to see the world below one, as one
has never seen it before.  In the Treatise there is something that does
not appear again in Hume's work--a feeling of excitement--the
excitement of discovery.  At moments he even hesitates, and stands
back, amazed at his own temerity.  "The intense view of these manifold
contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon
me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and
reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely
than another.  Where am I, or what?  From what causes do I derive my
existence, and to what condition shall I return?  Whose favour shall I
court, and whose anger must I dread?  What beings surround me? and on
whom have I any influence, or who have influence on me?  I am
confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the
most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest
darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty."
And then his courage returns once more, and he speeds along on his
exploration.

The Treatise, published in 1738, was a complete failure.  For many
years more Hume remained in poverty and insignificance.  He eked out a
living by precarious secretaryships, writing meanwhile a series of
essays on philosophical, political and sthetic subjects, which
appeared from time to time in small volumes, and gradually brought him
a certain reputation.  It was not till he was over forty, when he was
made librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, that his
position became secure.  The appointment gave him not only a small
competence, but the command of a large library; and he determined to
write the history of England--a task which occupied him for the next
ten years.

The History was a great success; many editions were printed; and in his
own day it was chiefly as a historian that Hume was known to the
general public.  After his death his work continued for many years the
standard history of England, until, with a new age, new fields of
knowledge were opened up and a new style of historical writing became
fashionable.  The book is highly typical of the eighteenth century.  It
was an attempt--one of the very earliest--to apply intelligence to the
events of the past.  Hitherto, with very few exceptions (Bacon's _Henry
the Seventh_ was one of them) history had been in the hands of memoir
writers like Commines and Clarendon, or moralists like Bossuet.
Montesquieu, in his _Considrations sur les Romains_, had been the
first to break the new ground; but his book, brilliant and weighty as
it was, must be classed rather as a philosophical survey than a
historical narration.  Voltaire, almost exactly contemporary with Hume,
was indeed a master of narrative, but was usually too much occupied
with discrediting Christianity to be a satisfactory historian.  Hume
had no such _arrire pense_; he only wished to tell the truth as he
saw it, with clarity and elegance.  And he succeeded.  In his
volumes--especially those on the Tudors and Stuarts--one may still find
entertainment and even instruction.  Hume was an extremely intelligent
man, and anything that he had to say on English history could not fail
to be worth attending to.  But, unfortunately, mere intelligence is not
itself quite enough to make a great historian.  It was not simply that
Hume's knowledge of his subject was insufficient--that an enormous
number of facts, which have come into view since he wrote, have made so
many of his statements untrue and so many of his comments unmeaning;
all that is serious, but it is not more serious than the circumstance
that his cast of mind was in reality ill-fitted for the task he had
undertaken.  The virtues of a metaphysician are the vices of a
historian.  A generalised, colourless, unimaginative view of things is
admirable when one is considering the law of causality, but one needs
something else if one has to describe Queen Elizabeth.

This fundamental weakness is materialised in the style of the History.
Nothing could be more enchanting than Hume's style when he is
discussing philosophical subjects.  The grace and clarity of exquisite
writing are enhanced by a touch of colloquialism--the tone of a
polished conversation.  A personality--a most engaging
personality---just appears.  The cat-like touches of ironic
malice--hints of something very sharp behind the velvet--add to the
effect.  "Nothing," Hume concludes, after demolishing every argument in
favour of the immortality of the soul, "could set in a fuller light the
infinite obligations which mankind have to divine revelation, since we
find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important
truth."  The sentence is characteristic of Hume's writing at its best,
where the pungency of the sense varies in direct proportion with the
mildness of the expression.  But such effects are banished from the
History.  A certain formality, which Hume doubtless supposed was
required by the dignity of the subject, is interposed between the
reader and the author; an almost completely latinised vocabulary makes
vividness impossible; and a habit of _oratio obliqua_ has a deadening
effect.  We shall never know exactly what Henry the Second said--in
some uncouth dialect of French or English--in his final exasperation
against Thomas of Canterbury; but it was certainly something about "a
set of fools and cowards," and "vengeance," and "an upstart clerk."
Hume, however, preferred to describe the scene as follows: "The King
himself being vehemently agitated, burst forth with an exclamation
against his servants, whose want of zeal, he said, had so long left him
exposed to the enterprises of that ungrateful and imperious prelate."
Such phrasing, in conjunction with the Middle Ages, is comic.  The more
modern centuries seem to provide a more appropriate field for urbanity,
aloofness and commonsense.  The measured cynicism of Hume's comments on
Cromwell, for instance, still makes good reading--particularly as a
corrective to the _O, altitudo!_ sentimentalities of Carlyle.

Soon after his completion of the History Hume went to Paris as the
secretary to the English Ambassador.  He was now a celebrity, and
French society fell upon him with delirious delight.  He was flattered
by princes, worshipped by fine ladies, and treated as an oracle by the
_philosophes_.  To such an extent did he become the fashion that it was
at last positively _de rigueur_ to have met him, and a lady who, it was
discovered, had not even seen the great philosopher, was banished from
Court.  His appearance, so strangely out of keeping with mental
agility, added to the fascination.  "His face," wrote one of his
friends, "was broad and flat, his mouth wide, and without any other
expression than that of imbecility.  His eyes vacant and spiritless,
and the corpulence of his whole person was far better fitted to
communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than of a refined
philosopher."  All this was indeed delightful to the French.  They
loved to watch the awkward affability of the uncouth figure, to listen
in rapt attention to the extraordinary French accent, and when, one
evening, at a party, the adorable man appeared in a charade as a sultan
between two lovely ladies and could only say, as he struck his chest,
over and over again, "Eh bien, mesdemoiselles, eh bien, vous voil
donc!" their ecstasy reached its height.  It seemed indeed almost
impossible to believe in this combination of the outer and inner man.
Even his own mother never got below the surface.  "Our Davie," she is
reported to have said, "is a fine good-natured cratur, but uncommon
wake-minded."  In no sense whatever was this true.  Hume was not only
brilliant as an abstract thinker and a writer; he was no less competent
in the practical affairs of life.  In the absence of the Ambassador he
was left in Paris for some months as _charg d'affaires_, and his
dispatches still exist to show that he understood diplomacy as well as
ratiocination.

Entirely unmoved by the raptures of Paris, Hume returned to Edinburgh,
at last a prosperous and wealthy man.  For seven years he lived in his
native capital, growing comfortably old amid leisure, books, and
devoted friends.  It is to this final period of his life that those
pleasant legends belong which reveal the genial charm, the happy
temperament, of the philosopher.  There is the story of the
tallow-chandler's wife, who arrived to deliver a monitory message from
on High, but was diverted from her purpose by a tactful order for an
enormous number of candles.  There is the well-known tale of the
weighty philosopher getting stuck in the boggy ground at the base of
the Castle rock, and calling on a passing old woman to help him out.
She doubted whether any help should be given to the author of the Essay
on Miracles.  "But, my good woman, does not your religion as a
Christian teach you to do good, even to your enemies?"  "That may be,"
was the reply, "but ye shallna get out of that till ye become a
Christian yersell: and repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Belief"--a feat
that was accomplished with astonishing alacrity.  And there is the
vision of the mountainous metaphysician seated, amid a laughing party
of young ladies, on a chair that was too weak for him, and suddenly
subsiding to the ground.

In 1776, when Hume was sixty-five, an internal complaint, to which he
had long been subject, completely undermined his health, and recovery
became impossible.  For many months he knew he was dying, but his mode
of life remained unaltered, and, while he gradually grew weaker, his
cheerfulness continued unabated.  With ease, with gaiety, with the
simplicity of perfect taste, he gently welcomed the inevitable.  This
wonderful equanimity lasted till the very end.  There was no
ostentation of stoicism, much less any Addisonian dotting of death-bed
i's.  Not long before he died he amused himself by writing his
autobiography--a model of pointed brevity.  In one of his last
conversations--it was with Adam Smith--he composed an imaginary
conversation between himself and Charon, after the manner of Lucian:
"'Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open
the eyes of the Public.  If I live a few years longer, I may have the
satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems
of superstition.'  But Charon would then lose all temper and decency.
'You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years.
Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term?  Get into the
boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.'"  Within a few days of
his death he wrote a brief letter to his old friend, the Comtesse de
Boufflers; it was the final expression of a supreme detachment.  "My
disorder," he said, "is a diarrhoea, or disorder in my bowels, which
has been gradually undermining me these two years; but, within these
six months, has been visibly hastening me to my end.  I see death
approach gradually, without anxiety or regret.  I salute you, with
great affection and regard, for the last time."




GIBBON

Happiness is the word that immediately rises to the mind at the thought
of Edward Gibbon: and happiness in its widest connotation--including
good fortune as well as enjoyment.  Good fortune, indeed, followed him
from the cradle to the grave in the most tactful way possible;
occasionally it appeared to fail him; but its absence always turned out
to be a blessing in disguise.  Out of a family of seven he alone had
the luck to survive--but only with difficulty; and the maladies of his
childhood opened his mind to the pleasures of study and literature.
His mother died; but her place was taken by a devoted aunt, whose care
brought him through the dangerous years of adolescence to a vigorous
manhood.  His misadventures at Oxford saved him from becoming a don.
His exile to Lausanne, by giving him a command of the French language,
initiated him into European culture, and at the same time enabled him
to lay the foundations of his scholarship.  His father married again;
but his stepmother remained childless and became one of his dearest
friends.  He fell in love; the match was forbidden; and he escaped the
dubious joys of domestic life with the future Madame Necker.  While he
was allowed to travel on the Continent, it seemed doubtful for some
time whether his father would have the resources or the generosity to
send him over the Alps into Italy.  His fate hung in the balance; but
at last his father produced the necessary five hundred pounds and, in
the autumn of 1764, Rome saw her historian.  His father died at exactly
the right moment, and left him exactly the right amount of money.  At
the age of thirty-three Gibbon found himself his own master, with a
fortune just sufficient to support him as an English gentleman of
leisure and fashion.  For ten years he lived in London, a member of
Parliament, a placeman, and a diner-out, and during those ten years he
produced the first three volumes of his History.  After that he lost
his place, failed to obtain another, and, finding his income unequal to
his expenses, returned to Lausanne, where he took up his residence in
the house of a friend, overlooking the Lake of Geneva.  It was the
final step in his career, and no less fortunate than all the others.
In Lausanne he was rich once more, he was famous, he enjoyed a
delightful combination of retirement and society.  Before another ten
years were out he had completed his History; and in ease, dignity, and
absolute satisfaction his work in this world was accomplished.

One sees in such a life an epitome of the blessings of the eighteenth
century--the wonderful [Greek: _mesn gan_] of that most balmy
time--the rich fruit ripening slowly on the sun-warmed wall, and coming
inevitably to its delicious perfection.  It is difficult to imagine, at
any other period in history, such a combination of varied qualities, so
beautifully balanced--the profound scholar who was also a brilliant man
of the world--the votary of cosmopolitan culture, who never for a
moment ceased to be a supremely English "character."  The ten years of
Gibbon's life in London afford an astonishing spectacle of interacting
energies.  By what strange power did he succeed in producing a
masterpiece of enormous erudition and perfect form, while he was
leading the gay life of a man about town, spending his evenings at
White's or Boodle's or the Club, attending Parliament, oscillating
between his house in Bentinck Street, his country cottage at Hampton
Court, and his little establishment at Brighton, spending his summers
in Bath or Paris, and even, at odd moments, doing a little work at the
Board of Trade, to show that his place was not entirely a sinecure?
Such a triumph could only have been achieved by the sweet
reasonableness of the eighteenth century.  "Monsieur Gibbon n'est point
mon homme," said Rousseau.  Decidedly!  The prophet of the coming age
of sentiment and romance could have nothing in common with such a
nature.  It was not that the historian was a mere frigid observer of
the golden mean--far from it.  He was full of fire and feeling.  His
youth had been at moments riotous--night after night he had reeled
hallooing down St. James's Street.  Old age did not diminish the
natural warmth of his affections; the beautiful letter--a model of its
kind--written on the death of his aunt, in his fiftieth year, is a
proof of it.  But the fire and the feeling were controlled and
co-ordinated.  Boswell was a Rousseau-ite, one of the first of the
Romantics, an inveterate sentimentalist, and nothing could be more
complete than the contrast between his career and Gibbon's.  He, too,
achieved a glorious triumph; but it was by dint of the sheer force of
native genius asserting itself over the extravagance and disorder of an
agitated life--a life which, after a desperate struggle, seemed to end
at last in darkness and shipwreck.  With Gibbon there was never any
struggle: everything came naturally to him--learning and dissipation,
industry and indolence, affection and scepticism--in the correct
proportions; and he enjoyed himself up to the very end.

To complete the picture one must notice another antithesis: the wit,
the genius, the massive intellect, were housed in a physical mould that
was ridiculous.  A little figure, extraordinarily rotund, met the eye,
surmounted by a top-heavy head, with a button nose, planted amid a vast
expanse of cheek and ear, and chin upon chin rolling downward.  Nor was
this appearance only; the odd shape reflected something in the inner
man.  Mr. Gibbon, it was noticed, was always slightly over-dressed; his
favourite wear was flowered velvet.  He was a little vain, a little
pompous; at the first moment one almost laughed; then one forgot
everything under the fascination of that even flow of admirably
intelligent, exquisitely turned, and most amusing sentences.  Among all
his other merits this obviously ludicrous egotism took its place.  The
astonishing creature was able to make a virtue even of absurdity.
Without that touch of nature he would have run the risk of being too
much of a good thing; as it was there was no such danger; he was
preposterous and a human being.

It is not difficult to envisage the character and the figure; what
seems strange, and remote, and hard to grasp is the connection between
this individual and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  The
paradox, indeed, is so complete as to be almost romantic.  At a given
moment--October 15, 1764--at a given place--the Capitoline Hill,
outside the church of Aracoeli--the impact occurred between the serried
centuries of Rome and Edward Gibbon.  His life, his work, his fame, his
place in the history of civilisation, followed from that circumstance.
The point of his achievement lay precisely in the extreme improbability
of it.  The utter incongruity of those combining elements produced the
masterpiece--the gigantic ruin of Europe through a thousand years,
mirrored in the mind of an eighteenth-century English gentleman.

How was the miracle accomplished?  Needless to say, Gibbon was a great
artist--one of those rare spirits, with whom a vital and penetrating
imagination and a supreme capacity for general conceptions express
themselves instinctively in an appropriate form.  That the question has
ever been not only asked but seriously debated, whether History was an
art, is certainly one of the curiosities of human ineptitude.  What
else can it possibly be?  It is obvious that History is not a science:
it is obvious that History is not the accumulation of facts, but the
relation of them.  Only the pedantry of incomplete academic persons
could have given birth to such a monstrous supposition.  Facts relating
to the past, when they are collected without art, are compilations; and
compilations, no doubt, may be useful; but they are no more History
than butter, eggs, salt and herbs are an omelette.  That Gibbon was a
great artist, therefore, is implied in the statement that he was a
great historian; but what is interesting is the particular nature of
his artistry.  His whole genius was pre-eminently classical; order,
lucidity, balance, precision--the great classical qualities--dominate
his work; and his History is chiefly remarkable as one of the supreme
monuments of Classic Art in European literature.

"L'ordre est ce qu'il y a de plus rare dans les oprations de
l'esprit."  Gibbon's work is a magnificent illustration of the splendid
dictum of Fenelon.  He brought order out of the enormous chaos of his
subject--a truly stupendous achievement!  With characteristic good
fortune, indeed, the material with which he had to cope was still just
not too voluminous to be digested by a single extremely competent mind.
In the following century even a Gibbon would have collapsed under the
accumulated mass of knowledge at his disposal.  As it was, by dint of a
superb constructive vision, a serene self-confidence, a very acute
judgment, and an astonishing facility in the manipulation of material,
he was able to dominate the known facts.  To dominate, nothing more;
anything else would have been foreign to his purpose.  He was a
classicist; and his object was not comprehension but illumination.  He
drove a straight, firm road through the vast unexplored forest of Roman
history; his readers could follow with easy pleasure along the
wonderful way; they might glance, as far as their eyes could reach,
into the entangled recesses on either side of them; but they were not
invited to stop, or wander, or camp out, or make friends with the
natives; they must be content to look and to pass on.

It is clear that Gibbon's central problem was the one of exclusion: how
much, and what, was he to leave out?  This was largely a question of
scale--always one of the major difficulties in literary
composition--and it appears from several passages in the
Autobiographies that Gibbon paid particular attention to it.
Incidentally, it may be observed that the six Autobiographies were not
so much excursions in egotism--though no doubt it is true that Gibbon
was not without a certain fondness for what he himself called "the most
disgusting of the pronouns"--as exercises on the theme of scale.  Every
variety of compression and expansion is visible among those remarkable
pages; but apparently, since the manuscripts were left in an unfinished
state, Gibbon still felt, after the sixth attempt, that he had not
discovered the right solution.  Even with the scale of the History he
was not altogether satisfied; the chapters on Christianity, he thought,
might, with further labour, have been considerably reduced.  But, even
more fundamental than the element of scale, there was something else
that, in reality, conditioned the whole treatment of his material, the
whole scope and nature of his History; and that was the style in which
it was written.  The style once fixed, everything else followed.
Gibbon was well aware of this.  He wrote his first chapter three times
over, his second and third twice; then at last he was satisfied, and
after that he wrote on without a hitch.  In particular the problem of
exclusion was solved.  Gibbon's style is probably the most exclusive in
literature.  By its very nature it bars out a great multitude of human
energies.  It makes sympathy impossible, it takes no cognisance of
passion, it turns its back upon religion with a withering smile.  But
that was just what was wanted.  Classic beauty came instead.  By the
penetrating influence of style--automatically, inevitably--lucidity,
balance and precision were everywhere introduced; and the miracle of
order was established over the chaos of a thousand years.

Of course, the Romantics raised a protest.  "Gibbon's style," said
Coleridge, "is detestable; but," he added, "it is not the worst thing
about him."  Critics of the later nineteenth century were less
consistent.  They admired Gibbon for everything except his style,
imagining that his History would have been much improved if it had been
written in some other way; they did not see that, if it had been
written in any other way, it would have ceased to exist; just as St.
Paul's would cease to exist if it were rebuilt in Gothic.  Obsessed by
the colour and movement of romantic prose, they were blind to the
subtlety, the clarity, the continuous strength of Gibbon's writing.
Gibbon could turn a bold phrase with the best of them--"the fat
slumbers of the Church," for instance--if he wanted to; but he very
rarely wanted to; such effects would have disturbed the easy,
close-knit, homogeneous surface of his work.  His use of words is, in
fact, extremely delicate.  When, describing St. Simeon Stylites on his
pillar, he speaks of "this last and lofty station," he succeeds, with
the least possible emphasis, merely by the combination of those two
alliterative epithets with that particular substantive, in making the
whole affair ridiculous.  One can almost see his shoulders shrug.  The
nineteenth century found him pompous; they did not relish the irony
beneath the pomp.  He produces some of his most delightful effects by
rhythm alone.  In the _Vindication_--a work which deserves to be better
known, for it shows us Gibbon, as one sees him nowhere else, really
letting himself go--there is an admirable example of this.  "I still
think," he says, in reply to a criticism by Dr. Randolph, "I still
think that an hundred Bishops, with Athanasius at their head, were as
competent judges of the discipline of the fourth century, as even the
Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford."
Gibbon's irony, no doubt, is the salt of his work; but, like all irony,
it is the product of style.  It was not for nothing that he read
through every year the _Lettres Provinciates_ of Pascal.  From this
point of view it is interesting to compare him with Voltaire.  The
irony of the great Frenchman was a flashing sword--extreme, virulent,
deadly--a terrific instrument of propaganda.  Gibbon uses the weapon
with far more delicacy; he carves his enemy "as a dish fit for the
Gods"; his mocking is aloof, almost indifferent, and perhaps, in the
long run, for that very reason, even more effective.

At every period of his life Gibbon is a pleasant thing to contemplate,
but perhaps most pleasant of all in the closing weeks of it, during his
last visit to England.  He had hurried home from Lausanne to join his
friend Lord Sheffield, whose wife had died suddenly, and who, he felt,
was in need of his company.  The journey was no small proof of his
affectionate nature; old age was approaching; he was corpulent, gouty,
and accustomed to every comfort; and the war of the French Revolution
was raging in the districts through which he had to pass.  But he did
not hesitate, and after skirting the belligerent armies in his chaise,
arrived safely in England.  After visiting Lord Sheffield he proceeded
to Bath, to stay with his stepmother.  The amazing little figure, now
almost spherical, bowled along the Bath Road in the highest state of
exhilaration.  "I am always," he told his friend, "so much delighted
and improved with this union of ease and motion, that, were not the
expense enormous, I would travel every year some hundred miles, more
especially in England."  Mrs. Gibbon, a very old lady, but still full
of vitality, worshipped her stepson, and the two spent ten days
together, talking, almost always tte--tte, for ten hours a day.
Then the historian went off to Althorpe, where he spent a happy morning
with Lord Spencer, looking at early editions of Cicero.  And so back to
London.  In London a little trouble arose.  A protuberance in the lower
part of his person, which, owing to years of characteristic
_insouciance_, had grown to extraordinary proportions, required
attention; an operation was necessary; but it went off well, and there
seemed to be no danger.  Once more Mr. Gibbon dined out.  Once more he
was seen, in his accustomed attitude, with advanced forefinger,
addressing the company, and rapping his snuff box at the close of each
particularly pointed phrase.  But illness came on again--nothing very
serious.  The great man lay in bed discussing how much longer he would
live--he was fifty-six--ten years, twelve years, or perhaps twenty.  He
ate some chicken and drank three glasses of madeira.  Life seemed
almost as charming as usual.  Next morning, getting out of bed for a
necessary moment, "Je suis plus adroit," he said with his odd smile to
his French valet.  Back in bed again, he muttered something more, a
little incoherently, lay back among the pillows, dozed, half-woke,
dozed again, and became unconscious--for ever.




MACAULAY

In Apollo's house there are many mansions; there is even one
(unexpectedly enough) for the Philistine.  So complex and various are
the elements of literature that no writer can be damned on a mere
enumeration of faults.  He may always possess merits which make up for
everything; if he loses on the swings, he may win on the roundabouts.
Macaulay--whatever the refined and the sublime may say to the
contrary--is an example of this.  A coarse texture of mind--a metallic
style--an itch for the obvious and the emphatic--a middle-class,
Victorian complacency--it is all too true; Philistine is, in fact, the
only word to fit the case; and yet, by dint of sheer power of writing,
the Philistine has reached Parnassus.  It is a curious occurrence, and
deserves a closer examination.

What are the qualities that make a historian?  Obviously these three--a
capacity for absorbing facts, a capacity for stating them, and a point
of view.  The two latter are connected, but not necessarily
inseparable.  The late Professor Samuel Gardiner, for instance, could
absorb facts, and he could state them; but he had no point of view; and
the result is that his book on the most exciting period of English
history resembles nothing so much as a very large heap of sawdust.  But
a point of view, it must be remembered, by no means implies sympathy.
One might almost say that it implies the reverse.  At any rate it is
curious to observe how many instances there are of great historians who
have been at daggers drawn with their subjects.  Gibbon, a highly
civilised scoffer, spent twenty years of his life writing about
barbarism and superstition.  Michelet was a romantic and a republican;
but his work on medival France and the Revolution is far inferior to
his magnificent delineation of the classic and despotic centuries.
Macaulay's great-nephew, Professor Trevelyan, has, it is true, written
a delightful account of the Italian Risorgimento, of which he is an
enthusiastic devotee.  But, even here, the rule seems to apply; one
cannot but feel that Professor Trevelyan's epic would have been still
more delightful if it had contained a little of the salt of
criticism--if, in fact, he had not swallowed Garibaldi whole.

As for Macaulay's point of view, everyone knows it was the Whig one.
In reality this is simplifying too much; but, however we may describe
it, there can be no doubt that Macaulay's vision was singularly alien
to the England of the latter years of the seventeenth century.  Like
Gibbon, like Michelet, like the later Carlyle, he did not--to put it
succinctly--understand what he was talking about.  Charles II, James
II--that whole strange age in which religion, debauchery, intellect,
faction, wit and brutality seethed and bubbled together in such an
extraordinary _olla podrida_--escaped him.  He could see parts of it;
but he could not see into the depths; and so much the better: he had
his point of view.  The definiteness, the fixity, of his position is
what is remarkable.  He seems to have been created _en bloc_.  His
manner never changed; as soon as he could write at all--at the age of
eight--he wrote in the style of his History.  The three main factors in
his mental growth--the Clapham sect, Cambridge, Holland House--were not
so much influences as suitable environments for the development of a
predetermined personality.  Whatever had happened to him, he would
always have been a middle-class intellectual with Whig views.  It is
possible, however, that he may actually have gained something from
Holland House.  The modern habit of gently laughing at Whigs and
Whiggery is based on a misconception.  A certain _a priori_ stuffiness
which seems to hang about that atmosphere is in reality a Victorian
innovation.  The true pre-Reform Bill Whig was a tremendous
aristocrat--the heir to a great tradition of intellectual independence
and spiritual pride.  When the Hollands' son travelled as a youth in
Italy he calmly noted in his diary that someone he had met had a face
"almost as stupid as the Duke of Wellington's"; the young Fox was a
chip of the old block.  Such surroundings must have been good for
Macaulay.  It was not only that they supported his self-confidence--he
had enough of that already--but that they brought him into touch with
the severity, the grandeur, and the amenity of an old civilisation.
Without them he might have been provincial or academic; but he was not
so; on every page of his work one sees the manifest signs of the
culture and the traffic of the great world.

Thus Macaulay's Whiggism was a composite affair--it was partly
eighteenth century and partly Victorian.  But the completeness with
which it dominated him gave him his certainty of attitude and his
clarity of vision.  It enabled him to stand up against the confusion
and frenzy of the seventeenth century and say, very loudly and very
distinctly, what he thought of it.  So far so good.  The misfortune is
that what he thought was not of a finer quality.  The point of view is
distinct enough, but it is without distinction; and Macaulay in
consequence remains an excellent but not a supreme historian.  His
Whiggism was in itself a very serious drawback--not because it was a
cause of bias, but because it was a symptom of crudity.  The bias was
of the wrong kind; it was the outcome of party politics, and the sad
truth is that, in the long run, party politics become a bore.  They did
not, indeed, succeed in making Macaulay a bore; that was impossible;
but, though he is never dull, one constantly feels that he might have
been much more interesting.  Too often he misses the really exciting,
the really fascinating, point.  And how can one fail to miss a great
deal if one persists in considering the world from one side or other of
the House of Commons?

A certain crudity, a certain coarseness of fibre--the marks of a party
politician--are particularly obvious in those character sketches of
great persons which form so important a part of Macaulay's History.
Within their limits they are admirably done; but their limits are too
narrow.  They lack colour; they are steel engravings--unsatisfactory
compromises between a portrait in oils and a realistic snapshot.  One
has only to compare them with Clarendon's splendid presentments to
realise their inadequacy.  With what a gorgeous sinuosity, with what a
grandiose delicacy, the older master elaborates, through his enormous
sentences, the lineaments of a soul!  Beside them the skimpy lines and
cheap contrasts of Macaulay's black and white are all too obvious.

But the Whig politician was not only crude; he was also, to a strange
degree, ingenuous and complacent.  A preposterous optimism fills his
pages.  The Revolution of 1688 having succeeded, all was well; Utopia
was bound to follow; and it actually had followed--in the reign of
Victoria.  Thus he contrasts with delight, almost with awe, the state
of Torbay at the time of William's landing and its condition in 1850.
In 1688 "the huts of ploughmen and fishermen were thinly scattered over
what is now the site of crowded marts and of luxurious pavilions."  A
description of the modern Torquay becomes irresistible.  "The
inhabitants are about ten thousand in number.  The newly-built churches
and chapels, the baths and libraries, the hotels and public gardens,
the infirmary and the museum, the white streets, rising terrace above
terrace, the gay villas peeping from the midst of shrubberies and
flower beds, present a spectacle widely different from any that in the
seventeenth century England could show."  They do indeed.

The style is the mirror of the mind, and Macaulay's style is that of a
debater.  The hard points are driven home like nails with unfailing
dexterity; it is useless to hope for subtlety or refinement; one cannot
hammer with delicacy.  The repetitions, the antitheses, resemble
revolving cog-wheels; and indeed the total result produces an effect
which suggests the operations of a machine more than anything else--a
comparison which, no doubt, would have delighted Macaulay.  The
descriptive passages are the most deplorable.  In a set-piece, such as
the account of Westminster Hall at the impeachment of Hastings, all the
horrors of a remorseless rhetoric are made manifest.  From the time of
Cicero downwards, the great disadvantage of oratory has been that it
never lets one off.  One must hear everything, however well one knows
it, and however obvious it is.  For such writers a dose of Stendhal is
to be recommended.  Macaulay, however, would not have benefited by the
prescription, for he was a hopeless case.  The tonic pages of the
_Chartreuse de Parme_ would have had no effect on him whatever.  When
he wished to state that Schomberg was buried in Westminster Abbey, he
_had_ to say that "the illustrious warrior" was laid in "that venerable
abbey, hallowed by the dust of many generations of princes, heroes and
poets."  There is no escaping it; and the incidental drawback that
Schomberg was not buried at Westminster at all, but in Dublin, is, in
comparison with the platitude of the style, of very small importance.

The curiously metallic quality in Macaulay's writing--its hardness of
outline, its slightly hollow ring--is so characteristic that it is
difficult not to see in it the indication of some profound
psychological state.  The stout, square man with the prodigious memory
and the inexhaustible capacity for conversation, was apparently a
normal human being, except in one direction: he never married, and
there seems no reason to suppose that he was ever in love.  An
entertaining essay might perhaps be written on the sexlessness of
historians; but it would be entertaining and nothing more: we do not
know enough either about the historians or sex.  Yet, in Macaulay's
case, one cannot resist the conclusion that the absence from his
make-up of intense physical emotion brought a barrenness upon his
style.  His sentences have no warmth and no curves; the embracing
fluidity of love is lacking.  And it is noticeable how far more
effective he is in his treatment of those whom he dislikes than of
those whom he admires.  His Marlborough is a fine villain.  His James
II is a caricature, with a queer vitality of its own--the vitality of a
marionette.  But his William of Orange is a failure--a lifeless image
of waxwork perfection.  Macaulay's inability to make his hero live--his
refusal to make any attempt to illuminate the mysteries of that most
obscure and singular character--epitomises all that is weakest in his
work.

Probably the futility of his sthetic judgments was another effect of
the same cause.  Whenever he writes of pure poetry--in the essay on
Byron, for instance--he is plainly at sea; his lack of sensibility
becomes painfully obvious.  A true child of his age, he had a profound
distrust, amounting at times to an actual hatred, of art.  That Queen
Mary should have ruined her father, turned him out of his kingdom, and
seized his throne for herself--all that was no blemish at all on her
character: was she not acting upon strictly Whig principles?  But one
fault she did have.  She was responsible for "a frivolous and inelegant
fashion."  She was the first person in England to form "a vast
collection of hideous images, and of vases on which houses, trees,
bridges and mandarins were depicted in outrageous defiance of all the
laws of perspective."  Queen Mary, in fact, liked china; and that could
not be forgiven her.

The weaknesses are obvious, and the strength, suitably enough, is
obvious too.  History is primarily a narrative, and in power of
narration no one has ever surpassed Macaulay.  In that he is a genius.
When it comes to telling a story, his faults disappear or change into
virtues.  Narrowness becomes clarity, and crudity turns into force.
The rhetoric of the style, from being the ornament of platitude,
becomes the servant of excitement.  Every word is valuable: there is no
hesitation, no confusion, and no waste.  It is clear from his journal
that Macaulay realised the dominating importance of this side of his
work.  He laboured at his purely narrative passages for weeks at a
time, with the result that they are masterpieces.  Nobody who has once
read them can ever forget his account of the trial of the Bishops, the
siege of Deny, and the battle of Killiecrankie.  To write so is to
write magnificently, and if one has to be a Philistine to bring off
those particular effects one can only say, so much the better for the
Philistine.  But it is not only in certain passages that Macaulay
triumphs.  His whole History is conditioned by a supreme sense of the
narrative form.  It presses on, with masterly precipitation, from start
to finish.  Everything falls into place.  Unsatisfying characters,
superficial descriptions, jejune reflections, are seen to be no longer
of importance in themselves--they are merely stages in the development
of the narrative.  They are part of the pattern--the enthralling,
ever-shifting pattern of the perfect kaleidoscope.  A work of art?
Yes, there is no denying it: the Philistine was also an artist.  And
there he is--squat, square and perpetually talking--on Parnassus.




CARLYLE

My grandfather, Edward Strachey, an Anglo-Indian of cultivation and
intelligence, once accompanied Carlyle on an excursion to Paris in
pre-railroad days.  At their destination the postilion asked my
grandfather for a tip; but the reply--it is Carlyle who tells the
story--was a curt refusal, followed by the words--"Vous avez driv
devilish slow."  The reckless insularity of this remark illustrates
well enough the extraordinary change which had come over the English
governing classes since the eighteenth century.  Fifty years earlier a
cultivated Englishman would have piqued himself upon answering the
postilion in the idiom and the accent of Paris.  But the Napoleonic
wars, the industrial revolution, the romantic revival, the Victorian
spirit, had brought about a relapse from the cosmopolitan suavity of
eighteenth-century culture; the centrifugal forces, always latent in
English life, had triumphed, and men's minds had shot off into the
grooves of eccentricity and provincialism.  It is curious to notice the
flux and reflux of these tendencies in the history of our literature:
the divine amenity of Chaucer followed by the no less divine
idiosyncrasy of the Elizabethans; the exquisite vigour of the
eighteenth century followed by the rampant vigour of the nineteenth;
and to-day the return once more towards the Latin elements in our
culture, the revulsion from the Germanic influences which obsessed our
grandfathers, the preference for what is swift, what is well arranged,
and what is not too good.

Carlyle was not an English gentleman, he was a Scotch peasant; and his
insularity may be measured accordingly--by a simple sum in proportion.
In his youth, no doubt, he had German preoccupations; but on the whole
he is, with Dickens, probably the most complete example of a home
growth which the British Islands have to offer to the world.  The
result is certainly remarkable.  There is much to be said for the
isolated productions of special soils; they are full of strength and
character; their freedom from outside forces releases in them a spring
of energy which leads, often enough, to astonishing consequences.  In
Carlyle's case the release was terrific.  His vitality burst out into
an enormous exuberance, filling volume after volume with essays,
histories, memoirs and philosophisings, pouring itself abroad through
an immense correspondence, and erupting for eighty years in a perpetual
flood of red-hot conversation.  The achievements of such a spirit take
one's breath away; one gazes in awe at the serried row of heavy books
on the shelf; one reads on and on until one's eyes are blinded by the
endless glare of that aurora borealis, and one's ears deafened by the
roar and rattle of that inexhaustible artillery.  Then one
recovers--very quickly.  That is the drawback.  The northern lights,
after all, seem to give out no heat, and the great guns were only
loaded with powder.  So, at any rate, it appears to a perverse
generation.  It was all very well in the days when English gentlemen
could say with perfect sang-froid "Vous avez driv devilish slow" to
French postilions.  Then the hurricane that was Carlyle came into
contact with what was exactly appropriate to it--gnarled oaks--solitary
conifers; and the effect was sublime; leaves whirled, branches crashed,
and fathers of the forest were uprooted.  But nowadays it hurls itself
upon a congregation of tremulous reeds; they bend down low, to the very
earth, as the gale passes; and then immediately they spring up again,
and are seen to be precisely as they were before.

The truth is that it is almost as fatal to have too much genius as too
little.  What was really valuable in Carlyle was ruined by his colossal
powers and his unending energy.  It is easy to perceive that, amid all
the rest of his qualities, he was an artist.  He had a profound relish
for words; he had a sense of style which developed, gradually and
consistently, into interesting and original manifestations; he had an
imaginative eye; he had a grim satiric humour.  This was an admirable
outfit for a historian and a memoir writer, and it is safe to prophesy
that whatever is permanent in Carlyle's work will be found in that
section of his writings.  But, unfortunately, the excellence, though it
is undoubtedly there, is a fitful and fragmentary one.  There are vivid
flashes and phrases--visions thrown up out of the darkness of the past
by the bull's-eye lantern of a stylistic imagination--Coleridge at
Highgate, Maupertuis in Berlin, the grotesque image of the "sea-green
Incorruptible"; there are passages of accomplished caricature, and
climaxes of elaborately characteristic writing; and then the artist's
hand falters, his eye wanders, his mind is distracted and led away.
One has only to compare Carlyle with Tacitus to realise what a
disadvantage it is to possess unlimited powers.  The Roman master,
undisturbed by other considerations, was able to devote himself
entirely to the creation of a work of art.  He triumphed: supremely
conscious both of his capacities and his intentions, he built up a
great design, which in all its parts was intense and beautiful.  The
Carlylean qualities--the satiric vision, the individual style--were
his; but how differently he used them!  He composed a tragedy, while
Carlyle spent himself in melodrama; he made his strange sentences the
expression of a profound personality, while Carlyle's were the vehicle
of violence and eccentricity.

The stern child of Ecclefechan held artists in low repute, and no doubt
would have been disgusted to learn that it was in that guise that he
would win the esteem of posterity.  He had higher views: surely he
would be remembered as a prophet.  And no doubt he had many of the
qualifications for that profession--a loud voice, a bold face, and a
bad temper.  But unfortunately there was one essential characteristic
that he lacked--he was not dishonoured in his own country.  Instead of
being put into a pit and covered with opprobrium, he made a comfortable
income, was supplied by Mrs. Carlyle with everything that he wanted,
and was the favourite guest at Lady Ashburton's fashionable parties.
Prophecies, in such circumstances, however voluminous and disagreeable
they may be, are apt to have something wrong with them.  And, in any
case, who remembers prophets?  Isaiah and Jeremiah, no doubt, have
gained a certain reputation; but then Isaiah and Jeremiah have had the
extraordinary good fortune to be translated into English by a committee
of Elizabethan bishops.

To be a prophet is to be a moralist, and it was the moral preoccupation
in Carlyle's mind that was particularly injurious to his artistic
instincts.  In Latin countries--the fact is significant--morals and
manners are expressed by the same word; in England it is not so; to
some Britons, indeed, the two notions appear to be positively
antithetical.  Perhaps this is a mistake.  Perhaps if Carlyle's manners
had been more polished his morals would have been less distressing.
Morality, curiously enough, seems to belong to that class of things
which are of the highest value, which perform a necessary function,
which are, in fact, an essential part of the human mechanism, but which
should only be referred to with the greatest circumspection.  Carlyle
had no notion that this was the case, and the result was disastrous.
In his history, especially, it is impossible to escape from the
devastating effects of his reckless moral sense.

Perhaps it is the platitude of such a state of mind that is its most
exasperating quality.  Surely, one thinks, poor Louis XV might be
allowed to die without a sermon from Chelsea.  But no!  The opportunity
must not be missed; the preacher draws a long breath, and expatiates
with elaborate emphasis upon all that is most obvious about mortality,
crowns, and the futility of self-indulgence.  But an occasional
platitude can be put up with; what is really intolerable is the
all-pervadingness of the obsession.  There are some German cooks who
have a passion for caraway seeds: whatever dish they are preparing,
from whipped cream to legs of mutton, they cannot keep them out.  Very
soon one begins to recognise the fatal flavour; one lies in horrified
wait for it; it instantly appears; and at last the faintest suspicion
of caraway almost produces nausea.  The histories of Carlyle (and no
less, it may be observed in passing, the novels of Thackeray) arouse
those identical sensations--the immediate recognition of the first
approaches of the well-known whiff--the inevitable saturation--the
heart that sinks and sinks.  And, just as one sometimes feels that the
cook was a good cook, and that the dish would have been done to a turn
if only the caraway canister could have been kept out of reach, so one
perceives that Carlyle had a true gift for history which was undone by
his moralisations.  There is an imaginative greatness in his conception
of Cromwell, for instance, a vigour and a passion in the presentment of
it; but all is spoilt by an overmastering desire to turn the strange
Protector into a moral hero after Carlyle's own heart, so that, after
all, the lines are blurred, the composition is confused, and the
picture unconvincing.

But the most curious consequence of this predilection is to be seen in
his Frederick the Great.  In his later days Carlyle evolved a kind of
super-morality by which all the most unpleasant qualities of human
nature--egotism, insensitiveness, love of power--became the object of
his religious adoration---a monstrous and inverted ethic, combining
every possible disadvantage of virtue and of vice.  He then, for some
mysterious reason, pitched upon Frederick of Prussia as the great
exemplar of this system, and devoted fourteen years of ceaseless labour
to the elucidation of his history.  Never was a misconception more
complete.  Frederick was in reality a knave of genius, a sceptical,
eighteenth-century gambler with a strong will and a turn for
organisation; and this was the creature whom Carlyle converted into an
Ideal Man, a God-like Hero, a chosen instrument of the Eternal Powers.
What the Eternal Powers would have done if a stray bullet had gone
through Frederick's skull in the battle of Molwitz, Carlyle does not
stop to inquire.  By an ironical chance there happened to be two
attractive elements in Frederick's mental outfit; he had a genuine
passion for French literature, and he possessed a certain scurrilous
wit, which constantly expressed itself in extremely truculent fashion.
Fate could not have selected two more unfortunate qualities with which
to grace a hero of Carlyle's.  Carlyle considered French literature
trash; and the kind of joke that Frederick particularly relished filled
him with profound aversion.  A copy of Frederick's collected works
still exists, with Carlyle's pencilled annotations in the margin.  Some
of the King's poetical compositions are far from proper; and it is
amusing to observe the historian's exclamations of agitated regret
whenever the Ideal Man alludes, in some mocking epigram, to his own or
his friends' favourite peccadilloes.  One can imagine, if Frederick
were to return to earth for a moment and look over one's shoulder, his
grin of fiendish delight.

The cruel Hohenzollern would certainly have laughed; but to gentler
beings the spectacle of so much effort gone so utterly awry seems
rather a matter for lamentation.  The comedy of Carlyle's case topples
over into tragedy--a tragedy of waste and unhappiness.  If only he
could have enjoyed himself!  But he never did.  Is it possible, one
wonders, to bring forth anything that is worth bringing forth, without
some pleasure--whatever pains there may be as well--in the parturition?
One remembers Gibbon, cleaving his way, with such a magisterial gaiety,
through the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  He, too, no doubt,
understood very little of his subject; but all was well with him and
with his work.  Why was it?  The answer seems to be--he understood
something that, for his purposes, was more important even than the
Roman Empire--himself.  He knew his own nature, his powers, his
limitations, his desires; he was the master of an inward harmony.  From
Carlyle such knowledge was hidden.  Blindness is always tragic; but the
blindness that brings mighty strength to baffled violence, towering
aspirations to empty visions, and sublime self-confidence to
bewilderment, remorse and misery, is terrible and pitiable indeed.

Unfortunately it was not only upon Carlyle himself that the doom
descended.  A woman of rare charm and brilliant powers was involved in
his evil destiny.  Regardless both of the demands of her temperament
and the qualities of her spirit, he used her without scruple to
subserve his own purposes, and made her as wretched as himself.  She
was his wife, and that was the end of the matter.  She might have
become a consummate writer or the ruler and inspirer of some fortunate
social group; but all that was out of the question; was she not Mrs.
Carlyle?  It was her business to suppress her own instincts, to devote
her whole life to the arrangement of his domestic comforts, to listen
for days at a time, as she lay racked with illness on the sofa, to his
descriptions of the battles of Frederick the Great.  The time came when
she felt that she could bear it no longer, and that at all hazards she
must free herself from those stifling bonds.  It is impossible not to
wish that she had indeed fled as she intended with the unknown man of
her choice.  The blow to Carlyle's egoism would have been so dramatic,
and the upheaval in that well-conducted world so satisfactory to
contemplate!  But, at the last moment, she changed her mind.  Curiously
enough, when it came to the point, it turned out that Mrs. Carlyle
agreed with her husband.  Even that bold spirit succumbed to the
influences that surrounded it; she, too, was a mid-Victorian at heart.
The woman's tragedy may be traced in those inimitable letters, whose
intoxicating merriment flashes like lightning about the central figure,
as it moves in sinister desolation against the background of a most
peculiar age: an age of barbarism and prudery, of nobility and
cheapness, of satisfaction and desperation; an age in which everything
was discovered and nothing known; an age in which all the outlines were
tremendous and all the details sordid; when gas-jets struggled feebly
through the circumambient fog, when the hour of dinner might be at any
moment between two and six, when the doses of rhubarb were periodic and
gigantic, when pet dogs threw themselves out of upper storey windows,
when cooks reeled drunk in areas, when one sat for hours with one's
feet in dirty straw dragged along the streets by horses, when an
antimacassar was on every chair, and the baths were minute tin circles,
and the beds were full of bugs and disasters.

After it was all over and his wife was dead, Carlyle realised what had
happened.  But all that he could do was to take refuge from the truth
in the vain vehemence of sentimental self-reproaches.  He committed his
confessions to Froude without sufficient instructions; and when he died
he left behind him a legacy of doubt and scandal.  But now, at length,
some enjoyment appeared upon the scene.  No one was happier than
Froude, with an agitated conscience and a sense of duty that involved
the divulgation of dreadful domesticities; while the Victorian public
feasted upon the unexpected banquet to its heart's content.




FROUDE

James Anthony Froude was one of the salient figures of mid-Victorian
England.  In that society of prepotent personages he more than held his
own.  He was not merely the author of the famous _History_; he was a
man of letters who was also a man of the world, an accomplished
gentleman, whose rich nature overflowed with abounding energy, a
sportsman, a yachtsman, a brilliant and magnificent talker--and
something more: one in whose presence it was impossible not to feel a
hint of mystery, of strange melancholy, an uncomfortable suggestion of
enigmatic power.  His most impressive appearance completed the effect:
the height, the long, pale face, the massive, vigorous features, the
black hair and eyebrows, and the immense eyes, with their glowing
darkness, whose colour--so a careful observer noted--was neither brown,
nor blue, nor black, but red.  What was the explanation of it all?
What was the inner cause of this _brio_ and this sadness, this
passionate earnestness and this sardonic wit?  One wonders, as his
after-dinner listeners used to wonder, in the 'sixties, with a little
shiver, while the port went round, and the ladies waited in the
drawing-room.

Perhaps it is easier for us than for them to make, at any rate, a
guess; for we know more of the facts, and we have our modern psychology
to give us confidence.  Perhaps the real explanation was old Mr.
Froude, who was a hunting parson of a severely conventional type, with
a marked talent for water-colours.  Mrs. Froude had died early, leaving
the boy to be brought up by this iron-bound clergyman and some brothers
much older than himself.  His childhood was wretched, his boyhood was
frightful.  He was sent, ill and overgrown, to college at Westminster,
and there--it was, as the biographers dutifully point out, in the bad
old days before the influence of Dr. Arnold had turned the Public
Schools into models of industry and civilised behaviour--he suffered,
for two years, indescribable torment.  He was removed in disgrace,
flogged by his father for imaginary delinquencies, and kept at home for
two years more in the condition of an outcast.  His eldest brother,
Hurrell, who was one of the leaders in the new fashion of taking
Christianity seriously, and mortified his own flesh by eating fish on
Fridays, egged on the parental discipline with pious glee.  At last,
grown too old for castigation, the lad was allowed to go to Oxford.
There, for the first time in his life, he began to enjoy himself, and
became engaged to an attractive young lady.  But he had run up bills
with the Oxford tradesmen, had told his father they were less than they
were, the facts had come out, and old Mr. Froude, declaring that his
son was little better than a common swindler, denounced him as such to
the young lady's father, who thereupon broke off the engagement.  It
seems surprising that Anthony resisted the temptation of suicide--that
he had the strength and the courage to outface his misfortunes, to make
a career for himself and become a highly successful man.  What is more
surprising is that his attitude towards his father never ceased, from
first to last, to be one of intense admiration.  He might struggle, he
might complain, he might react, but he always, with a strange
overpowering instinctiveness, adored.  Old Mr. Froude had drawn a magic
circle round his son, from which escape was impossible; and the
creature whose life had been almost ruined by his father's moral
cruelty, who--to all appearances--had thrown off the yoke, and grown
into maturity with the powerful, audacious, sceptical spirit of a free
man, remained, in fact, in secret servitude--a disciplinarian, a
Protestant, even a church-goer, to the very end.

Possibly the charm might have been exorcised by an invocation to
science, but Froude remained curiously aloof from the dominating
influence of his age; and instead, when his father had vanished,
submitted himself to Carlyle.  The substitution was symptomatic: the
new father expressed in explicit dogma the unconscious teaching of the
old.  To the present generation Carlyle presents a curious problem--it
is so very difficult to believe that real red-hot lava ever flowed from
that dry, neglected crater; but the present generation never heard
Carlyle talk.  For many years Froude heard little else: he became an
evangelist; but when he produced his gospel it met, like some others,
with a mixed reception.  The Victorian public, unable to understand a
form of hero-worship which laid bare the faults of the hero, was
appalled, and refused to believe what was the simple fact--that
Froude's adoration was of so complete a kind that it shrank with horror
from the notion of omitting a single wart from the portrait.  To us the
warts are obvious: our only difficulty is to account for the adoration.
However, since it led incidentally to the publication of Mrs. Carlyle's
letters as well as her husband's, we can only be thankful.

The main work of Froude's life, the _History of England from the Fall
of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada_, began to appear in
1856, and was completed in 1870.  It is undoubtedly a deeply
interesting book, full of thought, of imagination and of excitement,
the product of great industry and great power of writing: whether it
ranks among the small first class of histories is less certain.
Contemporary critics found much to complain of in it, but their
strictures were, on the whole, beside the mark.  Among them the most
formidable was Professor Freeman, who dissected Froude with the utmost
savagery month after month and year after year in the pages of the
_Saturday Review_.  Freeman was a man of considerable learning, and of
an ill temper even more considerable; his minute knowledge of the Early
English, his passionate devotion to the Anglo-Saxons, and his intimate
conviction (supported by that of Dr. Stubbs), that he (with the
possible exception of Dr. Stubbs) was the supreme historian, made a
strange mixture in his mind, boiling and simmering together over the
flames of a temperamental vexation.  Unfortunately no particle of this
heat ever reached his printed productions, which were remarkable for
their soporific qualities and for containing no words but those of
Anglo-Saxon descent.  The spirit, not only of the school but of the
Sunday school, was what animated those innumerable pages, adorning with
a parochial earnestness the heavy burden of research.  Naturally enough
Froude's work, so coloured, so personal, so obviously written by
somebody who was acquainted with the world as well as Oxford, acted
like a red rag on the professor.  He stormed, he stamped, his fiery and
choleric beard shook with indignation.  He declared that the book was a
mass of inaccuracies and a dastardly attack upon the Church of England.
The former accusation was the more important, and the professor devoted
years to the proof of it.  Unluckily for him, however, the years only
revealed more and more clearly the indisputable value of Froude's work
in the domain of pure erudition.  He was not a careful transcriber, and
he occasionally made a downright blunder; but such blemishes are of
small moment compared with the immense addition he made to historical
knowledge by his exploration and revelation of the manuscripts at
Simancas.  Froude was dignified; he kept silence for twenty years, and
then replied to his tormentor in an article so crushing as to elicit
something almost like an apology.

But he was more completely avenged in a very different and quite
unexpected manner.  Mr. Horace Round, a "burrower into worm-holes"
living in Brighton, suddenly emerged from the parchments among which he
spent his life deliciously gnawing at the pedigrees of the proudest
families of England, and in a series of articles fell upon Freeman with
astonishing force.  The attack was particularly serious because it was
delivered at the strongest point in the professor's armour--his
exactitude, his knowledge of his authorities, his undeviating attention
to fact, and it was particularly galling because it was directed
against the very crown and culmination of the professor's history--his
account of the Battle of Hastings.  With masterly skill Mr. Round
showed that, through a variety of errors, the whole nature of the
battle had been misunderstood and misrepresented; more than that, he
proved that the name of "Senlac" with which Freeman had christened it,
and which he had imposed upon the learned world, was utterly without
foundation, and had been arrived at by a foolish mistake.  Mr. Round
was an obscure technician, but he deserves the gratitude of Englishmen
for having extirpated that odious word from their vocabulary.  The
effect of these articles on Freeman was alarming; his blood boiled, but
he positively made no reply.  For years the attacks continued, and for
years the professor was dumb.  Fulminating rejoinders rushed into his
brain, only to be whisked away again--they were not quite fulminating
enough.  The most devastating article of all was written, was set up in
proof, but was not yet published; it contained the _expos_ of
"Senlac," and rumours of its purport and approaching appearance were
already flying about in museums and common-rooms.  Freeman was aghast
at this last impertinence; but still he nursed his wrath.  Like King
Lear, he would do such things--what they were yet he knew not--but they
should be the terrors of the earth.  At last, silent and purple, he
gathered his female attendants about him, and left England for an
infuriated holiday.  There was an ominous pause; and then the fell news
reached Brighton.  The professor had gone pop in Spain.  Mr. Round,
however, was remorseless, and published.  It was left for his
adversary's pupils and admirers to struggle with him as best they
could, but they did so ineffectively; and he remained, like the
Normans, in possession of the field.

A true criticism of Froude's _History_ implies a wider view than
Freeman's.  The theme of the book was the triumph of the Reformation in
England--a theme not only intensely dramatic in itself, but one which
raised a multitude of problems of profound and perennial interest.
Froude could manage the drama (though in his hands it sometimes
degenerated into melodrama) well enough: it was his treatment of the
philosophical issues that was defective.  Carlyle--it seems hardly
credible--actually believed that the Revolution was to be explained as
a punishment meted out to France for her loose living in the eighteenth
century; and Froude's ethical conceptions, though they were not quite
so crude, belonged to the same infantile species as his master's.  The
Protestants were right and the Catholics were wrong.  Henry VIII
enabled the Protestants to win, therefore Henry VIII was an admirable
person: such was the kind of proposition by which Froude's attitude
towards that period of vast and complicated import was determined.  His
Carlylean theories demanded a hero, and Henry VIII came pat to hand; he
refused to see--what is plain to any impartial observer--that the
Defender of the Faith combined in a peculiar manner the unpleasant
vices of meanness and brutality; no! he made the Reformation--he saved
England--he was a demi-god.  How the execution of Catherine Howard--a
young girl who amused herself--helped forward Protestant England, we
are not told.  Froude's insensitiveness to cruelty becomes, indeed, at
times, almost pathological.  When King and Parliament between them have
a man boiled alive in Smithfield Market, he is favourably impressed; it
is only when Protestants are tortured that there is talk of martyrdom.
The bias, no doubt, gives a spice to the work, but it is a cheap
spice--bought, one feels, at the Co-operative Stores.  The Whiggery of
Macaulay may be tiresome, but it has the flavour of an aristocracy
about it, of a high intellectual tradition; while Froude's
Protestantism is--there is really only one word for it--provincial.

A certain narrowness of thought and feeling: that may be forgiven, if
it is expressed in a style of sufficient mastery.  Froude was an able,
a brilliant writer, copious and vivid, with a picturesque imagination
and a fine command of narrative.  His grand set-pieces--the execution
of Somerset and Mary Queen of Scots, the end of Cranmer, the ruin of
the Armada--go off magnificently, and cannot be forgotten; and, apart
from these, the extraordinary succession of events assumes, as it flows
through his pages, the thrilling lineaments of a great story, upon
whose issue the most _blas_ reader is forced to hang entranced.  Yet
the supreme quality of style seems to be lacking.  One is uneasily
aware of a looseness in the texture, an absence of concentration in the
presentment, a failure to fuse the _whole_ material into organic life.
Perhaps, after all, it is the intellect and the emotion that are at
fault here too; perhaps when one is hoping for genius, it is only
talent--only immense talent--that one finds.  One thinks of the
mysterious wisdom of Thucydides, of the terrific force of Tacitus, of
the Gibbonian balance and lucidity and co-ordination--ah! to few, to
very few, among historians is it granted to bring the [Greek: _ktma es
ae_] into the world.  And yet ... if only, one feels, this gifted,
splendid man could have stepped back a little, could have withdrawn
from the provinciality of Protestantism and the crudity of the
Carlylean dogma, could have allowed himself, untrammelled, to play upon
his subject with his native art and his native wit!  Then, surely, he
would have celebrated other virtues besides the unpleasant ones; he
would have seen some drawbacks to power and patriotism, he would have
preferred civilisation to fanaticism, and Queen Elizabeth to John Knox.
He might even have written immortal English.  But alas! these are vain
speculations; old Mr. Froude would never have permitted anything of the
sort.




CREIGHTON

The Church of England is one of the most extraordinary of institutions.
An incredible concoction of Queen Elizabeth's, it still flourishes,
apparently, and for three hundred years has remained true to type.  Or
perhaps, in reality, Queen Elizabeth had not very much to do with it;
perhaps she only gave, with her long, strong fingers, the final twist
to a stem that had been growing for ages, deep-rooted in the national
life.  Certainly our cathedrals--so careful and so unsthetic, so
class-conscious and so competent--suggest that view of the case.
English Gothic seems to show that England was Anglican long before the
Reformation--as soon as she ceased to be Norman, in fact.  Pure piety,
it cannot be denied, has never been her Church's strong point.
Anglicanism has never produced--never could produce--a St. Teresa.  The
characteristic great men of the institution--Whitgift, Hooker, Laud,
Butler, Jowett--have always been remarkable for virtues of a more
secular kind: those of scholarship or of administrative energy.
Mandell Creighton was (perhaps) the last of the long line.  Perhaps;
for who can tell?  It is difficult to believe that a man of Creighton's
attainments will ever again be Bishop of London.  That particular
concatenation seems to have required a set of causes to bring it into
existence--a state of society, a habit of mind--which have become
obsolete.  But the whirligigs of time are, indeed, unpredictable; and
England, some day or other, may well be blessed with another Victorian
Age.

In Creighton _both_ the great qualities of Anglican tradition were
present to a remarkable degree.  It would be hard to say whether he
were more distinguished as a scholar or a man of affairs; but--such is
the rather unfair persistence of the written word--there can be little
doubt that he will be remembered chiefly as the historian of the
Papacy.  Born when the world was becoming extremely scientific, he
belonged to the post-Carlyle-and-Macaulay generation--the school of
Oxford and Cambridge inquirers, who sought to reconstruct the past
solidly and patiently, with nothing but facts to assist them--pure
facts, untwisted by political or metaphysical bias and uncoloured by
romance.  In this attempt Creighton succeeded admirably.  He was
industrious, exact, clear-headed, and possessed of a command over words
that was quite sufficient for his purposes.  He succeeded more
completely than Professor Samuel Gardiner, whose history of the Early
Stuarts and the Civil Wars was a contemporary work.  Gardiner did his
best, but he was not an absolute master of the method.  Strive as he
would, he could not prevent himself, now and then, from being a little
sympathetic to one or other of his personages; sometimes he positively
alluded to a physical circumstance; in short, humanity would come
creeping in.  A mistake!  For Professor Gardiner's feelings about
mankind are not illuminating; and the result is a slight blur.
Creighton was made of sterner stuff.  In his work a perfectly grey
light prevails everywhere; there is not a single lapse into
psychological profundity; every trace of local colour, every suggestion
of personal passion, has been studiously removed.  In many ways all
this is a great comfort.  One is not worried by moral lectures or
purple patches, and the field is kept clear for what Creighton really
excelled in--the lucid exposition of complicated political
transactions, and the intricate movements of thought with which they
were accompanied.  The biscuit is certainly exceedingly dry; but at any
rate there are no weevils in it.  As one reads, one gets to relish,
with a sober satisfaction, this plumless fare.  It begins to be very
nearly a pleasure to follow the intrigues of the great Councils, or to
tread the labyrinth of the theological theory of indulgences.  It is a
curious cross-section of history that Creighton offers to the view.  He
has cut the great tree so near to the ground that leaf and flower have
vanished; but he has worked his saw with such steadiness and precision
that every grain in the wood is visible, and one can look _down_ at the
mighty structure, revealed in all its complex solidity like a map to
the mind's eye.

Charming, indeed, are the ironies of history; and not the least
charming those that involve the historian.  It was very natural that
Creighton, a clever and studious clergyman of the Church of England,
should choose as the subject of his investigations that group of events
which, centring round the Italian popes, produced at last the
Reformation.  The ironical fact was that those events happened to take
place in a world where no clever and studious clergyman of the Church
of England had any business to be.  "Sobriety," as he himself said, was
his aim; but what could sobriety do when faced with such figures as
Savonarola, Csar Borgia, Julius II, and Luther?  It could only look
somewhere else.  It is pleasant to witness the high-minded husband and
father, the clever talker at Cambridge dinner tables, the industrious
diocesan administrator, picking his way with an air of calm detachment
amid the recklessness, the brutality, the fanaticism, the cynicism, the
lasciviousness, of those Renaissance spirits.  "In his private life,"
Creighton says of Alexander VI, "it is sufficiently clear that he was
at little pains to repress a strongly sensual nature....  We may
hesitate to believe the worst charges brought against him; but the
evidence is too strong to enable us to admit that even after his
accession to the papal office he discontinued the irregularities of his
previous life."  There is high comedy in such a tone on such a topic.
One can imagine the father of the Borgias, if he could have read that
sentence, throwing up his hands in delighted amazement, and roaring out
the obscene blasphemy of his favourite oath.

The truth was that, in spite of his wits and his Oxford training, the
admirable north-country middle-class stock, from which Creighton came,
dominated his nature.  His paradoxes might astound academical circles,
his free speech might agitate the lesser clergy, but at heart he was
absolutely sound.  Even a friendship with that dmonic imp, Samuel
Butler, left him uncorroded.  He believed in the Real Presence.  He was
opposed to Home Rule.  He read with grave attention the novels of Mrs.
Humphry Ward.  The emancipation of a Victorian bishop could never be as
that of other men.  The string that tied him to the peg of tradition
might be quite a long one; but it was always there.  Creighton enjoyed
his little runs with the gusto and vitality that were invariably his.
The sharp aquiline face, with the grizzled beard, the bald forehead,
and the gold spectacles, gleamed and glistened, the long, slim form, so
dapper in its episcopal gaiters, preened itself delightedly, as an
epigram--a devastating epigram--shot off and exploded, and the Fulham
teacups tinkled as they had never tinkled before.  Then, a moment
later, the guests gone, the firm mouth closed in severe determination;
work was resumed.  The duties of the day were dispatched swiftly; the
vast and stormy diocese of London was controlled with extraordinary
efficiency; while a punctual calmness reigned, for, however pressed and
pestered, the Bishop was never known to fuss.  Only once on a railway
journey, when he believed that some valuable papers had gone astray,
did his equanimity desert him.  "Where's my black bag?" was his
repeated inquiry.  His mischievous children treasured up this single
lapse; and, ever afterwards, "Where's my black bag?" was thrown across
the table at the good-humoured prelate when his family was in a teasing
mood.

When the fourth volume of the _History of the Papacy_ appeared there
was a curious little controversy, which illustrated Creighton's
attitude to history and, indeed, to life.  "It seems to me," he wrote
in the preface, "neither necessary to moralise at every turn in
historical writing, nor becoming to adopt an attitude of lofty
superiority over any one who ever played a prominent part in European
affairs, nor charitable to lavish undiscriminating censure on any man."
The wrath of Lord Acton was roused.  He wrote a violent letter of
protest.  The learning of the eminent Catholic was at least equal to
Creighton's, but he made no complaint upon matters of erudition; it was
his moral sense that was outraged.  Creighton, it seemed to him, had
passed over, with inexcusable indifference, the persecution and
intolerance of the medival Church.  The popes of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, he wrote, "... instituted a system of
persecution....  It is the most conspicuous fact in the history of the
medival Papacy....  But what amazes and disables me is that you speak
of the Papacy not as exercising a just severity, but as not exercising
any severity.  You ignore, you even deny, at least implicitly, the
existence of the torture chamber and the stake....  Now the Liberals
think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts
done by Ximenes considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman
courtesans by Alexander VI.  The responsibility exists whether the
thing permitted be good or bad.  If the thing be criminal, then the
authority permitting it bears the guilt....  You say that people in
authority are not to be snubbed or sneered at from our pinnacle of
conscious rectitude.  I really don't know whether you exempt them
because of their rank, or of their success and power, or of their
date....  Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal
responsibility.  Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad."  These words, surely,
are magnificent.  One sees with surprise and exhilaration the roles
reversed--the uncompromising fervour of Catholicism calling down fire
from Heaven upon its own abominable popes and the worldly Protestantism
that excused them.  Creighton's reply was as Anglican as might have
been expected.  He hedged.  One day, he wrote, John Bright had said,
"If the people knew what sort of men statesmen were, they would rise
and hang the whole lot of them."  Next day Gladstone had said
"Statesmanship is the noblest way to serve mankind."  "I am sufficient
of a Hegelian to be able to combine both judgments; but the results of
my combination cannot be expressed in the terms of the logic of
Aristotle....  Society is an organism," etc.  It is clear enough that
his real difference with Lord Acton was not so much over the place of
morals in history as over the nature of the historical acts upon which
moral judgments are to be passed.  The Bishop's imagination was not
deeply stirred by the atrocities of the Inquisition; what interested
him, what appealed to him, what he really understood, were the
difficulties and the expedients of a man of affairs who found himself
at the head of a great administration.  He knew too well, with
ritualists on one side and Kensitites on the other, the trials and
troubles from which a clerical ruler had to extricate himself as best
he could, not to sympathise (in his heart of hearts) with the clerical
rulers of another age who had been clever enough to devise regulations
for the elimination of heresy and schism, and strong enough to put
those regulations into force.

He himself, however, was never a persecutor; his great practical
intelligence prevented that.  Firmly fixed in the English tradition of
common sense, compromise and comprehension, he held on his way amid the
shrieking of extremists with imperturbable moderation.  One of his very
last acts was to refuse to prosecute two recalcitrant clergymen who had
persisted in burning incense in a forbidden manner.  He knew that, in
England at any rate, persecution did not work.  Elsewhere, perhaps, it
might be different; in Russia, for instance....  There was an exciting
moment in Creighton's life when he was sent to Moscow to represent the
Church of England at the Coronation of the Emperor Nicholas; and his
comments on that occasion were significant.  Clad in a gorgeous cope of
red and gold, with mitre and crozier, the English prelate attracted
every eye.  He thoroughly relished the fact; he tasted, too, to the
full, the splendour of the great ceremonies and the extraordinary
display of autocratic power.  That there might have been some degree of
spiritual squalor mixed with those magnificent appearances never seemed
to occur to him.  He was fascinated by the apparatus of a mighty
organisation, and, with unerring instinct, made straight for the prime
mover of it, the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, the sinister
Pobiedonostzeff, with whom he struck up a warm friendship.  He was
presented to the Emperor and Empress, and found them charming.  "I was
treated with great distinction, as I was called in first.  The Empress
looked very nice, dressed in white silk."  The aristocratic Acton
would, no doubt, have viewed things in a different light.  "Absolute
power corrupts absolutely"--so he had said; but Creighton had forgotten
the remark.  He was no Daniel.  He saw no Writing on the Wall.

The Bishop died in his prime, at the height of his success and energy,
and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.  Not far from his tomb, which a
Victorian sculptor did his best to beautify, stands the strange effigy
of John Donne, preaching, in his shroud, an incredible sermon upon
mortality.  Lingering in that corner, one's mind flashes oddly to other
scenes and other persons.  One passes down the mouldering street of
Ferrara, and reaches an obscure church.  In the half-light, from an
inner door, an elderly humble nun approaches, indicating with her
patois a marble slab in the pavement--a Latin inscription--the grave of
Lucrezia Borgia.  Mystery and oblivion were never united more
pathetically.  But there is another flash, and one is on a railway
platform under the grey sky of England.  A tall figure hurries by,
spectacled and bearded, with swift clerical legs, and a voice--a
competent, commanding, yet slightly agitated voice--says sharply:
"Where's my black bag?"




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THE PHOENIX LIBRARY

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ACKERLEY, J. R.

Hindoo Holiday

A journal kept by an Englishman during his visit to the Court of an
Indian maharajah.  Unique in its kind and full of subtlety, shrewd
observation and wit.  (86)



ALDINGTON, RICHARD

All Men are Enemies

A romance, its scenes in England and on the Continent, which has been
described as the perfect love story, and has been the subject of a very
popular film.  (94)


The Colonel's Daughter

This story portrays an English girl whom war and other circumstances
have deprived of the chance of marriage.  It is full of brilliant
satire, and created a storm of controversy on its first appearance.
_Punch_ compared its heroine, Georgie, with Hardy's Tess.  (89)


Death of a Hero

A novel of the pre-war and war years in England, Mr. Aldington's first
novel, and the book which established his name as a writer of fiction.
(58)


Medallions

Translations from Anyte of Tegea, Meleager, the Anacreontea, and
certain Latin poets of the Renaissance.  (74)


Roads to Glory

Stories.  (93)


Selections from Remy de Gourmont

Translated, with an Introduction by Richard Aldington.  (80)


Soft Answers

Stories.  (97)


Voltaire

A biography, and a critical study.  (90)



AUSTEN, JANE

Love and Friendship

A delicious _jeu d'esprit_; the author's earliest work, written
probably at the age of seventeen.  G. K. Chesterton, in a
characteristic introduction, describes it as a rattling burlesque.  (29)


BARBELLION, W. N. P.

The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Described by H. G. Wells in his introduction as the "Diary of an
intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically caught by the
creeping approach of death....  One of the most moving records of the
youthful aspect of our universal struggle."  (68)



BELL, CLIVE

Art

The book in which Mr. Bell first propounded the theory of "significant
form."  (12)


Civilization

A satirical criticism of modern civilization.  (79)


Since Czanne

Essays on modern artists and artistic subjects, e.g., Czanne, Renoir,
the Douanier Rousseau, Matisse and Picasso, Duncan Grant, Negro
Sculpture, Tradition and Movements, Art and Politics, etc.  (41)



BELLOC, HILAIRE

The Mercy of Allah

A novel which satirises modern finance.  (6)



BENNETT, ARNOLD

The Grim Smile of the Five Towns

Stories.  (26)


Tales of the Five Towns

Stories.  (5)



BIERCE, AMBROSE

In the Midst of Life

Weird and thrilling tales, many of them concerning the American Civil
War, by one of the greatest of American short story writers.  (54)



BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE

Et Cetera

Literary essays, including "Boswell Disrobed," "John Bunyan," "No
Crabb, No Christmas," "Thomas Love Peacock," etc.  (59)



CHESTERTON, G. K.

A Short History of England (35)



DOUGLAS, NORMAN

How about Europe?

A biting and very pointed reply to Katherine Mayo's _Mother India_.
(66)


In the Beginning

A fantasy, which, as the _Times Literary Supplement_ said, shows Mr.
Douglas's imaginative powers at their best.(42)



FAULKNER, WILLIAM

Light in August

This is Mr. Faulkner's longest novel, and is considered by many critics
to be his best.  Of all the younger American writers he is the most
experimental, and certainly among the most original.  (99)


Sanctuary

A novel.  (83)



FOTHERGILL, JOHN

An Innkeeper's Diary

Few innkeepers, alas, have kept diaries.  None have been better worth
keeping than that written at the 'Spreadeagle,' Thame.  Mr. Fothergill
has wit, and a fine eye for character.  (88)



FREEMAN, H. W.

Joseph and His Brethren

Mr. Freeman's first novel has retained its popularity for many years.
His scene is Suffolk, a county which he depicts with knowledge and
tenderness.  (91)



FRY, ROGER

Vision and Design

Essays on art by one of the most distinguished twentieth century
critics and painters.  (15)



GARNETT, DAVID

The Grasshoppers Come and A Rabbit in the Air (I Vol.)

The first of these two books is an exciting narrative of a
long-distance flight which was within an ace of ending in disaster.
The second is Mr. Garnett's account of how he himself learnt to fly.
(101)


Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo.  (I Vol.)

_Lady into Fox_, Mr. Garnett's first story, won the Hawthornden Prize
and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and has been long recognized
as a classic among modern fantasies.  It is here reprinted together
with his second book, _A Man in the Zoo_, which upset tradition by
achieving an equal success.  (7)


No Love

A modern novel which, as the Observer said, shows the author to be one
of the few younger writers "clearly and obviously possessed of genius."
(75)


The Sailors' Return

A story, its scene in Dorset, which the _Empire Review_ rightly
described as a masterpiece.  (21)



HALDANE, J. B. S.

Possible Worlds

One of the most fascinating books of scientific essays published during
the present century, and only equalled in its particular appeal by Mr.
Haldane's _Inequality of Man_.  It is pithy, clear, and packed with
ideas brilliantly expounded.  (52)



HAYWARD, JOHN

Nineteenth Century Poetry

An Anthology.  (78)



HEARD, GERALD

These Hurrying Years

An historical outline of the first third of the present century: a
critical survey not merely of events, but of trends and discoveries.
(105)



HUGHES, RICHARD

Confessio Juvenis

Poems.  (98)


A High Wind in Jamaica

Mr. Hughes' immensely successful novel, which was awarded the Femina
Vie Heureuse Prize.  The penetrating and unsentimental portrayal of
children will always arouse the keenest controversy.  (73)


A Moment of Time

Stories.  (51)


Plays

Containing "The Sister's Tragedy," "A Comedy of Good and Evil," "The
Man Born to be Hanged," and "Danger."  (17)



HUXLEY, ALDOUS

Along the Road

Notes and essays of a tourist.  Divided into "Travel in General,"
"Places," "Works of Art," and "By the Way."  (4)


Antic Hay

A novel, described by Harold Nicholson as a landmark in post-war
literature, and by the _Evening Standard_ as "a peep-hole through which
posterity will squint at London just after the War."  (3)


Brave New World

In a brilliant picture of a possible future state of society, Mr.
Huxley challenges the modern progressive scientists with the
question--Whither are we progressing?  Completely different in manner
and matter from his other novels, it is at once destructive and
creative.  In the opinion of Rebecca West, "it is one of the half dozen
most important books which have been published since the War."  (92)


Brief Candles

Stories, including "Chawdron," "The Claxtons," "After the Fireworks,"
etc.  (64)


Crome Yellow

This was Mr. Huxley's first novel, and it is as amusing and as readable
today as when it was first written.  (11)


Do What You Will

Essays, including "Spinoza's Worm," "Swift," "Baudelaire," and
"Pascal."  (71)


Jesting Pilate

The diary of a journey to India and Burma, Malaya, the Pacific and
America (including Hollywood).  (49)


Limbo

Stories, including "Happily Ever After," "Cynthia," "The Death of
Lully," etc.  (18)


Little Mexican

Stories, including "Uncle Spencer," "Hubert and Minnie," "Fard," etc.
(28)


Mortal Coils

Stories, including "The Gioconda Smile," "The Tillotson Banquet," "Nuns
at Luncheon," etc.  (22)


Music at Night

Essays, including "Tragedy and the Whole Truth," "Squeak and Gibber,"
and "Foreheads Villainous Low."  (81)


On the Margin

Essays, including "Subject Matter of Poetry," "Water Music,"
"Nationality in Love," and "Chaucer."  (25)


Proper Studies

Essays, including "Education," "Political Democracy," and "The Idea of
Equality."  (45)


Texts and Pretexts

An Anthology, with Mr. Huxley's own running commentary, planned on
original lines, and taking as its material the literature of many
countries.  (100)


Those Barren Leaves

Mr. Leonard Woolf, writing in 1925, said: "This is the best novel by
Mr. Huxley that I have read.  The ordinary reviewer's adjectives write
themselves almost automatically upon the well-used typewriter--it is
brilliant and daring, admirably written, humorous, witty, clever,
cultured."  (14)


Two or Three Graces

Stories, including "Half Holiday," "The Monocle," and "Fairy
Godmother."  (36)



HUXLEY, JULIAN

Ants

An illustrated monograph.  (102)


Bird-Watching and Bird Behaviour

Illustrated.  (95)


Essays of a Biologist

Including: "Biology and Sociology," "Sex Biology and Sex Psychology,"
and "Religion and Science."  (16)


Essays in Popular Science

Including "The Determination of Sex," "Biology in Utopia," "Birth
Control," and "Evolution and Purpose."  (34)


What Dare I Think?

The challenge of modern science to human action and belief.  (85)



JNGER, ERNST

The Storm of Steel

A narrative of the War on the Western Front, as seen by a German
front-line officer, who was himself a splendid leader of infantry, and
who saw in the War chiefly the sterling qualities it brought out in his
men.  Mr. Lloyd George has recorded his opinion that it is the best
record of the actual fighting he has read.  (57)



KNOX, E. V.

Humorous Verse: an Anthology

Selected by the present Editor of _Punch_.  (77)



LEHMANN, ROSAMOND

Dusty Answer

This novel of post-war Cambridge was praised on its first appearance by
many eminent critics, and has retained its popularity ever since.  The
_Sunday Times_ said that it was the kind of novel which Keats might
have written, had he lived in the present age.  (50)



LEWIS, WYNDHAM

Tarr

Mr. Wyndham Lewis's distinguished novel, long recognized as a landmark
in contemporary fiction, was completely revised for publication in the
Phoenix Library.  (27)



LEVEL, Mrs. C. F., and Miss OLGA HARTLEY

The Gentle Art of Cookery

Containing 750 original and delightful recipes, (39)



MILNE, A. A.

First Plays

Containing: "The Boy Comes Home," "Belinda," "Wurzel Flummery," "The
Lucky One," and "The Red Feathers."  (10)


Second Plays

Containing: "Mr. Pim Passes By," "The Romantic Age," "Make Believe,"
"The Camberley Triangle," and "The Stepmother."  (19)


Three Plays

Containing: "The Great Broxopp," "The Dover Road," and "The Truth About
Blayds."  (30)


Four Plays

Containing: "Ariadne (or Business First)," "To Have the Honour,"
"Success," and "Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers."  (40)



MONRO, HAROLD

Twentieth Century Poetry: an Anthology

One of the most popular anthologies of modern poetry, now in its 7th
impression.  (48)



MONTAGUE, C. E.

Action

Stories.  (55)


Disenchantment

A searching and memorable analysis of the War, written from the point
of view of the average Englishman.  The author himself, for many years
a prominent figure on the _Manchester Guardian_, joined the ranks in
1914 and served both in the trenches and at G.H.Q.  (13)


Dramatic Values

Essays on the Drama.  (76)


Fiery Particles

Stories.  (9)


The Right Place

A highly individual book of holiday pleasures.  (20)


Rough Justice

Containing, as it does, some of Montague's finest prose, "Rough
Justice" is easily his best known novel.  It is a magnificent picture
of the generation who served in the War.  "As a truth teller," said Sir
Philip Gibbs, "he has utter courage and an irony which cuts like a
knife."  (39)


A Writer's Notes on His Trade

An invaluable book for any aspiring writer, besides giving real insight
into the structure and variety of good writing.  (72)



MOTTRAM, R. H.

The Spanish Farm

This novel is the first in Mr. Mottram's "The Spanish Farm Trilogy"
1914-1918.  It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, and contains a
preface by John Galsworthy.  Madeleine Vanderlynden, the heroine, is
one of the most quoted characters in the whole literature of the War.
(53)


Ten Years Ago

A pendant to "The Spanish Farm Trilogy."  (60)



OWEN, WILFRED

Poems

Edited by Edmund Blunden.  There is no fiercer indictment of war than
these superb poems, written by a young subaltern of the Manchester
Regiment, who was killed in action in 1918 at the Sambre Canal, aged
25.  The first edition of these poems was edited by Mr. Siegfried
Sassoon.  Mr. Blunden's edition is definitive.  (87)



PATMORE, COVENTRY

Selected Poems

Edited by Derek Patmore.  (67)



POWYS, T. F.

The House with the Echo

Stories.  (31)


Mr. Tasker's Gods

A novel.  Next to "_Mr. Weston's Good Wine_," this is probably Mr.
Powy's best known story, although it is an early one.  (46)


Mr. Weston's Good Wine

This story was originally published in a limited edition, which was
sold out at publication.  In the Phoenix Library it has proved itself
to be by far the most popular of all the author's books.  It has been
praised in print by a Prime Minister; and in the opinion of the author
of "Fiction and the Reading Public," it is one of the few significant
works of fiction of the age.  (23)


No Painted Plumage

Formerly issued under the title "Fables."  (61)



PROUST, MARCEL

Swann's Way (2 Vols.) (32/3)

Within the Budding Grove (2 Vols.) (43/4)

The Guermantes Way (2 Vols.)

C. K. Scott Moncrieff's version of Proust's great novel is admitted to
be the principal triumph of modern translating.  There was at one time
a fashion in Paris to read Proust in the English edition.  No greater
compliment to a translator is possible.  Of the countless tributes to
Proust's art, Joseph Conrad's is one of the most gracious.  "I don't
think there has ever been in the whole of literature such an example of
the power of analysis, and I feel pretty safe in saying that there will
never be another."  (62/3)



ROLFE, Fr.  ('Baron Corvo')

Don Tarquinio

A novel.  (47)


Hadrian VII

This is Rolfe's best known novel, a masterpiece in the bizarre, and the
subject of an excellent analysis in Mr. A. J. A. Symons' biography of
Rolfe.  (37)



SHCHEDRIN (M. E. Saltykov)

Fables

Russian fables, charmingly translated by Vera Volkhovsky.  (70)



STENDHAL (Henri Beyle)

The Charterhouse of Parma

C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of the magnificent novel so admired
by Tolstoy, who said that Stendhal's description of Waterloo in this
book first taught him to understand war.  The Phoenix Library edition
is of well over 600 pages.  (65)



STRACHEY, LYTTON

Books and Characters

Essays on writers, French and English.  (8)


Elizabeth and Essex

Apart from "_Queen Victoria_," this is Strachey's most popular and best
known biography.  Queen Elizabeth emerges from its pages a living
creature, while it contains one of the few convincing portraits not
only of Essex but also of Sir Francis Bacon.  (82)


Eminent Victorians

This book, which appeared first at the end of the war, when men's minds
were occupied with other matters, gradually became not only the most
popular of biographical books, but revolutionised the whole technique
of biographical writing.  It contains studies of Cardinal Manning,
Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon.  (2)


Portraits in Miniature

Containing essays on six English historians and many celebrities,
French and English, such as John Aubrey, James Boswell, and Madame de
Svign's cousin.  (84)


Queen Victoria

The first volume in the Phoenix Library, and still the leading
biography of modern times.  It was awarded the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize in 1922, and has been a "best seller" for more than a
dozen years.  (1)



STRINDBERG, AUGUST

Tales

Translated by L. J. Potts.  These folk tales and fantasies have a
freshness and charm completely without the grimness which is evident in
some of Strindberg's plays.  (56)



SULLIVAN, J. W. N.

Limitations of Science

A general account, addressed to the lay reader, of the ground so far
gained by scientific discovery.  (96)



TCHEHOV, ANTON

The Cherry Orchard

Plays, including "The Cherry Orchard," "Uncle Vanya," "The Sea-Gull,"
"The Bear," and "The Proposal."  (104)


Three Sisters

Plays, including "Three Sisters," "Ivanov," "A Swan Song," "An
Unwilling Martyr," "The Anniversary," "On the High Road," and "The
Wedding."  (103)



TURNER, W. J.

Eighteenth Century Poetry

An Anthology.  (69)



WARNER, SYLVIA TOWNSEND

Lolly Willowes

This enchanting story concerns a certain spinster lady who turned into
a witch.  Besides being an excellent fantasy, it contains some of the
best writing that even Miss Townsend Warner has produced.  (24)




THE CENTAUR LIBRARY

Cr. 8vo.  3s. 6d. net per volume

ALDINGTON, RICHARD

  35 The Colonel's Daughter
  24 Death of a Hero
  20 Roads to Glory
  52 Soft Answers


ALINGTON, ADRIAN

  71 Ann and Aurelia
  37 The Career of Julian Stanley-William:
  54 Chaytor's
  46 Mr. Jubenka
  14 Slowbags and Arethusa


ASTON, JAMES

  65 First Lesson
  64 They Winter Abroad


BELL, CLIVE

  10 Civilization


BENNETT, ARNOLD

  21 Three Plays


BRIDGE, ANN

  56 Peking Picnic


CHESTERTON, G. K.

  5 The Return of Don Quixote


DOUGLAS, NORMAN

  33 They Went


FAULKNER, WILLIAM

  47 Sartoris
  28 Soldiers' Pay
  42 The Sound and the Fury


FREEMAN, H.  W.

  8 Down in the Valley
  58 Fathers of their People
  2 Joseph and his Brethren
  59 Pond Hall's Progress


GARNETT, DAVID

  22 Go She Must!


GARSTIN, CROSBIE

  27 China Seas
  15 Houp La!


HALDANE, CHARLOTTE

  30 Brother to Bert


HUGHES, RICHARD

  1 A High Wind in Jamaica
  23 A Moment of Time


IRWIN, MARGARET

  6 None So Pretty


KINCAID, DENNIS

  68 Cactus Land
  57 Durbar


LANDI, ELISSA

  48 House for Sale


LEHMANN, ROSAMOND

  43 Dusty Answer
  51 Invitation to the Waltz
  38 A Note in Music


LESLIE, SHANE

  26 The Anglo-Catholic


LEWIS, WYNDHAM

  32 The Wild Body


LUCAS, F. L.

  25 Cecile


MILLIN, SARAH GERTRUDE

  41 The Sons of Mrs. Aab


MONTAGUE, C. E.

  36 Action
  17 Right Off the Map
  13 Rough Justice


MOTTRAM, R. H.

  12 The Boroughmonger
  49 Castle Island
  29 The English Miss
  39 Europa's Beast
  70 Home for the Holidays
  60 The Lame Dog
  11 Our Mr. Dormer


MUIR, DAPHNE

  63 Barbaloot
  67 The Lost Crusade
  69 A Virtuous Woman


NICHOLS, BEVERLEY

  44 Patchwork
  9 Prelude
  45 Self


POWYS, T. F.

  61 Innocent Birds
  62 Kindness in a Corner
  40 The Left Leg
  66 Mockery Gap
  50 Unclay
  72 The White Paternoster


PREWETT, FRANK

  55 The Chazzey Tragedy


REID, H. S.

  18 Phillida


WARNER, SYLVIA TOWNSEND

  31 The True Heart


WILLIAMS, BRENDAN

  53 Go Marry


_Other titles are in active preparation_



THE ST. JAMES'S LIBRARY

Demy 8vo.  Mostly illustrated.  5s. net.


BONE, DAVID W.

  1 Merchantmen-at-Arms


DOUGLAS, NORMAN

  8 Alone
  10 Experiments
  9 Together


ELTON, OLIVER

  2 C. E. Montague: a Memoir


FULANAIN

  5 Haji Rikkan: Marsh Arab


GADD, C. J.

  11 History and Monuments of Ur


MOTTRAM, R. H.

  6 A History of Financial Speculation


WILSON, ROMER

  4 All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Bront


ZIMMERN, ALFRED

  3 The Prospects of Democracy




UNIFORM EDITIONS

Cr. 8vo.


HUXLEY, ALDOUS

  Brave New World
  Point Counter Point
  Antic Hay
  Crome Yellow
  Those Barren Leaves



3s. 6d. net per vol.  *5s. net.

STRACHEY, LYTTON

  Queen Victoria
  Eminent Victorians
  Elizabeth and Essex
  Books and Characters
  Characters and Commentaries
  Portraits in Miniature


The above 6 vols. are issued together, boxed at 30s. the set.




[End of Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays, by Lytton Strachey]
