Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
'Do you see those four fellows seated opposite to us? They are regular
swells--tip-top fellows, I can tell you--Mr. Trail, the Bishop of
Ealing's son, Honourable Fred Ringwood, Lord Cinqbars' brother, you
know; and Bob Suckling, who's always with him. I say, I'd like to mess
with those chaps.' 'And why?' asked Pen. 'Why! they don't come down here
to dine, you know, they only make believe to dine. _They_ dine here,
Lord bless you! They go to some of the swell clubs, or else to some
grand dinner-party. You see their names in the _Morning Post_ at all the
fine parties in London. They dine! They won't dine these two hours, I
dare say.' 'But why should you like to mess with them, if they don't
eat any dinner?' Pen asked, still puzzled. 'There's plenty, isn't
there?' 'How green you are,' said Lowton. 'Excuse me, but you are green!
They don't drink any wine, don't you see, and a fellow gets the bottle
to himself, if he likes it, when he messes with those three chaps.
That's why Corkoran got in with them.'"
Such were dinners at the Temple in Thackeray's time, and such they were
in mine. My legal studies were superintended by my friend Mr. J. S. Fox,
now K.C., and Recorder of Sheffield. Should this book ever fall under
his learned eye, I should be interested to know if he has ever completed
the erudite work which in those distant days he contemplated
undertaking,
"Tell a Lie and Stick to it:"
A Treatise on the Law of Estoppel.
But this is a digression.
Before I leave London as it was when first I dwelt in it, I ought to
recall some of the eminent persons who adorned it. Lord Beaconsfield was
at the zenith of his power and popularity. Mr. Gladstone, though the
crowning triumph of 1880 was not far off, was so unpopular in Society
that I was asked to meet him at a dinner as a favour to the hostess, who
found it difficult to collect a party when he was dining. Lord Salisbury
had just emerged from a seven years' retirement, and was beginning to
play for the Premiership. Mr. Chamberlain was spoken of with a kind of
awe, as a desperate demagogue longing to head a revolution; and Lord
Randolph Churchill was hardly known outside the Turf Club.
Law was presided over, as I have already said, by the brilliant
Cockburn, and the mellifluous Coleridge was palpably preparing to
succeed him. People whispered wonders about Charles Bowen; and Henry
James and Charles Russell had established their positions. In the
hierarchy of Medicine there were several leaders. Jenner ruled his
patients by terror; Gull by tact, and Andrew Clark by religious
mysticism. To me, complaining of dyspepsia, he prescribed a diet with
the Pauline formula: "I seek to impose a yoke upon you, that you may be
truly free." In the chief seat of the Church sat Archbishop Tait, the
most dignified prelate whom I have ever met in our communion, and a
really impressive spokesman of the Church in the House of Lords. The
Northern Primate, Dr. Thomson, was styled "The Archbishop of Society";
and the Deanery at Westminster sheltered the fine flower of grace and
culture in the fragile person of Dean Stanley. G. H. Wilkinson,
afterwards Bishop of Truro and of St. Andrews, had lately been appointed
to St. Peter's, Eaton Square, and had burst like a gunboat into a Dead
Sea of lethargy and formalism.
Of course, the list does not pretend to be exhaustive. It only aims at
commemorating a few of the figures, in different walks of life, which
commanded my attention when I began to know--otherwise than as a
schoolboy can know it--what London is, means, and contains. Five and
thirty years have sped their course. My Home in the country has ceased
to exist; and I find myself numbered among that goodly company who, in
succeeding ages, have loved London and found it their natural
dwelling-place. I fancy that Lord St. Aldwyn is too much of a sportsman
to applaud the sentiment of his ancestor who flourished in the reign of
Charles II., but it is exactly mine.
"London is the only place of England to winter in, whereof many true men
might be put for examples. If the air of the streets be fulsome, then
fields be at hand. If you be weary of the City, you may go to the
Court. If you surfeit of the Court, you may ride into the country; and
so shoot, as it were, at rounds with a roving arrow. You can wish for no
kind of meat, but here is a market; for no kind of pastime, but here is
a companion. If you be solitary, here be friends to sit with you. If you
be sick, and one doctor will not serve your turn, you may have twain.
When you are weary of your lodging, you may walk into St. Paul's ... in
the Middle Aisle you may hear what the Protestants say, and in the
others what the Papists whisper; and, when you have heard both, believe
but one, for but one of both says true you may be assured."
We clear the chasm of a century, and hear Dr. Johnson singing the same
tune as Squire Hicks.
"The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have
been in it. I'll venture to say, there is more learning and science
within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit, than in all
the rest of the kingdom."
"London is nothing to some people; but to a man whose pleasure is
intellectual, London is the place."
"The town is my element; there are my friends, there are my books, to
which I have not yet bid farewell, and there are my amusements."
But even Johnson, who is always quoted as the typical lover of London,
was not more enthusiastic in its praise than Gibbon. To him "London was
never dull, there at least he could keep the monster _Ennui_ at a
respectful distance." For him its heat was always tempered; even its
solitude was "delicious." In "the soft retirement of my _bocage de_
Bentinck Street" the dog-days pass unheeded. "Charming hot weather! I am
just going to dine alone. Afterwards I shall walk till dark in _my_
gardens at Kensington, and shall then return to a frugal supper and
early bed in Bentinck Street. I lead the life of a philosopher, without
any regard to the world or to fashion."
So much for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; we now return to
the nineteenth and are listening to Sydney Smith. "I look forward
anxiously to the return of the bad weather, coal fires, and good society
in a crowded city." "The country is bad enough in summer, but in winter
it is a fit residence only for beings doomed to such misery for misdeeds
in another state of existence." "You may depend upon it, all lives lived
out of London are mistakes, more or less grievous--but mistakes." "I
shall not be sorry to be in town. I am rather tired of simple pleasures,
bad reasoning, and worse cookery."
Let Lord Beaconsfield have the last word, as is his due; for truly did
he know and love his London.
"It was a mild winter evening, a little fog still hanging about, but
vanquished by the cheerful lamps, and the voice of the muffin-bell was
heard at intervals; a genial sound that calls up visions of trim and
happy hearths. If we could only so contrive our lives as to go into the
country for the first note of the nightingale, and return to town for
the first note of the muffin-bell, existence, it is humbly presumed,
might be more enjoyable."
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Lord Beaconsfield, _Tancred_.
[22] Written in May, 1910.
[23] A nickname invented by the famous Eton tutor, "Billy Johnson," for
a florid journalist.
[24] Lord Beaconsfield, _Lothair_.
[25] See M. Arnold's Letters, May 15, 1880.
[26] The Right Hon. J. W. Lowther.
[27] Sir George Trevelyan, _The Ladies in Parliament_.
VIII
HOSPITALITY
"I never eat and I never drink," said the Cardinal. "I am sorry to
say I cannot. I like dinner-society very much. You see the world,
and you hear things which you do not hear otherwise."
LORD BEACONSFIELD, _Lothair_.
The Cardinal was much to be pitied. He had a real genius for society,
and thoroughly enjoyed such forms of it as his health and profession
permitted. Though he could not dine with Mr. Putney Giles, he went to
Mrs. Putney Giles's evening party, where he made an important
acquaintance. He looked in at Lady St. Jerome's after dinner; and his
visits to Vauxe and to Muriel Towers were fraught with memorable
results.
Mrs. Putney Giles, though a staunch Protestant, was delighted to receive
a Cardinal, and not less so that he should meet in her drawing-room the
inexpressibly magnificent Lothair. That is all in the course of nature;
but what has always puzzled me is the ease with which a youth of no
particular pretensions, arriving in London from Oxford or Cambridge or
from a country home, swims into society, and finds himself welcomed by
people whose names he barely knows. I suppose that in this, as in more
important matters, the helpers of the social fledgling are good-natured
women. The fledgling probably starts by being related to one or two, and
acquainted with three or four more; and each of them says to a friend
who entertains--"My cousin, Freddy Du Cane, is a very nice fellow, and
waltzes capitally. Do send him a card for your dance"--or "Tommy Tucker
is a neighbour of ours in the country. If ever you want an odd man to
fill up a place at dinner, I think you will find him useful." Then there
was in those days, and perhaps there is still, a mysterious race of
men--Hierophants of Society--who had great powers of helping or
hindering the social beginner. They were bachelors, not very young; who
had seen active service as dancers and diners for ten or twenty seasons;
and who kept lists of eligible youths which they were perpetually
renewing at White's or the Marlborough. To one of these the intending
hostess would turn, saying, "Dear Mr. Golightly, _do_ give me your
list;" and, if Freddy Du Cane had contrived to ingratiate himself with
Mr. Golightly, invitations to balls and dances, of every size and sort,
would soon begin to flutter down on him like snow-flakes. It mattered
nothing that he had never seen his host or hostess, nor they him. Corney
Grain expressed the situation in his own inimitable verse:
"Old Mr. Parvenu gave a great ball--
And of all his smart guests he knew no one at all.
Old Mr. Parvenu went up to bed,
And the guest said 'Good-night' to the butler instead."
But light come, light go. Ball-going is elysian when one is very young
and cheerful and active, but it is a pleasure which, for nine men out of
ten, soon palls. Dinner-society, as Cardinal Grandison knew, is a more
serious affair, and admission to it is not so lightly attained.
When Sydney Smith returned from a visit to Paris, he wrote, in the
fulness of his heart:
"I care very little about dinners, but I shall not easily forget a
_matelote_ at the 'Rochers de Cancale,' or an almond tart at Montreuil,
or a _poulet a la Tartare_ at Grignon's. These are impressions which no
changes in future life can obliterate."
I am tempted to pursue the line of thought thus invitingly opened, but I
forbear; for it really has no special connexion with the retrospective
vein. I am now describing the years 1876-1880, and dinners then were
pretty much what they are now. The new age of dining had begun. Those
frightful hecatombs of sheep and oxen which Francatelli decreed had made
way for more ethereal fare. The age-long tyranny of "The Joint" was
already undermined. I have indeed been one of a party of forty in the
dog-days, where a belated haunch of venison cried aloud for decent
burial; but such outrages were even then becoming rare. The champagne of
which a poet had beautifully said:
"How sad and bad and mad it was,
And Oh! how it was sweet!"
had been banished in favour of the barely alcoholic liquor which foams