Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
impressed me the more forcibly because I was born a Whig, and brought up
in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of
learning; and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade,
the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no
monopoly of culture: the Tories may have been just as well-informed. But
a man "belongs to his belongings"; one can only describe what one has
seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable
enough. I am not thinking of professed scholars and students, such as
Lord Stanhope the Historian, and Sir Edward Bunbury the Senior Classic;
or of professed blue-stockings, such as Barbarina, Lady Dacre, and
Georgiana, Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family
and good position, who had received the usual education of their class,
and had profited by it.
Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, a boy might
learn much, or learn nothing; but he could not learn superficially. A
similar remark would have applied to the attainments of people who were
old when I was young. They might know much, or they might know nothing;
but they did not know superficially. What they professed to know, that
you could be sure they knew. The affectation of culture was despised;
and ignorance, where it existed, was avowed. For example, everyone knew
Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had
never been at a University, but had passed straight from a Public School
to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote
Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people
inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of
Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the
greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They
did not trouble themselves about various readings, and corrupt texts,
and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father
of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, who
had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband
was really "a merry man," or whether it was only his widow's
affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew
the whole mass of the Plays with a natural and unforced intimacy; their
speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's
speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics. Pope was quoted
whenever the occasion suggested him, and Johnson was esteemed the Prince
of Critics. Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets
down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed
with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; Wordsworth was tolerated,
and Tennyson was "coming in." Everyone knew Scott's novels by heart, and
had his or her favourite heroine and hero.
I said in a former chapter that I had from my earliest days free access
to an excellent library; and, even before I could read comfortably by
myself, my interest in books was stimulated by listening to my elders as
they read aloud. The magic of words and cadence--the purely sensuous
pleasure of melodious sound--stirred me from the time when I was quite a
child. Poetry, of course, came first; but prose was not much later. I
had by nature a good memory, and it retained, by no effort on my part,
my favourite bits of Macaulay and Scott. _The Battle of Lake Regillus_
and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, the impeachment of Warren Hastings
and the death of Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, are samples of the literature
with which my mind was stored. Every boy, I suppose, attempts to imitate
what he admires, and I was eternally scribbling. When I was eleven, I
began a novel, of which the heroine was a modern Die Vernon. At twelve,
I took to versification, for which the swinging couplets of _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ supplied the model. Fragments of prose and
verse came thick and fast. When I was thirteen, I made my first
appearance in print; with a set of verses on a Volunteer Encampment,
which really were not at all bad; and at fourteen I published
(anonymously) a religious tract, which had some success in Evangelical
circles.
The effect of Harrow was both to stimulate and to discipline my taste
for literature. It was my good fortune to be taught my Sophocles and
Euripides, Tacitus and Virgil, by scholars who had the literary sense,
and could enrich school-lessons with all the resources of a generous
culture. My sixteenth and seventeenth years brought me a real and
conscious growth in the things of the mind, and with that period of my
life I must always gratefully associate the names of Frederic Farrar,
Edward Bowen, and Arthur Watson.[49]
Meanwhile I was not only learning, but also practising. My teachers with
one accord incited me to write. Essay-writing formed a regular part of
our work in school and pupil-room, and I composed a great deal for my
own amusement. I wrote both prose and verse, and verse in a great many
metres; but it was soon borne in upon me--conclusively after I had been
beaten for the Prize Poem[50]--that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In
prose, I was more successful. My work for _The Harrovian_ gave me
constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English
Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and
rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for
the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and
Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme
has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture.
The "Young Lion" of the _Daily Telegraph_ thus "roared" over my
performance--
"The English Essay now takes a higher place on Speech Day than it did in
the old season; and the essay which was crowned yesterday was notable
alike for the theme, the opinions, and the literary promise of the
writer. The young author bore the historical name of Russell, and he was
really reviewing the forerunners and the fellow-workers of his own
ancestors, in describing the rhetorical powers of the elder and the
younger Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Canning and Grey.... The well-known
Constitutional note of Lord Russell was heard in every page, and the
sonorous English was such as the Earl himself might have written fifty
years ago, if the undergraduates of that day had been able to copy a
Macaulay. The essayist has read the prose of that dangerous model until
he has imitated the well-known and now hackneyed devices of the great
rhetorician with a closeness which perilously brought to mind the show
passages of the 'Essays' and the 'History.' Mr. Russell has caught the
trick of cutting up his paragraphs into rolling periods, and short,
sharp, and disjointed sentences; but he will go to more subtle and more
simple masters of style than Macaulay, when he shall have passed the
rhetorical stage of youth."
This prophecy was soon fulfilled, and indeed the process of fulfilment
had already begun. In the Sixth Form, we naturally were influenced by
Dr. Butler, who, though he certainly did not despise fine rhetoric,
wrote a beautifully simple style, and constantly instructed us in the
difference between eloquence and journalese. "Let us leave _commence_
and _partake_ to the newspapers," was an admonition often on his lips.
Our Composition Masters were Edward Young, an exquisite scholar of the
Eton type, and the accomplished Henry Nettleship, who detested
flamboyancy, and taught us to admire Newman's incomparable easiness and
grace. And there was Matthew Arnold living on the Hill, generously
encouraging every bud of literary promise, and always warning us against
our tendency to "Middle-class Macaulayese."
At Oxford, the chastening process went on apace. Newman became my
master, as far as language was concerned; and I learned to bracket him
with Arnold and Church as possessing "The Oriel style." Thackeray's
Latinized constructions began to fascinate me; and, though I still loved
gorgeous diction, I sought it from Ruskin instead of Macaulay.
All this time I was writing--in a very humble and obscure way,
certainly, but still writing. I wrote in local newspapers and Parish
Magazines. I published anonymous comments on current topics. I
contributed secretly to ephemeral journals. I gave lectures and printed
them as pamphlets. It was all very good exercise; but the odd part of it
seems to me, in looking back, that I never expected pay, but rather
spent my own money in printing what I wrote. That last infirmity of
literary minds I laid aside soon after I left Oxford. I rather think
that the first money which I made with my pen was payment for a
character-study of my uncle, Lord Russell, which I wrote for _The
World_; thereby eliciting from Matthew Arnold the urbane remark, "Ah, my
dear George, I hear you have become one of Yates's hired stabbers."
After I entered Parliament, opportunities of writing, and of writing for
profit, became more frequent. I contributed to the _Quarterly_, the _New
Quarterly_, the _Nineteenth Century_, the _Fortnightly_, the
_Contemporary_, the _Spectator_, and the _Pall Mall_. Yet another
magazine recurs pleasantly to my mind, because of the warning which was
inscribed on one's proof-sheet--"The cost of _corrigenda_ will be
deducted from _honoraria_." What fine language! and what a base economy!
It did not take me long to find that the society in which I habitually
lived, and which I have described in a former chapter, was profoundly
ignorant. A most amusing law-suit between a Duchess and her maid took
place about the time of which I am writing, and the Duchess's
incriminated letter, beginning in the third person, wandering off into
the first, and returning with an effort to the third, was indeed an
object-lesson in English composition. A young sprig of fashion once said
to me, in the tone of a man who utters an accepted truth, "It is so
much more interesting to talk about people than things"--even though
those "things" were the literary triumphs of humour or tragedy. In one
great house, Books were a prohibited subject, and the word "Books" was
construed with such liberal latitude that it seemed to include
everything except Bradshaw. Even where people did not thus truculently
declare war against literature, they gave it an uncommonly wide berth,
and shrank with ill-concealed aversion from such names as Meredith and
Browning. "Meredith," said Oscar Wilde, "is a prose-Browning--and so is
Browning." And both those forms of prose were equally eschewed by
society.
Of course, when one is surveying a whole class, one sees some
conspicuous exceptions to the prevailing colour; and here and there one
had the pleasure of meeting in society persons admirably accomplished. I
have already mentioned Lord Houghton, poet, essayist, pamphleteer,
book-lover, and book-collector, who was equally at home in the world of
society and the world of literature. Nothing that was good in books,
whether ancient or modern, escaped his curious scrutiny, and at his
hospitable table, which might truly be called a "Festive Board,"
authors great and small rubbed shoulders with dandies and diplomats and
statesmen. On the 16th of June, 1863, Matthew Arnold wrote--"On Sunday I
dined with Monckton Milnes,[51] and met all the advanced Liberals in
religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume.... The
philosophers were fearful! George Lewes, Herbert Spencer, a sort of
pseudo-Shelley called Swinburne, and so on. Froude, however, was there,
and Browning, and Ruskin."
The mention of Matthew Arnold reminds me that, though I had admired and
liked him in a reverent sort of way, when I was a Harrow boy and he was