Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
a man, I found him even more fascinating when I met him on the more even
terms of social life in London. He was indeed the most delightful of
companions; a man of the world entirely free from worldliness, and a man
of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry. He walked through the
world enjoying it and loving it; and yet all the time one felt that his
"eyes were on the higher loadstars" of the intellect and the spirit. In
those days I used to say that, if one could fashion oneself, I should
wish to be like Matthew Arnold; and the lapse of years has not altered
my desire.
Of Robert Browning, as he appeared in society, I have already spoken;
but here let me add an instance which well illustrates his tact and
readiness. He once did me the honour of dining with me, and I had
collected a group of eager disciples to meet him. As soon as dinner was
over, one of these enthusiasts led the great man into a corner, and
began cross-examining him about the identity of _The Lost Leader_ and
the meaning of _Sordello_. For a space Browning bore the catechism with
admirable patience; and then, laying his hand on the questioner's
shoulder, he exclaimed, "But, my dear fellow, this is too bad. _I_ am
monopolizing _you_," and skipped out of the corner.
Lord Tennyson was scarcely ever to be encountered in society; but I was
presented to him at a garden-party by Mr. James Knowles, of the
_Nineteenth Century_. He was, is, and always will be, one of the chief
divinities of my poetical heaven; but he was more worshipful at a
distance than at close quarters, and I was determined not to dispel
illusion by a too near approach to the shrine. J. A. Froude was a man of
letters whom from time to time one encountered in society. No one could
doubt his cleverness; but it was a cleverness which rather repelled than
attracted. With his thin lips, his cold smile, and his remorseless,
deliberate, way of speaking, he always seemed to be secretly gloating
over the hideous scene in the hall of Fotheringay, or the last agonies
of a disembowelled Papist. Lord Acton was, or seemed to be, a man of the
world first and foremost; a politician and a lover of society; a gossip,
and, as his "Letters" show, not always a friendly gossip.[52] His
demeanour was profoundly sphinx-like, and he seemed to enjoy the sense
that his hearers were anxious to learn what he was able but unwilling to
impart. His knowledge and accomplishments it would, at this time of day,
be ridiculous to question; and on the main concerns of human
life--Religion and Freedom--I was entirely at one with him. All the more
do I regret that in society he so effectually concealed his higher
enthusiasms, and that, having lived on the vague fame of his "History of
Liberty," he died leaving it unwritten.
I am writing of the years when I first knew London socially, and I may
extend them from 1876 to 1886. All through those years, as through many
before and since, the best representative of culture in society was Mr.,
now Sir, George Trevelyan--a poet, a scholar to his finger-tips, an
enthusiast for all that is best in literature, ancient or modern, and
author of one of the six great Biographies in the English language.
There is no need to recapitulate Sir George's services to the State, or
to criticize his performances in literature. It is enough to record my
lively and lasting gratitude for the unbroken kindness which began when
I was a boy at Harrow, and continues to the present hour.
I have spoken, so far, of literary men who played a more or less
conspicuous part in society; but, as this chapter is dedicated to
Literature, I ought to say a word about one or two men of Letters who
always avoided society, but who, when one sought them out in their own
surroundings, were delightful company. Foremost among these I should
place James Payn.
Payn was a man who lived in, for, and by Literature. He detested
exercise. He never travelled. He scarcely ever left London. He took no
holidays. If he was forced into the country for a day or two, he used
the exile as material for a story or an essay. His life was one
incessant round of literary activity. He had published his first book
while he was an Undergraduate at Trinity, and from first to last he
wrote more than a hundred volumes. _By Proxy_ has been justly admired
for the wonderful accuracy of its local colour, and for a masterly
knowledge of Chinese character; but the writer drew exclusively from
encyclopaedias and books of travel. In my judgment, he was at his best in
the Short Story. He practised that difficult art long before it became
popular, and a book called originally _People, Places, and Things_, but
now _Humorous Stories_, is a masterpiece of fun, invention, and
observation. In 1874, he became "Reader" to Messrs. Smith and Elder, and
in that capacity had the happiness of discovering _Vice Versa_, and the
less felicitous experience of rejecting _John Inglesant_ as unreadable.
It was at this period of his life that I first encountered Payn, and I
fell at once under his charm. His was not a faultless character, for he
was irritable, petulant, and prejudiced. He took the strongest dislikes,
sometimes on very slight grounds; was unrestrained in expressing them,
and was apt to treat opinions which he did not share very cavalierly.
But none of these faults could obscure his charm. He was the most
tender-hearted of human beings, and the sight, even the thought, of
cruelty set his blood on fire. But, though he was intensely humane, he
was absolutely free from mawkishness; and a wife-beater, or a
child-torturer, or a cattle-maimer would have had short shrift at his
hands. He was genuinely sympathetic, especially towards the hopes and
struggles of the young and the unbefriended. Many an author, once
struggling but now triumphant, could attest this trait. But his chief
charm was his humour. It was absolutely natural; bubbled like a
fountain, and danced like light. Nothing escaped it, and solemnity only
stimulated it to further activities. He had the power, which Sydney
Smith described, of "abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the
most successful ridicule;" and, when he was offended, the ridicule had a
remarkably sharp point. It was of course, impossible that all the humour
of a man who joked incessantly could be equally good. Sometimes it was
rather boyish, playing on proper names or personal peculiarities; and
sometimes it descended to puns. But, for sheer rapidity, I have never
known Payn's equal. When a casual word annoyed him, his repartee
flashed out like lightning. I could give plenty of instances, but to
make them intelligible I should have to give a considerable amount of
introduction, and that would entirely spoil the sense of flashing
rapidity. There was no appreciable interval of time between the
provoking word and the repartee which it provoked.
Another great element of charm in Payn was his warm love of Life,
"And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world."
While he hated the black and savage and sordid side of existence with a
passionate hatred, he enjoyed all its better--which he believed to be
its larger--part with an infectious relish. Never have I known a more
blithe and friendly spirit; never a nature to which Literature and
Society--books and men--yielded a more constant and exhilarating joy. He
had unstinted admiration for the performances of others, and was wholly
free from jealousy. His temperament indeed was not equable. He had ups
and downs, bright moods and dark, seasons of exaltation and seasons of
depression. The one succeeded the other with startling rapidity, but the
bright moods triumphed, and it was impossible to keep him permanently
depressed. His health had always been delicate, but illness neither
crushed his spirit nor paralysed his pen. Once he broke a blood-vessel
in the street, and was conveyed home in an ambulance. During the
transit, though he was in some danger of bleeding to death, he began to
compose a narrative of his adventure, and next week it appeared in the
_Illustrated London News_.
During the last two years of his life he was painfully crippled by
arthritic rheumatism, and could no longer visit the Reform Club, where
for many years he had every day eaten his luncheon and played his
rubber. Determining that he should not completely lose his favourite, or
I should rather say his only, amusement, some members of the Club banded
themselves together to supply him with a rubber in his own house twice a
week; and this practice was maintained to his death. It was a striking
testimony to the affection which he inspired. In those years I was a
pretty frequent visitor, and, on my way to the house, I used to bethink
me of stories which might amuse him, and I used even to note them down
between one visit and another, as a provision for next time. One day
Payn said, "A collection of your stories would make a book, and I think
Smith and Elder would publish it." I thought my anecdotage scarcely
worthy of so much honour; but I promised to make a weekly experiment in
the _Manchester Guardian_. My _Collections and Recollections_ ran
through the year 1897, and appeared in book-form at Easter, 1898. But
Payn died on the 25th of the previous March; and the book, which I had
hoped to put in his hand, I could only inscribe to his delightful
memory.
Another remarkable man of letters, wholly remote from the world, was
Richard Holt Hutton, for thirty-six years (1861-1897) the honoured
Editor of _The Spectator_. Hutton was a "stickit minister" of the
Unitarian persuasion, who had been led, mainly by the teaching of F. D.
Maurice, to the acceptance of orthodox Christianity; and who devoted all
the rest of his life to the inculcation of what he conceived to be moral
and religious truth, through the medium of a weekly review. He lived, a
kind of married hermit, on the edge of Windsor Forest, and could hardly
be separated, even for a week's holiday, from his beloved _Spectator_.
His output of work was enormous and incessant, and was throughout
critical and didactic. The style was pre-eminently characteristic of
the man--tangled, untidy, ungraceful, disfigured by "trailing relatives"
and accumulated epithets; and yet all the time conveying the sense of
some real and even profound thought that strove to express itself
intelligibly. As the style, so the substance. "_The Spectator_," wrote
Matthew Arnold in 1865, "is all very well, but the article has Hutton's
fault of seeing so very far into a mill-stone." And, two years later,
"_The Spectator_ has an article in which Hutton shows his strange
aptitude for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick." Both were
sound criticisms. When Hutton addressed himself to a deep topic of
abstract speculation, he "saw so very far into it" that even his most
earnest admirers could not follow the visual act. When he handled the
more commonplace subjects of thought or action with which ordinary men
concern themselves, he seemed to miss the most obvious and palpable
points. He was a philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the
abstract and the mystical--a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He
saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to
ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on
such a theme as Personal Identity or the Idea of God, he "found no end,
in wandering mazes lost."
But the very quality of aloofness from other men and their ways of
thinking, which made it impossible for him to be the exponent of a
system or the founder of a school, made him a peculiarly interesting
friend. In homely phrase, you never knew where to have him; he was
always breaking out in a fresh place. Whatever subject he handled, from
impaled Bulgarians to the credibility of miracles, was certain to be