Some Diversions Of A Man Of Letters Part 10

"There are two habits which I have contracted, and which I have endeavoured to pa.s.s on to my children, as I have found them useful.

One is to shut the door after me when I leave the room, and the other is always to affix the day of the month and the year to every doc.u.ment, however unimportant, that I sign. I have received numbers of letters, not only from women, one of whose numerous privileges it is to be vague, but also from men in high official positions, dated with the day of the week only. When the doc.u.ment is important, such a proceeding is a fraud on posterity."

He often, both in conversation and in letters, took up one of his favourite cla.s.sic tags, and wove a shrewd modern reflection round it.

For instance, a couple of years before the war, a phrase of Aristotle recommending a ruthless egotism in the conduct of war, led him to say:--

"I think that at times almost every modern nation has acted on this principle, though they gloss it over with fine words. Its princ.i.p.al exponents of late have unquestionably been the Hohenzollerns."

And, in connection with the axiom of Thucydides that war educates through violence, he wrote, about the same time:--

"The Germans, who, in spite of their culture, preserve a strain of barbarism in their characters, are the modern representatives of this view. There is just this amount of truth in it--that at the cost of undue and appalling sacrifices, war brings out certain fine qualities in individuals, and sometimes in nations."

This may, surely, be taken as a direct prophecy of the magnificent effort of France. Lord Cromer's reflections, thrown off in the warmth of personal contact, often had a pregnant directness. For instance, how good this is:--

"The prejudice against the Botians was probably in a large measure due to the fact that, as the late Lord Salisbury might have said, they 'put their money on the wrong horse' during the Persian war. So also, it may be observed, did the oracle at Delphi."

Lord Cromer's public speeches and published writings scarcely give a hint of his humour, which was lambent and sometimes almost boyish. He loved to be amused, and he repaid his entertainer by being amusing. I suppose that after his return from Cairo he allowed this feature of his character a much freer run. The legend used to be that he was looked upon in Egypt as rather grim, and by no means to be trifled with. He was not the man, we may be sure, to be funny with a Young Turk, or to crack needless jokes with a recalcitrant Khedive. But retirement softened him, and the real nature of Lord Cromer, with its elements of geniality and sportiveness, came into full play.

Eight years ago, I regret to admit, Mr. Lloyd George was not the universal favourite in the House of Lords that he has since become. Lord Cromer was one of those who were not entirely reconciled to the financial projects of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared the Chancellor with Pescennius Niger,

"who aspired to be Emperor after the death of Pertinax, and was already Governor of Syria. On being asked by the inhabitants of that province to diminish the land tax, he replied that, so far as he was concerned, not only would he effect no diminution, but he regretted that he could not tax the air which they breathed."

The strained relations between Mr. Lloyd George and the House of Lords inspired Lord Cromer with a really delightful parallel from Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_ (which, by the way, was one of his favourite poems):--

"Thus, worn or weakened, well or ill content, Submit they must to DAVID'S government; Impoverished and deprived of all command, Their taxes doubled as they lost their land; And--what was harder yet to flesh and blood, Their G.o.ds disgraced, and burnt like common wood."

When he pointed this out to me, I entreated him to introduce it into a speech on the Budget. But he said that he was not sure of his audience, and then it was most painful to an orator to make a literary reference which was not taken up. Once at Sheffield, when he was urging the necessity of a strong Navy upon a large public meeting, he quoted Swinburne's splendid lines:--

"All our past comes wailing in the wind, And all our future thunders on the sea,"

without producing any effect at all. But the House of Lords is not an illiterate audience, and I recollect that on one occasion, when Lord Cromer himself was speaking on preferential treatment for the Colonies, and quoted Prior:--

"Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure, But Chloe (that is Protection) is my real flame,"

the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation.

He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life in the East, and his stories were numberless. One was of a pet.i.tion which he once received from a young Egyptian with a grievance, which opened with these words:--

"O h.e.l.l! Lords.h.i.+p's face grow red when he hear quite ghastly behaviour of Public Works Department towards our humble servant."

He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle of enjoyment.

We have been told that he who blows through bronze may breathe through silver. The severe preoccupations of Lord Cromer's public life did not prevent him from sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903, before his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of _Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek_, in the preparation or selection of which I believe that he enjoyed the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was rather unlucky that, with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromer prefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest. He had no cause to apologise so deeply for exercises which were both elegant and learned. It is a curious fact that, in this collection of paraphrases, the translator did not touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well--he used to copy out pages of aeschylus and Sophocles in his loose Greek script, with notes of his own--but dealt entirely with lyric and epigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age. Perhaps it seemed to him less daring to touch them than to affront aeschylus. He was not quite sure about these verses of his; he liked them, and then he was afraid that they were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so difficult, he said, to get a critical opinion.

Among his unpublished translations there is one, from a fragment of Euripides, which should not be lost, if only because Lord Cromer himself liked it better than any other of his versions. It runs:--

"I learn what may be taught; I seek what may be sought; My other wants I dare To ask from Heaven in prayer."

Of his satirical _vers-de-societe_, which it amused him to distribute in private, he never, I believe, gave any to the world, but they deserve preservation. Some serious reflections on the advantages of the British occupation of Egypt close with the quotation:--

"Let them suffice for Britain's need-- No n.o.bler prize was ever won-- The blessings of a people freed, The consciousness of duty done."

These were, in a high degree, the rewards of Lord Cromer himself.

After his settlement in London, Mr. T.E. Page sent him a book, called _Between Whiles_, of English verse translated into Latin and Greek. Lord Cromer was delighted with this, and the desire to write in metre returned to him. He used to send his friends, in letters, little triolets and epigrams, generally in English, but sometimes in Greek. But he was more ambitious than this. So lately as February 1911, during the course of one of our long conversations upon literature, he asked me to suggest a task of translation on which he could engage. It was just the moment when he was particularly busy with Const.i.tutional Free Trade and Woman Suffrage and other public topics, but that made no difference. It had always seemed to me that he had been most happy in his versions of the Bucolic poets, and so I urged him to continue his translations by attempting the _Europa_ of Moschus. He looked at it, and p.r.o.nounced it unattractive. I was therefore not a little surprised to receive a letter, on March 25th, in which he said:--

"Not sleeping very well last night, I composed in my head these few lines merely as a specimen to begin _Europa_:--

"When dawn is nigh, at the third watch of night, What time, more sweet than honey of the bee, Sleep courses through the brain some vision bright, To lift the veil which hides futurity, Fair Cypris sent a fearful dream to mar The slumbers of a maid whose frightened eyes Pictured the direful clash of horrid war, And she, Europa, was the victor's prize."

"They are, of course, only a first attempt, and I do not think much of them myself. But do you think the sort of style and metre suitable?"

He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on April 27th I received a packet endorsed "Patched-up Moschus returned herewith." So far as I know, this version of the _Europa_, conducted with great spirit in his seventieth year, has never been published. It is the longest and most ambitious of all his poetical experiments.

Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the main beauty of Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In all his verses he aimed at limpidity and ease. He praised the Greek poets for not rhapsodising about the beauties of nature, and this was very characteristic of his own eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general att.i.tude to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages, was a little difficult to define. He was ready to give lists of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural, these differed from time to time. But one list of the books he had "read more frequently than any other" consisted of the _Iliad_, the Book of Job, _Tristram Shandy_, and _Pickwick_, to which he added _Lycidas_ and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It would require a good deal of ingenuity to bring these six masterpieces into line. He was consistent in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was "the finest bit of poetry ever written."

He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. Livingstone's book on _The Greek Genius_. It made him a little regret the pains he had expended on the Hymns of Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the severer and earlier cla.s.sics. But surely he had followed his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed his range. It was the modernness of the Alexandrian authors, and perhaps their Egyptian flavour, which had justly attracted him. He did not care very much for an antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. I urged him to read a book which had fascinated me, _The Religion of Numa_, by a learned American, the late Mr. Jesse Carter. Lord Cromer read it with respect, but he admitted that those earliest Roman ages were too remote and cold for him.

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

III

THE LAST DAYS OF LORD REDESDALE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it was not until after several suggestions and many conversations that light was found. The friend so pressingly appealed to returned to London, where he was stern in rejecting several projects, hotly flung at his head and then coldly abandoned. A study of the Empress Maria Theresa, suggested by a feverish perusal of Pechler, was the latest and least attractive of these. Lord Redesdale then frankly demanded that a subject should be found for him. "You have brought this upon yourself,"