Portraits of the seventies

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I. JUSTIN MoCAETHY .... 15

Chapter I Justin Mccarthy'

A PORTRAIT of Mr. McCarthy rightly occupies the first place in a book which tries to continue his Portraits of the Sixties. The McCarthy of the Sixties was a Journalist and a novelist. The McCarthy of the Seventies and the Eighties was also a politician and an historian. For reasons which will presently appear, he and I did not always agree in politics. All the more pleasing on that account was his unfailing amiability in private life. The tone and spirit of our social intercourse are happily illustrated by the following quotation from his Reminiscences : —

" My next and last anecdote on the subject of visitors to the House of Commons I tell partly, of course, for the instruction or amuse- ■ 1830-1912.

Justin McCarthy 17

guests. Everything went on delightfully until we were about to break up after dinner, and then our American friends told me that they had a letter of introduction to a Member of the House who then held a position in Her Majesty's administration. I said I had not seen him in the House that night; but Mr. Eussell came to the rescue and explained that the man we were speaking of was at that time working in a private room which he had within the precincts of the House.

" I did not happen to know where the room was, and George Eussell benignly said, ' It's the easiest place to find; go into the Central Hall and you will see the entrance to it just behind my uncle's statue.' Every one who has been in the Central Hall knows the statue to the late Earl Eussell, the Lord John of historic memory. Mr. Eussell shortly after left us, having to go back into the House ; and we went to conduct our visitors to the friend whom they desired to see. But on the way they both broke out, as if with one thought and one voice, ' There ! did we not tell you ? Were we not right? "Behind my uncle's statue." Yes, to be sure, " Behind my uncle's statue 1 " Just to show us untitled Americans what poor things we are — we who have no noblemen-uncles, with statues to consecrate their nobility.'

"Mr. Eussell has never, I am sure, heard this story before; but if he should happen to read it in these pages, I hope it may prove a lesson to him to abate his fierce aristocratic pride, and to be sure that on no future occasion does he ever, from no matter what good-natured purpose, endeavour to help us, the lowly born, upon our humble way by any allusion to ' my uncle's statue.' "

Justin McCarthy was born at Cork in 1830, and we, who knew him in his placid and gentleman-like maturity, always delighted in the recollection that he had begun life as a rebel. At eighteen, he was one of " the men of '48," and was only precluded by his tender years from attaining immortality in Thackeray's ballad of the "Battle of Limerick": —

On that day of Ireland's guilt ; Says Jack Mitohil, " I am kilt ! Boys, where's the back door?

'Tis a national disgrace :

Let me go and veil me face ; And he boulted with quick pace from the Shannon shore.

Foiled in his early desire to head or help a revolution, Justin McCarthy became a journalist;

Justin McCarthy 19

first at Cork, then at Liverpool, and finally in London. He edited the Morning Star, when it was John Bright' s organ and the oracle of Eadicalism ; and from the Star he passed to the service of the Daily News. Here, under the austere direction of F. H. Hill, and in the congenial companionship of Andrew Lang, Peter Olayden, and Mr. Herbert Paul, he plie'd for long years a busy and graceful pen. " The Ditto Press " was in those days an uninvented phrase, but the truth which it expresses was always with us ; and the Daily News said Ditto to the leaders of the Liberal party with touching regularity. But in 1879 Justin McCarthy entered Parliament for the County of Longford, and, before two years were over, he found himself, under Parnell's leadership, constrained to fight the Liberal party with all his might. " Ditto " in the Daily News was difl&cult to combine with denunciation in the House, obstruction in the Lobby, and hostility in the constituencies ; but McCarthy's tact and amiability enabled him to play his rather complicated part without, as far as I know, losing a single friend.

Gladstone's conversion to Home Eule, announced by the " Hawarden Kite" in Decembei*

1885, solved these difficulties. Thenceforward his hostihty— not a very deadly passion— vpas reserved for his former chief, John Bright, and the other Liberals who still upheld the Union; and he was again able to co-operate wholeheartedly with Gladstone, Harcourt, John Morley, and other devotees of the new policy. So all was plain sailing until the fateful month of November, 1890, when the high hopes of Home Eulers, ancient and modern, were quenched in the foul air of the Divorce Court. Then came the decisive hour of McCarthy's hfe, and he acquitted himself nobly in it. He must choose between Parnell's leadership and what he believed to be best for the cause of Irish Nationalism. It was a choice which might have tried the moral fibre of a stronger-seeming nature ; but McCarthy never wavered. He put the Cause above the Man, and thereby involved himself in a furious and fratricidal strife, from which his soul must have revolted.

In the angry scene which concluded the long-drawn-out drama of " Committee Room No. 16," -Parnell turned on Justin McCarthy with the taunt, " You have been wanting to step into my shoes all the time." To assert that Parnell never said anything more untrue

Justin McCarthy 2i

than this would perhaps be bold. He certainly never said anything more unjust. His subsequent saying that his successor in the Irish leadership was " a nice old gentleman for a quiet tea-party," though borrowed from O'Connell, was less unjust. Some men seek for greatness ; others have greatness thrust upon them. Justin McCarthy was of these last, if ever man was. Not long before, Parnell, speaking in a very different spirit, had dubbed him the " beau ideal of an Irish member." If Parnell meant what he said, he must indeed have felt that the time had come to beat the swords of a fighting party into plough-shares. " Quiet in manners, polished in speech, retiring and urbane in temperament, Justin McCarthy was the fly in amber of the Irish Parliamentary party." The only thing his colleagues ever lamented in him was " his distressing want of native ferocity." They did not, indeed, doubt his fortitude. He had been a familiar figure in the Reporters' Gallery almost before Parnell was born, and a Nationalist member while yet Parnell was only a sporting squire. He had proved his faithfulness to the Irish cause through many a year of storm and stress; and one of his colleagues was kind enough to breathe the pious wish that McCarthy might be hanged for high treason, "to show how -calmly a quiet man could die for Ireland." To be sure, he was scarcely a milder or more harmless-seeming revolutionary than Mr. J. F. X. O'Brien, M.P. for South Mayo, who had actually been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for that very offence.

With, and through, the strife of Parnellite and anti-Parnellite, McCarthy seemed to develope a new nature. Small in stature, delicate in constitution, pacific in temperament, he suddenly proved himself equal to exertions and endurances of which one would have judged him physically incapable. His natural fluency became eloquence; and to moral courage he added a complete indifference to bodily peril. In the House of Commons he became ten times more effective and more considerable than he had ever been before. His prudence in counsel, his anxiety to avoid needless offence, and his dignified demeanour, were exactly the qualities which a parliamentary leader requires ; and it was observed that " his qualities and even his defects marked him out as the easiest man for his colleagues to rally round in the place of their deposed dictator." All friends of Ireland deplored the day when shattered health and impaired eyesight compelled him to retire,

Justin McCarthy 23

Of McCarthy's novels there is no need to speak in detail. A critic said of them, very happily, that they were like their writer, agreeable after-dinner companions. Dear Lady Disdain, was the most popular, and Miss Misanthrope ran it close. Waterdale Neighbours is notable for its excellent description of a Tory Democrat, written long before Lord Eandolph Churchill had been heard of.

In 1878 McCarthy, suddenly developing a new line of talent, published his History of Our Own Times. No history since J. E. Green's — few since Macaulay's — ever attained so wide and so sudden a popularity. It is painted with a broad brush, and the drawing bestows little attention on details. But its facts, so far as they go, are accurate ; it gives a clear, though perhaps a superficial, view of all the leading persons and events of the time which it covers ; and it is written in graceful, flowing, and easy English. Its most distinguishing feature is about the last which one would expect in a book written by an active and lifelong politician — an absolute impartiality. I remember the astonishment, touched with indignation, of an old Whig when he cam-e to the passage describing the bellicose attitude of Napoleon III in 1858, and of the military advisers who urged him on. " Certainly this Mr. McCarthy is the most impartial gentleman I ever came across. He says, 'Let us be just to the French Colonels.' No, really, I must draw the line at those dangerous ruffians."

To be just to every one, even to French Colonels, was inherent in McCarthy's nature ; and, if he was sometimes too generous or too gentle, those are not very heinous faults.

CHAPTEE II LORD BEAOONSFIELD-

r I iHE Whigs, among whom I was reared, -L never could be induced to take Lord Beaconsfield seriously. To them he was just " Dizzy," a purely comic figure, whose antics were always incalculable and generally amusing. They felt none of that violent animosity to him which prevailed among the Tories until his genius had brought Toryism into subjection. They merely regarded him as a droll adventurer, who was always trying to play solemn parts and say impressive things. They were ready enough to allow that he was a good hand at parliamentary banter ; but the notion that he could be a serious statesman never crossed their minds. As the representative of the "Country Party" and leader of the "Landed Interest," he seemed particularly comic, but

^ 1804-81.

supremely so when he figured as the champion of the Church, declaring himself "on the side of the angels," and dating letters to his clerical constituents on " Maundy Thursday." In their graver moods the Whigs condemned him as an unprincipled adventurer, who had bamboozled the Conservative party, and wormed his way into a place which properly belonged to men of higher character ; but, whether grave or gay, they despised him, ignored his genius, and never dreamed that he could be formidable.

This habit of mind was natural enough in men whom the adventurer had spent his life in caricaturing, and any one of whom might have sate for the portrait, in Endymion, of " a haughty Whig peer, proud of his order, prouder of his party, freezing with arrogant reserve and condescending politeness." Furthermore, it is to be remembered that, though Disraeli had dethroned Peel and made himself leader of the Conservative party in the House of Commons, yet he had always been hampered by the hindrances and perplexities which beset a thoroughly false position ; and that, as long as Palmerston lived, he had striven in vain for an opportunity in which his real powers could be displayed.

LORD BFACONSFIELD.

Eeared in this tradition, I had certainly no prepossession in favour of the enigmatical Member for Buckinghamshire, who in July 1866 succeeded Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. Indeed, any prejudices which a boy of thirteen might have entertained would probably have lain in the opposite direction ; for the event which brought Disraeli into power was the defeat of my uncle's last Eeform Bill ; and I can remember the indignant surprise of the Whigs when Lord Derby, accepting office on my uncle's resignation, announced that he reserved to himself entire liberty to deal with the question of Parliamentary Eeform whenever suitable occasion should arise. Parliament met for the new Session in February 1867, and the Derby- Disraeli Eeform Bill was introduced in March.

I now approach one of the happy accidents of my life. I was shortly going to Harrow; but I happened to be in London when the Bill was in Committee. My father, being then Sergeant-at-Arms, could admit me to a seat under the gallery whenever he chose, and so it came about that I heard some of the most memorable debates of that great controversy. Grladstone and Bright and Lowe and Lord

Cranborne (who next year became Lord Salisbury), and Sir John Coleridge (afterwards Lord Chief Justice), and Ayrton and Kinglake and Horsman and Henley — it is a notable list of speakers, and might be greatly prolonged. But one figure appeared to me to tower head and shoulders above the rest, and that was the leader of the Conservative party, the ridiculed and preposterous "Dizzy." His mastery of the House, on both sides, seemed absolute. Compared to him, Gladstone played a secondary and an ambiguous part. At every turn in the debate Disraeli manifested two qualities in which, as Gladstone once told me, he surpassed all his predecessors — his political audacity ' and his readiness in throwing a colleague overboard. I was not surprised, but only confirmed in my boyish impression, when in later years I read in Lord Houghton's Life an entry relating to this period : " Gladstone seems quite awed by the diabolical cleverness of Dizzy " ; and this record by Bishop Wilberforce : "Disraeli . . . has been able to teach the House of Commons

' Mrs. Disraeli, famous for her conversational oddities, once said to a friend of mine : " Dizzy has the most wonderful moral courage, but no physical courage. When he has his shower-bath, I always have to pull the string."

almost to ignore Grladstone, and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold him down for twenty years."

Those debates interested me acutely, both because they first taught me the democratic as against the Whig idea of Government; and because they displayed, in the contrast between Disraeli and those who surrounded him, the difference between genius and talent.

The Eeform Bill passed into law on the 15th of August, 1867. On the 25th of February, 1868, Lord Derby having resigned, Disraeli became Prime Minister. Even now the Whigs could not take him seriously. " Old Diz. Prime Minister ! " This seemed the best joke of all. "The last government was the Derby; this is the Hoax," was a pleasantry which passed from mouth to mouth. " I give him six months," was the word at Brooks's ; but fate gave [him nine.

The General Election of November 1868 returned a majority of a hundred for Gladstone and Irish Disestablishment. Disraeli, though of course leader of the Opposition, took very little share in the debates on the Irish Church which occupied the Session of 1869, and his speech on the Second Beading of the disestablishing Bill was likened at the time to " a Columbine's skirt, all flimsiness and spangles." At the moment his energies were engaged in a quite unsuspected quarter, as was discovered at the beginning of May 1870, when he astonished the world by publishing Lothair (for which, by the way, he got £10,000). On the eve of publication Lord Houghton wrote : " There is an immense and most malevolent curiosity about Disraeli's novel. His wisest friends think that it must be a mistake, and his enemies hope that it wiU be his ruin. He told Longman he believed he was the first ex-Premier who had ventured on a work of fiction. If he had said this to me, I should have suggested M. Guizot's Meditations jReligieuses."

This is not the proper place for an analysis of what Froude held to be Disraeli's greatest achievement in literature, but I can recall the fact that once again it shook the Whigs with laughter. Certainly the descriptions of aristocratic life, embellished with portraits which every one could recognize, were droll enough. Even after the lapse of forty-five years I can hear the mock-heroic tone of my father's voice as he read out the description of a country house I where there were " salt-cellars a foot high " and state beds " borne by silver poles." But all this flummery is contained in the first volume : whoever has the patience to wade through it, or the courage to skip it, will find in the second and third volumes a vividly interesting chapter of modern history. The Garibaldian rising of September 1867, with its disastrous conclusion at Mentana, has never been described with such intimate knowledge. Mentana was historical, and, though the author might embellish the story with some fantastic touches of his own, even the Whigs could not say that he had invented it. But throughout the narrative Disraeli harps upon one theme — " The only strong things in Europe are the Catholic Church and the Secret Societies." The Whigs knew something about " the Catholic Church," and partly hated it, partly despised it. But the idea of Secret Societies, undermining the political soil of Europe, and ready, at any favourable moment, to break out in armed insurrection, seemed to them too absurd to be even intended for reality. " Here's old Diz. ' cramming ' us again ! All this bogey - stufi about Secret Societies ! What will the old boy

' Drawn from Knole.

try to make us believe next ? " But, before ten years were over, the Whigs, or such of them as survived, discerned to their amazement that Disraeli had been telling them the literal truth about a real and most formidable force in international politics. It was not for nothing that he, who noticed everything and never forgot anything, had been the most important member of the Cabinet when Fenianism was at its height ; and what he had learned in office he revealed in Lothair, even to the personal appearance and social habits of some of the chief conspirators. When the Fenian General, Gustave Paul Cluseret, who had played so sinister a part in the Commune, wrote his experiences in Macmillan's Magazine, we saw that, in describing " Captain Bruges " and his operations in London and in Ireland, Disraeli had been narrating historical facts which had fallen under his official observation.

When Lothair was once launched on its highly successful voyage (" The pecuniary results," Dizzy said to my father, " have been eminently gratifying") the author was free to return to his political duties as leader of the Opposition, and critic of the Gladstonian administration. His opponents gave him abundant opportunity for the exercise of his unequalled powers of sarcasm and ridicule. At this point a story may be interjected —

In early life Disraeli had been fond of riding, and in his Letters to his Sister there is a preposterous account of a run with Sir Henry Smythe's hounds, near Southend, in 1834. " Although not in pink, I was the bestmounted man in the field, riding an Arabian mare, which I nearly killed; a run of thirty miles, and I stopped at nothing."

A later and much better authenticated performance is thus recorded by an eye-witness In October 1873 Disraeli, who had not crossed a horse for thirty years, was staying with Lord Bradford at Weston, in Shropshire. To the astonishment of his fellow-guests, his host persuaded him to go out cub-hunting. My informant met him at Chillington, five miles from Weston. " He was wearing low shoes and white cotton socks, and trousers which rucked up nearly to his knees." To Mr. Giffard, the , owner of Chillington, he said, in his slow, impressive way, "I like your place; it is so stately." He did not get back to Weston till after luncheon, and, when he got off his horse in the stable-yard, he was so exhausted that he reeled, and almost fell against the wall. " It was a plucky performance for an old man who never rode."

By the end of 1873, Gladstone's government, which, when formed in 1868, seemed a Ministry of all the Talents, had become, in Disraeli's admirable phrase, " a range of exhausted volcanoes." Weary of rebuffs, Gladstone suddenly dissolved Parliament, and was astonished by the completeness of his overthrow. In February 1874 Disraeli became Prime Minister for the second time, and for the first time found himself not only in office but in power. Before this he had held office on sufferance : he was now entrusted by the country with absolute authority. His enemies had been made his footstool. Crown, Parliament, and populace were united in his support.

A schoolboy has few opportunities of seeing great men, and an undergraduate not many more. From my early boyhood, as I said before, I had followed Disraeli's career with interest. I took my degree at Oxford in 1876, and thenceforward, going a good deal into society both in London and in the country, and having as many friends among Tories as among Liberals, I had frequent opportunities of seeing Lord

Beaconsfield (as he became in 1876) at close quarters. He was indeed a striking, and even a startling, figure. He was a good deal bowed, and walked with a rather shuffling gait. His face was of a death-like pallor, and what remained of his once luxuriant hair was dyed to an inky blackness, the curl over his forehead being fixed in its place with gum. His eyelids drooped, and there was about him a general air of incipient paralysis, which was only dispelled by the brightness of his eyes and his singularly clear and deliberate enunciation. He was always rather elaborately dressed; in winter he wore an Astrakhan-lined great-coat,* and in summer, when he was wandering about the woods and lanes of Hughcnden, he displayed a velvet jacket, a " fancy " waistcoat, and a Tyrolean hat. He still stayed a good deal in country houses, such as Hatfield and Bretby and Welbeck, and even once at Woburn, but his health was failing and he was no longer good company. The processes of his toilet were too elaborate to allow of his appearing before luncheon-time, and then he was easily tired. He took scarcely any part in conversation, but sate for long stretches in moody silence, only broken now and then by * See the cartoon in Vanity Fair, Dec. 10, 1879.

some sententious or epigrammatic remark. The late Lord Bath declared he was the dullest guest who ever visited Longleat, but the fact that both host and guest cordially disliked each other may have accounted for this impression. The late Sir William Fraser, who was one of the most abandoned bores in London, and a devoted adherent of Lord Beaconsfield, left this artless record : —

" During his last Premiership I dined with him in Downing Street : on entering, he replied to my commonplace hope that he was no worse for the bitter weather, with a feeble groan. I ventured to add that I found him surrounded by his illustrious predecessors ; he groaned again. ' Sir Eobert Walpole over the chimneypiece ! ' He feebly bleated the word 'Walpole.' At first I thought he must be dying : then, harmless as were my words, I thought they might have shocked him. I waited for a minute or two : and was followed by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, his intimate personal friend from boyhood : a nobleman of by no means formal manners ; his words bore close resemblance to my own : to my relief Disraeli replied in the same ghastly manner. I felt that he could not survive the night. Within a quarter of an hour, all being seated at dinner, I observed him talking to the Austrian Ambassador, Count Apponyi, with extreme vivacity : during the whole of dinner their conversation was kept up : I saw no sign of flagging.

"This is difficult to account for. One theory has been that Disraeli took carefully measured doses of opium ; and, these being calculated to act at a given time, that the effect of the subtle drug was as I have described. I never saw such phenomena in any other person : in

fact I remember diverting the late Lord B ,

who was a great admirer of Disraeli, by telling

him that I believed D was in reality a

corpse, which occasionally came to life ; and that, if he had ever been a human being, it must have been at a far distant period of the world's existence."

Sir William's bland irrecognition of his own conversational infirmity has always struck me as a warning.

When Lord Beaconsfield roused himself to speak, he always spoke carefully, and his phrases were bandied about from mouth to mouth. "Have I read the ' Greville Memoirs'? No, and I have no intention of reading them. Charles Greville was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, though I have read Cicero and known Bulwer- Lytton." Once the late Lord Alington drove him over to visit the great Lord Shaftesbury at St. Giles's, and when he was leaving the house he said, " Farewell, my dear Lord. I have to-day seen one of the most impressive sights — a great English nobleman, living in patriarchal state in his own hereditary halls." A fervent admirer once said, " Lord Beaconsfield, I am going to ask a great favour. Will you let me bring my boy to see you, and will you give him one word of counsel which may stand him in stead all his life ? " The old gentleman groaned, but consented; and, when young hopeful was presented, he said, " My dear young friend, your good papa has asked me to give you a word of counsel ; here it is : Never ask who wrote the ' Letters of Junius,' or on which side of Whitehall Charles I was beheaded; for if you do you will be considered — a bore, and that is something too terrible for you, at your tender age, to understand." To a friend of my own, a brilliant and ambitious Jew, he said, "You and I belong to a race which can do everything but fail." A well-known and delightful lady tried to make him read the The New Bepublic, and write a favourable word about it for the author's encouragement. He replied, " I am not as strong as I was, and I cannot undertake to read your young friend's romances ; but give me a sheet of paper." So then and there he sate down

and wrote : " Dear Mrs. S , I am sorry

that I cannot dine with you next week, but I shall be at Hughenden. Would that my solitude could be peopled with the bright creations of Mr. Mallock's fancy ! " I have always thought that "bright creations," as an epitome of a book which one had not read, was a stroke of genius.

The following story, not less characteristic, I had direct from Lord Eandolph Churchill.

When Lord Eandolph was beginning to take politics seriously, he thought it would be a good move to ask Lord Beaconsfield to dinner. When the ladies left the dining-room, he placed himself where Lady Eandolph had been sitting, by the great man' side. "Will you have some more claret. Lord Beaconsfield?" "No thank you, my dear friend. It is admirable wine — true Falernian — but the gout holds me in its horrid clutch." When the guests had gone, and the host and hostess were talking over the events of the evening, Lord Eandolph said, " I think the old gentleman enjoyed himself, and I know he liked his claret." "Claret? He didn't touch it! He drank brandy and water all dinner-time."

Of Disraeli's phrases in debate there is no need to speak, for they are historic and proverbial, and most of them belong to a period anterior to that which we are now considering. But one is embedded in my memory of 1878. The beloved and admired Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, died of diphtheria, which she had contracted through kissing her sick boy. One would have thought that an incident so natural and touching could not, by any ingenuity, have been vulgarized, but Lord Beaconsfield was equal to the occasion. In moving a Vote of Condolence to the Queen, he indulged in some terrible phrases about " The Kiss of Death," and said it was an incident worthy to be portrayed in " painting, sculpture, or gems." Gems ! what an inconceivable bathos ! But, as a critic at the time remarked, the author of it belonged to the race which gave us jewellery and mosaic.