Part 6 (1/2)

came thundering up. It was from Sir Wilfred Lawson, the radical from Carlisle, whose statue now stands on the Thames Embankment. Lord Randolph Churchill made that night what I suppose was the great speech of his life, for some two hours facing the Irish members waging a forensic battle, memorable for even the House of Commons. From my perch I looked directly into his face at a distance of not many feet as he confronted the Irish crowd. Rather short of stature, he was a compact figure, and his face had in it combative energy as the marked characteristic. He outlined the policy of the new government with serene indifference to the stormy disapproval which almost every sentence evoked. When the outcry became deafening, he paused with a grim smile on his bull-dog face until the interruption wore itself out. ”This disturbance makes no difference to me,” he would quietly say, ”I am only sorry to have the time of the House wasted in such unreasonable fas.h.i.+on.” Then would come another prod and a new chorus of howls rolling thunderously from the cavern under my feet. It is not in line with my present plan to describe this speech; that may be found in Hansard under the date. I touch only on the outside manner as he fought his fight. It was a fine example of cool, imperturbable, unshrinking a.s.sault, and I thought that in some such way his ancestor, the great Duke of Marlboro, might have ruled the hour at Blenheim and Malplaquet. Many years after it fell to me to introduce to an audience his son Winston Churchill who, when his father was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a schoolboy at Harrow. I took occasion to describe briefly the battle I had seen his father wage at Westminster. It pleased Winston Churchill then fresh from the fields of South Africa.

”That was indeed a great speech of my father's,” he said. Since then the son has developed into a combatant probably not less formidable than his forebears.

This was well worth while for me, desiring to see the Parliament of England in its most interesting moods, but something came later which I treasure more. While the conflict proceeded, in his place near the mace but a yard or two distant from the conspicuous figure sat Gladstone. I had seen him enter the House, a ma.s.sive frame dressed in a dark frock-coat which hung handsomely upon his broad shoulders, with the strong head and face above, set in a lion-like mane of disordered hair. He sat unmoved and quiet throughout the conflict as he might have done at a ladies' tea-party, but now he rose to speak. At once complete silence pervaded the Chamber. I believe I have never seen so impressive an exhibition of the power of a great personality. Foes as well as friends waited almost breathless for the words that were to come. It was a time of crisis. He had just met defeat. What could the discredited leader say?

He began in a voice scarcely above a whisper, though in the silence it was distinctly audible, but the tones strengthened and deepened as he proceeded. His audience hung upon his every word, and so he discoursed for half an hour. It was not a great speech,--a series of calm, unimpa.s.sioned statements in which clearness of phrase and absolute abstention from aggressive attack upon his opponents were the most marked characteristics. It was courteous toward friend and foe, and foes no less than friends received each clear-cut sentence with attention most respectful. I was a bit disappointed not to see the old lion aroused and in his grandeur. But it is a thing to prize that I witnessed a manifestation made in his full strength and in the acme of his dominance. It was worth while to see that even in no great mood, the force of his leaders.h.i.+p was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay.

In the slang of the street of that time he was the ”G.O.M.,” the Grand Old Man as well to those who fought him as to those who loved him.

An impressive incident of the session occurred in the address of the ”Mover of the Queen's Speech.” The orator in brilliant court attire, a suit of plum-coloured velvet with full wig and small-clothes which seemed almost the only bit of colour in the soberly, sometimes rather shabbily, dressed a.s.semblage, a costume which through long tradition attaches to the function which he discharged, prefaced his remarks with this tribute: ”However we may differ from the honourable member for Midlothian, we are all willing to admit that he is the most ill.u.s.trious of living Englishmen.” In spite of the general bitterness of the tumultuous controversy, one felt that there lay beneath it all a certain fine magnanimity. Both Liberal and Tory believed in the substantial patriotism and good purpose of the adversary as a fundamental concession and that all were seeking the best welfare of England. The differences regarded only the expedients which were proper for the moment. One could see that foes furious in the arena might at the same time be closest personal friends. It was not a riddle that in the tea-rooms and the smoking-rooms Greek and Trojan could sit together in friendly _tete-a-tete_, or that such incidents could occur as the genial congratulations extended by Gladstone to Joseph Chamberlain over the fine promise of his son Austin Chamberlain making his debut in Parliament; congratulations extended when the two statesmen were at swords' points,--a friendly talk as it were, through helmet bars when the slash was at the sharpest.

As I went home that night, through the streets of London, my mind and heart were full. My special studies at the moment were familiarising me with what lay behind the scene which I had just beheld. In similar fas.h.i.+on in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House.

And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the ”Pet.i.tion of Right.”

Subst.i.tuting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must have been very similar. Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted ”Order! Order!” as did his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane pa.s.sionately inveighed against Prelacy and the ”Man of Blood,” as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good, the spot was the same. The conditions and the environment looking at it in the large were not widely different, the ancient Anglo-Saxon freedom struggling ever for its foothold as the centuries lapse, now precariously uncertain as Privilege and Prerogative push hotly, now fixed and strong in great moments of triumph; and the end is not yet.

In the earlier time the destinies of America were closely interlocked with England and came up no less for decision in the great arena at Westminster. The destinies of the two peoples are scarcely less interlocked at the present moment. We are gravitating toward closer brotherhood, and the thoughtful American sees reason to study with the deepest interest each pa.s.sage of arms in the ancient memorable arena.

I saw in Germany in 1870, usually through the good offices of Bancroft, our minister, the most eminent historians of that day.

Giesebrecht and von Raumur were no longer living, but men were still in the foreground to the full as ill.u.s.trious. Heidelberg in those days was relatively a more conspicuous university than at present. Its great men remain to it, though the process of absorption was beginning which at last carried the more distinguished lights to Berlin. The lovely little town, whose streets for nearly six hundred years have throbbed with the often boisterous life of the student population, is at its best in the spring and early summer. The Neckar ripples tumultuously into the broad Rhine plain, from which towers to the height of two thousand feet the romantic Odenwald. From some ruin of ancient watch-tower or cloister on the height, entrancing views spread out, the landscape holding the venerable towns of Worms and Speyer, each with its cathedral dominating the cl.u.s.tered dwellings, while the lordly Rhine pours its flood northward--a stream of gold when in the late afternoon it glows in the sunset. The old castle stands on its height, more beautiful in its decay, with ivy clinging about the broken arches, and the towers wrecked by the powder-bursts of ancient wars, than it could ever have been when unshaken.

Among the professors at Heidelberg, von Treitschke was one of the most eminent, and it was my privilege one day to hear him lecture on a theme which stirred him--the battle of Leipsic, the great _Volkerschlacht_ of 1813, when Germany cruelly clipped the pinions of the Napoleonic eagle. The hall was crowded with young men, _corps-studenten_ being especially numerous, robust youths in caps and badges, and many of the faces were patched and scarred from duels in the Hirsch-Ga.s.se. Von Treitschke, a dark, energetic figure, was received with great respect. Deafness, from which he suffered, affected somewhat his delivery. He told the story of the great battle, the frantic effort against combined Europe of the crippled French, the defection of the Saxons in the midst of the fight, the final driving of Napoleon across the Elster, the death of Poniatowski and the retreat to France. His voice was a deep, sonorous monotone and every syllable was caught eagerly by his auditors. They and the speaker were thoroughly at one in their intense German feeling. It was a celebration of triumph of the Fatherland. The significance of it all was not apparent, that sunny spring morning, but we were on the eve of a catastrophe which apparently no one foreboded; Metz, Gravelotte, and Sedan were only a few months away. The fire which I saw burning so hot in the souls of both speaker and hearers was part of the conflagration destined to consume widely and thoroughly before the summer closed.

Ernst Curtius was probably the most distinguished h.e.l.lenist of his time. He had studied the Greeks on their own soil and gone with German thoroughness into their literature, history, and art. He had excellent powers of presentment, wrote exhaustively and yet attractively and won early recognition. He was selected for the post of tutor to the Crown Prince, an honour of the highest. The Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick, held him in high regard and in 1870 his position in the world of scholars was of the best. I had the honour to pay him a visit in his home one pleasant Sunday afternoon in company with Bancroft. I remember Bancroft's crisp German enunciation as he presented me; ”Ich stelle Ihnen einen Amerikaner vor,” and he mentioned my name. I bowed and felt my hand grasped cordially in a warm, well-conditioned palm, while a round, genial face beamed good-naturedly. The interview was in the Professor's handsome garden, his accomplished wife and daughters were of the party, and I remember _Maiwein_ with pretzels on a lawn with rose-bushes close beside and music coming through the open windows of the house. The hospitality was graceful, there was no profound talk but only pleasant chatter. The daughters were glad to have a chance to try their English and I was glad for the moment to slip out of the foreign bond and disport myself for their benefit in my vernacular, but the Professor needed no practice. His English was quite adequate, as, on the other hand, the German of Bancroft was well in hand.

”What other university people would you like to see?” said Bancroft to me one day. I mentioned von Ranke, Lepsius, and Mommsen as men whose names were familiar, whose faces I should like to look upon.

”Find out the _sprech-stunden_ of these men,” said Bancroft to his secretary, and presently a slip was put into my hand containing the hours at which I could be conveniently received. Following the direction, I was one day admitted to the library of von Ranke, a plain apartment walled by books from floor to ceiling, with a desk well-worn by days and nights of work. As I awaited his entrance the facts of his career were vivid in my mind. He was a man of seventy-five and had been a scholar almost from his cradle. He was known to me particularly through his history of the popes, which was and perhaps is still the judicial authority with regard to the line of pontiffs, but that was only one book among many. He belonged to a cla.s.s of which Germany has been prolific, whose consciences a.s.sault them if they let their pens lie idle, and who have no recourse in self-defence but building about themselves a barricade of books. After researches in various fields, von Ranke now was undertaking a history of the world, with no thought apparently of a probable touch from the dart of death in the near future; and he did indeed live until nearly ninety and long produced a volume a year.

He entered presently from an inner room, rather a short, well-rounded figure with a face marked by a clear eye and much vivacity. He conversed well in English and was curious about American education and offered, rather ludicrously, I remember, to exchange the publications of the University of Berlin with those of the little fresh-water college in which I was at that time a young teacher. Could the scholar be aiming a sly sarcastic hit at the bareness of our educational outposts in the West? But no, his frank look and voice showed that he was unaware of the real conditions. The talk was not long, there was a hearty expression of regard for Mr. Bancroft who was fully accepted by the German learned world as one of their _Gelehrten_, trained as he had been in youth in their schools, and in that day our best-known historian. I bowed myself out respectfully from the presence of the little man and sincerely hope that the merit of his great history is in no way abated because I took a half-hour of his time.

I met Lepsius, the great Egyptian scholar, one afternoon in his garden, a hale, straight man of sixty with abundant grey hair surmounting a fine forehead, with blue eyes full of penetration behind his spectacles. I had little knowledge of the subject he had studied so profoundly and almost laughed outright when his pretty daughter asked me if I had read her father's translation of the _Book of the Dead_. Of von Ranke's themes I thought I knew something and was more at ease with him, as with Mommsen whom I met about the same time.

Theodor Mommsen, more than any other, forty years ago, was the leading historian of Germany. He began his career as a student of law, in the antiquities of which he became thoroughly versed. In particular Justinian and the Roman authorities, among whom he stands as chief, were the objects of Mommsen's research. From jurisprudence he pa.s.sed to the study of general history, and of the most interesting period of Rome he absorbed into his mind all the lore that has survived. This he digested and set forth in a monumental work, which, translated into English, has been, in the English-speaking world of scholars at least, as familiar as household words. At a still later time he was an active striver in the political agitations of his day.

I sent in my card to Mommsen with some trepidation and was at once admitted. I found him sitting at leisure among his books and Bancroft's introduction brought to pa.s.s for me a genial welcome. He was a man not large in frame with dark eyes, and black hair streaked with grey. No doubt but that like German scholars in general he could talk English, but he stuck to German and I was rather glad he did so; I could take him in better as he discoursed fluently in his mother-tongue. Mommsen was a man of sharp corners who often in his political career brought grief to adversaries who tried to handle him without gloves. I was fortunate in catching him in a softer mood and witnessed an amiability with which he was not usually credited. His little daughters were in the room, pretty children with whom the father played with evident pride and joy, interrupting the conversation to caress the curly pates, and trotting them on his knee.

He put keen questions to me as regards America, showing that while busy with Caesar and the on-goings of the ancient forum he had been wide awake also to modern happenings. He expressed much regard for Bancroft and praised Grant for selecting as minister to Germany a personality so agreeable to European scholars. He told me of the jubilee of Bancroft which was about to be celebrated with marked honours. Fifty years before Bancroft had ”made his doctor” at Gottingen, one of the earliest Americans to achieve that distinction, and the German universities meant to show emphatically their recognition of his merit. The celebration afterwards took place, not interrupted by the warlike uproar in which the land was about to be involved. A proud honour indeed for the American minister. It was a noteworthy occasion to talk thus familiarly with one of the most ill.u.s.trious scholars of the time, and I recall fondly the pleasant details of the picture.

At Heidelberg the February before I had had an interview with Schenkel, then the leading theologian of that university. Him I found in his _Studir-Zimmer_ without fire on a cold day. He seemed to scorn the use of the _Kachelofen_, the great porcelain stove, and was wrapped from head to foot in a heavy woollen robe which enveloped him and was prolonged about his head into a kind of cowl. He presented a figure closely like the portraits of some old reformers heavily mantled in a garb approaching the monkish _Tracht_ which they had forsaken. It seemed out of character for Schenkel, for he was an avowed liberal and particularly far away from old standards, but the sharp winter drove a champion of heterodoxy into this outer conformity with the old. In the case of the Berlin _Gelehrten_, however, the mediaeval dress was quite discarded. I chanced to see them in the spring with their windows wide open to the perfume of gardens and songs of nightingales, and in the case of Mommsen, my picture of his environment has traits of geniality, for he sat in light summer attire, his face aglow with fatherly impulses as he played in the soft air with his children.

One of the most interesting men whom I met in Berlin was Hermann Grimm, then just rising among the characters of mark, but best known at that time as the son of the famous Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm,--the ”Brothers Grimm,” whose names through their connection with the fairy tales are stamped in the memories not only of men and women, but of children throughout the civilised world.

The ”Brothers Grimm,” it must be remembered, were scholars of the profoundest. The Teutonic folk-lore engaged them not simply or mainly as a source of amus.e.m.e.nt, but as a subject proper for deep investigation. They painfully gathered in out-of-the-way nooks from the lips of old grandames in chimney corners and wandering singers in obscure villages, the survivals of the primitive superst.i.tions of the people. These they subjected to scientific study as ill.u.s.trating the evolution of society, a deep persistent search with results elaborately systematised, of which the delightful tales so widely circulated are only a by-product. Aside from their service in the field of folk-lore they grappled with many another mighty task. The vast dictionary, in which German words are not only set down in their present meaning but followed throughout every stage of their etymology with their relations to their congeners in other tongues indefatigably traced out, is a marvel of erudition. Theirs also was the great _Deutsche Grammatik_, a philosophical setting forth of the German tongue in its connection with its far-spreading Aryan affinities. The ”Brothers Grimm” were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they are not divided. Jakob was never married. Wilhelm was married, the child of the union being the distinguished man with whom it was my fortune to talk.

They worked together affectionately until far into old age, and I have described their graves in the _Matthai Kirchhof_ where they lie side by side.

I found Hermann Grimm in the study which had been the workshop through long years of his father and uncle. He was a handsome man in his vigorous years and had married the daughter of Bettine von Arnim, the Bettine of Goethe. It is not strictly right to cla.s.s him as a historian. He was poet, playwright, critic, and novelist, perhaps mainly these, but soon after, in his position as a professor in the university, he was to produce his well-known _Vorlesungen uber Gothe_, a work which though mainly critical, at the present time is a biography of conspicuous merit, which envisages the events of a famous epoch. I may, therefore, properly include him here, though the wide range of his activities makes it difficult to place him accurately. It paved the way for our interview that I knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, of whom he was, in Germany, the special admirer and student.

He had just translated Emerson into German and sat at the feet of the Concord sage, infused by his inspiration. Hermann Grimm had never seen Emerson, and listened eagerly to such details as I could give him of his personality. He dwelt with enthusiasm upon pa.s.sages in poems and essays by which he had been especially kindled, and hung upon my account of the voice and refined outward traits of the teacher whom he so reverenced. I afterwards procured a fine photograph of Hermann Grimm which I sent to Emerson. A kind letter from him, which I still treasure, let me know that I had put Emerson deeply in my debt; up to that time he had never seen a portrait of his German disciple, though the two men had been in affectionate correspondence. At a later time they met and cemented a friends.h.i.+p which was very dear to both.

Hermann Grimm showed me with pride the relics of his father and uncle; the rows of well-thumbed volumes; the wellscored _Heften_ over which their hands had moved; their inkstands and pens; the rough arm-chairs and tables where they had sat. I think a trace from the smoke of their pipes and midnight lamp still adhered to the ceiling, and possibly cobwebs still hung in the corners of the bookcases which had been there from an ancient day.

Quaint portraits of the ”Brothers Grimm” at work in their caps and rough dressing-gowns were at hand, but Hermann Grimm had rather the appearance of a well-groomed man of the world. His coat was fas.h.i.+onable, his abundant hair and flowing beard were carefully trimmed. He was not a recluse, though faithful to his heredity and devoted mainly to scholarly research. He was at ease in the clubs and also at Court and enjoyed the give and take of a social hour with friends.

CHAPTER VIII

POETS AND PROPHETS