Part 18 (1/2)
Townsend, as far as I remember, never talked about the ethics of journalism or the duties of the journalist. It must not be supposed for a moment that this was because he did not realise or respect those duties, or was indifferent. It was rather due to the fact that he had a kind of innocence, a _sancta simplicitas_, on this as, indeed, on many moral and social questions. He took sound and honourable behaviour as a matter of course, and he would no more have thought of praising other people or himself for having a strict sense of honour in their conduct of a newspaper than he would of praising them or himself for not committing petty larceny, perjury, or fraud. He took, indeed, a very hopeful view of mankind and did not the least believe they were really bad, even if they did show themselves to be tigers on occasion. For instance, I remember his saying to me once, with that naive gaiety which was peculiar to him, that though he and Hutton differed a great deal in matters of theology they never had any differences as to the line the paper should take. Though Hutton inclined to an extremely ”high” section of the Church, to what, indeed, might be described as a kind of sublimated sacerdotalism, and Townsend to a Broad Church Presbyterianism, b.u.t.tressed by an intense opposition to every form of priestly function, he went on to point out that everything was made easy ”because both Hutton and I are at heart on the side of the angels.”
Apropos of angels, I remember with intense delight one of Townsend's most characteristic sayings. In the course of a conversation which began on some mundane theme and drifted on to spiritual lines, I remember his suddenly throwing the n.o.ble horse of dialectic on to his haunches with the catastrophic remark: ”Strachey, remember this. If there are angels, they have edges.” Here was the whole man. The idler or the fool will think, or pretend to think, that this was simply ridiculous nonsense, and will pa.s.s on with the comment, ”We are not amused.” As a matter of fact, there was a great deal of good sense packed under a kind of semi- humorous hydraulic pressure in this amazing dictum. What he meant was that if there were angels, they were not vague, fluid, evanescent creatures, some times part of a general angelic reservoir and sometimes in single samples, but definite personalities. His was only a fierce and violent way of saying what Tennyson said so exquisitely in the immortal lines:
Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside, And I shall know him when we meet.
There can be no eternal form without an edge. The edge, the dividing- line, is the essential thing in individuals, and Townsend's mind had pounced upon this as a cat will fall like a thunderbolt upon a mouse. It was in this vivid, practical way that his mind worked. He jumped all the intermediate things and came out with the essential in his mouth. But those who had slow or atrophied minds and did not see the process often failed to recognise what he was after, or what a clever kill he had made.
CHAPTER XVIII
MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE 'NINETIES
I have described how I came to London, how I became established at _The Spectator_ Office, and what, before I succeeded to the Editors.h.i.+p of _The Spectator_, were my various _extra_ activities in journalism and literature. I must now say something of my personal life.
In 1887 I married. The year or so spent in my father-in-law's house, 14 Cornwall Gardens, where my first child was born, was very happy and delightful. As my people lived either in Somersets.h.i.+re or on the Riviera, I knew ”on my own” comparatively few people in London, though those I did know were for the most part people to whom special interest was attached.
It happened that my mother-in-law, Mrs. Simpson, was not only a very charming person in herself, but, partly owing to a natural gift for, and love of, Society, and partly owing to the fact that her father, Mr.
Na.s.sau-Senior, the conversationalist, had been one of the best-known men in the political-literary world of London and of Paris, from 1820 to 1860, she knew a very large number of distinguished men and women of the middle Victorian epoch. By this I mean such men as Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Leslie Stephen, Mr. Justice Stephen, Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, Sir Louis Mallet, Mr. Lecky, Lord Arthur Russell and his brothers--to choose a few names almost at random. The last- named, Lord Arthur Russell, was the most kindly and friendly of men.
Probably without being conscious of it themselves, he and his distinguished wife formed what a pedantic social a.n.a.lyst might call the centre of a social group.
I shall, for this reason, choose the Arthur Russells for description in detail. They were very old friends of the Na.s.sau-Seniors and so of Mrs.
Simpson, and friends with a double liaison. Mr. Na.s.sau-Senior and his family had been throughout his life on very friendly terms with Lady William Russell, one of the most remarkable women of Regency and Victorian London as regards her beauty, her intellectual ability, and her social qualities. When Byron wrote the graceful and lively stanza which so audaciously recommends the gilded youth, who want to know whether their partners' complexions are real or synthetic, to wait till the light of dawn comes through the ballroom windows and then note what it discloses, he breaks off to say that, at any rate, there is one lady who will always stand the test, and adds:
At the next London or Parisian ball You're sure to see her cheek outblooming all.
That lady was Lady William Russell--sister, by the way, of the unhappy Lady Flora Hastings so cruelly caught in the meshes of an angry Court intrigue based on the natural, nay, inevitable, ignorance and want of worldly knowledge of a girl-Queen, the stupidity and lack of worldly wisdom of the Court Physicians, and the blundering bitterness of a group of Great Ladies--the whole a.s.sisted and inflamed by the baser type of party-politician.
Lady William Russell had three sons, each destined to play, if not great, yet important parts in the world. The eldest became the Duke of Bedford. Though he lived in many ways a sequestered, almost hermit-like, life, he was a man of singular ability. Of him Jowett was wont to record a curious piece of private history. The Duke had said to him, that in the course of his life he had lived upon all incomes from 300 to 300,000 a year and in each category had been happy and contented.
Perhaps the best way to describe Hastings, Duke of Bedford, is to say that he was a typical Russell, though a man with a Melbourne-like mind would perhaps add that his untypicalness was the most typical thing about him. The next brother was Lord Odo Russell, who played a very distinguished, brilliant, and useful part in the diplomacy of the period marked by the rise first of Prussian and then of German power. His son is the present Lord Ampthill. The third son was Lord Arthur Russell. All three boys were brought up in what might be called a nursery or schoolroom friends.h.i.+p with the children of the Na.s.sau-Senior family. My mother-in-law remained in touch with all three Russells throughout her life; but her special friend, partly because he always lived in England, and partly because he married a friend of the Seniors, was Lord Arthur.
Among Mr. Na.s.sau-Senior's Parisian friends was the brilliant and distinguished Mme. de Peyronnet, an Englishwoman by birth, married to a man of distinguished French family, who occupied an official post in the post-Restoration Administration. Mme. de Peyronnet formed part of the memorable group of Liberals of which Tocqueville was one of the most distinguished members;--a group which from the latter part of Louis- Philippe's reign to the break-up of the Third Empire comprised as notable a body of intellectuals as were ever brought together even in the city of Paris--the natural home of Social intellectualism. This, too, was the group of which M. and Mme. Mohl were s.h.i.+ning ornaments. M.
de Peyronnet was, I believe, a very charming man, but somewhat eclipsed by his brilliant wife, whom I am glad to say I knew, and whose talk was to my mind one of the most delightful of mental experiences. Poignant, free, brilliant, and yet never pedantic or laboured, and, above all, never trivial, Mme. de Peyronnet's conversation was a perpetual source of joy to all who had the good fortune to know her and the ability to understand her. She had three daughters, who all inherited their mother's brilliancy and good looks.
Of these three daughters one, as I have said, married Lord Arthur Russell, the next, and she, I am glad to say, lives in full intellectual vigour, married Lord Sligo, a typical ”great gentleman” of the middle Victorian period. Except for his perfect manners and absence of any traces of grandiloquence or pomposity, he might have stepped out of Disraeli's novels, or let us say an expurgated edition from which all the vulgarity and false-taste had been eliminated and only the picturesqueness and cleverness retained. The third sister, Mlle, de Peyronnet, never married, but remained the devoted companion of her mother.
I am not going to imitate the pomposity of Lord Beaconsfield, which I have just denounced, by talking nonsense about _Salons_, the Eighteenth Century, or of the spirit of Mme. du Deffand or of Mile. de Lespina.s.se living again in these fascinating women. I am content to take them as they were and quite prepared to believe that they were not only very much nicer women, but also quite as able and quite as brilliant as those whom the spirit of Convention would be sure to name as their prototypes. I am quite certain that, though they took a natural and proper interest in history, it never for a moment crossed the minds of any of them to talk like the ladies of the _ancien regime_ or to imitate them in any sort or way. They were as natural and unsophisticated as they were incisive, intrepid, and amusing in their conversation.
Never has it been my good fortune to hear better talk than that which flowed so easily from them, and happily, in the case of Lady Sligo, still flows. What struck me most was the way in which anecdote, recollection, and quotation, though not frigidly or formally dismissed, kept a subordinate place in the talk and had to make way for comments which were actual, original, personal, and therefore in a high degree stimulating. Their talk had nothing of the flavour of the second-hand or of hearsay, however good.
I had been accustomed as a boy to hear the best type of what I may call old-fas.h.i.+oned after-dinner English conversation, from the mouth of a master, Abraham Hayward. Hayward was an excellent example of the special type of _raconteur_ who first became famous in the Regency period.
These men, who were chiefly anecdotal in their talk, are well described by Byron in the immortal account of the House-party, _Don Juan_-- ”Long-bow from Scotland, Strong-bow from the Tweed.” Hayward was a man of real ability, though in a narrow sphere, and with a remarkable power of style. With him talk meant telling stories of Byron, Melbourne, Castlereagh, Cobden, Bright, Peel, and later Gladstone, Palmerston, and Lord John and other eminent Victorians. He told these with great intensive force and was vivacious as well as concise. All the same, the talk was anecdotal, and that can never be as stimulating as when it is spontaneous. It was the difference between fresh meat and tinned meat-- the difference between a vintage claret on the day it is uncorked and the day after.
Do not let it be supposed that by this comparison I am suggesting that the talk of Mme. de Peyronnet and her daughters was naturalistic and so artless. It was nothing of the kind. Though original and spontaneous, it was the result, consciously or unconsciously, of a distinct artistic intention. When they talked, they talked their best, as does the writer of good familiar letters. Lady Arthur Russell was the most pungent talker of the three, Lady Sligo the most reminiscent and, in the proper, not the derived sense, the most woman-of-the-worldly. I mean by this that she dealt most with the figures of the great world, but by no means in a grandiloquent, consequential, or Beaconsfieldian sense. She had travelled a great deal and seen an enormous number of people in every country of Europe as well as in England, and, therefore, she was and is more cosmopolitan in her talk than were her sisters.
Mlle. de Peyronnet was the most epigrammatic. She had the happy gift of improvising in a lightning-flash epigrams and _jeux de mots_ which would not have discredited the best wits even of France. I think her repartee, or rather _jeu de mot_, at the dentist's, which went the round of London, the best example I can take by way of ill.u.s.tration.
Most people are dreary and depressed in a dentist's chair. Not so Mlle.
de Peyronnet. Even here she kept not only her good-temper, but also her brilliant imagination and, above all, her verbal felicity.
The scene pa.s.ses in a Dental _Atelier_ in Paris. Mlle. de Peyronnet must be imagined seated in the fateful chair, dreading the pain but hoping for the relief of an extraction. But, as Tacitus said, that morning she saw all things cross and terrible. The dentist, instead of doing his work deftly, bungled it, or else it was the fault of the patient's jaw. At any rate, the tooth broke off in the forceps, and the dentist had to confess to his patient that all the pain he had given her was useless. He had left in the root! ”_Ah, mademoiselle,_” he exclaimed, ”_quelle Tragedie!_” But the patient, though suffering acute agony, was worthy of the occasion. She did not pause for an instant in her comment--”_Une Tragedie de Racine!_”