Transcriber’s Note: A few obvious printer’s mistakes have been corrected (in particular in the Index, where entries often didn’t match the spelling given in the main text, and have been changed to do so); any remaining errors are the author’s own.

[i]

THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY

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[iii]

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THE PUPPET SHOW
OF MEMORY

BY
MAURICE BARING

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1922

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Printed in Great Britain

[vi]

My thanks are due to Messrs. Methuen for allowing me to use in Chapters XVI.-XIX. some matter which has already appeared in A Year in Russia and Russian Essays, two books published by them; to Mr. Leo Maxse for allowing me to use an article on Sarah Bernhardt which appeared in the National Review, and has been re-written for this book; to Father C. C. Martindale and Mr. Desmond MacCarthy for kindly correcting the proofs.

M. B.

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TO J.

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[1]

When people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with regret, “If only I had kept a diary, what a rich store of material I should now have at my disposal!” I remember one of the masters at Eton telling me, when I was a boy, that if I wished to make a fortune when I was grown up, I had only to keep a detailed diary of every day of my life at Eton. He said the same thing to all the boys he knew, but I do not remember any boy of my generation taking his wise advice.

On the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past memories, the absence of diaries and notebooks has its compensations. Memory, as someone has said, is the greatest of artists. It eliminates the unessential, and chooses with careless skill the sights and the sounds and the episodes that are best worth remembering and recording. The first thing I can remember is a Christmas tree which I think celebrated the Christmas of 1876. It was at Shoreham in Kent, at a house belonging to Mr. H. B. Mildmay, who married one of my mother’s sisters. I was two years old, and I remember my Christmas present, a large bird with yellow and red plumage, which for a long time afterwards lived at the top of the nursery wardrobe. It was neither a bird of Paradise nor a pheasant; possibly only a somewhat flamboyant hen; but I loved it dearly, and it irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years.

The curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 37 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, London. The nursery[2] epoch, which lasted till promotion to the schoolroom and lessons began, seems to children as long as a lifetime, just as houses and places seem to them infinitely large. The nursery was on the third floor of the house, and looked out on to the street. There was a small night-nursery next door to it, which had coloured pictures of St. Petersburg on the wall.

I can remember the peculiar roar of London in those days; the four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pavement through the fog, except when there was straw down in the street for some sick person; and the various denizens of the streets, the lamplighter and the muffin-man; often a barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and sometimes a Punch and Judy. During the war, when the streets began to be darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 1917, London looked at night very much as it was in my childhood. But the strange rumbling noise had gone for ever. Sometimes on one of the houses opposite there used to be an heraldic hatchment. The nursery was inhabited by my brother Hugo and myself, our nurse, Hilly, and two nurserymaids, Grace Hetherington, and Annie. Grace was annexed by me; Annie by Hugo. Hilly had been nurse to my sisters and, I think, to my elder brothers too. She had the slightly weather-beaten but fresh agelessness of Nannies, and her most violent threat was: “I’ll bring my old shoe to you,” and one of her most frequent exclamations: “Oh, you naughty boy, you very naughty boy!” The nursery had Landseer pictures in gilt frames, and on the chest of drawers between the two windows a mechanical toy of an entrancing description. It was a square box, one side of which was made of glass, and behind this glass curtain, on a small platform, a lady sat dressed in light blue silk at an open spinet; a dancing master, in a red silk doublet with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one side of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short skirts of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to dance. When you wound up the toy, the lady played, the man conducted elegantly with an open score in one hand and a baton in the other, and the little girl pirouetted. It only played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely refined dance-tune.

At one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little girl used to appear sometimes. Hugo and I used to exchange[3] signals with her, and we called her Miss Rose. Our mute acquaintance went on for a long time, but we never saw her except across the street and at her window. We did not wish to see more of her. Nearer acquaintance would have marred the perfect romance of the relation.

There were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to the nursery, and probably to all nurseries: one was Albert biscuits, and the other toast-in-water. Children call for an Albert biscuit as men ask for a whisky-and-soda at a club, not from hunger, but as an adjunct to conversation and a break in monotony. At night, after we had gone to bed, we used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of water. “Hilly, I want a drink of water”; but this meant, not that one was thirsty, but that one was frightened and wanted to see a human being. All my brothers and sisters, I found out afterwards, had done the same thing in the same way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been handed down quite unconsciously. I can’t remember how the nursery epoch came to an end; it merges in my memory without any line of division, into the schoolroom period; but the first visits in the country certainly belonged to the nursery epoch.

We used to go in the summer to Coombe Cottage, near Malden, an ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one end, a cool oak hall and staircase, a drawing-room full of water-colours, a room next to it full of books, with a drawing-table and painting materials ready, and a long dining-room, of which the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a verandah looking out on to the garden. There was also a kitchen garden, lawns, a dairy, a gardener, Mr. Baker, who made nosegays, a deaf-and-dumb under-gardener who spoke on his fingers, a farmyard, and a duck-pond into which I remember falling.

Coombe was an enchanted spot for us. My recollection of it is that of a place where it was always summer and where the smell of summer and the sounds of summer evening used to make the night-nursery a fairy place; and sometimes in the morning, red-coated soldiers used to march past playing “The Girl I left behind me,” with a band of drums and fifes. The uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the field, and that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. I never forgot it. I can remember losing my first front tooth[4] at Coombe by tying it on to a thread and slamming the door, and I can remember my sisters singing, “Where are you going to, my pretty Maid?” one of them acting the milkmaid, with a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. Best of all, I remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt on a bird’s tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in the hayfields.

We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and Nature is steeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to say to the fleeting moment what Faust challenged and defied the devil to compel him to cry out: “Verweile, Du bist schön.”

It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: Shakespeare, in the end of the Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo and Jessica let the sounds of music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven; Keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain; Musset, in the “Nuit de Mai”; Victor Hugo, when, on their lovely brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Doña Sol fancy in the moonlight that sleeping Nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of words: Beethoven, in his Sonata; Chopin, again and again; Schumann, in his lyrics, especially “Frühlingsnacht”; Schubert, in his “Serenade.”

I have known many such nights: the dark nights of Central Russia before the harvest ends, when the watchman’s rattle punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo Shakespeare and Schubert in magic; June nights in Florence, when you couldn’t see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon, when streaks of red still hung in the west; May nights by the Neckar at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with lilac; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, when large trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be[5] part of a fairy revel; and nights in South Devon, when the full September moon made the garden and the ilex tree as unreal as Prospero’s island.

But I never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in the summer evenings in the night nursery at Coombe Cottage, when we went to bed by daylight and lay in our cots guessing at the pattern on the wall, to wake up later when it was dark, half conscious of the summer scents outside, and of a bird’s song in the darkness. The intense magic of that moment I have never quite recaptured, except when reading Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” for the first time, when the door on to the past was opened wide once more and the old vision and the strange sense of awe, unreality, and enchantment returned.

But to go back to nursery life. Our London life followed the ritual, I suppose, of most nurseries. In the morning after our breakfast we went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, into the dining-room, where breakfast was at nine, and kissed our father before he drove to the city in a phaeton, and played at the end of the dining-room round a pedestalled bust of one of the Popes. Then a walk in the Park, and sometimes as a treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to Cremer’s, the toy-shop in Bond Street. Hugo and I detested the Park, and the only moment of real excitement I remember was when one day Hilly told me not to go near the flower-beds, and I climbed over the little railing and picked a towering hyacinth. Police intervention was immediately threatened, and I think a policeman actually did remonstrate; but although I felt for some hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none the less an aftertaste of triumph in the tears; attrition, perhaps, but no contrition.

When we got to be a little older … older than what? I don’t know … but there came our moment when we joined our sisters every morning to say our prayers in my mother’s bedroom, every day before breakfast. They were short and simple prayers—the “Our Father” and one other short prayer. Nevertheless, for years the “Our Father” was to me a mysterious and unintelligible formula, all the more so, as I said it entirely by the sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that “Whichartinheaven” was one word and “Thykingdomcome” another. I never asked what it meant. I think in some dim way I felt that, could I understand it, something of its value[6] as an invocation would be lost or diminished. I also remember learning at a very early age the hymn, “There is a green hill far away,” and finding it puzzling. I took it for granted that most green hills had city walls round them, though this particular one hadn’t. Besides going to Coombe we went at the end of the summer to Devonshire, to Membland, near the villages of Noss Mayo, and Newton, and not far from the river Yealm, an arm of the sea. It was when getting ready for the first of these journeys that I remember, while I was being dressed in the nursery, my father’s servant, Mr. Deacon, came up to the nursery and asked me whether I would like a ticket. He then gave me a beautiful green ticket with a round hole in it. I asked him what one could do with it, and he said, “In return for that ticket you can get Bath buns, Banbury cakes, jam-rolls, crackers, and pork sausages.” In the bustle of departure I lost it. Paddington Station resounded with the desperate cries of the bereaved ticket-holder. In vain I was given half a white first-class ticket. In vain Mr. Bullock, the guard, offered every other kind of ticket. It was not the same thing. That ticket, with the round hole, had conjured up visions of wonderful possibilities and fantastic exchanges. Sausages and Banbury cakes and Bath buns (all of them magic things), I knew, would be forthcoming to no other ticket. The loss was irreparable. I remember thinking the grown-up people so utterly wanting in understanding when they said: “A ticket? Of course, he can have a ticket. Here’s a ticket for the dear little boy.” As if that white ticket was anything like the unique passport to gifts new and unheard of, anything like that real green ticket with the round hole in it. At the end of one of these journeys, at Kingsbridge Road, the train ran off the line. We were in a saloon carriage, and I remember the accident being attributed to that fact by my mother’s maid, who said saloon carriages were always unsafe. It turned out to be an enjoyable accident, and we all got out and I was given an orange.

Mr. Bullock, the guard, was a great friend of all of us children; and our chief pleasure was to ask him a riddle: “Why is it dangerous to go out in the spring?” I will leave it to the reader to guess the answer, with merely this as a guide, that the first part of the answer to the riddle is “Because the hedges are shooting,” and the second part of the answer is peculiarly[7] appropriate to Mr. Bullock. I am afraid Mr. Bullock never saw why, although no doubt he enjoyed the riddle.

I have already said that I cannot fix any line of division between the nursery and the schoolroom epochs, but before I get on to the subject of the schoolroom I will record a few things which must have belonged to the pre-schoolroom period.

One incident which stands out clearly in my mind is that of the fifty-shilling train. There were at that time in London two toy-shops called Cremer. One was in New Bond Street, No. 27, I think, near Tessier’s, the jeweller; another in Regent Street, somewhere between Liberty’s and Piccadilly Circus.

In the window of the Regent Street shop there was a long train with people in it, and it was labelled fifty shillings. In the year 1921 it is only a small mechanical train that can be bought for fifty shillings. I can’t remember whether I had reached the schoolroom when this happened, but I know I still wore a frock and had not yet reached the dignity of trousers. I used constantly to ask to go and look at this shop window and gaze at the fifty-shilling train, which seemed first to be miraculous for its size, and, secondly, for its price. Who in the world could have fifty shillings all at once?

I never went so far as thinking it was possible to possess that train; but I used to wonder whether there were people in the world who could store up fifty shillings. We were each of us given sixpence every Saturday, but it was always spent at once, nor could I calculate or even conceive how long it would take to save enough sixpences to make fifty shillings.

One evening, when we were at Coombe, in the summer, I was sent for to the drawing-room and then told to go into the dining-room. I opened the door, and there, on the floor, was the fifty-shilling train. If a fairy had flown into the room and lifted me to the ceiling I could not have thought a fact more miraculous. From that moment I knew for certain that miracles could happen and do happen, and subsequent experience has confirmed the belief. Alas! the funnel of the engine was soon broken, and Mr. Toombs, the carpenter, was said to be able to mend it, and I looked forward to another miracle. He did, but in a way which was hardly satisfactory considered as a miracle, although perfect for practical usage. He turned on a lathe a solid funnel made of black wood, but not hollow, and he stuck it in where the funnel ought to be. I pretended[8] I was satisfied, but my private belief was that Mr. Toombs didn’t know how to make funnels.

Another thing which happened when I was six years old was a visit to the Drury Lane pantomime, which was Mother Goose. This, of course, with a transformation scene with a large fairy with moving emerald butterfly-like wings and Arthur Roberts who, when playing a trumpet, spat out all his teeth on to the floor as if they were an encumbrance, was an ecstasy beyond words.

Another event almost more exciting was the arrival of a doll’s house. I played with dolls, but not as girls do, mothering them and dressing them. Mine were little tiny dolls, and could not be dressed or undressed, and they were used as puppets. I made them open Parliament, act plays and stories, and most frequently take the part of the French Merovingian kings. This was at the beginning of the schoolroom period, and the dolls were called Chilpéric, Ermengarde, Clothilde, Blanche de Castille, Frédégonde, Brunehaut, Galswinthe, and Pépin le Bref, and other names belonging to the same remote period of history. One day I was told that a doll’s house was coming. I couldn’t sleep for excitement, and Hilly, Grace, and Annie gravely held a conclave one night when I was in bed and supposed to be asleep, over their supper, and said that so exciting a thing as a doll’s house ought not to be allowed me. It would ruin my health. I feigned deep sleep, and the next day pretended to have lost all interest in dolls’ houses, but when it came, all its furniture was taken out, put on the floor, and arranged in two long rows, with a throne at one end, to enable Chilpéric and Frédégonde to open Parliament.

One year in London I actually saw Queen Victoria drive to the opening of Parliament in a gilded coach with a little crown perched on her head and an ermine tippet. It was not quite a satisfactory crown, but still it was a crown, and the coach had the authentic Cinderella quality.

To go back to the dolls for a moment. I used to go to Membland sometimes for Easter with my father and mother when the rest of the family stayed in London, and Margaret used to write me letters from the dolls, beginning “Cher Papa” and ending “Ermengarde” or “Chilpéric,” as the case might be. These letters used to cover me with confusion and mortification before the grown-up people, as I kept it a secret that I[9] ever played with dolls, knowing it to be thought rather eccentric, and liable to be misunderstood, especially when there were other boys about, which there were.

Of course, in the nursery, Hugo and I had endless games of pretending, especially during bath-time (baths were hip-baths), and I remember Hugo refusing to have his bath because when we were playing at fishes I seized the shark’s part and wouldn’t let him be a shark. “Hilly,” he wailed, “I will be a shark.” But no, I wouldn’t hear of it, and he had to be a whale, which the shark, so I said, easily mastered.

Promotion to the schoolroom meant lessons and luncheon downstairs. The schoolroom was inhabited by my three sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Susan, and ruled over by the French governess, Chérie. I thought Chérie the most beautiful, the cleverest, and altogether the most wonderful person in the world. My earliest recollection of her almost magical powers was when she took a lot of coloured silks and put them behind a piece of glass and said this was une vision. I believed there was nothing she didn’t know and nothing she couldn’t do. I was also convinced that one day I would marry her. This dream was sadly marred by the conduct of my sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the eldest, Margaret the second, and Susan the third, of my sisters. I firmly believed in fairies. Elizabeth and Margaret fostered the belief by talking a great deal about their powers as fairies, and Elizabeth said she was Queen of the fairies. One day she said: “Just as you are going to be married to Chérie, and when you are in church, I will turn you into a frog.” This was said in the schoolroom in London. The schoolroom was on the floor over the nursery. No sooner had Elizabeth made this ominous remark when I ran to the door and howled in a manner which penetrated the whole house from the housemaids’ rooms upstairs to the housekeeper’s room in the basement. Screams and yells startled the whole house. Hilly came rushing from the nursery; Chérie came from her bedroom, where she had been doing some sewing; Dimmock, my mother’s maid, whom we called D., came downstairs, saying: “Well, I never”; Sheppy, the housekeeper, peered upwards from the subterranean housekeeper’s room; and, lastly, my mother came from the drawing-room. The cause of the crisis was explained by me through sobs. “She says” … sob, sob, yell … “that she’s a fairy” … sob, sob …[10] “and that she’ll turn me into a frog” … sob, sob … “when I marry Chérie…” All attempts to calm me were in vain. Elizabeth was then appealed to, and the whole house in chorus said to her, “Say you’re not a fairy.” But Elizabeth became marble-constant. She said, “How can I say I’m not a fairy when I am one?” A statement which I felt to be all too true and well founded. More sobs and yells. Universal indignation against Elizabeth. My paroxysm was merely increased by all the efforts everyone made to soothe me. Elizabeth was cajoled, persuaded, argued with, bribed, threatened, exhorted, blamed, anathematised, entreated, appealed to, implored, but all in vain. She would not budge from her position, which was that she was a fairy.

The drama proceeded. Nothing stopped the stream of convulsive sobs, the flood of anguish—not all Chérie’s own assurances that the wedding would be allowed to take place.

Elizabeth was taken downstairs to be reasoned with, and after an hour and a half’s argument, and not before she had been first heavily bribed with promises and then sent to bed, she finally consented to compromise. She said, as a final concession, “I’ll say I’m not a fairy, but I am.” When this concession was wrung from her the whole relieved household rushed up to tell me the good news that Elizabeth had said she was not a fairy. The moment I heard the news my tears ceased, and perfect serenity was restored. But although Elizabeth capitulated, Margaret was firmer, and she continued to mutter (like Galileo) for the rest of the afternoon, “But I am a fairy all the same.”

Margaret was the exciting element in the schoolroom. She was often naughty, and I remember her looking through the schoolroom window at Coombe, while I was doing lessons with Chérie, and making faces. Chérie said to her one day: “Vous feriez rougir un régiment.” Elizabeth was pleasantly frivolous, and Susan was motherly and sensible, and supposed to be the image of her father, but Margaret was dramatic and imaginative, and invincibly obstinate.

She knew that for Chérie’s sake I didn’t like admitting that the English had ever defeated the French in battle, so every now and then she would roll out lists of battles fought by the English against the French and won, beginning with Creçy, Poitiers, getting to Agincourt with a crescendo, and ending[11] up in a tremendous climax with Waterloo. To which I used to retort with a battle called Bouvines, won by Philippe Auguste, in some most obscure period over one of the Plantagenet kings, and with Fontenoy. I felt them both to be poor retorts.

Another invention of Margaret’s was a mysterious Princess called Louiseaunt, who often came to see her, but as it happened always when we were out. If we suddenly came into the room, Margaret would say, “What a pity! Louiseaunt has just been here. She’ll be so sorry to have missed you.” And try as we would, we always just missed Louiseaunt.

If we went out without Margaret, Louiseaunt was sure to come that day. We constantly just arrived as Louiseaunt had left, and the inability ever to hit off Louiseaunt’s precise visiting hours was a lasting exasperation.

Another powerful weapon of Margaret’s was recitation. She used to recite in English and in French, and in both languages the effect on me was a purge of pity and terror. I minded most “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” declaimed with melodramatic gesture, and nearly as much a passage from Hernani, beginning—

which she recited, rolling her eyes in a menacing attitude.

“Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” said with the help of Susan, whose rendering had something reassuringly comfortable and homely about it—Susan couldn’t say her “r’s,” and pronounced them like “w’s”—in contradistinction to Margaret’s sombre and vehement violence, did a little to mitigate the effect, but none the less it frightened me so much that it had to be stopped. Hugo was not yet in the schoolroom then.

Lessons in London began soon after breakfast. They were conducted by Chérie and by an English governess, Mrs. Christie, who used to arrive in a four-wheeler, always the same one, from Kentish Town, and teach us English, Arithmetic, and Latin. Mrs. Christie was like the pictures of Thackeray, with spectacles, white bandeaux, and a black gown. During lessons she used to knit. She was in permanent mourning, and we knew we must never ask to learn “Casabianca,” as her little boy who had died had learnt it. She used to arrive with a parcel of books from the London Library, done up in a leather strap. She was the first of a long line of teachers who failed to teach me Arithmetic.[12] She used to stay the whole morning, or sometimes only part of it. During lessons she used to have a small collation, a glass of claret, and a water biscuit. She also taught other families.

At Coombe the schoolroom looked out on the lawn, a long, flat lawn which went down by steps on a lower lawn, at the bottom of which we had our own gardens and where there was a summer-house. I remember sitting in the schoolroom next to Chérie while, with a large knitting needle, she pointed out the words pain and vin written large in a copy-book, with a picture of a bottle of red wine and a picture of a piece of bread, to show what the words meant, while Margaret was copying out Clarence’s dream in a copy-book and murmuring something about skulls, and all the time through the window framed with clematis came the sound, the magic sound of the mowing-machine, the noise of bees, and a smell of summer, tea-roses and of hayfields.

On certain days of the week Mademoiselle Ida Henry used to come and give us music lessons. Our house was saturated with an atmosphere of music. My mother played the violin and was a fine concertina player, and almost before I could walk I had violin lessons from no less a person than Mr. Ries. Until I was three I was called Strad, and I think my mother cherished the dream that I would be a violinist, but I showed no aptitude.

My first music lesson I received from Mademoiselle Ida over Stanley Lucas’ music shop in Bond Street. I was alone in London with my mother and father, one November, and I suppose about six. Mademoiselle Ida was very encouraging, and—unduly, as it turned out—optimistic, and said: “Il a des mains faites pour jouer le piano,” and soon my morceau was Diabelli’s duets. While I was learning Diabelli’s duets, Susan was learning a Fantasia by Mozart, which I envied without malice. It had one particular little run in it which I learnt to play with one finger. One day I played this downstairs in the drawing-room. A few days later Mademoiselle Ida came to luncheon, and my mother said: “Play that little bar out of the Mozart to Mademoiselle Ida.” I was aghast, feeling certain, and quite rightly, that Mademoiselle Ida would resent my having encroached on a more advanced morceau, and indeed, as it became clear to her what the bar in question was, she at once said: “Je ne veux pas que tu te mêles des morceaux des autres.” That was what I had feared. My mother was quite unconscious of the solecism that she was committing, and[13] pressed me to play it. Finally I hummed the tune, which satisfied both parties.

I never liked music lessons then or ever afterwards, but I enjoyed Mademoiselle Ida’s conversation and company almost more than anything. Every word she ever said was treasured. One day she said to Mrs. Christie: “Bonjour, Madame Christé. J’ai bien mal à la tête.” “Je suis très fachée de le savoir, Mademoiselle Henri,” said Mrs. Christie in icy tones, and this little dialogue was not destined ever to be forgotten by any of us. We used often afterwards to enact the scene.

Elizabeth and Susan learnt the piano, and Margaret was taught the violin by Herr Ludwig, a severe German master. John, my eldest brother, was an accomplished pianist and organist; Everard, my third brother, played the piccolo. Cecil sang, and my mother was always bewailing that he had not learnt music at Eton, because his house-master said it would be more useful for him to learn how to shoe a horse. This, alas! did not prove to be the case, as he has seldom since had the opportunity of making use of his skill as a blacksmith. The brothers were all at Eton when I first went into the schoolroom, but they often used to visit us in the evening at tea-time, and sometimes they used to listen when Chérie read aloud after tea.

Echoes of the popular songs of the day reached both the nursery and the schoolroom, and the first I can remember the tunes of are: “Pop goes the Weasel,” which used to be sung to me in the nursery; “Tommy, make room for your Uncle”; “My Grandfather’s Clock”; “Little Buttercup” from Pinafore, which used to be played on a musical box; “Oh where and oh where is my little wee Dog?” with its haunting refrain.

Later we used to sing in chorus and dancing a pas de trois, a song from a Gaiety burlesque:

And, later still, someone brought back to London for Christmas the unforgettable tune of “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” which in after-life I heard all over the world—on the lagoon of Venice and in the villages of Mongolia.

One day after luncheon—on Sunday—John played the “Two Grenadiers” at the pianoforte, and I remember the experience being thrilling, if a little alarming, but a revelation, and a first introduction into the world of music.

[14]

Life was divided between London from January to August, then Devonshire till after Christmas. In the nursery and the early part of the schoolroom period we used to go to Coombe in the summer. Coombe seemed to be inextricably interwoven with London and parallel to it; and I remember dinner-parties happening, and a Hungarian band playing on the lawn, unless I have dreamt that. But there came a time, I think I must have been six or seven, when Coombe was sold, and we went there no more, and life was confined to Membland and Charles Street. London in the winter, and summer in Devonshire, with sometimes brief visits to Devonshire at Easter and Whitsuntide, and brief visits to London in November, when my father and mother went up by themselves.

It is not any false illusion or the glamour of the past that makes the whole of that period of life until school-time was reached seem like fairyland. I thought so at the time, and grown-up people who came to Coombe and Membland felt, I think, that they had come to a place of rare and radiant happiness.

But I will begin with London first.

This was the routine of life. We all had breakfast at nine downstairs. I remember asking how old my father was, and the answer was fifty-three. As he was born in 1828 and I was born in 1874, I must have been seven years old at the time of this question. I always thought of my father as fifty-three years old. My brothers John, Cecil, and Everard were at Eton at Warre’s House, and Hugo was five years old and still in the nursery.

After breakfast, at about a quarter to ten, my father drove to the City, and he never came home to luncheon except on Saturdays.

[15]

We went for a walk with Chérie, and after this lessons lasted from eleven, I think, till two, in the schoolroom.

The schoolroom was a long room with three windows looking out on to the street. There was a cottage pianoforte at an angle, and in the niche of one of the windows a small table, where Chérie used to sit and read the Daily News in the morning. We each of us had a cupboard for our toys, and there were some tall bookcases, containing all the schoolroom books, Noel and Chapsal’s Grammar, and many comfortable, shabby books of fairy-tales. We each of us had a black writing-desk, with a wooden seat attached to it, in which we kept our copybooks, and at which we did our work. A long table ran right down the middle of our room, where we did our lessons, either when everyone did them together, collectively, with Chérie, who sat at the head of the table, or with Mrs. Christie, who sat at one side of the table at the farther end.

At two o’clock we all came down to luncheon, and as my mother was at home to luncheon every day, stray people used to drop in, and that was a great excitement, as the guests used to be discussed for hours afterwards in the schoolroom.

Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived in the same street, used often to come to luncheon and make paper boats for me. She used also to shock me by her frank expression of Tory principle, not to say prejudice, as we were staunch Liberals, and Lady Dorothy used to say that Mr. Gladstone was a dreadful man.

Mr. Alfred Montgomery was a luncheon visitor, and one day Bobby Spencer, who was afterwards to be Margaret’s husband, was subjected to a rather sharp schoolroom criticism owing to the height of his collars. I sometimes used to embarrass Chérie by sudden interpellations. One day, when she had refused a dish, I said: “Prends en, Chérie, toi qui es si gourmande.” Another day at luncheon a visitor called Colonel Edgcumbe bet my mother a pound there would be war with France within three years. I expect he forgot the bet, but I never did. Another time my mother asked Mademoiselle Ida what was the most difficult piece that existed for the pianoforte, and Mademoiselle Ida said Liszt’s “Spinnelied.” My mother bet her a pound she would learn it in a month’s time (and she did).

There were two courses at luncheon, some meat and a sweet, and then cheese, and we were not allowed to have the sweet unless we had the meat first, but we could always have two[16] helpings if we liked. After luncheon we went for another walk. At five there were more lessons, and then schoolroom tea, presided over by Chérie, and after that various games and occupations, and sometimes a visit to the drawing-room.

There were two drawing-rooms downstairs, a front drawing-room with three windows looking out on to the street, and a back drawing-room at right angles to it. The drawing-rooms had a faded green silk on the walls. Over the chimney-piece there was a fine picture by Cuyp, which years later I saw in a private house in the Bois de Boulogne. The room was full of flowers and green Sèvres china. In the back drawing-room there was a grand pianoforte and some bookcases, and beyond that a room called the gilding-room, a kind of workshop where my mother did gilding. I only once saw a part of the operation, which consisted of making size. Later on this room became the organ room and was enlarged. The drawing-room led to a small landing and a short staircase to the front hall. On the landing wall there was an enormous picture of Venice, by Birket Foster, and from this landing, when there was a dinner-party, we used to peer through the banisters and watch the guests arriving. We were especially forbidden to slide down the banisters, as my mother used to tell us that when she was a little girl she had slid down the banisters and had a terrible fall which had cut open her throat, so that when you put a spoon in her mouth it came out again through her throat. When Hugo, the last of the family to be told this story, heard it, he said, “Did you die?” And my mother was obliged to say that she did not.

On the ground floor was a room looking out into the street, called the library, but it only possessed two bookcases let into Louis XV. white walls, and this led into the dining-room, beyond which was my father’s dressing-room, where, when we were quite small, we would watch him shave in the morning.

Dinner downstairs was at eight, and when we were small I was often allowed to go down to the beginning of dinner and draw at the dinner-table on a piece of paper, and the girls used to come down to dessert, bringing an occupation such as needlework. We were always supposed to have an occupation when we were downstairs, and I remember Susan, being asked by Chérie what needlework she was going to take to the dining-room, saying: “Mon bas, ma chemise, et ma petite wobe, Chéwie.”

[17]

On Saturday afternoons we often had a treat, and went to the German Reed’s entertainment and Corney Grain, or to Maskelyne and Cook, and Hengler’s Circus, and on Sundays we often went to the Zoo, or drove down to Coombe when Coombe existed.

Lessons were in the hands of Chérie and Mrs. Christie. Chérie taught me to read and write in French, French history out of Lamé Fleury, not without arguments on my part to learn it from the bigger grown-up book of Guizot, and French poetry. Every day began with a hideous ordeal called “La Page d’Ecriture.” Chérie would write a phrase in enormous letters in a beautiful copy-book handwriting on the top line of the copy-book, and we had to copy the sentence on every other line, with a quill pen. Mrs. Christie, besides struggling with my arithmetic, used to teach us English literature, and make us learn passages from Shakespeare by heart, which were quite unintelligible to me, and passages from Byron, Walter Scott, Campbell, and Southey, and various pieces from the Children’s Garland and Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. I enjoyed the latter whole-heartedly.

Sometimes Mrs. Christie and Chérie used to have conversations across the children, as it were, during lessons. I remember Mrs. Christie saying to Chérie while I was doing my lessons by Chérie’s side one day: “That child will give you more trouble than all the others.”

I liked history lessons, especially Lamé Fleury’s French history and mythology; and in Lamé Fleury’s French history the favourite chapter was that beginning: “Jean II. dit le bon commença son règne par un assassinat.” The first book I read with Mrs. Christie was called Little Willie, and described the building of a house, an enchanting book. I did not like any of the English poetry we read, not understanding how by any stretch of the imagination it could be called poetry, as Shakespeare blank verse seemed to be a complicated form of prose full of uncouth words; what we learnt being Clarence’s dream, King Henry IV.’s battle speeches, which made me most uncomfortable for Chérie’s sake by their anti-French tone, and passages from Childe Harold, which I also found difficult to understand. The only poems I remember liking, which were revealed by Mrs. Christie, were Milton’s L’Allegro and Penseroso, which I copied out in a book as soon as I could write.[18] One day she read me out Gray’s Elegy and I was greatly impressed. “That is,” she said, “the most beautiful Elegy in the language.” “Is it the most beautiful poem in the language?” I asked, rather disappointed at the qualification, and hankering for an absolute judgment. “It’s the most beautiful Elegy in the language,” she said, and I had to be content with that.

I don’t want to give the impression that we, any of us, disliked Mrs. Christie’s lessons in English literature. On the contrary, we enjoyed them, and I am grateful for them till this day. She taught us nothing soppy nor second-rate. The piece of her repertoire I most enjoyed, almost best, was a fable by Gay called “The Fox at the Point of Death.” She was always willing to explain things, and took for granted that when we didn’t ask we knew. This was not always the case. One of the pieces I learnt by heart was Shelley’s “Arethusa,” the sound of which fascinated me. But I had not the remotest idea that it was about a river. The poem begins, as it will be remembered:

For years I thought “Acroceraunian” was a kind of pin-cushion.

Mrs. Christie had a passion for Sir Walter Scott and for the Waverley Novels. “You can’t help,” she said, “liking any King of England that Sir Walter Scott has written about.” She instilled into us a longing to read Sir Walter Scott by promising that we should read them when we were older. One of the most interesting discussions to me was that between Chérie and Mrs. Christie as to what English books the girls should be allowed to read in the country. Mrs. Christie told, to illustrate a point, the following story. A French lady had once come across a French translation of an English novel, and seeing it was an English novel had at once given it to her daughter to read, as she said, of course, any English novel was fit for the jeune personne. The novel was called Les Papillons de Nuit. “And what do you think that was?” said Mrs. Christie. “Moths, by Ouida!”

The first poem that really moved me was not shown me by Mrs. Christie, but by Mantle, the maid who looked after the girls. It was Mrs. Hemans’: “Oh, call my Brother back to me, I cannot[19] play alone.” This poem made me sob. I still think it is a beautiful and profoundly moving poem. Besides English, Mrs. Christie used to teach us Latin. I had my first Latin lesson the day after my eighth birthday. This is how it began: “Supposing,” said Mrs. Christie, “you knocked at the door and the person inside said, ‘Who’s there?’ What would you say?” I thought a little, and then half-unconsciously said, “I.” “Then,” said Mrs. Christie, “that shows you have a natural gift for grammar.” She explained that I ought reasonably to have said “Me.” Why I said “I,” I cannot think. I had no notion what her question was aiming at, and I feel certain I should have said “Me” in real life. The good grammar was quite unintentional.

As for arithmetic, it was an unmixed pain, and there was an arithmetic book called Ibbister which represented to me the final expression of what was loathsome. One day in a passion with Chérie I searched my mind for the most scathing insult I could think of, and then cried out, “Vieille Ibbister.”

I learnt to read very quickly, in French first. In the nursery Grace and Annie read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales till they were hoarse, and as soon as I could read myself I devoured any book of fairy-tales within reach, and a great many other books; but I was not precocious in reading, and found grown-up books impossible to understand. One of my favourite books later was The Crofton Boys, which Mrs. Christie gave me on 6th November 1883, as a “prize for successful card-playing.” It is very difficult for me to understand now how a child could have enjoyed the intensely sermonising tone of this book, but I certainly did enjoy it.

I remember another book called Romance, or Chivalry and Romance. In it there was a story of a damsel who was really a fairy, and a bad fairy at that, who went into a cathedral in the guise of a beautiful princess, and when the bell rang at the Elevation of the Host, changed into her true shape and vanished. I consulted Mrs. Christie as to what the Elevation of the Host meant, and she gave me a clear account of what Transubstantiation meant, and she told me about Henry VIII., the Defender of the Faith, and the Reformation, and made no comment on the truth or untruth of the dogma. Transubstantiation seemed to me the most natural thing in the world, as it always does to children, and I privately made up my mind[20] that on that point the Reformers must have been mistaken. One day Chérie said for every devoir I did, and for every time I wasn’t naughty, I should be given a counter, and if I got twenty counters in three days I should get a prize. I got the twenty counters and sallied off to Hatchard’s to get the prize. I chose a book called The Prince of the Hundred Soups because of its cover. It was by Vernon Lee, an Italian puppet-show in narrative, about a Doge who had to eat a particular kind of soup every day for a hundred days. It is a delightful story, and I revelled in it. On the title-page it was said that the book was by the author of Belcaro. I resolved to get Belcaro some day; Belcaro sounded a most promising name, rich in possible romance and adventure, and I saved up my money for the purpose. When, after weeks, I had amassed the necessary six shillings, I went back to Hatchard’s and bought Belcaro. Alas, it was an æsthetic treatise of the stiffest and driest and most grown-up kind. Years afterwards I told Vernon Lee this story, and she promised to write me another story instead of Belcaro, like The Prince of the Hundred Soups. The first book I read to myself was Alice in Wonderland, which John gave to me. Another book I remember enjoying very much was The King of the Golden River, by Ruskin.

I enjoyed my French lessons infinitely more than my English ones. French poetry seemed to be the real thing, quite different from the prosaic English blank verse, except La Fontaine’s Fables, which, although sometimes amusing, seemed to be almost as prosy as Shakespeare. They had to be learnt by heart, nevertheless. They seemed to be in the same relation to other poems, Victor Hugo’s “Napoléon II.” and “Dans L’Alcove sombre,” which I thought quite enchanting, as meat was to pudding at luncheon, and I was not allowed to indulge in poetry until I had done my fable, but not without much argument. I sometimes overbore Chérie’s will, but she more often got her way by saying: “Tu as toujours voulu écrire avec un stylo avant de savoir écrire avec une plume.” I learnt a great many French poems by heart, and made sometimes startling use of the vocabulary. One day at luncheon I said to Chérie before the assembled company: “Chérie, comme ton front est nubile!” the word nubile having been applied by the poet, Casimir de la Vigne, to Joan of Arc.

The first French poem which really fired my imagination[21] was a passage from Les Enfants d’Édouard, a play by the same poet, in which one of the little princes tells a dream, which Margaret used to recite in bloodcurdling tones, and his brother, the Duke of York, answers lyrically something about the sunset on the Thames.[1] Those lines fired my imagination as nothing else did. We once acted a scene from this play, Margaret and I playing the two brothers, and Susan the tearful and widowed queen and mother, and Hugo as a beefeater, who had to bawl at the top of his voice: “Reine, retirez-vous!” when the queen’s sobs became excessive, and indeed in Susan’s rendering there was nothing wanting in the way of sobs, as she was a facile weeper, and Margaret used to call her “Madame la Pluie.” Indeed there was a legend in the schoolroom that the decline of Louis XIV., King of France, moved her to tears, and being asked why she was crying, she sobbed out the words: “la vieillesse du grand Woi.”

As far back as I remember we used to act plays in French. The first one performed in the back drawing-room in Charles Street was called Comme on fait son lit on se couche, and I played some part in it which I afterwards almost regretted, as whenever a visitor came to luncheon I was asked to say a particular phrase out of it, and generally refused. This was not either from obstinacy or naughtiness; it was simply to spare my mother humiliation. I was sure grown-up people could not help thinking the performance inadequate and trifling. I was simply covered with prospective shame and wished to spare them the same feeling. One day, when a Frenchman, Monsieur de Jaucourt, came to luncheon, I refused to say the sentence in question, in spite of the most tempting bribes, simply for that reason. I was hot with shame at thinking what Monsieur de Jaucourt—he a Frenchman, too—would think of something so inadequate. And this shows how impossible it is for grown-up people to put themselves in children’s shoes and to divine their motives. If only children knew, it didn’t matter what they said!

Another dramatic performance was a scene from Victor Hugo’s drama, Angelo, in which Margaret, dressed in a crimson[22] velvet cloak bordered with gold braid, declaimed a speech of Angelo Podesta of Padua, about the Council of Ten at Venice, while Susan, dressed in pink satin and lace, sat silent and attentive, looking meek in the part of the Venetian courtesan.

All this happened during early years in London.

Mademoiselle Ida used to enliven lessons with news from the outside world, discussions of books and concerts, and especially of other artists. One day when I was sitting at my slate with Mrs. Christie, she was discussing English spelling, and saying how difficult it was. Mrs. Christie rashly said that I could spell very well, upon which Mademoiselle Ida said to me, “You would spell ‘which’ double u i c h, wouldn’t you?” And I, anxious to oblige, said, “Yes.” This was a bitter humiliation.

Besides music lessons we had drawing lessons, first from a Miss Van Sturmer. Later we had lessons from Mr. Nathaniel Green, a water-colourist, who taught us perspective. One year I drew the schoolroom clock, which Mr. Jump used to come to wind once a week, as a present for my mother on her birthday, the 18th of June.

Sometimes I shared my mother’s lesson in water-colours. Mr. Green used to say he liked my washes, as they were warm. He used to put his brush in his mouth, which I considered dangerous, and he sometimes used a colour called Antwerp blue, which I thought was a pity, as it was supposed to fade. I was passionately fond of drawing, and drew both indoors and out of doors on every possible opportunity, and constantly illustrated various episodes in our life, or books that were being read out at the time. I took an immense interest in my mother’s painting, especially in the colours: Rubens madder, cyanine, aureoline, green oxide of chromium, transparent—all seemed to be magic names. The draughtsman of the family was Elizabeth. None of my brothers drew. Elizabeth used to paint a bust of Clytie in oils, and sometimes she went as far as life-size portraits. Besides this, she was an excellent caricaturist, and used to illustrate the main episodes of our family life in a little sketch-book.

Lessons, on the whole, used to pass off peacefully. I don’t think we were ever naughty with Mrs. Christie, although Elizabeth and Margaret used often to rock with laughter at some private joke of their own during their lessons, but with Chérie we were often naughty. The usual punishment was to[23] be privé de pudding. When the currant and raspberry tart came round at luncheon we used to refuse it, and my mother used to press it on us, not knowing that we had been privé. Sometimes, too, we had to write out three tenses of the verb aimer, and on one occasion I refused to do it. It was a Saturday afternoon; there was a treat impending, and I was told I would not be allowed to go unless I copied out the tenses, but I remained firm throughout luncheon. Finally, at the end of luncheon I capitulated in a flood of tears and accepted the loan of my mother’s gold pencil-case and scribbled J’aime, tu aimes, il aime, etc., on a piece of writing-paper.

In the drawing-room we were not often naughty, but we were sometimes, and tried the grown-ups at moments beyond endurance. My mother said that she had had to whip us all except Hugo. I was whipped three times. Before the operation my mother always took off her rings.

Upstairs, Margaret and Elizabeth used sometimes to fight, and Susan would join in the fray, inspired by the impulse of the moment. She was liable to these sudden impulses, and on one occasion—she was very small—when she was looking on at a review of volunteers, when the guns suddenly fired, she stood up in the carriage and boxed everyone’s ears.

Not long ago we found an old mark-book which belonged to this epoch of schoolroom life, and in it was the following entry in Chérie’s handwriting: “Elizabeth et Marguerite se sont battues, Suzanne s’est jetée sur le pauvre petit Maurice.” Whenever Margaret saw that I was on the verge of tears she used to say that I made a special face, which meant I was getting ready to cry, and she called this la première position; when the corners of the mouth went down, and the first snuffle was heard, she called it la seconde position; and when tears actually came, it was la troisième position. Nearly always the mention of la première position averted tears altogether.

On Monday evenings in London my mother used to go regularly to the Monday Pops at St. James’s Hall, and on Saturday afternoon also. Dinner was at seven on Mondays, and we used to go down to it, and watch my mother cut up a leg of chicken and fill it with mustard and pepper and cayenne pepper to make a devil for supper. Margaret was sometimes taken to the Monday Pop, as she was supposed to like it, but the others were seldom taken, in case, my mother used to say,[24] “You say when you are grown up that you were dragged to concerts, and get to dislike them.” The result was a feverish longing to go to the Monday Pop. I don’t remember going to the Monday Pop until I was grown up, but I know that I always wanted to go. I was taken to the Saturday Pop sometimes, and the first one I went to was on 8th November 1879. I was five years old. This was the programme:

Every winter we were taken to the pantomime by Lord Antrim, and the pantomimes I remember seeing were Mother Goose, Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Cinderella, in which the funny parts were played by Herbert Campbell and Harry Nicholls, and the Princess sometimes by the incomparably graceful dancer, Kate Vaughan.

I also remember the first Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Pinafore I was too young for; but I saw the Children’s Pinafore, which was played by children. Patience and Iolanthe and Princess Ida I saw when they were first produced at the Savoy.

Irving and Ellen Terry we never saw till I went to school, as Irving’s acting in Shakespeare made my father angry. When he saw him play Romeo, he was heard to mutter the whole time: “Remove that man from the stage.”

Then there were children’s parties. Strangely enough, I only remember one of these, so I don’t expect I enjoyed them. But I remember a children’s garden party at Marlborough House, and the exquisite beauty, the grace, and the fairy-tale-like welcome of the Princess of Wales.

[25]

Two of the great days for the children in London were Valentine’s Day, on the eve of which we each of us sent the whole of the rest of the family Valentines, cushioned and scented Valentines with silken fringes; and the 1st of April, when Susan was always made an April fool, the best one being one of Chérie’s, who sent her to look in the schoolroom for Les Mémoires de Jonas dans la baleine. She searched conscientiously, but in vain, for this interesting book.

On one occasion, on the Prince of Wales’ wedding-day, in March, the whole family were invited to a children’s ball at Marlborough House. The girls’ frocks were a subject of daily discussion for weeks beforehand, and other governesses used to come and discuss the matter. They were white frocks, and when they were ready they were found to be a failure, for some reason, and they had to be made all over again at another dressmaker’s, called Mrs. Mason. It was on this occasion that Chérie made a memorable utterance and said: “Les pointes de Madame Mason sont incomparables,” as Elizabeth had for the first time risen to the dignity of a pointe (the end of the pointed “bodies” of the fashions of that day). It was doubtful whether the new frocks would be ready in time. There was a momentous discussion as to whether they were to wear black stockings or not. Finally the frocks arrived, and we were dressed and were all marshalled downstairs ready to start. My father in knee-breeches and myself in a black velvet suit, black velvet breeches, and a white waistcoat. I was told to be careful to remember to kiss the Princess of Wales’ hand.

I can just remember the ballroom, but none of the grown-up people—nothing, in fact, except a vague crowd of tulle skirts.

One night there was a ball, or rather a small dance, in Charles Street, and I was allowed to come down after going to bed all day. People shook their heads over this, and said I was being spoilt, to Chérie, but Chérie said: “Cet enfant n’est pas gâté mais il se fait gâter.”

The dance led off with a quadrille, in which I and my father both took part. After having carefully learnt the pas chassé at dancing lessons, I was rather shocked to find this elegant glide was not observed by the quadrille dancers.

All this was the delightful epoch of the ’eighties, when the shop windows were full of photographs of the professional beauties, and bands played tunes from the new Gilbert and[26] Sullivan in the early morning in the streets, and people rode in Rotten Row in the evening, and Chérie used to rush us across the road to get a glimpse of Mrs. Langtry or the Princess of Wales.

Dancing lessons played an important part in our lives. Our first dancing instructor was the famous ex-ballerina, Madame Taglioni, a graceful old lady with grey curls, who held a class at Lady Granville’s house in Carlton House Terrace. It was there I had my first dancing lesson and learnt the Tarantelle, a dance with a tambourine, which I have always found effective, if not useful, in later life. Then Madame Taglioni’s class came to an end, and there was a class at Lady Ashburton’s at Bath House, which was suddenly put a stop to owing to the rough and wild behaviour of the boys, myself among them. Finally we had a class in our own house, supervised by a strict lady in black silk, who taught us the pas chassé, the five positions, the valse, the polka, and the Lancers.

Another event was Mrs. Christie’s lottery, which was held once a year at her house at Kentish Town. All her pupils came, and everyone won a prize in the lottery. One year I won a stuffed duck. After tea we acted charades. On the way back we used to pass several railway bridges, and Chérie, producing a gold pencil, used to say: “Par la vertu de ma petite baguette,” she would make a train pass. It was perhaps a rash boast, but it was always successful.

We used to drive to Mrs. Christie’s in a coach, an enormous carriage driven by Maisy, the coachman, who wore a white wig. It was only used when the whole family had to be transported somewhere.

Another incident of London life was Mademoiselle Ida’s pupils’ concert, which happened in the summer. I performed twice at it, I think, but never a solo. A duet with Mademoiselle Ida playing the bass, and whispering: “Gare au dièse, gare au bémol,” in my ear. What we enjoyed most about this was waiting in what was called the artists’ room, and drinking raspberry vinegar.

But the crowning bliss of London life was Hamilton Gardens, where we used to meet other children and play flags in the summer evenings.

This was the scene of wild enjoyment, not untinged with romance, for there the future beauties of England were all at[27] play in their lovely teens. We were given tickets for concerts at the Albert Hall and elsewhere in the afternoon, but I remember that often when Hugo and I were given the choice of going to a concert or playing in the nursery, we sometimes chose to play. But I do remember hearing Patti sing “Coming thro’ the Rye” at the Guildhall, and Albani and Santley on several occasions.

But what we enjoyed most of all was finding some broken and derelict toy, and inventing a special game for it. Once in a cupboard in the back drawing-room I came across some old toys which had belonged to John and Cecil, and must have been there for years. Among other things there was an engine in perfectly good repair, with a little cone like the end of a cigar which you put inside the engine under the funnel. You then lit it and smoke came out, and the engine moved automatically. This seemed too miraculous for inquiry, and I still wonder how and why it happened. Then the toy was unaccountably lost, and I never discovered the secret of this mysterious and wonderful engine.

During all this time there were two worlds of which one gradually became conscious: the inside world and the outside world. The centre of the inside world, like the sun to the solar system, was, of course, our father and mother (Papa and Mamma), the dispenser of everything, the source of all enjoyment, and the final court of appeal, recourse to which was often threatened in disputes.

Next came Chérie, then my mother’s maid, Dimmock, then Sheppy, the housekeeper, who had white grapes, cake, and other treats in the housekeeper’s room. She was a fervent Salvationist and wore a Salvationist bonnet, and when my father got violent and shouted out loud ejaculations, she used to coo softly in a deprecating tone.

Then there was Monsieur Butat, the cook, who used to appear in white after breakfast when my father ordered dinner; Deacon, his servant, was the source of all worldly wisdom and experience, and recommended brown billycock hats in preference to black ones, because they did not fade in the sea air; Harriet, the housemaid, who used to bring a cup of tea in the early morning to my mother’s bedroom, and Frank the footman. I can’t remember a butler in London, but I suppose there was one; but if it was the same one we had in the country, it was Mr. Watson.

[28]

Dimmock, or D., as we used to call her, played a great part in my early life, because when I came up to London or went down to the country alone with my father and mother she used to have sole charge of me, and I slept in her room. One day, during one of these autumnal visits to London, I was given an umbrella with a skeleton’s head on it. This came back in dreams to me with terrific effect, and for several nights running I ran down from the top to the bottom of the house in terror. The umbrella was taken away. I used to love these visits to London when half the house was shut up, and there was no one there except my father and mother and D., and we used to live in the library downstairs. There used to be long and almost daily expeditions to shops because Christmas was coming, as D. used to chant to me every morning, and the Christmas-tree shopping had to be done. D. and I used to buy all the materials for the Christmas-tree—the candles, the glass balls, and the fairy to stand at the top of it—in a shop in the Edgware Road called Eagle. I used to have dinner in the housekeeper’s room with Sheppy, and spent most of my time in D.’s working-room. One day she gave me a large piece of red plush, and I had something sewn round it, and called it Red Conscience. Never did a present make me more happy; I treated it as something half sacred, like a Mussulman’s mat.

On one occasion D. and I went to a matinée at St. James’s Theatre to see A Scrap of Paper, played by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. This year I read the play (it was translated from Sardou’s Pattes de Mouche) for the first time, and I found I could recollect every scene of the play, and Mrs. Kendal’s expression and intonation.

Another time Madame Neruda, who was a great friend of my mother’s, whom we saw constantly, gave me two tickets for a ballad concert at which she was playing. The policeman was told to take me into the artists’ room during the interval. D. was to take me, but for some reason she thought the concert was in the evening, and it turned out to be in the afternoon; so as a compensation my father sent us to an operetta called Falka, in which Miss Violet Cameron sang. I enjoyed it more than any concert. The next day Madame Neruda came to luncheon and heard all about the misadventure. “And did you enjoy your operetta?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, with enthusiasm. “Say, not as much as you would have enjoyed[29] the ballad concert,” said my mother. But I didn’t feel so sure about that.

I used to do lessons with Mrs. Christie, and have music lessons from Mademoiselle Ida, and in the afternoon I often used to go out shopping in the carriage with my mother, or for a walk with D. But I will tell more about her later when I describe Membland.

The girls had a maid who looked after them called Rawlinson, and she and the nursery made up the rest of the inside world in London.

In the outside world the first person of importance I remember was Grandmamma, my mother’s mother, Lady Elizabeth Bulteel, who used to paint exquisite pictures for the children like the pictures on china, and play songs for us on the pianoforte. She often came to luncheon, and used to bring toys to be raffled for, and make us, at the end of luncheon, sing a song which ran:

Each singer held a glass in his hand. When the song had got thus far, everyone drained their glass, and the person who finished first had to say the last line of the verse, which was:

And the person who said it first, won.

Everything about Grandmamma was soft and exquisite: her touch on the piano and her delicate manipulation of the painting-brush. She lived in Green Street, a house I remember as the perfection of comfort and cultivated dignity. There were amusing drawing-tables with tiles, pencils, painting-brushes; chintz chairs and books and music; a smell of potpourri and lavender water; miniatures in glass tables, pretty china, and finished water-colours.

In November 1880—this is one of the few dates I can place—we were in London, my father and mother and myself, and Grandmamma was not well. She must have been over eighty, I think. Every day I used to go to Green Street with my mother and spend the whole morning illuminating a text. I was told Grandmamma was very ill, and had to take the nastiest[30] medicines, and was being so good about it. I was sometimes taken in to see her. One day I finished the text, and it was given to Grandmamma. That evening when I was having my tea, my father and mother came into the dining-room and told me Grandmamma was dead. The text I had finished was buried with her.

The next day at luncheon I asked my mother to sing “A pie sat on a pear tree,” as usual. It was the daily ritual of luncheon. She said she couldn’t do “Hopped she,” as we called it, any longer now that Grandmamma was not there.

Another thing Grandmamma had always done at luncheon was to break a thin water biscuit into two halves, so that one half looked like a crescent moon; and I said to my mother, “We shan’t be able to break biscuits like that any more.”

[31]

To mention any of the other people of the outside world at once brings me to Membland, because the outside world was intimately connected with that place. Membland was a large, square, Jacobean house, white brick, green shutters and ivy, with some modern gabled rough-cast additions and a tower, about twelve miles from Plymouth and ten miles from the station Ivy Bridge.

On the north side of the house there was a gravel yard, on the south side a long, sweeping, sloping lawn, then a ha-ha, a field beyond this and rookery which was called the Grove.

When you went through the front hall you came into a large billiard-room in which there was a staircase leading to a gallery going round the room and to the bedrooms. The billiard-room was high and there were no rooms over the billiard-room proper—but beyond the billiard-table the room extended into a lower section, culminating in a semicircle of windows in which there was a large double writing-table.

Later, under the staircase, there was an organ, and the pipes of the great organ were on the wall.

There was a drawing-room full of chintz chairs, books, potpourri, a grand pianoforte, and two writing-tables; a dining-room looking south; a floor of guests’ rooms; a bachelors’ passage in the wing; a schoolroom on the ground floor looking north, with a little dark room full of rubbish next to it, which was called the Cabinet Noir, and where we were sent when we were naughty; and a nursery floor over the guests’ rooms.

From the northern side of the house you could see the hills of Dartmoor. In the west there was a mass of tall trees, Scotch firs, stone-pines, and ashes.

There was a large kitchen garden at some distance from the house on a hill and enclosed by walls.

[32]

Our routine of life was much the same as it was in London, except that the children had breakfast in the schoolroom at nine, as the grown-ups did not have breakfast till later.

Then came lessons, a walk, or play in the garden, further lessons, luncheon at two, a walk or an expedition, lessons from five till six, and then tea and games or reading aloud afterwards. One of the chief items of lessons was the Dictée, in which we all took part, and even Everard from Eton used to come and join in this sometimes.

Elizabeth won a kind of inglorious glory one day by making thirteen mistakes in her dictée, which was the record—a record never beaten by any one of us before or since; and the words treize fautes used often to be hurled at her head in moments of stress.

After tea Chérie used to read out books to the girls, and I was allowed to listen, although I was supposed to be too young to understand, and indeed I was. Nevertheless, I found the experience thrilling; and there are many book incidents which have remained for ever in my mind, absorbed during these readings, although I cannot always place them. I recollect a wonderful book called L’Homme de Neige, and many passages from Alexandre Dumas.

Sometimes Chérie would read out to me, especially stories from the Cabinet des Fées, or better still, tell stories of her own invention. There was one story in which many animals took part, and one of the characters was a partridge who used to go out just before the shooting season with a telescope under his wing to see whether things were safe. Chérie always used to say this was the creation she was proudest of. Another story was called Le Prince Muguet et Princesse Myosotis, which my mother had printed. I wrote a different story on the same theme and inspired by Chérie’s story when I grew up. But I enjoyed Chérie’s recollections of her childhood as much as her stories, and I could listen for ever to the tales of her grand-mère sévere who made her pick thorny juniper to make gin, or the story of a lady who had only one gown, a yellow one, and who every day used to ask her maid what the weather was like, and if the maid said it was fine, she would say, “Eh bien, je mettrai ma robe jaune,” and if it was rainy she would likewise say, “Je mettrai ma robe jaune.” Poor Chérie used to be made to repeat this story and others like it in season and out of season.

[33]

She would describe Paris until I felt I knew every street, and landscapes in Normandy and other parts of France. The dream of my life was to go to Paris and see the Boulevards and the Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, and above all, the Champs Elysées.

Chérie had also a repertory of French songs which she used to teach us. One was the melancholy story of a little cabin-boy:

Another one, less pathetic but more sentimental, was:

I forget the rest, but it said that she looked into the stream to see whether it was true, as people said, that she was beautiful—“pour voir si gent ne ment pas”—and came back satisfied that it was true.

But best of all I liked the ballad:

or words to that effect.

Besides these she taught us all the French singing games: “Savez-vous planter les choux?” “Sur le pont d’Avignon,” and “Qu’est qui passe ici si tard, Compagnons de la Marjolaine?” We used to sing and dance these up and down the passage outside the schoolroom after tea.

Round about Membland were several nests of relations. Six miles off was my mother’s old home Flete, where the Mildmays lived. Uncle Bingham Mildmay married my mother’s sister,[34] Aunt Georgie, and bought Flete; the house, which was old, was said to be falling to pieces, so it was rebuilt, more or less on the old lines, with some of the old structure left intact.

At Pamflete, three miles off, lived my mother’s brother, Uncle Johnny Bulteel, with his wife, Aunt Effie, and thirteen children.

And in the village of Yealmpton, three miles off, also lived my great-aunt Jane who had a sister called Aunt Sister, who, whenever she heard carriage wheels in the drive, used to get under the bed, such was her disinclination to receive guests. I cannot remember Aunt Sister, but I remember Aunt Jane and Uncle Willie Harris, who was either her brother or her husband. He had been present at the battle of Waterloo as a drummer-boy at the age of fifteen. But Aunt Sister’s characteristics had descended to other members of the family, and my mother used to say that when she and her sister were girls my Aunt Georgie had offered her a pound if she would receive some guests instead of herself.

On Sundays we used to go to church at a little church in Noss Mayo until my father built a new church, which is there now.

The service was long, beginning at eleven and lasting till almost one. There was morning prayer, the Litany, the Ante-Communion service, and a long sermon preached by the rector, a charming old man called Mr. Roe, who was not, I fear, a compelling preacher.

When we went to church I was given a picture-book when I was small to read during the sermon, a book with sacred pictures in colours. I was terribly ashamed of this. I would sooner have died than be seen in the pew with this book. It was a large picture-book. So I used every Sunday to lose or hide it just before the service, and find it again afterwards. On Sunday evenings we used sometimes to sing hymns in the schoolroom. The words of the hymns were a great puzzle. For instance, in the hymn, “Thy will be done,” the following verse occurs—I punctuate it as I understood it, reading it, that is to say, according to the tune—

[35]

I thought the blending and the subsequent taking away of what was blent was a kind of trial of faith.

After tea, instead of being read to, we used sometimes to play a delightful round game with counters, called Le Nain Jaune.

Any number of people could play at it, and I especially remember Susan triumphantly playing the winning card and saying:

“Le bon Valet, la bonne Dame, le bon Woi. Je wecommence.”

In September or October, Chérie would go for her holidays. I cannot remember if she went every year, but we had no one instead of her, and she left behind her a series of holiday tasks.

During one of her absences my Aunt M’aimée, another sister of my mother’s, came to stay with us. Aunt M’aimée was married to Uncle Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary. He came, too, and with them their daughter Betty. Betty had a craze at that time for Sarah Bernhardt, and gave a fine imitation of her as Doña Sol in the last act of Hernani. It was decided we should act this whole scene, with Margaret as Hernani and Aunt M’aimée reading the part of Ruy Gomez, who appears in a domino and mask.

Never had I experienced anything more thrilling. I used to lie on the floor during the rehearsals, and soon I knew the whole act by heart. I thought Betty the greatest genius that ever lived.

When Chérie came back she was rather surprised and not altogether pleased to find I knew the whole of the last act of Hernani by heart. She thought this a little too exciting and grown-up for me, and even for Margaret, but none the less she let me perform the part of Doña Sol one evening after tea in my mother’s bedroom, dressed in a white frock, with Susan in a riding-habit playing the sinister figure of Ruy Gomez. I can see Chérie now, sitting behind a screen, book in hand to prompt me, and shaking with laughter as I piped out in a tremulous and lisping treble the passionate words:

Chérie’s return from her holidays was one of the most exciting of events, for she would bring back with her a mass of toys from Giroux and the Paradis des Enfants, and a flood of[36] stories about the people and places and plays she had seen, and the food she had eaten.

One year she brought me back a theatre of puppets. It was called Théâtre français. It had a white proscenium, three scenes and an interior, a Moorish garden by moonlight, and a forest, and a quantity of small puppets suspended by stiff wires and dressed in silk and satin. There was a harlequin, a columbine, a king, a queen, many princesses, a villain scowling beneath black eyebrows, an executioner with a mask, peasants, pastry-cooks, and soldiers with halberds, who would have done honour to the Papal Guard at the Vatican, and some heavily moustached gendarmes. This theatre was a source of ecstasy, and innumerable dramas used to be performed in it. Chérie used also to bring back some delicious cakes called nonnettes, a kind of gingerbread with icing on the top, rolled up in a long paper cylinder.

She also brought baskets of bonbons from Boissier, the kind of basket which had several floors of different kinds of bonbons, fondants on the top in their white frills, then caramels, then chocolates, then fruits confits. All these things confirmed one’s idea that there could be no place like Paris.

In 1878, when I was four years old, another brother was born, Rupert, in August, but he died in October of the same year. He was buried in Revelstoke Church, a church not used any more, and then in ruins except for one aisle, which was roofed in, and provided with pews. It nestled by the seashore, right down on the rocks, grey and covered with ivy, and surrounded by quaint tombstones that seemed to have been scattered haphazard in the thick grass and the nettles.

I think it was about the same time that one evening I was playing in my godmother’s room, that I fell into the fire, and my little white frock was ablaze and my back badly burnt. I remember being taken up to the nursery and having my back rubbed with potatoes, and thinking that part, and the excitement and sympathy shown, and the interest created, great fun.

All this was before Hugo was in the schoolroom, but in all my sharper memories of Membland days he plays a prominent part. We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word “Yes” was a trisyllable,[37] namely: “Sheepartee,” and the word for “No” was even longer and more complicated, namely: “Quiliquinino.” We used to talk this language, which was called “Sheepartee,” and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.

The language stopped, but a game grew out of it, which was most complicated, and lasted for years even after we went to school. The game was called “Spankaboo.” It consisted of telling and acting the story of an imaginary continent in which we knew the countries, the towns, the government, and the leading people. These countries were generally at war with one another. Lady Spankaboo was a prominent lady at the Court of Doodahn. She was a charming character, not beautiful nor clever, and sometimes a little bit foolish, but most good-natured and easily taken in. Her husband, Lord Spankaboo, was a country gentleman, and they had no children. She wore red velvet in the evening, and she was bien vue at Court.

There were hundreds of characters in the game. They increased as the story grew. It could be played out of doors, where all the larger trees in the garden were forts belonging to the various countries, or indoors, but it was chiefly played in the garden, or after we went to bed. Then Hugo would say: “Let’s play Spankaboo,” and I would go straight on with the latest events, interrupting the narrative every now and then by saying: “Now, you be Lady Spankaboo,” or whoever the character on the stage might be for the moment, “and I’ll be So-and-so.” Everything that happened to us and everything we read was brought into the game—history, geography, the ancient Romans, the Greeks, the French; but it was a realistic game, and there were no fairies in it and nothing in the least frightening. As it was a night game, this was just as well.

Hugo was big for his age, with powerful lungs, and after luncheon he used to sing a song called “Apples no more,” with immense effect. Hugo was once told the following riddle: “Why can’t an engine-driver sit down?”—to which the answer is, “Because he has a tender behind.” He asked this to my mother at luncheon the next day, and when nobody could guess it, he said: “Because he has a soft behind.” There was a groom in the stables who had rather a Japanese cast of face,[38] and we used to call him le Japonnais. One day Hugo went and stood in front of him and said to him: “You’re the Japonais.” On another occasion when Hugo was learning to conjugate the auxiliary verb être, Chérie urged him to add a substantive after “Je suis,” to show he knew what he was doing. “Je suis une plume,” said Hugo.

We were constantly in D.’s room and used to play sad tricks on her. She rashly told us one day that her brother Jim had once taken her to a fair at Wallington and had there shown her a Punch’s face, in gutta-percha, on the wall. “Go and touch his nose,” had said Jim. She did so, and the face being charged with electricity gave her a shock.

This story fired our imagination and we resolved to follow Jim’s example. We got a galvanic battery, how and where, I forget, the kind which consists of a small box with a large magnet in it, and a handle which you turn, the patient holding two small cylinders. We persuaded D. to hold the cylinders, and then we made the current as strong as possible and turned the handle with all our might. Poor D. screamed and tears poured down her cheeks, but we did not stop, and she could not leave go because the current contracts the fingers; we went on and on till she was rescued by someone else.

Another person we used to play tricks on was M. Butat, the cook, and one day Hugo and I, to his great indignation, threw a dirty mop into his stock-pot.

A great ally in the house was the housekeeper, Mrs. Tudgay. Every day at eleven she would have two little baskets ready for us, which contained biscuits, raisins and almonds, two little cakes, and perhaps a tangerine orange.

To the outside world Mrs. Tudgay was rather alarming. She had a calm, crystal, cold manner; she was thin, reserved, rather sallow, and had a clear, quiet, precise way of saying scathing and deadly things to those whom she disliked. Once when Elizabeth was grown up and married and happened to be staying with us, Mrs. Tudgay said to her: “You’re an expense to his Lordship.” Once when she engaged an under-housemaid she said: “She shall be called—nothing—and get £15 a year.” But for children she had no terrors. She was devoted to us, bore anything, did anything, and guarded our effects and belongings with the vigilance of a sleepless hound. She had formerly been maid to the Duchess of San Marino in Italy,[39] and she had a fund of stories about Italy, a scrap-book full of Italian pictures and photographs, and a silver cross containing a relic of the True Cross given her by Pope Pius IX. We very often spent the evening in the housekeeper’s room, and played Long Whist with Mrs. Tudgay, D., Mr. Deacon, and John’s servant, Mr. Thompson.

When, in the morning, we were exhausted from playing forts and Spankaboo in the garden, we used to leap through Mrs. Tudgay’s window into the housekeeper’s room, which was on the ground floor and looked out on to the garden, and demand refreshment, and Mrs. Tudgay used to bring two wine glasses of ginger wine and some biscuits.

Sometimes we used to go for picnics with Mrs. Tudgay, D., Hilly, and the other servants. We started out in the morning and took luncheon with us, which was eaten at one of the many keepers’ houses on the coast, some of which had a room kept for expeditions, and then spent the afternoon paddling on the rocks and picking shells and anemones. We never bathed, as there was not a single beach on my father’s estate where it was possible. It was far too rocky. Mrs. Tudgay had a small and ineffectual Pomeranian black dog called Albo, who used to be taken on these expeditions. Looking back on these, I wonder at the quantity of food D. and Mrs. Tudgay used to allow us to eat. Hugo and I thought nothing of eating a whole lobster apiece, besides cold beef and apple tart.

Sometimes we all went expeditions with my mother. Then there used to be sketching, and certainly more moderation in the way of food.

Membland was close to the sea. My father made a ten-mile drive along the cliffs so that you could drive from the house one way, make a complete circle, and come back following the seacoast all the way to the river Yealm, on one side of which was the village of Newton Ferrers and on the other the village of Noss Mayo. Both villages straggled down the slopes of a steep hill. Noss Mayo had many white-washed and straw-thatched cottages and some new cottages of Devonshire stone built by my father, with slate roofs, but not ugly or aggressive. Down the slopes of Noss there were fields and orchards, and here and there a straw-thatched cottage. They were both fishing villages, the Yealm lying beneath them, a muddy stretch at low tide and a brimming river at high tide. Newton had an old[40] grey Devonshire church with a tower at the west end. At Noss my father built a church exactly the same in pattern of Devonshire stone. You could not have wished for a prettier village than Noss, and it had, as my mother used to say: “a little foreign look about it.”

At different points of this long road round the cliffs, which in the summer were a blaze of yellow gorse, there were various keepers’ cottages, as I have said. From one you looked straight on to the sea from the top of the cliff. Another was hidden low down among orchards and not far from the old ruined church of Revelstoke. A third, called Battery Cottage, was built near the emplacement of an old battery and looked out on to the Mewstone towards Plymouth Sound and Ram Head. The making of this road and the building of the church were two great events. Pieces of the cliff had to be blasted with dynamite, which was under the direction of a cheery workman called Mr. Yapsley, during the road-making, and the building of the church which was in the hands of Mr. Crosbie, the Clerk of the Works, whom we were devoted to, entailed a host of interesting side-issues. One of these was the carving which was done by Mr. Harry Hems of Exeter. He carved the bench-ends, and on one of them was a sea battle in which a member of the Bulteel family, whom we took to be Uncle Johnny, was seen hurling a stone from a mast’s crows’ nest in a sailing ship, on to a serpent which writhed in the waves. Hugo and I both sat for cherubs’ heads, which were carved in stone on the reredos. There were some stained-glass windows and a hand-blown organ on which John used to play on Sundays when it was ready.

The church was consecrated by the Bishop of Exeter, Bishop Temple.

Hugo and I learned to ride first on a docile beast called Emma, who, when she became too lethargic, was relegated to a little cart which used to be driven by all of us, and then on a Dartmoor pony called the Giant, and finally on a pony called Emma Jane.

The coachman’s name was Bilky. He was a perfect Devonshire character. His admiration for my brothers was unbounded. He used to talk of them one after the other, afraid if he had praised one, he had not praised the others enough. My brother Everard, whom we always called the “Imp,” he said was as strong as a lion and as nimble as a bee. “They have[41] rightly, sir, named you the Himp,” one of the servants said to him one day.

During all these years we had extraordinarily few illnesses. Hugo once had whooping-cough at London, and I was put in the same room so as to have it at the same time, and although I was longing to catch it, as Hugo was rioting in presents and delicacies as well as whoops, my constitution was obstinately impervious to infection.

We often had colds, entailing doses of spirits of nitre, linseed poultices, and sometimes even a mustard poultice, but I never remember anything more serious. Every now and then Hilly thought it necessary to dose us with castor-oil, and the struggles that took place when Hilly used to arrive with a large spoon, saying, as every Nanny I have ever known says: “Now, take it!” were indescribable. I recollect five people being necessary one day to hold me down before the castor-oil could be got down my throat. We had a charming comfortable country doctor called Doctor Atkins, who used to drive over in a dog-cart, muffled in wraps, and produce a stethoscope out of his hat. He was so genial and comfortable that one began to feel better directly he felt one’s pulse.

When we first went to Membland the post used to be brought by a postman who walked every day on foot from Ivy Bridge, ten miles off. He had a watch the size of a turnip, and the stamps at that time were the dark red ones with the Queen’s head on them. Later the post came in a cart from Plympton, and finally from Plymouth.

In the autumn, visitors used to begin to arrive for the covert shooting, which was good and picturesque, the pheasants flying high in the steep woods on the banks of the Yealm, and during the autumn months the nearing approach of Christmas cast an aura of excitement over life. The first question was: Would there be a Christmas tree? During all the early years there was one regularly.

After the November interval in London, which I have already described, the serious business of getting the tree ready began. It was a large tree, and stood in a square green box.

The first I remember was placed in the drawing-room, the next in the dining-room, the next in the billiard-room, and after that they were always in the covered-in tennis court, which[42] had been built in the meanwhile. The decoration of the tree was under the management of D. The excitement when the tree was brought into the house or the tennis court for the first time was terrific, and Mr. Ellis, the house-carpenter, who always wore carpet shoes, climbed up a ladder and affixed the silver fairy to the top of the tree. Then reels of wire were brought out, scissors, boxes of crackers, boxes of coloured candles, glass-balls, clips for candles, and a quantity of little toys.

Hugo and I were not allowed to do much. Nearly everything we did was said to be wrong. The presents were, of course, kept a secret and were done up in parcels, and not brought into the room until the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

The Christmas tree was lit on Christmas Eve after tea. The ritual was always the same. Hugo and I ran backwards and forwards with the servants’ presents. The maids were given theirs first,—they consisted of stuff for a gown done up in a parcel,—then Mrs. Tudgay, D., and the upper servants. One year Mrs. Tudgay had a work-basket.

Then the guests were given their presents, and we gave our presents and received our own. The presents we gave were things we had made ourselves: kettle-holders, leather slippers worked in silk for my father, and the girls sometimes made a woollen waistcoat or a comforter. Chérie always had a nice present for my mother, which we were allowed to see beforehand, and she always used to say: “N’y touchez pas, la fraîcheur en fait la beauté.”

Our presents were what we had put down beforehand in a list of “Christmas Wants”—a horse and cart, a painting-box, or a stylograph pen.

The house used to be full at Christmas. My father’s brothers, Uncle Tom and Uncle Bob, used to be there. Madame Neruda I remember as a Christmas visitor. Godfrey Webb wrote the following lines about Christmas at Membland:

Mr. Webb was a great feature in the children’s life of many families. With his beady, bird-like eye and his impassive face he made jokes so quietly that you overheard them rather than heard them. One day out shooting on a steep hill in Newton Wood, in which there were woodcock and dangerous shots, my father said to him, “You take the middle drive, Godfrey; it’s safer, medio tutissimus.” “Is there any chance of an Ibis?” Mr. Webb asked quietly. Another time, he went out duck-shooting. He was asked afterwards whether he had shot many. “Not even a Mallard imaginaire,” was his answer.

Another Christmas event was the French play we used to act under the stage management of Chérie.

When I was six I played the part of an old man with a bald forehead and white tufts of hair in a play called Le Maître d’Ecole, and I remember playing the part of Nicole in scenes from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme at Christmas in 1883, and an old witch called Mathurine in a play called Le Talisman in January 1884.

One of our most ambitious efforts was a play called La Grammaire, by Labiche: it proved too ambitious, and never got further than a dress rehearsal in the schoolroom. In this play, Elizabeth had the part of the heroine, and had to be elegantly[44] dressed; she borrowed a grown-up gown, and had her hair done up, but she took such a long time preening herself that she missed her cue, which was: “L’ange la voici!” It was spoken by Margaret, who had a man’s part.

“L’ange la voici!” said Margaret in ringing tones, but no ange appeared. “L’ange la voici!” repeated Margaret, with still greater emphasis, but still no ange; finally, not without malice, Margaret almost shouted, “L’ange la voici!” and at last Elizabeth tripped blushing on to the stage with the final touches of her toilette still a little uncertain. In the same play, Susan played the part of a red-nosed horse-coper, dressed in a grey-tailed coat, called Machut.

Another source of joy in Membland life was the yacht, the Waterwitch, which in the summer months used to sail as soon as the Cowes Regatta was over, down to the Yealm River. The Waterwitch was a schooner of 150 tons; it had one large cabin where one had one’s meals, my mother’s cabin aft, a cabin for my father, and three spare cabins. The name of the first captain was Goomes, but he was afterwards replaced by Bletchington. Goomes was employed later by the German Emperor. He had a knack of always getting into rows during races, and even on other occasions.

One day there was a regatta going on on the Yealm River; the gig of the Waterwitch was to race the gig of another yacht. They had to go round a buoy. For some reason, I was in the Waterwitch’s gig when the race started, sitting in the stern next to Goomes, who was steering. All went well at first, but when the boats were going round the buoy they fouled, and Goomes and the skipper of the rival gig were soon engaged in a hand-to-hand combat, and beating each other hard with the steering-lines. My father and the rest of the family were watching the race on board the yacht. I think I was about six or seven. My father shouted at the top of his voice, “Come back, come back,” but to no avail, as Goomes and the other skipper were fighting like two dogs, and the boats were almost capsizing. I think Goomes won the fight and the race. I remember enjoying it all heartily, but not so my father on board the yacht.

Bletchington was a much milder person and, besides being a beautiful sailor, one of the gentlest and most beautiful-mannered mariners I have ever met. He was invariably optimistic, and always said there was a nice breeze. This sometimes tempted[45] the girls, who were bad sailors, to go out sailing, but they always regretted it and used to come back saying, “How foolish we were to be taken in!” Hugo and I were good sailors and enjoyed the yacht more than anything. John was an expert in the handling of a yacht, but the “Imp” nearly died of sea-sickness if ever he ventured on board.

Captain Bletchington taught Hugo and myself a song in Fiji language. It ran like this:

Which meant:

I think what we enjoyed most of all were games of Hide-and-seek on board. One day one of the sailors hid us by reefing us up in a sail in the sail-room, a hiding-place which baffled everyone. The Waterwitch was a fast vessel, and won the schooners’ race round the Isle of Wight one year and only narrowly missed winning the Queen’s Cup. The story of this race used to be told us over and over again by D., and used to be enacted by Hugo and me on our toy yachts or with pieces of cork in the sink. This is what happened. Another schooner, the Cetonia, had to allow the Waterwitch five minutes, but the Waterwitch had to allow the Sleuthhound, a cutter, twenty-five minutes. D. was watching from the shore, and my mother was watching from the R.Y.S. Club. The Cetonia came in first, but a minute or two later the Waterwitch sailed in before the five minutes’ allowance was up. Then twenty minutes of dreadful suspense rolled by, twenty-three minutes, and during the last two minutes, as D. dramatically said, “That ’orrid Sleuthhound sailed round the corner and won the race.” Hugo and I felt we could never forgive the owner of the Sleuthhound.

Besides the Waterwitch there was a little steam launch called the Wasp which used to take us in to Plymouth, and John had a sailing-boat of his own.

[46]

In the summer holidays of 1883 Mr. Warre came to stay with us. John, Cecil, and Everard were at his house at Eton. Cecil was to read with him during the holidays. Cecil was far the cleverest one of the family and a classical scholar.

Mr. Warre was pleased to find I was interested in the stories of the Greek heroes, but pained because I only knew their names in French, speaking of Thesée, Medée, and Egée. The truth being that I did not know how to pronounce their names in English, as I had learnt all about them from Chérie. Chérie said that Mr. Warre had “une tête bien equilibrée.” We performed Les Enfants d’Édouard before him.

The following Christmas, Mr. Warre sent Hugo a magnificent book illustrating the song “Apples no more,” with water-colour drawings done by his daughter; and he sent me Church’s Stories from Homer, with this Latin inscription at the beginning of it:

MAURICIO BARING
Jam ab ineunte aetate
Veterum fautori
antiquitatis studioso
Maeonii carminis argumenta
Anglice enucleata
Streniâ propitiâ
mittit
EDMUNDUS WARRE
Kal. Jan.
mdccclxxxiii.

Nobody in the house knew what the Latin word streniâ meant, not even Walter Durnford, who was then an Eton master and destined to be the house tutor of Hugo and myself later. But Chérie at once said it meant the feast of the New[47] Year. The scholars were puzzled and could not conceive how she had known this. The French word étrennes had given her the clue.

The whole of my childhood was a succession of crazes for one thing after another: the first one, before I was three, was a craze for swans, then came trains, then chess, then carpentry, then organs and organ-building. My mother played chess, and directly I learnt the game I used to make all the visitors play with me. My mother used to say that she had once bet my Aunt Effie she would beat her twenty-one games running, giving her a pawn every time. She won twenty games and was winning the twenty-first, late one night after dinner, when my father said they had played long enough, and must go to bed, which of course they refused to do. He then upset the board, and my mother said she had never been so angry in her life; she had bent back his little finger and had, she hoped, really hurt him.

I can remember playing chess and beating Admiral Glyn, who came over from Plymouth. His ship was the Agincourt, a large four-funnelled ironclad. One day we had luncheon on board, and my father was chaffed for an unforgettable solecism, namely, for having smoked on the quarter-deck.

Another craze was history. Chérie gave the girls a most interesting historical task, which was called doing Le Siècle de Péricles and Le Siècle de Louis XIV., or whose-ever the century might be.

You wrote on one side of a copy-book the chief events and dates of the century in question, and on the other side short biographies of the famous men who adorned it, with comments on their deeds or works. I implored to be allowed to do this, and in a large sprawling handwriting I struggled with Le Siècle de Péricles, making up for my want of penmanship by the passionate admiration I felt for the great men of the past. My History of the World was the opposite to that of Mr. H. G. Wells!

Somebody gave me an American History of the World, a large flat book which told the histories of all the countries of the world in the form of a pictured chart, the countries being represented by long, narrow belts or strips, so that you could follow the destinies of the various Empires running parallel to each other and see the smaller countries being absorbed by the greater. The whole book was printed on a long, large, glazed linen sheet, which you could pull out all at one time[48] if you had a room long enough and an unencumbered door. You could also turn over the doubly folded leaves. That was the more convenient way, although you did not get the full effect. This book was a mine of interest. It had pictures of every kind of side-issue and by-event, such as the Seven Wonders of the World, the Coliseum, pictures of crusaders, and portraits of famous men.

About the same time a friend of Cecil’s, Claud Lambton, gave me an historical atlas which was also a great treat. Lessons continued with Chérie, and I used to learn passages of Racine (“Le Récit de Theramène”) and of Boileau (“La Mollesse,” from the Lutrin) by heart, and “Les Imprécations de Camille.” I also read a good deal by myself, but mostly fairy-tales, although there were one or two grown-up books I read and liked. The book I remember liking best of all was a novel called Too Strange not to be True, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, which my mother read out to my cousin, Bessie Bulteel. I thought this a wonderful book; I painted illustrations for it, making a picture of every character.

There was another book which I read to myself and liked, if anything, still better. I found it in Everard’s bedroom. It was a yellow-backed novel, and it had on the cover the picture of a dwarf letting off a pistol. It was called the Siege of Castle Something and it was by—that is the question, who was it by? I would give anything to know. The name of the author seemed to me at the time quite familiar, that is to say, a name one had heard people talk about, like Trollope or Whyte-Melville. The story was that of an impecunious family who led a gay life in London at a suburban house called the Robber’s Cave, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were always in debt, and finally, to escape bailiffs, they shut themselves up in a castle on the seacoast, where they were safe unless a bailiff should succeed in entering the house, and present the writ to one of the debtors in person. The bailiffs tried every expedient to force a way into the castle, one of them dressing up as an old dowager who was a friend of the family, and driving up to the castle in a custard-coloured carriage. But the inmates of the house were wily, and they had a mechanical device by which coloured billiard balls appeared on the frieze of the drawing-room and warned them when a bailiff was in the offing.

One day when they had a visitor to tea, a billiard ball[49] suddenly made a clicking noise round the frieze. “What is that for?” asked the interested guest. “That,” said the host, with great presence of mind, “is a signal that a ship is in sight.” As tea went on, a perfect plethora of billiard balls of different colours appeared in the frieze. “There must be a great many ships in sight to-day,” said the guest. “A great many,” answered the host.

Whether a bailiff ever got into the house I don’t know. The picture on the cover seems to indicate that he did. The book was in Everard’s cupboard for years, and then, “suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.” I never have been able to find it again, although I have never stopped looking for it. Once I thought I had run it to earth. I once met at the Vice-Provost’s house at Eton a man who was an expert lion-hunter and who seemed to have read every English novel that had ever been published. I described him the book. He had read it. He remembered the picture on the cover and the story, but, alas! he could recall neither its name nor that of the author.

In French Les Malheurs de Sophie, Les Mémoires d’un Âne, Sans Famille, were the first early favourites, and then the numerous illustrated works of Jules Verne.

Walter Scott’s novels used to be held before us like an alluring bait. “When you are nine years old you shall read The Talisman.” Even the order in which Scott was to be read was discussed. The Talisman first, and then Ivanhoe, and then Quentin Durward, Woodstock and Kenilworth, Rob Roy and Guy Mannering.

The reading of the Waverley Novels was a divine, far-off event, to which all one’s life seemed to be slowly moving, and as soon as I was nine my mother read out The Talisman to me. The girls had read all Walter Scott except, of course, The Heart of Midlothian, which was not, as they said, for the J.P. (jeune personne) and (but why not, I don’t know) Peveril of the Peak. They also read Miss Yonge’s domestic epics. There I never followed them, except for reading The Little Duke, The Lances of Lynwood, and the historical romance of The Chaplet of Pearls, which seemed to me thrilling.

I believe children absorb more Kultur from the stray grown-up conversation they hear than they learn from books. At luncheon one heard the grown-up people discussing books and Chérie talking of new French novels. Not a word of all this[50] escaped my notice. I remember the excitement when John Inglesant was published and Marion Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs and, just before I went to school, Treasure Island.

But besides the books of the day, one absorbed a mass of tradition. My father had an inexhaustible memory, and he would quote to himself when he was in the train, and at any moment of stress and emotion a muttered quotation would rise to his lips, often of the most incongruous kind. Sometimes it was a snatch of a hymn of Heber’s, sometimes a lyric of Byron’s, sometimes an epitaph of Pope’s, some lines of Dryden or Churchill, or a bit of Shakespeare.

One little poem he was fond of quoting was:

I believe it is by Hook.[2] I remember one twilight at the end of a long train journey, when Papa, muffled in a large ulster, kept on saying:

and then Byron’s “I saw thee weep,” and when it came to

there were tears in his eyes. Then after a pause he broke into Cowper’s hymn, “Hark my soul,” and I heard him whispering:

But besides quotations from the poets he knew innumerable tags, epitaphs, epigrams, which used to come out on occasions: Sidney Smith’s receipt for a salad; Miss Fanshawe’s riddle, “’Twas whispered in heaven, ’twas muttered in hell”; and many other poems of this nature.

My father spoke French and German and Spanish. He knew many of Schiller’s poems by heart. Soon after he was married, he bet my mother a hundred pounds that she would not learn Schiller’s poem “Die Glocke” by heart. My mother[51] did not know German. The feat was accomplished, but the question was how was he to be got to hear her repeat the poem, for, whenever she began he merely groaned and said, “Don’t, don’t.” One day they were in Paris and had to drive somewhere, a long drive into the suburbs which was to take an hour or more, and my mother began, “Fest gemauert in der Erde,” and nothing would stop her till she came to the end. She won her hundred pounds. And when my father’s silver wedding came about, in 1886, he was given a silver bell with some lines of the “Glocke” inscribed on it.

Mrs. Christie was decidedly of the opinion that we ought to learn German, and so were my father and mother, but German so soon after the Franco-Prussian War was a sore subject in the house owing to Chérie, who cried when the idea of learning German was broached, and I remember one day hearing my mother tell Mrs. Christie that she simply couldn’t do it. So much did I sympathise with Chérie that I tore out a picture of Bismarck from a handsome illustrated volume dealing with the Franco-Prussian War—an act of sympathy that Chérie never forgot. So my father and mother sadly resigned themselves, and it was settled we were not to learn German. I heard a great deal about German poetry all the same, and one of the outstanding points in the treasury of traditions that I amassed from listening to what my father and mother said was that Goethe was a great poet. I knew the story of Faust from a large illustrated edition of that work which used to lie about at Coombe.

But perhaps the most clearly defined of all the traditions that we absorbed were those relating to the actors and the singers of the past, especially to the singers. My father was no great idolater of the past in the matter of acting, and he told me once that he imagined Macready and the actors of his time to have been ranters.

It was French acting he preferred—the art of Got, Delaunay, and Coquelin—although Fechter was spoken of with enthusiasm, and many of the English comedians, the Wigans, Mrs. Keeley, Sam Sothern, Buckstone. The Bancrofts and Hare and Mrs. Kendal he admired enormously, and Toole made him shake with laughter.

At a play he either groaned if he disliked the acting or shook with laughter if amused, or cried if he was moved. Irving[52] made him groan as Romeo or Benedick, but he admired him in melodrama and character parts, and as Shylock, while Ellen Terry melted him, and when he saw her play Macbeth, he kept on murmuring, “The dear little child.” But it was the musical traditions which were the more important—the old days of Italian Opera, the last days of the bel canto—Mario and Grisi and, before them, Ronconi and Rubini and Tamburini.

My mother was never tired of telling of Grisi flinging herself across the door in the Lucrezia Borgia, dressed in a parure of turquoises, and Mario singing with her the duet in the Huguenots. Mario, they used to say, was a real tenor, and had the right méthode. None of the singers who came afterwards was allowed to be a real tenor. Jean de Reszke was emphatically not a real tenor. None of the German school had any méthode. I suppose Caruso would have been thought a real tenor, but I doubt if his méthode would have passed muster. There was one singer who had no voice at all, but who was immensely admired and venerated because of his méthode. I think his name was Signor Brizzi. He was a singing-master, and I remember saying that I preferred a singer who had just a little voice.

My father loathed modern German Opera. Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi enchanted him, and my mother, steeped in classical music as she was, preferred Italian operas to all others. Patti was given full marks both for voice and méthode, and Trebelli, Albani, and Nilsson were greatly admired. But Wagner was thought noisy, and Faust and Carmen alone of more modern operas really tolerated.

Sometimes my mother would teach me the accompaniments of the airs in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, while she played on the concertina, and she used always to say: “Do try and get the bass right.” The principle was, and I believe it to be a sound one, that if the bass is right, the treble will take care of itself. What she and my Aunt M’aimée called playing with a foolish bass was as bad as driving a pony with a loose rein, which was for them another unpardonable sin.

On the French stage, tradition went back as far as Rachel, although my mother never saw her, and I don’t think my father did; but Desclée was said to be an incomparable artist, of the high-strung, nervous, delicate type. The accounts of her remind one of Elenora Duse, whose acting delighted my[53] father when he saw her. “Est-elle jolie?” someone said of Desclée. “Non, elle est pire.”

Another name which meant something definite to me was that of Fargeuil, who I imagine was an intensely emotional actress with a wonderful charm of expression and utterance. My father was never surprised at people preferring the new to the old. He seemed to expect it, and when I once told him later that I preferred Stevenson to Scott, a judgment I have since revised and reversed, he was not in the least surprised, and said: “Of course, it must be so; it is more modern.” But he was glad to find I enjoyed Dickens, laughed at Pickwick, and thought Vanity Fair an interesting book, when I read these books later at school.

We were taken to see some good acting before I went to school. We saw the last performances of School and Ours at the Haymarket with the Bancrofts. My mother always spoke of Mrs. Bancroft as Marie Wilton: we saw Hare in The Colonel and the Quiet Rubber; Mrs. Kendal in the Ironmaster, and Sarah Bernhardt in Hernani. She had left the Théâtre français then, and was acting with her husband, M. Damala. This, of course, was the greatest excitement of all, as I knew many passages of the play, and the whole of the last act by heart. I can remember now Sarah’s exquisite modulation of voice when she said:

The greatest theatrical treat of all was to go to the St. James’s Theatre, because Mr. Hare was a great friend of the family and used to come and stay at Membland, so that when we went to his theatre we used to go behind the scenes. I saw several of his plays: Pinero’s Hobby Horse, Lady Clancarty, and the first night of As You Like It. This was on Saturday, 24th January 1885.

One night we were given the Queen’s box at Covent Garden by Aunt M’aimée, and we went to the opera. It was Aïda.

We also saw Pasca in La joie fait peur, so that the tradition that my sisters could hand on to their children was linked with a distant past.

When Mary Anderson first came to London we went to see her in the Lady of Lyons, and never shall I forget her first[54] entrance on the stage. This was rendered the more impressive by an old lady with white hair making an entrance just before Mary Anderson, and Cecil, who was with us, pretending to think she was Mary Anderson, and saying with polite resignation that she was a little less young than he had expected. When Mary Anderson did appear, her beauty took our breath away; she was dressed in an Empire gown with her hair done in a pinnacle, and she looked like a picture of the Empress Josephine: radiant with youth, and the kind of beauty that is beyond and above discussion; eyes like stars, classic arms, a nobly modelled face, and matchless grace of carriage. Next year we all went in a box to see her in Pygmalion and Galatea, a play that I was never tired of reproducing afterwards on my toy theatre.

As I grew older, I remember going to one or two grown-up parties in London. One was at Grosvenor House, a garden party, with, I think, a bazaar going on. There was a red-coated band playing in the garden, and my cousin, Betty Ponsonby, who was there, asked me to go and ask the band to play a valse called “Jeunesse Dorée.” I did so, spoke to the bandmaster, and walked to the other end of the lawn. To my surprise I saw the whole band following me right across the lawn, and taking up a new position at the place I had gone to. Whether they thought I had meant they could not be heard where they were, I don’t know, but I was considerably embarrassed; so, I think, was my cousin, Betty.

Another party I remember was at Stafford House. My mother was playing the violin in an amateur ladies’ string-band, conducted by Lady Folkestone. My cousin, Bessie Bulteel, had to accompany Madame Neruda in a violin solo and pianoforte duet. The Princess of Wales and the three little princesses were sitting in the front row on red velvet chairs. The Princess of Wales in her orders and jewels seemed to me, and I am sure to all the grown-up people as well, like the queen of a fairy-tale who had strayed by chance into the world of mortals; she was different and more graceful than anyone else there.

There is one kind of beauty which sends grown-up people into raptures, but which children are quite blind to; but there is another and rarer order of beauty which, while it amazes the grown-up and makes the old cry, binds children with a spell. It is an order of beauty in which the grace of every movement, the radiance of the smile, and the sure promise of lasting youth[55] in the cut of the face make you forget all other attributes, however perfect.

Of such a kind was the grace and beauty of the Princess of Wales. She was as lovely then as Queen Alexandra.

I was taken by my father in my black velvet suit. I was sitting on a chair somewhere at the end of a row, and couldn’t see very well. One of the little princesses smiled at me and beckoned to me, so I boldly walked up and sat next to them, and the Princess of Wales then took me on her knee, greatly to the surprise of my mother when she walked on to the platform with the band. The audience was splendid and crowded with jewelled beauties, and I remember one of the grown-ups asking another: “Which do you admire most, Lady Clarendon or Lady Dudley?”

Another party I remember was an afternoon party at Sir Frederic Leighton’s house, with music. Every year he gave this party, and every year the same people were invited. The music was performed by the greatest artists: Joachim, Madame Neruda, Piatti the violoncellist, and the best pianists of the day, in a large Moorish room full of flowers. It was the most intimate of concerts. The audience, which was quite small, used to sit in groups round the pianoforte, and only in the more leisurely London of the ’eighties could you have had such an exquisite performance and so naturally cultivated, so unaffectedly musical an audience. The Leighton party looked like a Du Maurier illustration.

When we were in London my father would sometimes come back on Saturday afternoons with a present for one of us, not a toy, but something much more rare and fascinating—a snuff-box that opened with a trick, or a bit of china. These were kept for us by Chérie in a cupboard till we should be older. One day he took out of a vitrine a tiny doll’s cup of dark blue Sèvres which belonged to a large service and gave it me, and I have got it now. But the present I enjoyed more than any I have ever received in my life, except, perhaps, the fifty-shilling train, was one day when we were walking down a path at Membland, he said: “This is your path; I give it to you and the gate at the end.” It was the inclusion of the little iron gate at the end which made that present poignantly perfect.

There was no end to my father’s generosity. His gifts were on a large scale and reached far and wide. He used to collect[56] Breguet watches; but he did not keep them; he gave them away to people who he thought would like one. He had a contempt for half measures, and liked people to do the big thing on a large scale. “So-and-so,” he used to say, “has behaved well.” That meant had been big and free-handed, and above small and mean considerations. He liked the best: the old masters, a Turner landscape, a Velasquez, a Watteau; good furniture, good china, good verse, and good acting; Shakespeare, which he knew by heart, so if you went with him to a play such as Hamlet, he could have prompted the players; Schiller, Juvenal, Pope, and Dryden and Byron; the acting of the Comédie française, and Ellen Terry’s diction and pathos. Tennyson was spoilt for him by the mere existence of the “May Queen”; but when he saw a good modern thing, he admired it. He said that Mrs. Patrick Campbell in her performance of Mrs. Ebbsmith, which we went to the first night of, was a real Erscheinung, and when all the pictures of Watts were exhibited together at Burlington House he thought that massed performance was that of a great man. He was no admirer of Burne-Jones, but the four pictures of the “Briar Rose” struck him as great pictures.

He was quite uninsular, and understood the minds and the ways of foreigners. He talked foreign languages not only easily, but naturally, without effort or affectation, and native turns of expression delighted him, such as a German saying, “Lieber Herr Oberkellner,” or, as I remember, a Frenchman saying after a performance of a melodrama at a Casino where the climax was rather tamely executed, “Ce coup de pistolet était un peu mince.” And once I won his unqualified praise by putting at the end of a letter, which I had written to my Italian master at Florence, and which I had had to send via the city in order to have a money order enclosed with it, “Abbi la gentilezza di mandarmi un biglettino.” This use of a diminutive went straight to my father’s heart. Nothing amused him more than instances of John Bullishness; for instance, a young man who once said to him at Contrexéville: “I hate abroad.”

He conformed naturally to the customs of other countries, and as he had travelled all over the world, he was familiar with the mind and habit of every part of Europe. He was completely unselfconscious, and was known once when there was a ball going on in his own house at Charles Street to have[57] disappeared into his dressing-room, undressed, and walked in his dressing-gown through the dining-room, where people were having supper, with a bedroom candle in his hand to the back staircase to go up to his bedroom. His warmth of heart was like a large generous fire, and the people who warmed their hands at it were without number.

With all his comprehension of foreigners and their ways, he was intensely English; and he was at home in every phase of English life, and nowhere more so than pottering about farms and fields on his grey cob, saying: “The whole of that fence must come down—every bit of it,” or playing whist and saying about his partner, one of my aunts: “Good God, what a fool the woman is!”

Whist reminds me of a painful episode. I have already said that I learnt to play long whist in the housekeeper’s room. I was proud of my knowledge, and asked to play one night after dinner at Membland with the grown-ups. They played short whist. I got on all right at first, and then out of anxiety I revoked. Presently my father and mother looked at each other, and a mute dialogue took place between them, which said clearly: “Has he revoked?” “Yes, he has.” They said nothing about it, and when the rubber was over my father said: “The dear little boy played very nicely.” But I minded their not knowing that I knew that they knew, almost as much as having revoked. It was a bitter mortification—a real humiliation. Later on when I was bigger and at school, the girls and I used to play every night with my father, and our bad play, which never improved, made him so impatient that we invented a code of signals saying, “Bêchez” when we wanted spades to lead, and other words for the other suits.

A person whom we were always delighted to see come into the house was our Uncle Johnny. When we were at school he always tipped us. If we were in London he always suggested going to a play and taking all the stalls.

When we went out hunting with the Dartmoor foxhounds he always knew exactly what the fox was going to do, and where it was going. And he never bothered one at the Meet. I always thought the Meet spoilt the fun of hunting. Every person one knew used to come up, say that either one’s girths were too tight or one’s stirrups too long or too short, and set about making some alteration. I was always a bad horseman,[58] although far better as a child than as a grown-up person. And I knew for certain that if there was an open gate with a crowd going through it, my pony would certainly make a dart through that crowd, the gate would be slammed and I should not be able to prevent this happening, and there would be a chorus of curses. But under the guidance of Uncle Johnny everything always went well.

Whenever he came to Membland, the first thing he would do would be to sit down and write a letter. He must have had a vast correspondence. Then he would tell stories in Devonshire dialect which were inimitable.

There are some people who, directly they come into the room, not by anything they say or do, not by any display of high spirits or effort to amuse, make everything brighter and more lively and more gay, especially for children, and Uncle Johnny was one of those. As the Bulteel family lived close to us, we saw them very often. They all excelled at games and at every kind of outdoor sport. The girls were fearless riders and drivers and excellent cricketers. Cricket matches at Membland were frequent in the summer. Many people used to drive from Plymouth to play lawn-tennis at Pamflete, the Bulteels’ house.

We saw most of Bessie Bulteel, who was the eldest girl. She was a brilliant pianist, with a fairylike touch and electric execution, and her advent was the greatest treat of my childhood. She told thrilling ghost stories, which were a fearful joy, but which made it impossible for me to pass a certain piece of Italian furniture on the landing which had a painted Triton on it. It looks a very harmless piece of furniture now. I saw it not long ago in my brother Cecil’s house. It is a gilt writing-table painted with varnished figures, nymphs and fauns, in the Italian manner. The Triton sprawls on one side of it recumbent beside a cool source. Nothing could be more peaceful or idyllic, but I remember the time when I used to rush past it on the passage in blind terror.

A picturesque figure, as of another age, was my great-aunt, Lady Georgiana Grey, who came to Membland once in my childhood. She was old enough to have played the harp to Byron. She lived at Hampton Court and played whist every night of her life, and sometimes went up to London to the play when she was between eighty and ninety. She was not deaf, her sight was undimmed, and she had a great contempt for people[59] who were afraid of draughts. She had a fine aptitude for flat contradiction, and she was a verbal conservative, that is to say, she had a horror of modern locutions and abbreviations, piano for pianoforte, balcŏny for balcōni, cucumber for cowcumber, Montagu for Mountagu, soot for sut, yellow for yallow.

She wore on her little finger an antique onyx ring with a pig engraved on it, and I asked her to give it me. She said: “You shall have it when you are older.” An hour later I went up to her room and said: “I am older now. Can I have the ring?” She gave it me. Nobody ever sat at a table so bolt upright as she did, and she lived to be ninety-nine. She came back once to Membland after my sisters were married.

Perhaps the greatest excitement of all our Membland life was when the whole of the Harbord family, our cousins, used to arrive for Christmas. Our excitement knew no bounds when we knew they were coming, and Chérie used to get so tired of hearing the Harbords quoted that I remember her one day in the schoolroom in London opening the window, taking the lamp to it and saying: “J’ouvre cette fenêtre pour éclairer la famille Harbord.”

On rainy days at Membland there were two rare treats: one was to play hide-and-seek all over the house; the other was to make toffee and perhaps a gingerbread cake in the still-room. The toffee was the ultra-sticky treacle kind, and the cake when finished and baked always had a wet hole in the middle of it. Hugo and I used to spend a great deal of time in Mr. Ellis’ carpenter’s shop. We had tool-boxes of our own, and we sometimes made Christmas presents for our father and mother; but our carpentry was a little too imaginative and rather faulty in execution.

Not far from Membland and about a mile from Pamflete there was a small grey Queen Anne house called “Mothecombe.” It nestled on the coast among orchards and quite close to the sandy beach of Mothecombe Bay, the only sandy beach on our part of the South Devon coast. This house belonged to the Mildmays, and we often met the Mildmay family when we went over there for picnics.

Aunt Georgie Mildmay was not only an expert photographer, but she was one of the first of those rare people who have had a real talent for photography and achieved beautiful and artistic results with it, both in portraits and landscapes.

[60]

Whenever Hugo and I used to go and see her in London at 46 Berkeley Square, where she lived, she always gave us a pound, and never a holiday passed without our visiting Aunt Georgie.

Mothecombe was often let or lent to friends in summer. One summer Lady de Grey took it, and she came over to luncheon at Membland, a vision of dazzling beauty, so that, as someone said, you saw green after looking at her. It was like looking at the sun. The house was often taken by a great friend of our family, Colonel Ellis, who used to spend the summer there with his family, and he frequently stayed at Membland with us. I used to look forward to going down to dinner when he was there, and listening to his conversation. He was the most perfect of talkers, because he knew what to say to people of all ages, besides having an unending flow of amusing things to tell, for he made everything he told amusing, and he would sometimes take the menu and draw me a picture illustrating the games and topics that interested us at the moment. We had a game at one time which was to give someone three people they liked equally, and to say those three people were on the top of a tower; one you could lead down gently by the hand, one you must kick down, and the third must be left to be picked by the crows.

We played this one evening, and the next day Colonel Ellis appeared with a charming pen-and-ink drawing of a Louis-Quinze Marquis leading a poudré lady gently by the hand. If he gave one a present it would be something quite unique—unlike what anyone else could think of; once it was, for me, a silver mug with a twisted handle and my name engraved on it in italics, “Maurice Baring’s Mug, 1885.” His second son, Gerald, was a little bit older than I was, and we were great friends. Gerald had a delightfully grown-up and blasé manner as a child, and one day, with the perfect manner of a man of the world, he said to me, talking of Queen Victoria, “The fact is, the woman’s raving mad.”

We used to call Colonel Ellis “the gay Colonel” to carefully distinguish him from Colonel Edgcumbe, whom we considered a more serious Colonel. The Mount Edgcumbes were neighbours, and lived just over the Cornish border at Mount Edgcumbe. Colonel Edgcumbe was Lord Mount Edgcumbe’s brother, and often stayed with us. He used to[61] be mercilessly teased, especially by the girls of the Bulteel family. One year he was shooting with us and the Bulteels got hold of his cartridges and took out the shot, leaving a few good cartridges.

He was put at the hot corner. Rocketing pheasants in avalanches soared over his head, and he, of course, missed them nearly all, shooting but one or two. He explained for the rest of the day that it was a curious thing, and that something must be wrong, either with his eyes or with the climate. Some new way of tormenting was always found, and, although he was not the kind of man who naturally enjoys a practical joke, he bore it angelically.

His sister, Lady Ernestine, was rather touchy in the matter of Devonshire clotted cream. As Mount Edgcumbe was just over the border in Cornwall, and as clotted cream was made in Cornwall as well as in Devonshire, she resented its being called Devonshire cream and used to call it Cornish cream; but when she stayed with us, not wishing to concede the point and yet unwilling to hurt our feelings, she used to call it West-country cream.

Another delightful guest was Miss Pinkie Browne, who was Irish, gay, argumentative, and contradictious, with smiling eyes, her hair in a net, and an infectious laugh. As a girl she had broken innumerable hearts, but had always refused to marry, as she never could make up her mind. She was extremely musical, and used to sing English and French songs, accompanying herself, with an intoxicating lilt and a languishing expression. As Dr. Smyth says about Tosti’s singing, it was small art, but it was real art. And her voice must have had a rare quality, as she was about fifty when I heard her. Such singing is far more enjoyable than that of professional singers, and makes one think of Tosti’s saying: “Le chant est un truc.” She would make a commonplace song poignantly moving. She used to sing a song called “The Conscript’s Farewell”:

of which the refrain was:

[62]

Membland was always full of visitors. There were visitors at Easter, visitors at Whitsuntide, in the autumn for the shooting, and a houseful at Christmas: an uncle, General Baring, who used to shoot with one arm because he had lost the other in the Crimea; my father’s cousin, Lord Ashburton, who was particular about his food, and who used to say: “That’s a very good dish, but it’s not veau à la bourgeoise”; Godfrey Webb, who always wrote a little poem in the visitors’ book when he went away; Lord Granville, who knew French so alarmingly well, and used to ask one the French for words like a big stone upright on the edge of a road and a ship tacking, till one longed to say, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “What’s the French for fiddle de dee?”; Lord and Lady Lansdowne, Mr. and Mrs. Percy Wyndham—Mr. Wyndham used to take me out riding; he was deliciously inquisitive, so that if one was laughing at one side of the table he would come to one quietly afterwards and ask what the joke had been about; Harry Cust, radiant with youth and spirits and early success; Lady de Clifford and her two daughters (Katie and Maud Russell), she carrying an enormous silk bag with her work in it—she was a kind critic of our French plays; Lady Airlie, and her sister, Miss Maude Stanley, who started being a vegetarian in the house, and told me that Henry VIII. was a much misunderstood monarch; Madame Neruda, and once, long before she married him, Sir Charles Hallé. Sir Charles Hallé used to sit down at the pianoforte after dinner, and nothing could dislodge him. Variation followed variation, and repeat followed repeat of the stiffest and driest classical sonatas. And one night when this had been going on past midnight, my father, desperate with impatience and sleep, put out the electric light. I am not making an anachronism in talking of electric light, as it had just been put in the house, and was thought to be a most daring innovation.

We had a telegraph office in the house, which was worked by Mrs. Tudgay. It was a fascinating instrument, rather like a typewriter with two dials and little steel keys round one of them, and the alphabet was the real alphabet and not the Morse Code. It was convenient having this in the house, but one of the results was that so many jokes were made with it, and so many bogus telegrams arrived, that nobody knew whether a telegram was a real one or not.

[63]

Mr. Walter Durnford, then an Eton House master, and afterwards Provost of King’s, in a poem he wrote in the visitors’ book, speaks of Membland as a place where everything reminded you of the presence of fairy folk, “Where telegrams come by the dozen, concocted behind the door.”

Certainly people enjoyed themselves at Membland, and the Christmas parties were one long riot of dance, song, and laughter. Welcome ever smiled at Membland, and farewell went out sighing.

As I got nearer and nearer to the age of ten, when it was settled that I should go to school, life seemed to become more and more wonderful every day. Both at Membland and in Charles Street the days went by in a crescendo of happiness. Walks with Chérie in London were a daily joy, especially when we went to Covent Garden and bought chestnuts to roast for tea. The greatest tea treat was to get Chérie, who was an inspired cook, to make something she called la petite sauce. You boiled eggs hard in the kettle; and then, in a little china frying-pan over a spirit lamp, the sauce was made, of butter, cream, vinegar, pepper, and the eggs were cut up and floated in the delicious hot mixture. A place of great treats where we sometimes went on Saturday afternoons was the Aquarium, where acrobats did wonderful things, and you had your bumps told and your portrait cut out in black-and-white silhouette. The phrenologist was not happy in his predictions of my future, as he said I had a professional and mathematical head, and would make a good civil engineer in after-life.

Going to the play was the greatest treat of all, and if I heard there was any question of their going to the play downstairs, and Mr. Deacon, my father’s servant, always used to tell me when tickets were being ordered, I used to go on my knees in the night nursery and pray that I might be taken too. Sometimes the answer was direct.

One night my mother and Lord Mount Edgcumbe were going to a pantomime together by themselves. Mr. Deacon told me, and asked me if I was going too, but nothing had been said about it. I prayed hard, and I went down to my mother’s bedroom as she was dressing for dinner. No word of the pantomime was mentioned on either side. She then, while her hair was being done by D., asked for a piece of paper and scribbled a note and told me to take it down to my father.

[64]

I did so, and my father said: “Would you like to go to the pantomime, too?” The answer was in the affirmative.

What a fever one would be in to start in time and to be there at the beginning on nights when we went to the play! how terribly anxious not to miss one moment! How wonderful the moment was before the curtain went up! The delicious suspense, the orchestra playing, and then the curtain rising on a scene that sometimes took one’s breath away, and how calm the grown-up people were. They would not look at the red light in the background, the pink sky which looked like a real pink sky, or perhaps some moving water. People say sometimes it is bad for children to go to the theatre, but do they ever enjoy anything in after life as much? Is there any such magic as the curtain going up on the Demon’s cave in the pantomime, or the sight in the Transformation scene of two silvery fairies rising from the ground on a gigantic wedding cake, and the clown suddenly breaking on the scene, shouting, “Here we are again!” through a shower of gold rain and a cloud of different-coloured Bengal lights? Is there any such pleasure as in suddenly seeing and recognising things in the flesh one had been familiar with for long from books and stories, such as Cinderella’s coach, the roc’s egg in Sinbad the Sailor, or Aladdin’s cave, or the historical processions of the kings of England, some of whom you clapped and some of whom you hissed? Oh! the charm of changing scenery! a ship moving or still better sinking, a sunset growing red, a forest growing dark; and then the fun! The indescribable fun, of seeing Cinderella’s sisters being knocked about in the kitchen, or the Babes in the Wood being put to bed, and kicking all their bedclothes off directly they had settled down; or best of all, the clown striking the pantaloon with the red-hot poker and the harlequin getting the better of the policeman! Harry Paine was the clown in those days, and he used, in a hoarse voice, to say to the pantaloon: “I say, Joey.” “Yes, master,” answered the pantaloon in a feeble falsetto.

Childhood bereft of such treats I cannot help thinking must be a sad affair; and it generally happens that if children are not allowed to go to the play, so that they shall enjoy it more when they are grown-up, they end by never being able to enjoy it at all.

One great event of the summer was the Eton and Harrow[65] match, when Cecil and Everard used to come up from Eton with little pieces of light blue silk in their black coats. John had gone to Cambridge, and I hardly remember him as an Eton boy. We used to go on a coach belonging to some friends, and one year one of the Parkers bowled three of the Harrow boys running.

As Chérie had been with Lord Macclesfield in the Parker family before she came to us, and as this boy, Alex Parker, had either been or nearly been one of her pupils, she had a kind of reflected glory from the event.

Eton was always surrounded with a glamour of romance. John had rowed stroke in the Eton eight, and when Cecil rose to the dignity of being Captain of the Oppidans we were proud indeed. One summer we all went down to Eton for the 4th of June.

We went to speeches and had tea in Cecil’s room, and strawberry messes, and walked about in the playing-fields and saw the procession of boats and the fireworks.

From that day I was filled with a longing to go to Eton, and resented bitterly having to go to a private school first.

Another exciting event I remember was a visit to Windsor, to the Norman Tower in Windsor Castle, where my uncle, Henry Ponsonby, and my Aunt M’aimée lived. This happened one year in the autumn. We stayed a Sunday there. The house was, for a child, fraught with romance and interest. First of all there were the prisons. My aunt had discovered and laid bare the stone walls of two octagonal rooms in the tower which had been prisons in the olden times for State prisoners, and she had left the walls bare. There were on them inscriptions carved by the prisoners. She had made these two rooms her sitting-rooms, and they were full of books, and there was a carpenter’s bench in one of these rooms, with a glass of water on it ready for painting.

Windsor was itself exciting enough, but I think what struck me most then was the toy cupboard of the boys, Fritz, Johnny, and Arthur. All their toys were arranged in tiers in a little windowless room, a tier belonging to each separate boy, and in the middle of each beautiful and symmetrical arrangement there were toys representing a little room with a table and lamp on it. As if all this was not exciting enough, my Cousin Betty told me the story of the Corsican Brothers.

Before I went to school my father had to go to Contrexéville[66] to take the waters. My father and mother took me with them. I faintly regretted not playing a solo at Mademoiselle Ida’s pupils’ concert, which was to have been part of the programme, but otherwise the pleasure and excitement at going were unmitigated. We started for Paris in July. Bessie Bulteel came with us, and we stopped a night in Paris, at the Hôtel Bristol. My father took me for a walk in the Rue de la Paix, and the next day we went to Contrexéville. I never enjoyed anything more in my life than those three weeks at Contrexéville. There were shops in the hotel gardens called les Galeries, where a charming old lady, called Madame Paillard, with her daughter, Thérèse, sold the delicious sweets of Nancy, and spoilt me beyond words. The grown-up people played at petits chevaux in the evening, and as I was not allowed to join in that game, the lady of the petits chevaux, Mademoiselle Rose, had a kind of rehearsal of the game in the afternoon at half-price, in which only I and the actresses of the Casino, whom I made great friends with, took part. My special friend was Mademoiselle Tusini of the Eldorado Paris Music Hall. She was a songstress.

One day she asked me to beg Madame Aurèle, the directrice of the Theatre, to let her sing a song at the Casino which she had not been allowed to sing, and which was called “Les allumettes du Général.” Mademoiselle Tusini said it was her greatest success, and that when she had sung it at Nancy, nobody knew where to look. I pleaded her cause; but Madame Aurèle said, “Un jour quand il n’y aura que des Messieurs,” so I am afraid the song can hardly have been quite nice. When we went away, Mademoiselle Tusini gave me a large photograph of herself in the rôle of a commère, carrying a wand. Chérie was slightly astonished when she saw it, and when I described the great beauty and the wonderful goodness of Mademoiselle Tusini, she was not as enthusiastically sympathetic as I could have wished.

There were a great many French children at Contrexéville, and I was allowed to join in their games. There was a charming old curé who I made friends with in the village, and his church was the first Catholic church I ever entered.

My mother and father used to go to the Casino play every night. I was allowed to go once or twice, as Mademoiselle Tusini had threatened to strike if I left Contrexéville without seeing her act, so I was taken to Monsieur Choufleury restera chez lui, a harmless farce, which is, I believe, often acted by amateurs.

[67]

We stayed there three weeks, and I left in sorrow and tears. We went on for a Nachkur to a place in the Vosges called Géradmer, which is near a lake. One day we drove to a place called the Schlucht, and saw the stone marking the frontier into Alsace, which was, of course, Germany. It was suggested that we should cross over, but I, mindful of Chérie, refused to set foot on the stolen and violated territory.

On the way back we stayed a day and night in Paris, and bought presents for all those at home. In the evening we went to the Théâtre français and saw no less an actor than Delaunay in Musset’s play, On ne badine pas avec l’Amour. Delaunay had a voice like silver, and his diction on the stage was incomparable. I remember Count Benckendorff once saying about him that whereas one often bewailed the failure of an actor to look the part of a grand seigneur, when one saw Delaunay one wished anyone off the stage could be half as distinguished as he was on the stage.

My father took me to the Louvre and showed me the Mona Lisa and Watteau’s large picture of a Pierrot: “Gilles” and the Galérie d’Apollon, and late in the afternoon we drove to the Bois de Boulogne.

Chérie had always told us of the Magasin du Louvre, where as children went out they were given, as George, in the poem, when he had been as good as gold, an immense balloon. This balloon had always been one of my dreams, and we went there, and the reality was fully up to all expectations.

We bought some nonnettes in the Rue St. Honoré and a great many toys at the Paradis des Enfants.

The next time I went to Contrexéville I was at school. I wore an Eton jacket and a top hat in Paris; this created a sensation. A man said to me in the Rue de Rivoli, “Monsieur a son Gibus.” I also remember receiving a wonderful welcome in the Galeries.

With the end of the first visit to Contrexéville I will end this chapter, for it was the end of a chapter of life, the happiest and most wonderful chapter of all. New gates were opened; but the gate on the fairyland of childhood was shut, and for ever afterwards one could only look through the bars, but never more be a free and lawful citizen of that enchanted country, where life was like a fairy-tale that seemed almost too good to be true, and yet so endlessly long and so infinitely happy that it seemed as if it must last for ever.

[68]

I went to school in September 1884. On the 7th of September John came of age, and we had a large party in the house and a banquet for the tenants in the tennis court, at which I had to stand up on a chair and make a speech returning thanks for the younger members of the family. I travelled up to London with my mother and Mr. Walter Durnford, and was given Frank Fairleigh to read in the train, but it was too grown-up for me, and I only pretended to read it. We stayed a night in Charles Street. I was given a brown leather dispatch case with my name stamped on it and a framed photograph of my father and mother and of Membland, and a good stock of writing-paper, and the next afternoon we started for my school, which was near Ascot. I didn’t cry either on leaving Membland or at any moment on the day I was taken to school.

We arrived about tea-time. The school was a red brick building on the top of the hill, north of Ascot Station, and looking towards the station, situated among pine trees. The building is there now and is a girls’ school. We were shown into a drawing-room where the Headmaster and his wife received us with a dreadful geniality. There was a small aquarium in the room with some goldfish in it. The furniture was covered with black-and-yellow cretonne, and there were some low ebony bookcases and a great many knick-knacks. Another parent was there with a small and pale-looking little boy called Arbuthnot, who was the picture of misery, and well he might look miserable, as I saw at a glance that he was wearing a made-up sailor’s tie. Two days later the machinery inside this tie was a valuable asset in another boy’s collection. Conversation was kept up hectically until tea was over. They talked of a common friend, Lady Sarah Spencer. “What a[69] charming woman she is!” said the Headmaster. How sensible he seemed to charm! How impervious to all amenities he revealed himself to be later! Then my mother said good-bye to him, and we were taken upstairs by the matron to see my cubicle, a little room with pitch-pine walls, partitioned off from the next cubicle by a thin wooden partition that did not reach the ceiling, so that you could talk to the boy in the next cubicle. Boys were not allowed to go into each other’s cubicles. We hung my solitary picture up, and my mother interviewed the matron, Mrs. Otway, in her room and gave her a pound as she went away; then we went out into the garden for a moment. My mother said good-bye to me and left me alone. I wandered about the garden, which was not a garden but grass hill leading down to a cricket-field. Half-way down the hill was a gymnasium, and a high wooden erection with steps. I wondered what it was for. The boys had not yet arrived. Two boys presently appeared on the scene; they looked at me, but took no great notice. Then after a little time one of them approached me, holding in his hand a small pebble surrounded with cotton-wool, and asked me if I would like a cuckoo’s egg. I did not know whether I was supposed to pretend that I thought it was a real egg or not. It was so unmistakably a stone. I smiled and said nothing. Presently a Chinese gong sounded somewhere out of doors. The two boys ran into the house. I followed them. On the ground floor of the house there was a large hall with a table running down it, a fireplace at one end, and at the other end an arch opening on to the staircase draped with red curtains with black fleur-de-lys stamped on them. There were windows on one side of the room and a cupboard with books in on the other. This hall was now full of boys talking and laughing. Nobody took the slightest notice of me. They then trooped through a passage into the dining-room, a large room with tables round three sides of it and a small square table in the middle where the Headmaster, his wife, and one of the other masters sat. We sat down. I was placed nearly at the end of the last table. More boys—those of the first division, who were a race apart—came in from another door. Then the Headmaster entered, rapped on his table with a knife, and said grace. We had tea; large thick slabs of bread and butter, with the butter spread very thinly over them.

Soon after tea we went to bed, and I dreamt I was at[70] Membland, and woke up to find I was in a strange place. The boy in the cubicle next to mine was called Hope. He was in the second division. In another cubicle opposite to mine there was a boy in the first division called Worthington. One could talk to them, and they were both of them friendly.

The next morning after breakfast I was placed in the fourth division for Latin and English, and the fourth set for Mathematics and French, and had my first lesson in Mathematics. The first thing the master did was to take a high three-legged stool from a corner and exhibit it to us. It had a very narrow seat. It was a rickety stool. “This,” he said, “is the stool of penitence. I hope none of you will have to stand on it.” Then some figures were written down on the blackboard, and a sum in short division was set, which I at once got wrong. In fact, I couldn’t do it at all. The master came and sat down by my side, and said: “You’re trembling.” So I was. He corrected the mistakes and went on to something else. He was terrifying to look at, I thought, but perhaps not as frightening as he appeared to be. I was a little bit reassured. Later in the day we had a French lesson. To my surprise I saw he knew but little French, and read out the first page of the elementary accidence, pronouncing the French words as though they were English ones.

After luncheon, we played prisoner’s base, and I at once realised that there is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do not play them to enjoy yourselves. Everyone was given two blue cards, and every time you were taken prisoner you lost a card. If you lost both you were kicked by the captain of the side, who said we were a pack of dummies. The first week seemed endlessly long, and acute homesickness pervaded every moment of it. Waking up in the morning was the worst moment. Every night I used to dream I was back at home, every morning the moment of waking up was a sharp bewildering shock. Our voices were tried, and I was put in the chapel choir. The chapel choir had special privileges, but also long half-hours of choir practice.

The masters laughed at me mercilessly for my pronunciation of English. I don’t know what was wrong with it, except that I said yallow, aint for aren’t, and ant for aunt, but I did my best to get out of this as soon as possible. Apart from idiosyncrasies[71] of pronunciation, my voice seemed to them comic, and they used to imitate me by speaking through their noses whenever I said anything. The boys at first entirely ignored one, simply telling one to shut up if one spoke, but the boys in my own division soon became friendly, especially an American boy called Hamilton Fish the third. He was the first man to be killed in the American-Spanish War in Cuba. There was no bullying. One boy, although he was in the first division, was charming, and treated one like a grown-up person. This was Basil Blackwood. Even then he drew pictures which were the delight of his friends. Another boy who was friendly was Niall Campbell. Dreadful legends were told about Winston Churchill, who had been taken away from the school. His naughtiness appeared to have surpassed anything. He had been flogged for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, he had taken the Headmaster’s sacred straw hat from where it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces. His sojourn at this school had been one long feud with authority. The boys did not seem to sympathise with him. Their point of view was conventional and priggish.

Every morning there was a short service in the pitch-pine school chapel, and every morning an interval between lessons called the hour, in which the boys played nondescript games, chiefly a game called IT. If you were IT you had to catch someone else, and then he became IT. On Sunday afternoon we went for a walk. On Sunday evening the Headmaster read out a book called The Last Abbot of Glastonbury, which I revelled in. After the first week I had got more or less used to my new life. In a fortnight’s time I was quite happy and enjoying myself; but every now and then life was marred and made hideous for the time being by sudden and unexpected dramas. The first drama was that of the Spanish chestnuts. There were some Spanish chestnuts lying about in the garden. We were told not to eat these. Some of the boys did eat them, and one boy gave me a piece of something to eat on the end of a knife. It was no bigger than a crumb, and it turned out afterwards to be a bit of Spanish chestnut, or at least I thought it might have been. One afternoon at tea the Head rapped on his table with his knife. There was a dead silence. “All boys who have eaten Spanish chestnuts are to stand up.”[72] Nobody stood up, and there was a long pause. I think the boys were puzzled, and did not know they had been eating Spanish chestnuts. I certainly did not know a Spanish chestnut by sight. I had no chestnut on my conscience. After a very long pause the Headmaster made some rather facetious remarks, which I thought were meant to encourage us, but the other boys, knowing him better, knew that they were ironical and portended dreadful things. One boy stood up. Then, after a slight pause, another; about four or five boys followed suit. I suddenly remembered the incident of the penknife in the gymnasium three days before. Could it have been that I had eaten a Spanish chestnut? Was that little bit of white crumb on the end of the knife a part of a Spanish chestnut? I had not seen a whole Spanish chestnut anywhere. In any case I had better be on the safe side, and I stood up. The Headmaster made a cutting comment on boys who were so slow to own up. A few more stood up, and that was all. The Head then delivered a serious homily. We had been guilty of three things: greed, disobedience, and deceit. We would all do two hours’ extra work on a half-holiday.

There was electric light in the school, and the electric light was oddly enough supposed to be under the charge of one of the boys, who was called the Head Engineer. Clever and precocious as this boy was, I cannot now believe that his office was a serious one, although we took it seriously indeed at the time. However that may be, nobody except this boy was allowed to go into the engine-shed or to have anything to do with the electric light. We were especially forbidden to touch any of the switches in the house or ever to turn on or off the electric light ourselves. Electric light in houses at that time was a new thing, and few private houses were lighted with it. One day one of the boys was visited by his parents, and he could not resist turning on the electric light in one of the rooms to show them what it was like. Unfortunately the Head saw him do this through the window, and directly his parents were gone the boy was flogged. Every week the school newspaper appeared. It was edited by two of the boys in the first division, and handed round to the boys at tea-time. This was a trying and painful moment for some of the boys, as there were often in this newspaper scathing articles on the cricket or football play of some of[73] the boys written by one of the masters, and all mentioning them by name; and as parents took in the newspaper it was far from pleasant to be pilloried in this fashion. Just before half-term another drama occurred. I was doing a sum in short division, and another boy was waiting for me to go out. He was impatient, and he said, “That’s right; don’t you see the answer is 3456,” or whatever it was. I scribbled it down, but unfortunately had left a mistake in the working, so the answer was right and the sum was partly wrong. This was at once detected, and I was asked if I had had any help. I said “Yes,” and I was then accused of having wanted to get marks by unfair means, and of having cheated. We did not even know these particular sums received marks. The Division Master bit his knuckles, and said he would report the matter to the Headmaster. When I went into chapel from the vestry, robed in a white surplice, he pinned a piece of paper with cheat on it, on to my back. I was appalled, but as nothing happened immediately I began to recover, and on the following Sunday when we were writing home the master told me I could put in my Sunday letter that I had done very well, and that I was his favourite boy. This was only his fun, but I took it quite seriously, and I did not put it in my letter, because I thought the praise excessive. On Monday morning there was what was called “reading over.” The boys sat in the hall, grouped in their divisions. The Headmaster in a silk gown stood up at a high desk, the three undermasters sat in a semicircle round him, also in gowns, and one division after another went and stood up in front of the desk while the report of the week’s work was read out. When the fourth division went up, the news was read out that Duckworth and Baring had been guilty of a conspiracy, and had tried to get marks by unfair means. Duckworth was blamed even more severely than I was, being an older boy.

We were told this would be mentioned in our report, and that if anything of the kind occurred again we would be flogged. When this was over, the boys turned on Duckworth and myself and asked us how we could have done such a base act. We were shunned like two cardsharpers, and it took us some time to recover our normal position. The half-term report was about nothing else, and my father was dreadfully upset. My mother came down to see me, and I told her the whole story, and I think she understood what had happened. I got[74] through the rest of the term without any fresh dramas, and did well in trials at the end of the term.

One day my sister Susan unwittingly caused me annoyance by writing to me and sealing the letter with her name, Susan. The boys saw the seal and called out, “He’s got a sister called Susan; he’s got a sister called Susan.” Sisters should be warned never to let their Christian names come to the knowledge of their brother’s schoolfellows. This kind of thing is typical of private-school life. The boys were childish and conventional, but they did not bully. It was the masters who every now and then made life a misery. In spite of everything, the boys were happy—in any case, they thought that was happiness, as they knew no better.

In the afternoons we played Rugby football, an experience which was in my case exactly what Max Beerbohm describes it in one of his Essays: running about on the edge of a muddy field. The second division master pursued the players with exhortations and imprecations, and every now and then a good kicking was administered to the less successful and energetic players, which there were quite a number of. The three best Rugby football players were allowed to wear on Sundays a light blue velvet cap with a silver Maltese cross on it, and a silver tassel. I am sorry to say that this cap was not always given to the best players. It was given to the boys the Headmaster liked best. What I enjoyed most were the readings out by the Headmaster, which happened on Sunday afternoons and sometimes on ordinary evenings. He read out several excellent books: The Moonstone, the Leavenworth Case, a lot of Pickwick, and, during my first term, Treasure Island. The little events, the rages for stamp collecting and swopping, stag-beetle races, aquariums, secret alphabets, chess tournaments, that make up the interests of a boy’s everyday life outside his work and his play, delighted me. I was a born collector but a bad swopper, and made ludicrous bargains. I made great friends with a new boy called Ferguson, and taught him how to play Spankaboo. We never told anyone, and the secret was never discovered. We used to find food for the game in bound copies of the Illustrated London News. We had drawing lessons and music lessons, and I was delighted to find that my first school piece was a gigue by Corelli that I had heard my mother play at the concert at Stafford House, which I have already described.[75] At the end of the term came the school concert, for which there were many rehearsals. I did not take any part in it, except in the chorus, who sang “Adeste Fideles” in Latin at the end of it.

Some scenes were acted from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the same scenes we had acted at Membland, but I took no part in them. Then came the unutterable joy of going home for the holidays, which were spent at Membland. When I arrived and had my first schoolroom tea I was rather rough with the toast, and Chérie said: “Est-ce là les manières d’Ascot?” At the end of the holidays I spent a few days in London, and was taken to the play, and enjoyed other dissipations which made me a day or two late in going back to school. The holiday task was Bulwer Lytton’s Harold, which my mother read out to me. As soon as I arrived at school I was given the holiday-task paper and won the prize, a book called Half-hours in the Far South, which I have never read, but which I still possess and respect.

During the Lent term we had athletic sports: long jump, high jump, hurdle, flat and obstacle races. I won a heat in a hurdle race and nearly got a place in the final, the only approach to an athletic achievement in the whole of my life. A curious drama happened during this term. A boy called Phillimore was the chief actor in it. He was in the first division. One day the Headmaster went up to London. During his absence a message was sent round in his name by one of the undermasters. The message was brought by one of the boys to the various divisions. It was to the effect that we were allowed or not allowed to do some specific thing. When the boy, who was new and inexperienced, brought the message into the first division, Phillimore said to him, “Ask Mr. So-and-so with my compliments whether the message is genuine.” “Do you really want me to ask him?” asked the boy. “Yes, of course,” said Phillimore. The little boy went back to the master, who happened to be the severest of all the masters, and said: “Phillimore wants to know whether the message is genuine.” As soon as the Headmaster returned the whole school was summoned, and the Headmaster in his black gown told us the dreadful story of Phillimore’s unheard-of act. Phillimore was had up in front of the whole school, and told to explain his conduct. He said it was a joke, and that he[76] had never dreamt that the boy would deliver the message. The explanation was not accepted, and Phillimore was stripped of his first division privileges. The privileges of the first division were various: they were allowed to dig in a place called the wilderness, which was a sand-heap through which ran a light truck railway without an engine. They went on special expeditions.

These expeditions need an explanation. Sometimes they consisted merely of walks to Bagshot or Virginia Water, and perhaps a picnic tea. Sometimes, as in the case of the first division expeditions or the choir expedition, they were far more elaborate, and consisted of a journey to London with sight-seeing, or to places as far off as Bath and the Isle of Wight.

During my first term the choir went to Swindon to see the Great Western Works, to Reading to see the Biscuit Factory, and to Bath in one day, and we got home late in the night. During my second term we spent a day in London inspecting the Tower, the Mint, and other sights, and had tea at the house of one of the boys’ parents, Colonel Broadwood, who lived in Eccleston Square.

These expeditions were recorded in the school Gazette, and when my mother heard of our having had tea with Colonel Broadwood, she said: “Why should not the choir, next time they came to London, have luncheon at Charles Street?” The idea made me shudder, although I said nothing. The idea of having one’s school life suddenly brought into one’s home life, to see the Headmaster sitting down to luncheon in one’s home, seemed to me altogether intolerable. My mother thought I would perhaps be ashamed of the food for not being good enough, and said: “If we had a very good luncheon.” But that wasn’t the reason. It never happened. Anything more miserable than the appearance of Broadwood when we had tea in his father’s house cannot be imagined.

Nothing was more strange at this school than the sudden way in which either a treat or a punishment descended on the school. The treats, too, were of such a curious kind, and involved so much travelling. Sometimes the first division would be taken up en masse to a matinée. Sometimes they would be away for nearly twenty-four hours. The punishments were equally unexpected and curious. One boy was suddenly flogged for cutting off a piece of his hair and keeping the piece[77] in his drawer. In the second division the boys were punished by electricity. The division was made to join hands, and a strong electric shock was passed through it. This went on until one day one boy, smarting from an overcharge of electricity, took the battery and threw it at the master’s head, inflicting a sharp wound. Nothing was said about this action, to the immense astonishment of the boys, who thought it jolly of him not to sneak.

We lived in an atmosphere of complete uncertainty. We never knew if some quite harmless action would not be construed into a mortal offence. Any criticism, explicit or implicit, of the food was considered the greatest of crimes. The food was good, and the boys had nothing to complain of, nor did they, but they were sometimes punished for looking as if they didn’t like the cottage pie.

One day I heard a boy use the expression “mighty good.” The next day I said at breakfast that the porridge was mighty good. The master overheard me and asked me what I said. I answered, “I said the porridge was very good.” “No,” said the master, “that is not exactly what you said.” I then admitted to the use of the word mighty. This was thought to be ironical, and I was stopped talking at meals for a week.

Another time a message was passed up to me to stop talking at luncheon. This was frequently done; a message used to be passed up saying: “Baring and Bell stop talking,” but sometimes the boys used to be inattentive, and if one sat far up table the message had a way of getting lost on the way. This happened to me. I was stopped talking and the message never reached me, and I went on talking gaily. Afterwards the master sent for me and said, “You’ll find yourself in Queer Street.” I was not allowed to remonstrate. I didn’t even know what I was accused of at the time, and I was stopped talking for a week.

The Headmaster was a virulent politician and a fanatical Tory. On the 5th of November an effigy of Mr. Gladstone used to be burnt in the grounds, and there was a little note in the Gazette to say there were only seven Liberals in the school, the least of whom was myself. The Gazette went on to add that “needless to say, the school were supporters of the Church and the State.” One day somebody rashly sent the Head a Liberal circular. He sent it back with some coppers[78] inside, so that the recipient should have to pay eightpence on receipt of it, and the whole school was told of his action. One day there was a by-election going on hard-by. All the school were taken with blue ribbons on their jackets except the unfortunate seven Liberals, who were told to stay at home and work.

One year Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was burnt in effigy, as he was then a Radical, and the effigy held in its hands a large cardboard cow with three acres written on it. It was a bad time for the Liberals, as the foreign policy of the Liberal Government was at that time particularly weak, and it was impossible to defend Mr. Gladstone’s Egyptian policy, still less Lord Granville. So the Head smiled in triumph over the renegades, one of whom I am glad to say was Basil Blackwood. He took the matter very calmly and drew offensive caricatures of the Conservative politicians.

During the summer the rage the boys had for keeping caterpillars in breeding cages, for collecting butterflies, and keeping live stock was allowed full play. The Head himself had supplies of live animals brought to the school, among which were salamanders and Italian snakes. I myself invested in a green lizard, which although it had no tail, was in other respects satisfactory, and ate, so a letter of mine of that date says, a lot of worms. I also had a large, fat toad, which was blind in one eye, but for a toad, affectionate. But the ideal of the boys was to possess a Natterjack toad, whatever that may mean or be. We were allowed to go out on the heath during the summer and catch small lizards and butterflies, and altogether natural history was encouraged; so was gardening. Boys who wished to do so might have a garden, and a prize was offered for the garden which was the prettiest and the best kept throughout the summer term. I won that prize. My garden contained four rose trees, several geraniums, some cherry pie, and a border of lobelias. It was a conventional garden, but there was a professional touch about it, and I tended it with infinite care. The prize was a ball of string in an apple made of Lebanon wood. Sometimes we were allowed into the strawberry beds, and could eat as many strawberries as we liked. During this term I made great friends with Broadwood. We were both in the third division, and decided that we would write a pantomime together some day. One day we were[79] looking on at a cricket match which was being played against another school. I have told what happened in detail elsewhere in the form of a story, but the sad bare facts were these. The school was getting beaten, the day was hot, the match was long and tedious, and Broadwood and another boy called Bell and myself wandered away from the match; two of us climbed up the wooden platform, which was used for letting off fireworks on the 5th of November. Bell remained below, and we threw horse-chestnuts at him, which he caught in his mouth. Presently one of the masters advanced towards us, biting his knuckles, which he did when he was in a great rage, and glowered. He ordered us indoors, and gave us two hours’ work to do in the third division schoolroom. We went in as happy as larks, and glad to be in the cool. But at tea we saw there was something seriously amiss. The rival eleven who had beaten us were present, but not a word was spoken. There was an atmosphere of impending doom over the school charged with the thunder of a coming row. After tea, when the guests had gone, the school was summoned into the hall, and the Head, gowned and frowning, addressed us, and accused the whole school in general, and Broadwood, Bell, and myself in particular, of want of patriotism, bad manners, inattention, and vulgarity. He was disgusted, he said, with the behaviour of the school before strangers. We were especially guilty, but the whole school had shown want of attention, and gross callousness and indifference to the cricket match (which was all too true), and consequently had tarnished the honour of the school. There was to have been an expedition to the New Forest next week. That expedition would not come off; in fact, it would never come off; and the speech ended and the school trooped out in gloomy silence and broke up into furtive whispering groups. That night in my cubicle I said to Worthington that I thought Campbell minor, who had been scoring during the match, had certainly behaved well all day, and didn’t he deserve to go to the New Forest? “No,” said Worthington; “he whistled twice.” “Oh,” I said, “then of course he can’t go.”

But the choir had an expedition that term, nevertheless. We went to Shanklin in the Isle of Wight, where we bathed in the sea and got back after midnight.

My mother took my sister Elizabeth to the Ascot races[80] that year. Elizabeth was just out, and they came and fetched me and took me too, as boys were allowed to go to the races. A little later another drama happened, in which I was unwillingly to play the chief part. We were all playing on the heath one morning, and I had just found a lizard and was utterly absorbed in this find when I got a summons that I was wanted by the Head. I found the Head in the Masters’ Common Room enjoying a little collation. It was half-past ten. “A telegram has come,” said the Head, “that you have been especially invited to a children’s garden-party at Marlborough House by the Princess of Wales, and you are to go up to London at once. Are you,” said the Head ironically, “a special friend of the Princess of Wales?” Half excited, half fearful, and not without forebodings, I changed into my best clothes, and ran off to catch the train. I was to come back that evening. I arrived in time for luncheon, and after luncheon went to the garden-party with Hugo, where we spent a riotous afternoon. There were performing dogs and many games. My father was not there. He was in Devonshire. When we got home it was found that I had missed the train I was supposed to go back by, and my mother thought I had better stay the night. She sent off a telegram to the Head, and asked if I might do so. I thought this was a rash act. The answer came back just before dinner that if I did not come back that night I was not to come back at all. Everyone was distraught. There was only one more train, which did not get to Ascot till half-past twelve.

My mother was incensed with the Headmaster, and said if my father was there she knew he would not let me go back. I remained neutral in the general discussion and absolutely passive, while my fate hung in the balance, but I wanted to go back, on the whole. Both courses seemed quite appalling: to go back after such an adventure, or not to go, and face a new school. At first it was settled that on no account should I go, but finally it was settled that I should go. D. took me. We arrived late. There were no flys at the station and we had to walk to the school. We did not get there till half-past one in the morning. D. said she would sleep at the hotel, but the matron who opened the door for us insisted on giving her a bedroom. The next morning I got up at half-past six to practise the pianoforte, as usual, and D. looked into the room and said good-bye, and then I felt I had to begin to live down this appalling[81] episode. But to my surprise it was not alluded to. The truth being, as I afterwards found out, that not only my father and mother, but Dr. Warre of Eton, had written to the Headmaster to tell him he had behaved foolishly, and shortly afterwards, to make amends, I was sent up to London to the dentist. But oh, parents, dear parents, if you only knew what stress of mind such episodes involve, you would not insist on such favours, nor ever forward invitations of that kind, not even at the bidding of the King.

D. paid me one other visit while I was at Ascot, and brought with her a large bunch of white grapes from Sheppy. We were not allowed hampers, nor were we allowed to eat any food brought by strangers or relations in the house, and when I saw that bunch of white grapes I was terrorstruck. I made D. hide it at once. I was afraid that even its transient presence in the house might be discovered, nor did I eat one grape.

I cannot remember that summer holiday, unless it was that summer we went to Contrexéville for the second time, but when I went back to school in September, Hugo went with me and we shared the same room. Games of Spankaboo went on every night. During all my schooltime at Ascot I have already said that I was never once bullied by the boys, but I never seemed to do right either in the eyes of the Headmaster or of the Second Division master. The two other masters were friendly. These two masters, we were one day informed, intended to leave the school and set up a school of their own at Eastbourne. They were both of them friendly to Hugo and myself. The school was to subscribe and give them a bacon dish in Sheffield plate as a parting gift. One day I wrote home and suggested that Hugo and I should go to that school. I did not think this request would be taken seriously. It seemed to me quite fantastic—an impossible, wild fancy. To my intense surprise no answer explaining how impossible such a thing was arrived, and I forget what happened next, but I know that soon the two departing masters discussed the matter with me, and I found out they were actually in correspondence with my mother. The remaining masters used to scowl at us, but the term ended calmly and we left the day before the end of the term, so I was unable to play in the treble in a piece for three people at one pianoforte called “Marche Romaine,” which I was down for on the concert programme, the[82] second time I missed performing at a concert in public, and the opportunity of a lifetime missed. When I got to Membland I found it was settled that we were not going back to Ascot, but to the new school, St. Vincent’s, at Eastbourne. The Headmaster was told, and he at first accepted the matter calmly, but a little later he wrote to my father and asked him what reasons he had for taking his sons away if other parents asked him. My father seldom wrote a letter of more than one page. But on that occasion he wrote a letter of four pages, and the Head wrote back to say that he was entirely satisfied with his reasons. My mother and I always wondered what was in that letter. My father when asked said: “I knew what the man wanted to know, and I told him,” but we never knew what that was.

In January Hugo and I went to Eastbourne, and my friend, Broadwood, also left Ascot and followed us. There were only nine boys at first. But the next term there were, I think, twenty, then thirty, and soon the school became almost as big as the Ascot school, where there were forty boys.

Before I left Eastbourne, the Headmaster of my first school died, and I do not know what happened to the school afterwards. Several of the Ascot boys came to Eastbourne later, but the boys at Ascot were not allowed to correspond with us. My cousins, Rowland and Windham Baring, arrived, the sons of my Uncle Mina, who was afterwards Lord Cromer.

At Eastbourne a new life began. There was more amusement than work about it, and everything was different. We played Soccer with another school; we went to the swimming bath, and I learnt to swim; to a gymnasium, and we were drilled by a volunteer sergeant. Broadwood and I gave theatrical performances, one of which represented the Headmaster’s ménage at our first school. It must have been an amusing play to watch, as the point of it was that the Ascot Headmaster discovered his wife kissing her brother, another of the Ascot masters, the villain, and she sang a song composed by Broadwood and myself, of which the refrain was, “What would Herbert say, dear—what would Herbert say?” Herbert being the Ascot Headmaster. Herbert then broke on to the scene and gave way to paroxysms of jealous rage. Another boy who came to this school was Pierre de Jaucourt, the son of Monsieur de Jaucourt, a great friend of my father’s. Pierre was one of the playfellows of[83] my childhood. He took part in the dramatic performances organised by Broadwood and myself in the Boot Room, which became more and more ambitious, and in one play the Devil appeared through a trap-door in a cloud of fire.

Broadwood and I were constantly making up topical duets modelled on those of Harry Nicholls and Herbert Campbell in the Drury Lane pantomime. But we were not satisfied with these scratch performances in the Boot Room, although we had a make-up box from Clarkson, and wigs, and we decided to act She Stoops to Conquer, which was at once put into rehearsal. I was cast for the part of Mr. Hardcastle, Hugo for that of Miss Hastings, Broadwood for that of Marlowe, Bell for that of Miss Hardcastle, and an overgrown boy called Pyke-Nott for the part of Tony Lumpkin. After a few rehearsals it was settled that the play should be done on a real stage, and that parents and others should be invited to witness the performance. Dresses were made for us in London, scenery was painted by Mr. Shelton, our drawing-master, and my father and mother came down to see the play.

Hugo looked a vision of beauty as Miss Hastings. Pyke-Nott was annoyed because he was not allowed to sing a song about Fred Archer in the tavern scene, instead of the real song which is a part of the text. It was thought that a song of which the refrain was, “Archer, Archer up,” would be an anachronism.

The play went off very well, and Hugo played a breakdown on the banjo between the acts, but when he had played three bars the bridge of his banjo fell with a crash, and the solo came to an end.

We kept up the custom of going expeditions, not long ones, but only to places like Pevensey and Hurstmonceux, which were quite close. We also went out riding with a riding-master on the Downs, and in the summer we sailed in sailing boats. Altogether it was an ideal school life. We found the work easy, and we all seemed to get quantities of prizes, but we learnt little. Hugo and I continued to play Spankaboo in our room, and Hugo would do anything in the world if I threatened to refuse to play. So much so, that one of the masters thought I was blackmailing him, and we were told to reveal our strange secret at once. This we both resolutely refused to do, protesting with tears that it was a private matter of no importance, and there the matter was allowed to rest, the master merely[84] saying that if he ever saw any signs of anything subterranean going on we should be punished.

I remember one curious episode happening. One of the masters found a letter addressed to one of the boys written to him by another boy. This was the text of the letter: “Dear Mister C.,—May I have my sausage next Sunday at breakfast because I am very hungry.”

Mr. C., it was discovered, had been regularly levying a tribute from his neighbour at breakfast for some weeks, and the other boy, a much smaller boy, had had to go without his sausage. Mr. C. was severely flogged in front of the whole school. Boys who went to Scotland for the holidays were allowed to leave a day before the others, and as we had an all day’s journey to Devonshire, we shared the same privilege; so did Pierre de Jaucourt, who went to France. This inspired Broadwood to make the following lampoon, which was good-naturedly but insistently chanted by the rest of the school on the day before we went away:

When we went home for the holidays for the first time from Eastbourne the train stopped at Slough. The St. Vincent’s term had ended a few days before the Ascot term, and there, on the platform of Slough Station, we saw the Headmaster of our Ascot school, surrounded by the first division and evidently enjoying a first division expedition.

“Why don’t you put your head out and say how do you do to them?” said my mother, but Hugo and I almost hid under the seat, and we lay right back from the windows, spellbound, till the train went on.

Broadwood and I used to meet in the holidays in London. Broadwood used to say to his parents that he was having luncheon with me in Charles Street, and I used to say I was having luncheon with Broadwood in Eccleston Square, but what really happened was that we used to go to a bun shop, or have no luncheon at all, as neither of us would be seen at luncheon with a friend in each other’s homes.

[85]

Broadwood said that his mother cross-questioned him about our house, and that he gave a most fantastic account of our mode of life.

While we were at school at Eastbourne many eventful things happened at home. In the summer holidays of 1886, Hugo and I went with my father to the Cowes Regatta.

In September of the same year my father, Hugo, and myself went for a long cruise in the Waterwitch. We started from Membland and stopped at Falmouth, and Mounts Bay, and saw over St. Michael’s Mount, and then we sailed to the Scilly Isles, where we spent a day in the wonderful garden of Tresco. At that time of year the sea in the Scilly Isles was as blue as the Mediterranean, especially when seen through the fuchsia hedges and the almost tropical vegetation of the Tresco gardens. We then sailed across the Irish Channel to Bantry Bay and up the Kenmare River and drove in an Irish car right across the mountains to Killarney.

Next year was Jubilee year. Both my eldest sisters were married that year. Hugo and I attended these weddings and the Jubilee procession as well, which we saw from Bath House, Piccadilly, but I don’t remember much about it, except the Queen’s bonnet, which had diamonds in front of it, and the German Crown Prince in his white uniform, but I remember the aspect of London before and after the Jubilee, the Venetian masts, the flags, the crowds, the carriages, the atmosphere of festivity, and the jokes about the Jubilee.

We went on acting a French play every year at Christmas, and it was before Margaret was married that we had our greatest success with a little one-act play by Dumas fils called Comme Elles sont Toutes, in which Margaret and Susan did the chief parts quite admirably, and in which I had a minor part. This was performed at Christmas 1886. After Elizabeth and Margaret were married, Susan and I and Hugo continued to act, and we did three plays in all: Les Rêves de Marguerite (1887); La Souris (1888); l’Amour de l’Art (by Labiche) (1889).

Another home excitement was the building of an organ in the house in Charles Street. It was by way of being a small organ at first, but it afterwards expanded into quite a respectable size, and had three manuals. This gave me a mania for everything to do with organs. I got to know every detail in the process of organ-building and every device, tubular-pneumatic,[86] and otherwise. The organ we had at Membland had been built by Mr. Hele of Plymouth, and when we went back to Membland, when the organ was being built in London, my mother said: “Don’t say anything to Mr. Hele about this, as he will be hurt at our not having employed him.” One day Mr. Hele came to tune the organ, and I disappeared with him, as was my wont, right under the staircase into the very entrails of the organ and watched him at his work. While we were there in the darkness and the confined space, I confessed to him the secret that we were having an organ built in London. When we came out he went straight to my mother and said that Messrs. Hele would have been only too glad to build an organ in London. When my mother asked me how I could have told Mr. Hele we were having an organ built in London, I said I thought that as we were right inside the organ, in the dark and in such a narrow space, that it wouldn’t matter, and that he would forget. When my mother told Chérie of this episode, Chérie laughed more than I ever saw her laugh, and I couldn’t understand why; I was, in fact, a little offended.

[87]

I enjoyed Eton from the first moment I arrived. The surprise and the relief at finding one was treated like a grown-up person, that nobody minded if one had a sister called Susan or not, that all the ridiculous petty conventions of private-school life counted for nothing, were inexpressibly great.

Directly I arrived I was taken up to my tutor in his study, which was full of delightful books. He took me to the matron, Miss Copeman, whom we called MeDame. I was then shown my room, a tiny room on the second floor in one of the houses opposite to the school-yard. As I sat in my room, boy after boy strolled in, and instead of asking one idiotic questions they carried on rational conversation.

The next day I met Broadwood, who was at another house, and we walked up to Windsor in the afternoon. He told me all the things I had better know at once; such as not to walk on the wrong side of the street when one went up town; never to roll up an umbrella or to turn down the collar of one’s greatcoat; how to talk to the masters and how to talk of them; what shops to go to, and what were the sock-shops that no self-respecting boy went to. There were several such which I never entered the whole time I was at Eton, and yet I suppose they must have been patronised by someone.

The day after that came the entrance examination, in which I did badly indeed, only taking Middle Fourth. My tutor said: “You have been taught nothing at all.” I was in the twenty-seventh division—the last division of the school but three, and up to Mr. Heygate. I was in the French division of M. Hua, who directly he put me on to read saw that I knew French, a fact which I had concealed during the whole time I was at my first private school. I messed with Milton and[88] Herbert Scott, and after the first fortnight I became one of the two fags apportioned to Heywood-Lonsdale.

The captain of the House was Charlie Wood, Lord Halifax’s eldest son, and his younger brother, Francis, was a contemporary of mine and in the same house, but Francis, who was the most delightful of boys and the source and centre of endless fun, died at Eton in the Lent half of 1889.

Fagging was a light operation. One had to make one’s fagmaster tea, two pieces of toast, and sometimes boil some eggs, show that one’s hands were clean, and that was all. Then one was free to cook buttered eggs or fry sausages for one’s own tea.

On my first Sunday at Eton I had breakfast with Arthur Ponsonby, who was at Cornish’s, and I was invited to luncheon at Norman Tower, Windsor, where the Ponsonbys lived. There I found my Uncle Henry, my Aunt M’aimée, my cousins, Betty and Maggie and Johnny, and the Mildmay boys, who were also at Eton then.

In the afternoon we went for a walk in the private grounds of the Home Park with Johnny, and he took us to a grotto called the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was supposed to represent the exact dimensions of that infamous prison. It had a small, thick, glazed glass window at the top of it. On the floor was a heap of stones. Johnny suggested our throwing stones at the window, and soon a spirited stone-throwing competition began. The window was already partly shattered when warning was given that someone was coming. We thought it might be the Queen, and we darted out of the grotto and ran for our lives.

The whole of my Eton life was starred with these Sundays at the Norman Tower, which I looked forward to during the whole week. Maggie would take us sometimes into the Library and the State Rooms, and we used sometimes to hear the approaching footsteps of some of the Royal Family, and race for our life through the empty rooms.

One day we came upon the Empress Frederick, who was quietly enjoying the pictures by herself.

Sometimes in the afternoon Betty would take me up to her room and read out books to me, but that was later.

Our house played football with Evans’, Radcliffe’s, and Ainger’s. We had to play four times a week, and though I was[89] always a useless football player, I thoroughly enjoyed these games, especially the changing afterwards (when we roasted chestnuts in the fire as we undressed), and the long teas. Milton, my mess-mate, was an enthusiastic, but not a skilful chemist, and one day he blew off his eyebrows while making an experiment.

At the end of my first half we had a concert in the house, in which I took part in the chorus. I had organ lessons from Mr. Clapshaw, and during my first half I once had the treat of hearing Jimmy Joynes preach in Lower Chapel. He had been lower master for years, and had just left Eton; he came down to pay a visit, and this was the last time he ever preached at Eton. His sermons were of the anecdotal type, full of quaint, pathetic, and dramatic stories of the triumph of innocence. They were greatly enjoyed by the boys. In the evening, after prayers, my tutor used to come round the boys’ rooms and talk to every boy. He used to come into the room saying: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ci que ça?” My friends were Dunglass, Herbert Scott, Milton, Stewart, and Brackley. After Eton days I never saw Stewart again till 1914, when the war had just begun. I met him then in Paris. He was in the Intelligence. He had been imprisoned in Germany before the war, and he was killed one day while riding through the town of Braisne on the Aisne.

Dunglass was peculiarly untidy in his clothes, and his hat was always brushed round the wrong way. My tutor used to say to him: “You’re covered with garbage from head to foot,” and sometimes to me: “If your friends and relations could see you now they would have a fit.”

In the evenings the Lower boys did their work in pupil room. Boys in fifth form, when they were slack, did the same as a punishment, and this was called penal servitude. While they prepared their lessons or did their verses, my tutor would be taking older boys in what was called private; this in our case meant special lessons in Greek. One night these older boys were construing Xenophon, and a boy called Rashleigh could not translate the phrase, “Τοὺς πρὸς ἐμὲ λέγοντας.”[3] My tutor repeated it over and over again, and then appealed to us Lower boys. I knew what it meant, but when I was asked I repeated[90] exactly what Rashleigh had said, like one hypnotised, much to my tutor’s annoyance.

Sometimes when my tutor was really annoyed he would say: “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think what a ghastly fool you are?” Another time he said to a boy: “You’ve no more manners than a cow, and a bad cow, too.” When the word δύναμαι occurred in Greek, my tutor made a great point of distinguishing the pronunciation of δύναμαι and δυνάμει. δύναμαι he pronounced more broadly. When we read out the word δύναμαι we made no such distinction, and he used to say, “Do you mean dunamẏ or dunamai?” It was our great delight to draw this expression from him, and whenever the word δύναμαι occurred we were careful to accent the last syllable as slightly as possible. It never failed.

We did verses once a week. A little later most of these were done in the house by a boy called Malcolm, who had the talent for dictating verses, on any subject, while he was eating his breakfast, with the necessary number of mistakes and to the exact degree of badness needed for the standard of each boy, for if they were at all too good my tutor would write on them, “Who is the poet?” In return for this I did the French for him and a number of other boys. Latin verses both then, and until I left Eton, were the most important event of the week’s work. When one’s verses had been done and signed by one’s tutor one gave a gasp of relief. Sometimes he tore them up and one had to do them again. I was a bad writer of Latin verse. The kind of mistakes I made exasperated my tutor to madness, especially when I ventured on lyrics which he implored me once never to attempt again. In spite of the trouble verses gave one, even when they were partly done by someone else, one preferred doing them to a long passage of Latin prose, which was sometimes a possible alternative. It is a strange fact, but none the less true, that boys can acquire a mechanical facility for doing Latin verse of a kind, with the help of a gradus, without knowing either what the English or the Latin is about.

The subjects given for Latin verse, what we called sense for verses, were sometimes amusing. The favourite subject from the boys’ point of view was Spring. It was a favourite subject among the masters, too. It afforded opportunities for innumerable clichés, which were easy to find. One of the masters[91] giving out sense for verses used to say: “This week we will do verses”—and then, as if it were something unheard of—“on Spring. Take down some hints. The grass is green, sheep bleat, sound of water is heard in the distance—might perhaps get in desilientis aquæ.”

The same master said one day, to a boy who had done some verses on Charles II., “Castus et infelix is hardly an appropriate epithet for Charles II.” Once we had a lyric on a toad. “Avoid the gardener, a dangerous man,” was one of the hints which I rendered:

The whole of my first half was like Paradise, and I came back to Membland for the holidays quite radiant.

When I went back for my second half I was in the Upper Fourth in the Lower Master’s Division. The Lower Master was Austen Leigh and the boys called him the Flea. I started, when I was up to him, the fiction that I could scarcely write, that the process was so difficult to me that a totally illegible script was all that could be expected from me. This was completely successful throughout the half, but in Trials I did well. I had started off by getting the holiday task prize, the holiday task being the Lord of the Isles, and as I had read a great part of it in the train going back, and as none of the other boys had read any of it, I got the prize.

Those holidays Chérie took Susan and myself to Paris. We stayed at the Hôtel Normandy in the Rue de l’Échelle, and I started from Eton the day before the result of Trials was declared. The day we arrived in Paris a blue telegram came telling us the result. It ran as follows: “Brinkman divinity prize, distinction in Trials, Trial Prize.” This meant that for the distinction, one had a cross next to one’s name in the school list for the rest of one’s Eton career. The Trial prize meant one was first in Trials in the division. It was a complete triumph, and the Lower Master wrote in my report: “Had I known what I discovered at the end of the half that he could write perfectly well, I would have torn up every scrap of his work during the half.” But it was an idle regret, as he did not discover it until too late. We spent the whole of the holidays in Paris and enjoyed it wildly.

Looking at a letter which I wrote from Paris (March 1888)[92] at this time, I see we did some strenuous sight-seeing. We went to Notre Dame des Victoires, to the Musée Grévin, to Sainte Geneviève, la Foire de Jambon, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and the Bois de Boulogne; we breakfasted at the Café de Paris, with anisette at the end of the meal; went to hear “la Belle musique sacrée” at the Châtelet, where Mademoiselle Kraus sang and Mounet Sully recited; we visited the Panthéon, saw Victor Hugo’s tomb, the Musée Cluny; had breakfast at Foyod’s, and saw the Archbishop of Paris officiate at Notre Dame, and went to the Louvre. All this was in Holy Week.

The next week we went to Versailles, the Sainte Chapelle, and the Invalides; saw Reichemberg and Samary act in the Le Monde ou l’on s’ennuie at the Théâtre français and Michel Strogoff at the Châtelet.

On Monday, 2nd April, I wrote home: “Nous allons jeter une plume et la suivre.” We also saw a play of Georges Ohnet’s at the Porte Saint Martin called La Grande Marnière and Le Prophète at the opera, with Jean de Reske singing the part of the false Messiah. We saw this from a little box high up in the fourth tier, and when we arrived we found a lady and a gentleman in our seats. We had expressly paid for the front seats. Chérie was indignant, and had it out with the gentleman, who gave way under protest. “Vous voyez,” said the lady, “Monsieur vous cède sa place.” “C’est ce qu’un Monsieur doit faire,” said Chérie. “On rencontre des gens,” said the lady, shrugging her shoulders.

We did not go to see L’Abbé Constantin, as Chérie said it was “une pièce de carême.”

On our last night in Paris we went to see a farce called Cocart et Bicoquet at the Renaissance. This play had been recommended to Chérie by a French friend of hers, who thought we did not understand French enough to follow dialogue. After the first act, Chérie became uneasy, and no sooner was the second act well under way than Chérie took us away. It was, she said to me, no play for Susan. She added that whenever she had tried to distract Susan’s attention from the more scabrous moments by saying, “Regarde cette manche,” and by calling her attention to interesting details in the toilettes of the audience, I had recalled Susan’s attention to the play by my only too well-timed laughter.

The year after this, 1889, we again went to Paris—Chérie,[93] Susan, and myself—and this year Hugo came with us. Great preparations were being made for the Exhibition. It was not yet open, but the Eiffel Tower was finished, and we saw the reconstruction of the Le Vieux Paris and a representation of Latude escaping from the Bastille.

We also saw Maître Guérin performed at the Théâtre français, with Got Worms, Baretta, and Pierson in the cast. Got’s performance as the old, infinitely cunning, and scheming notaire, who is finally deserted by his hitherto submissive wife, was said to be the finest thing he ever did.

We saw two melodramas—Robert Macaire and La Porteuse de Pain; Zampa at the Opéra Comique and Belle Maman, Sardou’s comedy at the Gymnase; and Chérie and I went to see Sarah Bernhardt in perhaps the worst play to which she ever lent her incomparable genius, and which, I imagine, she chose simply to give herself the opportunity of playing a quiet death scene. It was an adaptation of the English novel, As in a Looking-Glass. Bad or good, I enjoyed it, and wrote home a detailed criticism of the play. This is what I wrote: “The adaptation of the book is bad. They evidently think you are perfectly acquainted with the book, and the sharp outline and light and shade of character is not sufficiently marked. In the first act you see about a dozen people who come in and who don’t let you know who they are, and who never appear again, and you do not arrive at the dramatic part till the last act.

“The story is briefly thus: Léna is staying with Mrs. Broadway, very Sainte Nitouche! everyone admiring her and all the octogenaires in love with her. She (whose passé is not sans tache) is under the power of a certain Jack Fortinbras, who forces her, under the penalty of unveiling her past, to marry a certain Lord Ramsey. Léna has in her possession a letter which Ramsey wrote to a Lady Dower, whose name is also Léna, and the letter is in very affectionate terms. Ramsey is engaged to Beatrice, and Léna shows this letter to Beatrice and says it was to her! Of course, Beatrice thinks Ramsey un lâche and leaves the house, saying her marriage is impossible, and leaving a letter for Ramsey to that effect. Act II. is in Léna’s house. Fortinbras comes and plays cards with a young man and cheats. Ramsey sees this, and Fortinbras is turned out of the house.

“Act III., Monte Carlo.—Léna is staying there with Ramsey,[94] with whom she is now desperately in love. Fortinbras appears and asks for money, which she gives. Ramsey comes in and asks why she is agitated. She says she is helpless, alone. He confesses his love for her, and she, in a nervous excitement, says, “Je t’adore,” and so scheming to marry for money, she finds she is dreadfully in love with him.

“Act IV.—They are married and in Scotland. Fortinbras appears tracked by detectives and asks for 200,000 (pounds or francs?) at once, or he tells of her passé. Then Sarah Bernhardt was superb. It was quite impossible for her to get the money, and she is so happy with her husband. At this crisis Ramsey comes in and half strangles Fortinbras, who, when let go, reveals all Léna’s past. At the words, ‘Cette femme m’aimait une fois,’ Léna jette un cri d’angoisse, I would have given anything for you to have seen her act that scene. Ramsey hears it all, and, when given the proofs that are in letters, throws them into the fire, and Fortinbras is given to the detectives and Ramsey is alone with Léna and tells her that he really believes what the man said. She cannot deny it, and confesses the whole thing. Her acting was supreme, and Ramsey says to her, ‘Et m’avez vous jamais aimé?’ Then she gives way and bursts into sanglots, and implores him to believe her, and that she adored him. He refuses to believe her and goes out. Then all is pantomime. She takes up a knife, throws it down, gets a little bottle of ‘morphine,’ drinks it, sits down with Ramsey’s photograph in her hand; then come seven minutes of silence. All pantomime, but what pantomime; she quietly dies. I have never seen such a splendid bit of acting. It was lovely. As she is dying, Ramsey tries to come in, but the door is locked. He comes in at the window in an agony of grief and forgives her. Just when he is at the door she stretches out her hand and falls back épuisée. It was beautiful.”

I remember a doctor saying, as we went out of the theatre: “Mais ce n’est pas comme cela qu’on meurt de la morphine,”—upon which someone else answered: “Alors, ceux qui ont dit: Voilà une mort réaliste ont dit une sottise. Pourtant elle a été dite.”

We went to the cemetery of the Père Lachaise, and the tombs that I cited in a letter are those of Héloïse and Abelard, Balzac, Alfred de Musset, Bizet, and Géricault.

I went back to Eton for my first summer half, which is[95] said to be the most blissful moment of Eton life, and I think in my case it was. The first thing one had to do was to pass swimming. I had learnt to swim at Eastbourne, and I swam as well as I ever did before or afterwards, but to pass, one had to swim in a peculiar way. The passing was supervised by my tutor, and I failed to pass twice, chiefly, I think, owing to the curious nature of my dive from the boat, which took the form of a high leap into the air and a descent on all-fours into the water. “Swim to the bank,” said my tutor, much to my disappointment. The second time I failed again, but there was soon a third trial, and I passed. I at once hired an outrigged gig with another boy, and then a period of unmixed enjoyment began: rows up to Surley every afternoon and ginger-beer in the garden there, bathes in the evening at Cuckoo Weir, teas at Little Brown’s, where one ordered new potatoes and asparagus, or cold salmon and cucumber, gooseberries and cream, raspberries and cream, and every fresh delicacy of the season in turn. Little Brown’s, the school sock-shop next to Ingalton Drake’s, the stationer’s, which we still called Williams’, was then controlled by Brown, who was a comfortable lady rather like the pictures of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She was assisted by Phœbe, who kept order with great spirit, in a seething mass of unruly boys, all shouting at the top of their voices and clamouring to be served first. Brown’s was open before early school, and if one had the energy, one got up in time to go and have a coffee and a bun there. It was well worth the effort, for the buns were slit open and filled with butter, and then, not toasted, but baked in the oven, and were crisp, hot, and delicious. Brown and Phœbe had the most marvellous memory for faces I have ever come across. They would remember a boy years afterwards, and when I was at Eton I used often to hear Brown say to Phœbe, as some very middle-aged man passed the window, “There’s Mr. So-and-so.”

There was a pandemonium in the front of the shop; in the little room at the back of the shop only swells went. There was another sock-shop called Rowland’s, near Barnes Pool, which had a garden and an arbour, and sold scalloped prawns in winter and wonderful strawberry messes in the summer. Then farther up town there was Califano, who was celebrated for his fiery temper, and in Windsor there was[96] Leighton’s. But Brown’s was the smallest and cosiest of all the sock-shops, and nothing at any of the others could vie with her hot buns in the early morning.

I was now in Remove, and once more under the tuition of Mr. Heygate. We no longer translated Greek stories and epigrams from the delightful collection called Sertum, which was used in the Fourth Form. This book is now out of print, but I fortunately possess a copy. It is a most delightful anthology of short anecdotes and poems. On the other hand, we did Sidgwick’s Greek exercises, a book of very short English stories, which have to be translated into Greek. It is one of the most charming books ever written, and even now I can read it when I can’t read anything else.

I can’t remember what we read in school that half, but I remember reading Monte Cristo out of school. My mother had given me an illustrated edition of it on my birthday. On the afternoon of a whole school day I was reading of Dantès’ escape from the Chateau d’If, and I became oblivious of the passage of time. The school clock chimed the quarters, but I heeded them not. Just before the school hour was ended the boys’ maid came in and told me I was missing school. I flung away my book and ran breathless to upper school, where I found the boys just going out. I had missed school, an unheard-of thing to do, which meant probably writing out endless exercises of Bradley’s Latin prose. Each division had what was called a Prepostor, a boy who kept a book in which he was supposed to note all boys who were absent, and to find out if they were staying out, which meant staying out of lessons, that is to say, staying indoors on account of sickness, in which case the Dame of the house had to sign a statement to that effect in the prepostor’s book, and add also whether they were excused lessons; if they were not excused lessons they had to do written work in the house. On this day the prepostor had not noticed my absence, nor had Mr. Heygate, and I joined the crowd of boys running downstairs as if I had been there all the time.

There were two sorts of masters at Eton—those who could keep order and those who couldn’t. With those who could, there was never any question of ragging. Boys knew at once what was impossible and accepted it. They also knew in a moment when it was possible, and they lost no minute of their opportunities, and at once began to harass the wretched master[97] with importunate, absurd, and impertinent questions, seeing how far they could go in veiled insolence without overstepping the line of danger. It was the masters who taught mathematics and French who had the worst time, with the exception of Monsieur Hua, who was an admirable teacher and stood no nonsense.

In Remove we did science. There were three science masters—Mr. Porter, Mr. Drew, and Mr. Hale (Badger). I was taught by them all in turn. Mr. Drew used to produce a mysterious and rather dirty-looking bit of stony metal or metallic stone, and say in a confidential whisper: “Do you know what that is? It’s quartz.” Badger Hale had only one experiment. It was a split football which was made to revolve by turning a handle, and proved, but hardly to our satisfaction, the centrifugal tendency of the earth. Mr. Porter’s science lectures, on the other hand, were fraught with excitement. Apparatus after apparatus was brought in, and experiment after experiment was attempted, sometimes involving explosions. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes, just at the critical moment we would laugh. Mr. Porter would say: “I have been three days trying to get this experiment ready, and now you have spoilt it all.” “Please, sir, we were not laughing,” we would say. “You were looking as if you were laughing, and that disturbs me just as much,” Mr. Porter would answer. It was no use accusing us of laughing, because we always denied it at once, and after a time he would always say: “Write out the verbs in mi for looking as if you were laughing.” At the end of the half, Mr. Porter gave what was called a “Good Boys’ Lecture,” at which the first nine boys of all the various sets he taught attended, if their work had been satisfactory throughout the term. I went to three of these or more. They were lectures with coloured magic-lantern slides, showing views of places all over the world, from Indus to the Pole. Never have I enjoyed anything more. There was a slide of Vesuvius in eruption, and slides of Venice and New Zealand, which were entrancingly beautiful. But one half, the Good Boy Lecture was confined to Mr. Porter’s holiday trip to the Isle of Skye, and the slides were not coloured. This lecture was a disappointment, and I am afraid, from the boys’ point of view, a failure. Another remarkable lecture Mr. Porter gave was on soap-bubbles. Films of soap bubble were projected by some device on to a screen, so that you saw the prismatic colours enlarged and as vivid as rainbows. While this was going on,[98] a boy called Harben, who had a fruity alto voice, sang a sentimental song into a tube; the vibrations of the sound had a strange effect on the soap-bubble films, and made them change rapidly into a multitude of kaleidoscopic shapes and gyrations and symmetrical patterns. So Mr. Porter was the precursor of Skriabin’s Symphony, in which the music is assisted by visible colour.

Mr. Porter gave a series of lectures on electricity out of school. I and a boy in my house, Francis Egerton, applied to go to these. Mr. Porter somewhat reluctantly and suspiciously allowed us to come. They were rather stiff and advanced lectures, involving a good deal of formula writing on the blackboard with pi and other mysterious signs, but there were also experiments. We did not understand one word of it, but soon a difficult experiment was begun, which Mr. Porter said had taken him days to prepare. He was doubtful whether it would succeed. This was a rash remark. Egerton and I rocked with laughter. We laughed till we cried. There was no question of looking as if we were laughing. We were not allowed to go to any more lectures on electricity. There was an assistant masters’ prize given for science, and it was either that or the following year that the subject was physiography. I went in for this prize, staying out the whole Sunday before so as to have time to read the book on which we were to be examined, a short book by Huxley. I competed and won the prize. When it came to choosing a book for my prize, I chose The Epic of Hades, by Lewis Morris. I had to go to Mr. Cornish, who was not yet Vice-Provost, to have my name written in it. He was disgusted with my choice, and he advised me to change the book. But I was obdurate. I had chosen the book for its nice smooth binding, and nothing would make me reconsider my decision. “It’s poor stuff,” said Mr. Cornish; “it’s like boys’ Latin verses when they’re very good.”

There were two other French masters besides M. Hua—M. Roublot and M. Banck. M. Banck was sublimely strict, but M. Roublot was easygoing, good-natured, but lacking in authority. During his lesson we used to read the newspapers and write our letters, but we liked him too much to rag. We used to bring in all our occupations for the week, and stacks of writing-paper. One day when this was happening, and every boy was pleasantly but busily engaged in some occupation of his own, who should[99] walk in but the Headmaster, Dr. Warre. The newspapers and the writing-paper and envelopes disappeared as by magic, and M. Roublot at once put on the safest boy to construe. Dr. Warre, who had grasped the situation, told us that our conduct was disgraceful.

He often made sudden visits to divisions, and stood up by the master’s desk while the work went on. These visits were always alarming, and one day, when he had just gone out of the room, one of the boys said: “Lord, how that man makes me sweat!” But there was one other French master who was not French, but far more formidable than all the rest, and this was Mr. Frank Tarver. Mr. Tarver was a perfect French scholar, and when he explained what the word bock meant, and said: “When you go to a café in Paris you sit down and say, ‘Garçon, un bock,’” one felt that one had before one a perfect man of the world. But sometimes there were no bounds to his anger, especially if he found that one had not looked out words in the dictionary, or if one translated encore by again. One day I remember his being in such a passion that he took a drawer from his desk and flung it on the ground. It is a great thing to be able to do this effectually. The boys quaked. Most of us liked him very much all the same; but to some he was a terror.

Mathematical lessons were always a difficulty in my case. I should never have passed Trials in mathematics had it not been for Euclid, which counted together with arithmetic and algebra. Fortunately I could do Euclid without difficulty, so I always got enough marks in that subject to make up for getting none at all in the two other branches of the science.

Every week we had a task called an extra-work to do out of school, which was meant to represent an hour’s work of mathematics, and consisted of sums in arithmetic and algebra. It generally took me more than an hour, and I never managed to get a sum right. When we used to get into hopeless arrears with our work, and everything was in an inextricable tangle, there was always one solution, and that was to stay out; but to be excused lessons one had to go to bed, and for that it was necessary to catch cold. But just an ordinary attack of Friday fever was enough to stay out. We complained of a bad headache and incipient insomnia, and Miss Copeman let us stay out at once, thinking it might be the beginning of measles, and we sat in her sitting-room reading a novel till the crisis was over.

[100]

At the slightest sign of a real streaming cold my tutor used to pack us off to bed and keep us there till it was gone, and we were allowed bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the boys’ library, and my tutor would lend us books from his own library.

Each boy in a division had to be prepostor for the division for a week at a time in turn. With the prepostor’s book one marked in the boys who were absent, either from school or chapel. One had a list of the boys’ names at the end of the book and ticked them off as they walked into chapel. This sounds a simple thing to do, but as the boys used to come in at the last minute and all together, and one had to take up the book to a master before chapel began, I found it flustering to a degree, and never knew if I had marked everyone in or not. I had to go to the Headmaster once for losing the prepostor’s book, and he said I had played fast and loose with a position of grave responsibility, and gave me three exercises of Bradley’s Prose to write out.

After the summer half I was in Arthur Benson’s division. We read passages from the Odyssey, Virgil, and Horace’s Odes, the Second Book, and for the first time I enjoyed some Latin. I thought Horace’s Odes delightful. Arthur Benson used to make us draw pictures illustrating episodes in Greek history, and he would stick them up on the wall if they were good. One of the subjects suggested was the bridge of boats that Xerxes threw across the sea, and I remember drawing a magnificent picture, with the hills of the Chersonese in the background, copied from some illustrations of the Crimean War, and a realistic flat bridge made of planks placed on broad punts. He was delighted with the picture and put it up at once, and sometimes he used to take older boys to see it.

There was not much religious instruction at Eton. We construed the Greek Testament on Monday mornings, but this was a Greek lesson like any other; and Sunday was made hideous by an exercise called Sunday Questions, which had to be done on that day, and which we always put off doing to the last possible moment. These were questions on historical points in the Old Testament, and entailed finding out the answers from some such book as Maclear’s Old Testament History, and writing four large sheets of MSS. The questions were sometimes puzzling, and we used to consult Miss Copeman,[101] and sometimes, as a last resort, my tutor, who used to say: “I can’t think what Mr. Benson”—or whoever it might be—“can mean.” I have still got a copy of Sunday Questions done at Eton. In this set we were told to give the probable dates showing the duration of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and what was going on in any other countries. Another question is: “Why was Pharaoh Necho against Judah? How did he treat their successive kings?” And the last question (there were several others) was: “Distinguish carefully between Jehoiakim and Jehoiakin.” I seem to have answered these questions rather evasively, but I got seven marks out of ten.

Besides this, boys got their religion from the sermons in Chapel, of which they were highly critical. They enjoyed a good preacher, and some of the masters and guests were good preachers, but the boys were merciless critics of a bad or ludicrous preacher, and there were many of these. One of the masters preached symbolic sermons about the meaning of the Four Beasts. Another used to begin his sermons by saying: “The story of the Prodigal Son is too well known to repeat. We all know how⸺” and then elaborately retell what was supposed to be too well known to tell at all. Before boys were confirmed they received special tuition on religious and moral topics from their tutor, but I missed it by having measles. So I was confirmed in the holidays, and just before my confirmation it struck my mother that I was singularly unprepared, so she sent me to see my Uncle Henry Ponsonby’s brother, who was a clergyman. We called him Uncle Fred; his sister had married one of my uncles. He had a great sense of humour, and was rather shy. He was also extremely High Church. When I arrived with a note from my mother, in which he was asked to examine me in theology, he was embarrassed, and he said: “Well, I will ask you your catechism, What is your name, N. or M.?” And then he laughed and said, “I think that will do.” When I told my mother this, she sent me to another clergyman who did talk, but confined the conversation to moral generalities, and said no word about the catechism. So I may say I had no religious instruction at school during all my school-time, for which I have always been profoundly grateful.

Music lessons became a difficulty and a stumbling-block as time went on. I had organ lessons, and they were, of course, given out of school, and these lessons and the necessary practice[102] took up a lot of one’s spare time, besides having to give way to work. Mr. Joseph Barnby, the organist and the head of the music masters, said: “Your parents pay for your music lessons just as they pay for your Latin lessons, and so you ought to take just as much trouble about them.” This was quite true, but the other masters did not see the matter in the same light. They couldn’t be expected to take music lessons seriously, and said that music must in all cases always give way to work.

The result was one scamped one’s practice and shirked one’s music lesson on every possible opportunity. Matters came to such a pitch that I was sent for by Mr. Barnby. The situation was aggravated because Dunglass and I had unwittingly offended the violin master, and had gone into his room while he was giving a lesson to another boy, and had then shut the door rather more violently than was necessary. Mr. Barnby was indignant. My brother John had been one of his best pupils. He said our conduct was scandalous. I had employed base subterfuges to shirk music lessons, and I and Dunglass had insulted dear kind Mr. Morsh. We apologised to Mr. Morsh, and things went more smoothly; but I gave up the organ and had lessons on the pianoforte instead. Mr. Barnby was quite right, but he got no sympathy from the other masters, who continued to treat music as an utterly unimportant side issue which must give way to everything else. The result being, of course, that directly boys found that music lessons made it more difficult for them to get through their work, they gave up learning music. I have never stopped meeting people in after life who are naturally musical, and bitterly regretted not having been taught music seriously as boys; and if parents were wise they would insist on music being taken seriously, if they pay for music lessons for their boys. But as yet parents have done no such thing. Besides music lessons, there was the musical society, which consisted of an orchestra and a chorus, and performed a cantata at the school concert at the end of the half. I belonged to this later, and we sang Parry’s setting to Swinburne’s Eton “Ode” at the Eton Tercentenary Concert in June 1891. Mr. Barnby used to conduct, and had an amazing knack of discovering someone who was not singing, or singing a wrong note. The concerts were, I used to think, intensely enjoyable. There was an atmosphere of triumph about them when the swells used to walk in at the[103] beginning in evening clothes, and coloured scarves, which stood for various achievements either on the river, the cricket or the football field. As each hero walked in there were thunders of applause. Then a treble or an alto used to sing a song that reduced the audience to tears: “Lay my head on your shoulder, Daddy,” or “The Better Land.” There was a boy called Clarke, who used to sing year after year till his voice broke. He had a melting voice. During my last half at Eton there was a boy called Herz, who sang “Si vous n’avez rien à me dire,” with startling dramatic effect, exactly like a French professional. But the best moment of all was when the Captain of the Boats sang the solo in the Eton Boating Song, whether he had got a voice or not, and then the whole school sang the “Carmen Etonense” at the end. What an audience it was! How they yelled and roared when a song pleased them! I used sometimes to go to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, and Sir Walter Parratt used to let me sit in the organ loft. I heard Bach’s “Passion Music of St. Matthew” in this way, and Sir Walter said: “You must be as still as a mouse.”

I have said there were two kinds of masters: those who were ragged and those who were not. The master who was most ragged was a mathematical master called Mr. Mozley. He punished, but could never stop the stream of impertinent comment that went on through the hours of his instruction. One day we got a boy called Studd to practise “God save the Queen” at his open window. His window looked out on to a yard, and Mr. Mozley’s schoolroom was on the ground floor of the house next door to ours and looked out on to the same yard. The windows were open. It was a hot summer’s afternoon, and the strains of “God save the Queen” came in through Mr. Mozley’s window. Every time the tune began we stood up. “Sit down,” cried the Mo, or Ikey Mo, as he was called. “National Anthem, sir,” we said; “we must stand up.” There was a short pause. Then the tune began again. Again we all stood up. Mr. Mozley rushed to the window, but there was no sign of any violinist. For ten minutes there was no interruption, and then, just when Mr. Mozley, by a shower of punishments, thought he had got the division in hand once more, the tune began again, and again we all stood up with plaintive, resigned faces, as though nobody minded the interruption more than we did.

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Another master who was mercilessly ragged was Mr. Bouchier,[4] who was deaf, and afterwards a famous Times correspondent at Sofia—a man who could do what he liked with the Bulgars, but who could not manage a division of Eton boys. The boys took mice into his schoolroom, and ultimately he had to go away.

There were masters who were stimulating teachers and roused the interest of boys in topics outside the ordinary routine of work, and others who kept scrupulously to the routine. The latter were the fairest, for when outside topics were discussed probably only a minority of the boys listened. It was above the heads of many. Arthur Benson kept scrupulously to the routine; he made it as interesting as he could, but rarely diverged on to stray topics, and never on to such topics that would only interest a few of the boys. Edward Lyttelton did exactly the opposite. When I was in his division there were about half a dozen boys who were advanced, and had got shoved up into his division by a rapid rise. The others were solid, stolid dunces. Edward Lyttelton devoted his time to the intelligent, and spent much time in conversation on such topics as ritual in Church, the reign of Charlemagne, and the acting at the Comédie française. He carried on teaching by asking a quantity of questions which entailed a great deal of interesting comment and argument. In the meantime the dunces ragged. I was good at answering his questions, but I joined in the ragging, nevertheless, partly from a sense of loyalty to raggers in general. The result was that at the end of the half I was top of his division for the school-time, but I forfeited the prize owing, as he said in my report, to my incorrigible babyishness. My tutor thought this unfair, and gave me a book instead of the prize. Mr. Rawlins, who was afterwards Lower Master and then Vice-Provost, was a good teacher, but his chief hobby was grammar, and he talked far above our heads. I startled him one day. We were construing an Ode of Horace, where a phrase occurred mentioning the difficulty of removing her cubs from, I think, a Gætulan lioness.[5] He said, “There is a parallel to that in French poetry.” I[105] said, “Yes,” and quoted the lines from Hernani I had known for so long:

He was dumbstruck.

I was two years a lower boy, and reached the lower division of fifth form by September 1889. Hugo arrived at Eton, and we shared a room together. We messed together with Dunglass, who had an order at Little Brown’s of a shilling a day. Every day on the sideboard of the passage a large plate used to await us in a brown paper parcel containing eggs and bacon or sausages or fish. My tutor changed his house, and we exchanged the convenient house opposite the school-yard for a house that was once Marindin’s, on the Etonwick road. It was far to go, and one had to get up early if one wished for coffee and a bun at Little Brown’s before early school.

Dunglass and I used to read a good many books. Rider Haggard and Edna Lyall were our favourite authors; Stevenson got a second or third place; but Jane Eyre and Ben Hur were approved of, and Monte Cristo got the first prize of all. After Rider Haggard and Edna Lyall, I had a passion for Marion Crawford’s books and read every one I could get hold of. I have still got a list of the books I read in the year 1889, marked according to merit. It is as follows:

The reason the last two have no comments was probably because the red ink in which the comments were made had run out. I remember being particularly thrilled by Jane Eyre, and so was Dunglass, who read it at the same time.

The 4th of June was an excitement for boys who were just beginning their Eton career, but older boys were most blasé about it and preferred short leave. We made great preparations[107] for my first 4th of June; grease spots were ironed out of the tablecloth, everything that looked untidy was put away; the window-box, which did duty for a garden, was prepared and decked. I struck out a bold note in my window-box by having a fountain in it, made by Mr. Duffield of High Street, according to my instructions. There was a square tin basin and a fountain in the middle of it, which was fed from a tank which was hung high up by the side of the window. The fountain worked successfully, but made a great mess, and the boys’ maid had no patience with it. When my tutor came round in the evening, the night before the 4th of June, he said the room looked like a whited sepulchre. I had visitors on the 4th of June. Chérie came, and I forget which other members of the family.

Once every half the Headmaster used to ask Hugo and myself to breakfast. This we enjoyed; it was an excellent breakfast, with lots of sausages. The Headmaster used to look at the Times, comment on the House of Commons, quote Horace, and ask after John and Cecil. Other masters asked one to breakfast as well, and I think few things gave the boys so much pleasure. They used to discuss every detail of the breakfast with the other boys afterwards, and retail everything the master had said. I enjoyed my breakfasts with Mr. Impey most; he used to tell me about books, and we used to discuss Rider Haggard and Stevenson. I greatly preferred Rider Haggard, and I had just read King Solomon’s Mines, and had one night sat up late reading She.

Long leave and short leave were two great excitements. When I went for short leave I used to go by the earliest possible train and arrive at my sister Margaret’s house long before breakfast. When long leave came about, we always went to a play on Saturday night, and I remember seeing Captain Swift at the Haymarket, and Coquelin in L’Étourdi. For my long leave of the summer of 1889, I had been looking forward for days to going to see Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca, but when I came up to London, I found to my horror that Chérie and my mother had both been told it was too horrible a play to go and see. My eloquent advocacy overcame Chérie’s scruples. “Vraiment,” she said, “tu serais un superbe avocat.” And she, Margaret, and I went off to the Lyceum and thoroughly enjoyed Sarah’s harrowing and electric performance. While we were[108] having dinner, before starting, someone who was there said that two men who had been to see the play had come out in the middle. Chérie, who by that time had decided we were to go, said they must have been des poules mouillées.

I think it was in 1890 that Queen Victoria opened the New Schools at Eton and made a speech. And one summer while I was at Eton, the German Emperor inspected the Eton Volunteers. While he was doing this on horseback, a boy called Cunliffe let off his rifle and the German Emperor’s horse bolted into the playing fields.

Well-known people used to come and lecture at the literary society sometimes, but the only famous man I heard while I was at Eton was Mr. Gladstone, who lectured at the literary society in March 1891, on Artemis, as revealed in Homer. I was fortunate enough to get a ticket for this lecture. The boys, abstruse as the subject was, were spellbound. There was only one joke in the lecture, and that would have been better away. It was this: “Some of you may have heard the old story of the moon being made of green cheese.” Pause for laughter and a dead silence. “The moon might just as well,” continued Mr. Gladstone, “be made of green cheese for all the purposes she serves in Homer.”

At the end of the lecture the Provost returned thanks, and then Mr. Gladstone leapt to his feet and made an impassioned speech on classical education. The last sentence of his peroration was as follows: “But this, Mr. Provost, I venture to say, and say with confidence, and it is not a fancy of youth nor the whim of the moment, but the conviction forced upon me even more by the experience of life than by any reasoning quality, that if the purposes of education be to fit the human mind for the efficient performance of the greatest functions, the ancient culture, and, above all, the Greek culture, is by far the best and strongest, the most lasting, and the most elastic instrument that could possibly be applied to it.”

As he said these words his eyes flashed, he opened and raised his arms, and his body seemed to expand and grow tall. He seemed like the priest of culture speaking inspired words. His voice rolled out in a golden torrent, and as he said the words, “the best and strongest, the most lasting, the most elastic,” they seemed to come to him with the certainty of happy inspiration and with the accent of the unpremeditated. With these[109] words his voice reached its highest pitch of crescendo, and then, slightly dying down, melodiously sank into silence.

This little speech showed me what great oratory could be.

At the end of my first year there was a prize called the Headmaster’s prize for French, for lower boys. I competed for this. It was always rather difficult to get a French prize at Eton, as there was usually a French or a Canadian boy who spoke and knew the language like a native. There was a special examination paper for this prize. I and a French boy, whose name I have forgotten, both got 95 marks out of 100. Then the papers were looked through again, and it was found that I had translated the French word hôte by host, when it should have been guest, so the other boy was given the prize, but my tutor gave me a book as a consolation. The following year I competed for the Headmaster’s French prize for boys in fifth form, and that time I won it, much to the delight of Chérie and of everyone at Membland.

In fifth form we learnt German as an extra. German was taught by Mr. Ploetz, who knew the language; and by other masters, who didn’t. During the lessons of the latter, one paid no attention, and attended to one’s private affairs. Mr. Ploetz was an excellent, stimulating teacher, but most unpopular with the other masters. The boys liked him; he was a book collector, and had a fine library. He taught me a great deal, not of German, as I paid no attention to the regular work, but I picked up from him a mass of miscellaneous information. It was the fashion to rag during his lessons, and I outdid everyone in ingenious interruption during Mr. Ploetz’ lessons. It was not that he couldn’t keep order. He was extremely strict and competent, but one knew, with the fiendish intuition of boys, that his complaints would not be taken seriously by the other masters, or by one’s tutor. This was indeed the case. There were three forms of punishment at Eton. First of all, one could get a yellow ticket, which meant one had to do a punishment of some written kind and get the ticket signed by one’s tutor. We did not much like leaving out the yellow ticket in a prominent place for my tutor to see when he came round in the evening. If matters went further, one was reported to the Headmaster and received a white ticket. The white ticket was in force for a week. During that week leave was stopped, and if the slightest complaint was made by anyone, it meant[110] being complained of to the Headmaster a second time and a flogging by the Headmaster. I was complained of by Mr. Ploetz to the Headmaster. As I guessed, the other masters took this far from seriously. “What have you been doing to Mr. Ploetz?” said my tutor. What I had been guilty of was overt rowdyism, combined with prolonged and unbearable impertinence, which if done to any other master would have been taken very seriously indeed. “What have you been doing to Mr. Ploetz?” said another master to me, with a laugh, when he met me in the street. I received a white ticket, but I got through the week without further complaints, and I was never complained of again.

When I was in fifth form, the school library became a favourite haunt of mine, and Mr. Burcher, the librarian, a special friend. Mr. Burcher was a little dapper man, who was pained when we jumped over the tables, a favourite game of mine, or if we threw the books about. “Is it a joke,” he would ask plaintively, “or is it an insult?” But in that library, during my last year at Eton, I made by myself the discovery of English poetry, and read the works of Shelley in the three little volumes of the second Moxon edition of 1850, and the poems of Keats in Lord Houghton’s one-volume edition. On Sundays I used to go, rich with my new discoveries, to Norman Tower, and compare notes with Betty Ponsonby, who knew reams of English poetry by heart, and we would read each last new favourite poem. There is no joy in the world like this to discover these things for the first time. The shabby little Keats and Shelley, the green volumes of Tennyson, the three dark volumes of Matthew Arnold—what mines of fairy treasure they represented!

I made friends, through one of his pupils, with Arthur Benson. I had been in his division twice, but I had never known him well. One of the Coventrys, Willie Coventry, was his pupil, and he told Arthur Benson that I liked books and poetry, and had written a novel called Elvira, which was true (only it had to be destroyed after I had measles), and was going to write the libretto of an opera of which he, Coventry, was to write the music. He was not really musical, and did not know a note of music technically. He also intended, when I first made his acquaintance, to write a life of Mary Stuart; but this, like the opera, never got far.

Arthur Benson was most kind and interested, and it was[111] arranged that on Sunday afternoons we should meet in his rooms and read out poetry. Arnold Ward, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s son, who was in College, joined us. We read out poetry; if we had written something ourselves, we left it with Arthur Benson for a week, he told us what he thought about it next time. I showed him a Fairies’ Chorus from my libretto. He said: “I don’t like those galloping metres, but I see you have got a good vocabulary.” My next effort was an Ode on the Tercentenary of Eton College, in which Fielding was mentioned as “the great wielder of the painting pen.” “Have you read Fielding?” asked Arthur Benson. I had not read Fielding. “I see,” said Arthur Benson, “you take him on trust.”

There was at that time a newspaper edited by two of the boys, called the Mayfly. I sent them my poem on Eton College, but they wisely refused it. The Mayfly, edited by Ramsay, was an amusing paper, but not quite as good as the Parachute, which had come out the year before, and was edited by Carr Bosanquet and others. This was a singularly brilliant newspaper. It only had three numbers, but they were most successful. There was at the same time an exceedingly serious newspaper called The Eton Review, edited, I think, by Beauchamp, which had articles about the Baconian theory, and other rather heavy topics. During my last summer a newspaper which had twenty editors, but only one number, came out, called The Students’ Humour. There was also a book published in 1891, called Keate’s Lane Papers, in which there is an excellent poem by J. K. Stephen, which has never been republished, called “The Song of the Scug.” It begins:

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J. K. Stephen used often to come down to Eton, dressed always in slippers, a dark blue flannel blazer, and a dirty pink cap on the back of his head; and thus dressed, and reading a small book, I saw him serenely and unconsciously walk across the pitch during the Winchester match.

Arthur Benson stimulated our reading tremendously, and we were startled and interested by his frank heresies. He said he did not care for Milton’s Lycidas. He wished Shakespeare had been a modern and had written novels. He was indifferent to Shelley. He loathed Byron, but was none the less impressed, when one Sunday Arnold Ward read out the description of the battle of Talavera (Childe Harold, I. xxxviii.), and he admitted it was moving. He disliked Carlyle, Ruskin, and Thackeray. On the other hand, he introduced us to Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, FitzGerald, and many others, and encouraged us to go on liking anything we did like. By this time I had read many novels—Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Pickwick, a good deal of Scott (I was given the Waverley Novels for Christmas 1889), George Eliot’s Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and quantities of poetry. Betty Ponsonby gave me Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, but explained to me that the denunciations of God in it only applied to the Greek gods, and she and my Aunt M’aimée both changed the subject when I suggested reading Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads.

Willie Coventry and I found out that there was a competition going on at this time in a magazine called Atalanta for who should write the best essay in 500 words. You were allowed to choose your own subject. Willie Coventry won it one month by writing an essay on Dr. Schliemann’s Excavations, a subject suggested to him by Arthur Benson. The next month I competed, and chose as my subject a poem by Edgar Allan Poe called “For Annie,” and I won the prize too.

In the summer of 1890 I went to stay at the Coventrys’ place at Croome Court in Worcestershire, and Willie Coventry came to Membland later in the same summer. The libretto I was writing for him never got further than a few lyrics, and his score never got further than a few bars and a triumphal march, which I composed, and even played at one of Miss Copeman’s afternoon parties. I can still play it now, if pressed.

I had a faint hope at one time that I might be able to get into the Boats. Arthur Benson had taken me out one day down[113] stream and advised me to try. I could row well enough on the stroke side, but not so well on the bow side of the boat. I put my name down for Novice Eights, in which boys were tried, and one evening I started out full of hope. Unfortunately I was told to row bow in the boat. A tall Colleger stood up in the stern of the boat to coach us. No sooner had we started than there was a loud call: “Keep time, Bow—keep time, Bow!” and we had not gone much farther than the Brocas when I caught so violent a crab that the coach fell into the water, the boat was partially submerged, and we had to go back, some of us swimming. I was never allowed to row in company again, and earned the reputation of being the only person who had ever swamped a Novice Eight.

In the autumn of 1890 Hugo and I went up to London for long leave. My father and mother were staying at my sister Elizabeth’s house in Grosvenor Place, and there we heard about the financial crisis in Baring Brothers, which had nearly ended in a great disaster. When we went back to Membland at Christmas everything was different. There was no Christmas party, and the household was going through a process of gradual dissolution. Chérie was leaving us, the stables were empty, and the old glory of Membland had gone for ever.

All through the next year I was engrossed with the discoveries I was making in English literature. In the summer I sent a poem to Temple Bar, then edited by George Smith, and to my great surprise it was printed, and I received a cheque for a guinea. During that same summer I had a little book of poems privately printed at Eton, called Damozel Blanche, consisting of ballads and lyrics.

I was now a member of the House Debating Society, in which we used to have heated discussions on such subjects as whether sports were brutalising or not, whether conscription was a good thing, whether General Booth’s scheme was a sound one, and whether Mary Queen of Scots had been improperly beheaded.

There was another debating society founded before I left Eton, called Le Cercle des Débats, in which we made speeches in French, and I remember M. Hua making a passionate speech in favour of England relinquishing her hold upon Egypt. I spoke several times at this debating society, and in the report on the debate as to whether Monte Carlo should be allowed to exist, it is recorded that: “M. Baring croyait que c’était un mauvais endroit mais que cela ne devrait pas être supprimé.”

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The summer of the Eton Tercentenary, 1891, was great fun, especially the concert, when Hubert Parry’s beautiful setting to Swinburne’s “Ode” was performed. I sang among the baritones. My mother came down for the concert, and Hubert Parry conducted himself. There was an interesting exhibition in the school hall, and it was there that I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Cornish. My Aunt M’aimée introduced me to her, and I soon became a great friend of the Cornish family, and was invited by them to go out on water-parties down stream to the Bells of Ousley and Runnymede, and to have supper with them afterwards. I enjoyed these water-parties as much as anything at Eton.

In the summer holidays of 1891 I went to stay with Chérie, who had left us. She lived with her friend, Miss Charlesworth, in a little house called Waterlooville, near Cosham, in Hants, and realised the dream of her life, namely, to have a large garden of her own full of hollyhocks and sunflowers and sweet peas.

In the Michaelmas half of 1891 I competed for the Prince Consort’s French prize. I had already done so the last year, but I was then too young to compete with sixth-form boys, who were much older, and I was not expected to get a place, but I came out third. This year it was my great ambition to get the prize. I thought of nothing else. We had to read several books—Molière’s L’Avare, Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq Mars, Taine’s Voyage aux Pyrénées, Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, and Brachet’s Grammaire Historique. Besides this, we were examined in unseen translations from and into French, and we had to write a French essay. We were examined by a Monsieur Hammonet. I worked extremely hard for this examination, and had extra lessons in the evenings from M. Hua. So did the other competitors. My serious rival was Grand d’Hauteville, who I think was a French Canadian, and who spoke French fluently. The examination took five days, and as it went on I became more and more convinced that I had not done well and could not possibly win the prize. When it was over, there was a long interval of agonising suspense before the result was made known.

One afternoon I received a summons from my Uncle Henry Ponsonby to go and see him at Windsor. I found him, not at Norman Tower, but in a room somewhere in the Castle, and he told me that the Queen had just received the news of the result[115] of the Prince Consort’s prize. She was the first to get this news; the news was that I was first and had got the prize. I at once sent a telegram to my mother and to Chérie, and walked back to Eton, drunk with triumph and delight to tell my tutor.

The news was not published for some days, and I told nobody, I think, except my tutor and Dunglass. But it came out at last, and was published in the Times and on the board at Eton. My father and mother came down to see me, and my father gave me his own watch: a Breguet, the Demidoff Breguet. It was then settled that I was not to go back to Eton, but to go to Germany to learn German and prepare for the Diplomatic Service competitive examination.

Dunglass went on messing with Hugo and myself until I left Eton. We had three or four fags and they bored us, and we could never find things for them to do. Dunglass developed into a fine Eton football player, and got his House Colours and then his Field Colours. He was a new boy the same half as I was, and our alliance lasted unbroken through my Eton life. One half we learnt bird-stuffing together, and when our mess funds used to run short Dunglass used to say: “I’ve marked off an uncle,” and one of his many uncles used to come down and tip us. Our mess was a lively one, and when there was a whole holiday on Friday, which necessitated Friday’s work being done on Thursday, an arrangement which used to be called doing Friday’s business, we used to sing in a loud chorus a song, the words of which were:

The greatest excitements of Eton life were, I always thought, the House football matches for the House Cup. There was the Eton and Harrow match, of course, but while I was at Eton these matches were unexciting and Eton never won, and Dunglass and I agreed that there were few things we enjoyed more than driving away from Lord’s. Nothing surpassed the excitement of the House matches. One year, I think it was the year before I left, we were supposed to have a small chance of getting beyond first ties, but our House played so well together that they got into the ante-final. They then drew Cornish’s, who had a strong side of powerfully built boys. An epic match[116] followed. Durnford’s played as if inspired; they got three rouges to nil, but failed to convert them into goals, and the game was almost over. Then, in the last five minutes of the game, Cornish’s scored a rouge, and being far the heavier team converted it into a goal, and won the match. Never was there a more exciting match.

During my last year my chief friends in the House, besides Dunglass, were Leslie Hamilton, who went into the Coldstream Guards and was killed in the war, and Crum; and outside the House, Gerald Cornish. He, too, killed in the war.

Arthur Benson was my greatest friend among the masters, and I used constantly to have tea with him, and have long talks about books and every other sort of thing. My last half I was up to Mr. Luxmoore, who was to be a lifelong friend.

The last days of my last half were like a dream. I was hardly conscious of the reality of things, and I did not yet fully realise that my Eton life was coming to an end. There was no more work to do. The battle for the Prince Consort’s prize had been fought and won. It was, as Eton triumphs go, a small triumph—small indeed compared with such glories as surround those who get the Newcastle, stroke the Eight, or play in the Field, or at Lord’s in the Eleven; but such as it was, it gave me as much joy and triumph as my being could hold, and nothing in after life could ever touch the rapture of the moment when I knew I had got it.

Now there was nothing left to do but to make every moment seem as long as possible and to say good-bye. Good-bye to the School Library, my favourite haunt at Eton, the scene of so much hurried, scrambled work, of such minute consultations of ecclesiastical authorities for Sunday Questions, or of translations of Virgil and Horace, and the Greeks; of such long and serious discussions of future and present plans and literary topics, schemes and dreams, poems, plays, operas, novels, romances, with Willie Coventry and Gerald Cornish. Good-bye to the leather tables where numberless poems had been copied out on the grey Library foolscap paper, which for some reason we used to call electric-light paper; tables over which we had leapt in wild steeplechases, while Burcher protested, where so many construes had been prepared, and so many punishments scribbled, and where the great poets of England had been surreptitiously discovered, and the accents of Milton[117] and Keats overheard for the first time, and the visions of Shelley and Coleridge discerned through the dust of the daily work and above the din of chattering boys. Good-bye to the playing fields, to South Meadow, the Field, to Upper School, and to Williams’ inner room, full of prizes and redolent with the smell of tree-calf and morocco, where I had so often dreamt of getting prizes and wondered what I should choose if I ever managed to get the Prince Consort’s prize. Good-bye to the Brocas, to Upper Hope and Athens and Romney Weir,

and to all the reaches of the river. Good-bye to Windsor and Norman Tower, and to the chimes of the inexorable school clock; to my little room with its sock cupboard, bureau, and ottoman, to Little Brown’s and to Phœbe, and then to one’s friends: to my Dame and to my tutor, and to Arthur Benson, and the unforgettable readings and talks in his house.

I went to Williams’ to choose my prize, and while I was there Mr. Cornish strolled in, and seeing what I was doing, he said: “Of course you will choose a lot of little books—boys always do—but what you ought to do is to get Littré’s Dictionary or all Sainte Beuve.” This was asking too much in the way of sense, and I compromised. I chose a Shakespeare in twelve volumes, bound in tree calf, a Milton in three volumes, and a few other small books. My tutor gave me two volumes of Ruskin; Mr. Luxmoore gave me a volume of Ruskin as well. Arthur Benson gave me Ionica. Just before leaving I had the honour of dining with my tutor, which made one feel already as if one was entering a new world. The hour struck when I was actually leaving Eton. Up to that last moment all had been excitement and fun, but when I was actually sitting in the train and crossing the fifteen arches railway bridge, and Windsor Castle and the trees of the Brocas came into sight, the whole of the past, the Eton past, surged up and overwhelmed me like a flood, and I realised in that last fleeting glimpse of the trees, the river, and the grey Castle all that Eton life had meant, and what it was that in leaving Eton I was saying good-bye to.

[118]

I spent the Christmas holidays, after leaving Eton, at Membland. I had had another little book of poems printed privately as a Christmas present for my mother, and I was still making discoveries in English literature, and of these the most important of all: Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. We travelled up in January to London, and it was settled that I was to go to Germany to learn German. My father heard of a family in Hanover where English boys were taken, but there was no room there. Someone then gave him the address of a Dr. Timme who lived at Hildesheim, near Hanover, and also took in Englishmen. It was settled that I was to go there. I started at the end of the month, and at Victoria Station I met Hubert Cornish, who was going to Dresden to learn German. We travelled together to Hanover via Flushing, and we were both of us seasick, and both swore that we would never cross the Channel again. We arrived at Hanover the next evening and stayed at Kasten’s Hotel. The next morning we went on by the same train. I got out at Hildesheim, and Hubert Cornish went on to Dresden. Hubert Cornish had just left Eton, but he was older than I was, and I had only seen him in the distance, and at his father’s house at picnics. We made great friends at once. Hildesheim was a charming little old town. One part of it was really old, and straight out of a fairy-tale, with houses with high gabled roofs, and mediæval carvings on them, and there were many quaint and interesting churches, including the old cathedral with its ravishingly beautiful cloister behind it, and a rose-tree said to be a thousand years old. Dr. Timme had a small house in the Weissenburger-Strasse on the edge of the modern town. It was a two-storied, square, grey house with a flat roof, looking out on to the street on one side, and on to a garden at the back. I was received by[119] Frau Doktor Timme. Her husband was a master at the Real Gymnasium, and he was at school when I arrived. I could not speak a word of German. It was a curious sensation to live with a family and partake of their daily life and not to be able to understand a word they said; to go out for walks and pretend to be joining in and following a conversation when one had not the remotest idea of the drift of it. I started lessons at once, and bought a small Heine, which I used to read to myself, and I soon understood that. It was bitterly cold. There was still snow on the ground.

There were three children in the house: a dear little girl called Aenna, and a little boy called Kurt, and an older boy, about twelve, called Atho. Dr. Timme had two spinster sisters who lived in a house not far off with another old lady who was called Die Alte Tante, and Frau Timme had a brother who was called Onkel Adolf, and who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War, and her mother was alive.

I found life interesting in spite of not understanding the language. In the early morning I used to go downstairs and have coffee and Apfelgelee. We had Mittagessen at one, and after that the household indulged in a Mittagschläfchen. At four in the afternoon we again drank coffee and ate Apfelgelee, and we had supper at half-past seven, at which there would generally be some delicacy like Bratkartoffel or Leberwurst or Häringsalat. Many English boys had been there before; and Frau Timme told me that we English, as a rule, disliked German dishes. The first German phrase I remember understanding was when Frau Timme announced to one of the aunts a surprising fact about me that I ate everything (“Er isst alles”). In the evening the aunts and other people used to visit us, and sometimes we would go to a concert. The Timmes were great friends with the family of Herr Musik-Direktor Nick, who was a musician, and all his family played; they had entrancing musical evenings of trios and duets for violin, pianoforte, and viola. Herr Musik-Direktor Nick’s nephew, Wunnibald, gave me lessons on the pianoforte. I had German lessons with Dr. Timme.

In the afternoon, I used to go for long walks with Dr. Timme and his brother-in-law, and we walked to the Galgenberg, to the Steinberg, and the Moritzberg, rather bleak hills of fir-trees, stopping as a rule at a small Wirtshaus, where we used to drink[120] beer or coffee. In the house there was a small drawing-room downstairs, where the guest of honour always sat on the sofa. A smart drawing-room or the Gute Stube, which was only opened on rare and state occasions. Frau Timme told me one day that she knew this room was a useless extravagance, but it gave her, she said, such great pleasure that she could not sacrifice it. Upstairs, Dr. Timme had a sitting-room, where I took my lessons with him, and I had a sitting-room where I did my work. After about a month I could understand what was being said, and in about two months’ time I could make myself understood and carry on a conversation. I used sometimes to go to the theatre at Hanover, coming back by train afterwards. The first time I saw Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Tod I did not understand a word of it. One night I went to hear Tannhäuser. Wagner was only a name to me, and meant something vaguely noisy. I had no idea he wrote about interesting or romantic subjects. I had no idea of what Tannhäuser was about. I went expecting a tedious evening of dry and ultra-classical, unintelligible music. As soon as the orchestra began the overture, I was overwhelmed. I did not know that music was capable of so tremendous an effect. The Venusberg music and the “Pilgrims’ Chorus” opened a new world, and I was so excited afterwards that I could not sleep a wink. I was stunned by these magnetic effects of sound. Curiously enough, I left it at that, and made no further effort to go and hear any more Wagner. I was almost afraid of repeating the experience for fear of being disappointed, and the next time I went to the opera it was to hear Verdi’s Otello.

I happened to mention casually that it was my birthday on 27th April, and when I came down that morning I found in the drawing-room a beautiful cake or Apfeltorte with eighteen candles burning on it and a present from every member of the family. I could talk German quite fluently by this time. Frau Timme suggested that I should make the acquaintance of some of the boys at the schools. There were two large schools at Hildesheim, a Gymnasium, and a Real Gymnasium. The Real Gymnasium concentrated on the modern. The Gymnasium was more classical in its programme. For the purpose of getting to know the boys I was introduced to a grown-up boy called Braun, who was, I think, a native of Hildesheim. Most of the boys at both schools came from different parts of Germany and lived en pension in different families. The boys from both[121] schools used to meet in the evening before supper at a restaurant called Hasse, where a special room was kept for them. Braun was an earnest and extremely well-educated youth, a student of geology. Before I was taken to Hasse, he said I must be instructed in the rules of the Bierkomment,[6] that is to say, the rules for drinking beer in company, which were, as I found out afterwards, the basis of the social system. These rules were intricate, and when Braun explained them to me, which he did with the utmost thoroughness, the explanation taking nearly two hours, I did not know what it was all about. I did not know it had anything to do with drinking beer. I afterwards learned, by the evidence of my senses and by experience, the numerous and various points of this complicated ritual, but the first evening I was introduced to Hasse I was bewildered by finding a crowd of grown-up boys seated at a table; each one introduced himself to me by standing to attention and saying his name (“Mein Name ist So-and-so”). After which they sat down and seemed to be engaged in a game of cross-purposes.

The main principles which underlay this form of social intercourse were these. You first of all ordered a half-litre of beer, stating whether you wanted light or dark beer (dunkles or helles). It was given to you in a glass mug with a metal top. This mug had to remain closed whatever happened, otherwise the others put this mug on yours, and you had to pay for every mug which was piled on your own. Having received your beer, you must not drink it quietly by yourself, when you were thirsty; but every single draught had to be taken with a purpose, and directed towards someone else, and accompanied by a formula. The formula was an opening, and called for the correct answer, which was either final and ended the matter, or which was of a kind to provoke a counter-move, in the form of a further formula, which, in its turn, necessitated a final answer. You were, in fact, engaged in toasting each other according to system. When you had a fresh mug, with foam on the top of it, that was called die Blume, and you had to choose someone who was in the same situation; someone who had a Blume. You then said his name, not his real name but his beer name, which was generally a monosyllable like Pfiff (my beer name was Hash, pronounced Hush), and you said[122] to him: “Prosit Blume.” His answer to this was: “Prosit,” and you both drank. To pretend to drink and not drink was an infringement of the rules. If he had no beer at the time he would say so (“Ich habe keinen Stoff”), but would be careful to return you your Blume as soon as he received it, saying: “Ich komme die Blume nach” (“I drink back to you your Blume”). Then, perhaps, having disposed of the Blume, you singled out someone else, or someone perhaps singled you out, and said: “Ich komme Ihnen Etwas” (“I drink something to you”). When you got to know someone well, he suggested that you should drink Bruderschaft with him. This you did by entwining your arm under his arm, draining a whole glass, and then saying: “Prosit Bruder.” After that you called each other “Du.” Very well. After having said “Ich komme Ihnen” or “Ich komme Dir etwas,” he, in the space of three beer minutes, which were equivalent to four ordinary minutes, was obliged to answer. He might either say: “Ich komme Dir nach” or “Ich komme nach” (“I drink back”). That settled that proceeding. Or he might prolong the interchange of toasts by saying: “Uebers Kreuz,” in which case you had to wait a little and say: “Unters Kreuz,” and every time the one said this, the other in drinking had to say: “Prosit.” Then the person who had said “Uebers Kreuz” had the last word, and had to say: “Ich komme definitiv nach” (“I drink back to you finally”), and that ended the matter. If you had very little beer left in your mug you chose someone else who was in the same predicament, and said: “Prosit Rest.” It was uncivil if you had a rest to choose someone who had plenty of beer left. If you wanted to honour someone or to pay him a compliment, you said “Speziell” after your toast, which meant the other person was not obliged to drink back. You could also say: “Ich komme Dir einen halben” (“I drink you a half glass”), or even “einen Ganzen” (“a whole glass”). The other person could then double you by saying: “Prosit doppelt.” In which case he drank back a whole glass to you and you then drank back a whole glass to him.

Any infringement of these rules, or any levity in the manner the ritual was performed, was punished by your being told to “Einsteigen”[7] (or by the words, “In die Kanne”), which meant you had to go on drinking till the offended party said “Geschenkt.” If you disobeyed this rule or did anything[123] else equally grave, you were declared by whoever was in authority to be in B.V., which meant in a state of Beer ostracism. Nobody might then drink to you or talk to you. To emerge from this state of exile, you had to stand up, and someone else stood up and declared that “Der in einfacher B.V. sich befindender” (“The in-simple-beer-banishment-finding-himself so-and-so”) will now drink himself back into Bierehrlichkeit (beer-honourability) once again. He does it. At the words, “Er thut es,” you set a glass to your lips and drank it all. The other man then said: “So-and-so ist wieder bierehrlich” (“So-and-so is once more beer honourable”). Any dispute on a point of ritual was settled by what was called a Bierjunge. An umpire was appointed, and three glasses of beer were brought. The umpire saw that the quantity in each of the glasses was exactly equal, pouring a little beer perhaps from one or the other into his own glass. A word was then chosen, for choice a long and difficult word. The umpire then said: “Stosst an,” and on these words the rivals clinked glasses; he then said: “Setzt an,” and they set the glasses to their lips. He then said: “Loss,” and the rivals drained the glasses as fast as they could, and the man who finished first said: “Bierjunge,” or whatever word had been chosen. The umpire then declared the winner. All these proceedings, as can be imagined, would be a little difficult to understand if one didn’t know that they involved drinking beer. Such had been my plight when the ritual was explained to me by Mr. Braun. I found the first evening extremely bewildering, but I soon became an expert in the ritual, and took much pleasure in raising difficult points.

These gatherings used to happen every evening. If you wished to celebrate a special occasion you ordered what was called a Tunnemann, which was a huge glass as big as a small barrel which was circulated round the table, everyone drinking in turn as out of a loving-cup. A record was kept of these ceremonies in a book. The boys who attended these gatherings were mostly eighteen or nineteen years old, and belonged to the first two classes of the school, the Prima and the Secunda. They belonged to a Turnverein, a gymnastic association, and were divided into two classes—the juniors who were called Füchse and the seniors who were not. The Füchse had to obey the others.

Another thing which I found more difficult than the Bierkomment[124] was a card game which Dr. Timme tried to teach me. It was the game of Skat, and was played by three people, one against two, with a possible fourth person cutting in, but only by three at a time. When Dr. Timme first explained it to me I understood German imperfectly, and I could not make head or tail of the game. This disgusted Dr. Timme, who said: “Herr Baring hat kein Interesse dafür.” But at the end of five years, after repeated visits to Germany, and with the help of an English book on the subject, I ended by mastering the principles of the game. I think it is the best game of cards ever invented, and by far the most difficult. I will not attempt to explain it, but it is a mixture of “Solo-whist,” “Préférence,” and “Misery,” with a dash of “Picquet” in it. Everybody plays for his own hand and you have no partner; so you are responsible to yourself alone. I did not learn the game until several years later.

In the meantime, Hubert Cornish had left Dresden and was established at Professor Ihne’s at the Villa Felseck, Heidelberg. Professor Ihne, who knew my cousins, invited me to go there. I set out, and after travelling all day I arrived at one in the morning and found not only Hubert but an American called Mr. Hazlitt Alva Cuppy, who was studying German, and who had come to the station in case I should want help with my luggage. The next morning I woke up and went to the window, and beheld one of the most beautiful sights it is possible to see: Heidelberg Castle and the hills of the Neckar in spring. It was the beginning of May. It was fine and hot; the trees had just put on their most brilliant green; the lilac and laburnum were out. The fields, yellow with buttercups and scarlet with poppies, were like impressionist pictures of the newest school. After the slow spring and the bleak fir-tree-clad country of the north it was like coming suddenly into another world. At breakfast I was introduced to Professor Ihne, a large, comfortable Professor with white hair and spectacles. I had met him once before at the Norman Tower. The two other inmates of the house besides Hubert were Mr. Hazlitt Alva Cuppy and Mr. Otto Kuhn, an Austrian; both of them were attending the lectures of the University. The Villa Felseck was half-way up a hill covered with vines, and Professor Ihne made his own wine. In the garden there was a pergola under which we worked outdoors at a table. Then a most blissful epoch began. In the morning[125] we went to lectures in the University and strolled about the town, and in the afternoons we went for walks in the woods or for expeditions on the river.

Heidelberg was full of students, and our ambition was to get to know some of them, but we did not know how to set about doing this. We were too shy to take any steps, and every day we settled we would take a step, but the day passed, and nothing had been done. We confided our hesitations to a lady—a kind, motherly lady who kept a Wirtshaus, and she said that the matter was simple. What she did I do not know, but that very day we received a visit from the representatives of a Burschenschaft called the Franconia, who asked us to visit their clubhouse with a view to our being received as guests. We went there the next morning, and the conditions under which we could be either Konkneipante or Kneipgäste of the Germania were read out to us.

A Konkneipant was a kind of unofficial member, a Kneipgas was simply a guest with certain obligations. The former, the Konkneipant, seemed to be liable to many alarming possibilities and conditions, and he had to be prepared to fight duels, even if he did not do so, so we chose the latter status, and were enrolled as Kneipgäste.

We attended a Kneipe that night, I think. All the rules of the Bierkomment, which I have already described, obtained. You sat at a table, and endless mugs of beer were brought in, and toasts were drunk, according to ritual, but the evening was enlivened by the singing of songs in chorus. Someone accompanied the songs, everyone had a song-book, and the entertainment led off with Goethe’s song, “Ergo Bibamus”; after that a song was sung about every quarter of an hour: “Der Mai ist gekommen,” “Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein Collegium,” or “Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein.”

The entertainment went on till about one in the morning. There was an official Kneipe three nights a week (offiziell), and an unofficial Kneipe (offizieuse) on the other nights. Besides this, the members of the Burschenschaft met in the morning for Frühschoppen in the castle gardens, or elsewhere, and in the afternoon went expeditions together. In the morning they had fencing lessons. They never went to lectures. When they wanted to work they went for a term to another university,[126] and did nothing but work there. One morning Hubert and I attended a lecture on Philosophie, that is to say, history, and curiously enough the lecture was about England. The lecturer went through the gifts which different nations had bequeathed to the world as a legacy; how Greece had given the arts to the world, and the Romans had given it law; England’s gift to the world, he said, was Freedom, and as he said the word Freiheit, his voice rang, and we felt all of a tremble.

The country round Heidelberg was at this time of year at its most glorious. The fields were sheets of the brightest yellow. At night choruses of nightingales sang; the air was heavy with the smell of the lilacs. Sometimes we would go up the river and to the little town of Neckarsteinar, which is like a toy city on the top of a green hill, with a wall round it, and is exactly what I imagined the “green hill far away” to be when I was a child, except that it had a wall. One evening—but this was later in the summer when I went back a second time to Heidelberg—we had a Kneipe in Dr. Ihne’s garden and invited the Germania Burschenschaft. Professor Ihne came and made a speech and then left us; songs were sung, and I made a speech in German, and we sang: “Alt Heidelberg du Feine.”

Besides all these events, Hubert and I spent a good deal of time reading and discussing theories of life. We were intoxicated by Swinburne, spellbound by Kipling, and great devotees of Meredith and Hardy. We also read a certain amount of German, and I remember reading Lewes’ Life of Goethe. I had already read a certain amount of Goethe and Schiller with Dr. Timme, including Hermann und Dorothea, Iphegenie auf Tauris, and Tasso. Faust and the lyrics I had read by myself as soon as I could spell out the letters. Professor Ihne used to discuss books with us. He admired Byron enormously. He had no patience with the German infatuation for Tennyson, especially for “Enoch Arden,” which he thought a childish poem. Byron, he used to say, was a giant; Tennyson a dwarf. Shelley, he admitted, had written a fine philosophical poem: “Prometheus Unbound,” and Swinburne could schöne Versen machen. He could not abide the German cult for Shakespeare. It was not that he did not admire Shakespeare as a dramatist and a poet, but the German searching for meanings in the plays, and the philosophical theories deduced from them and spun round his work, made him impatient. This was a sound point of view, for[127] he approached Shakespeare in much the same spirit as Dryden and Dr. Johnson did. Hamlet annoyed him. Why, he used to ask, did Hamlet presume to think he was born to set the world aright? Nobody had asked him to do so. Othello, he said, was stupid: ein dummer Kerl. The tragedies hurt him too much. He preferred Schiller.

He had no great love for Milton’s Paradise Lost either; he thought there was a lot of tautology in the English language. He said the phrase, “Assemble and meet together,” in the Prayer Book was an instance of this. He said the modern English writers used unnecessarily long Latin words. He had actually seen the word to pullulate in a Times leading article. Swarm would have meant the same thing and been a thousand times better. He was broad-minded in politics and the contrary of a Chauvinist. He had a hearty dislike of Bismarck. There was something refreshingly Johnsonian about him, and when Mr. Cuppy read him the thesis which he destined to show up to the Heidelberg examiners for his degree, Professor Ihne repeated the first sentence, which ran thus: “Ever since my earliest years I determined to be a great man,” and said: “Pooh, pooh, you can’t say that here.” “But it’s true,” said Mr. Cuppy.

Mr. Cuppy was a charming character. He had been in about twenty-five professions before arriving at Heidelberg, and he had been in a circus troop, a stoker in the railway, a clerk, a journalist, a farmer, and I don’t know how many other things, and he was now working hard for his degree. He was the kindest man I have ever met, and there was no trouble he would not take to do one a service, and there was no atom of selfishness in his composition.

The students took us to the Mensur to see the duels. The students fought with sharp rapiers, as sharp as a razor on one side, which they held high over their heads, all the fighting being done by the strength of the wrist; you could only, from the position that the rapier was held in, wound your adversary on the top of his head or on the side of his cheek, but lest your rapier should go astray, and wound some other vital part the duellists wore a padded jacket, and a protection for the neck. The wounds on the top of the head were formidable, and directly after a fight they were sewn up. The Mensur reeked with iodoform. After the entertainment was over Maibowle was[128] drunk, a delicious sort of cup in which wild strawberries floated. Hubert used to have fencing lessons and found the exercise difficult.

The time came when I had to go back to Hildesheim. Shortly after I arrived there the Timmes invited Hubert Cornish to come and stay with them, and he stayed with us for about ten days. During his visit we went for a short walking tour in the Harz Mountains and climbed up the Brocken, a disappointing mountain, as, so far from meeting Mephistopheles and the witches, you walk up a broad and intensely civilised and tidy road, with a plentiful array of notice-boards, till you get to the top, where it is uncomfortably cold. After he left us, it was settled, at my earnest request, that I should go to the school, the Real Gymnasium, and take part in some of the lessons. I was to be an Oberprimaner: in the first class, that is to say; and to attend not all the lessons, but the English, German, and History classes. Before entering upon this school career, Frau Doktor Timme told me that I must make an official visit to all the masters with gloves. So I bought a pair of shiny glacé gloves and paid an official visit to the Headmaster and the various undermasters. The first class I attended was a mathematical lesson, given by the Headmaster. I sat next to a boy called Schwerin, whom I met years later as the director of one of the Berlin theatres. I was not meant to go to this lesson, and I went there by accident, but the Headmaster told me I might stay and listen to it if I liked. It was so far above my head that I did not even know what it was about. At the English lesson I was more at home, and I was asked to give the English dictation. I did this, but the boys at once complained, as I did not read out the English with the German pronunciation, which they were accustomed to, and they could not understand me. The master said they were quite right, and that it was plain I did not know how to pronounce English. The lessons in German literature and in history were interesting. Every week the boys had to write a German essay on the topic that was being discussed, or rather on the book that was being read and diagnosed. This essay was the main feature of the week’s work, just as Latin verses were at Eton. The writing of this essay took an enormous amount of time and trouble. I only wrote one, on Schiller’s Braut von Messina. It had to be neatly copied out, on paper folded in a special way, and the subject[129] had to be divided into sections. The history master was fond of drawing parallels between ancient and modern history, and when he discussed the Punic wars, he laid stress on the fact that sea power had been beaten by land power. That was, he said, the universal lesson of history, and let England lay this matter to heart. The Napoleonic Wars seemed to have escaped him.

After I had been at Hildesheim a little time, Frau Timme told me one day that perhaps I was unaware how greatly Englishmen were disliked in Germany. This was a complete surprise to me, as I had always thought the relations between the two countries were supposed to be good, and that in a kind of way the Germans were supposed to be our cousins. “No,” said Frau Timme; “there is a real prejudice against English people,” and Timme added: “There had always been ein gewisser Neid,” a certain envy of the English. They knew, they said, that individual Englishmen were often admirable, but politically and collectively the English were disliked. One grievance was we supplied, they said, the French with coal during the Franco-Prussian War: another, the behaviour of the Empress Frederick, who was accused of redecorating Frederick the Great’s rooms at Potsdam. I found afterwards the Empress Frederick’s doings were a universal topic, wherever I went in Germany. Frau Timme’s brother, Onkel Adolph, deplored the relations between Great Britain and Germany, which he said could not well be worse, although looking back on that time they were supposed then, I think, to be good. The Timmes were Hanoverians, and used still to reckon in Thalers and speak of the Prussians with dislike; in spite of this they were whole-hearted admirers of Bismarck. I enjoyed my little bit of school life at Hildesheim immensely. I used to get up at half-past six, walk to school and be there by seven, wear a red cap, take part in the few classes I attended, and then come back for luncheon. In the afternoon, I used to go for walks or bathe in the little river which ran through Hildesheim, called the Innerste. In the evenings before supper we met at Hasse’s, and sometimes we used to walk to a distant village and hold a Kneipe, after which the boys used to dance to the strains of Donauwellen. It was difficult to believe that one had ever lived any other kind of life.

[130]

Domestic life in the Timme family was full of infinite charm and many amusing little incidents. Dr. Timme grew a melon, which he kept in a cucumber frame. It was not a satisfactory melon, for it never grew to be larger than a tennis ball. It was hard and green. Nevertheless, one day Dr. Timme made the announcement that the melon would be ready for eating in a fortnight’s time. “In vierzehn Tagen wird die Melone gegessen,” were his actual words. Frau Doktor looked sceptical. When the fortnight had elapsed Timme brought in the melon, which was still no bigger and no softer, and said, “Heute essen wir die Melone” (“To-day the melon will be eaten”), and he cut it with difficulty into twelve bits. Frau Doktor said it was unripe, and not fit to be eaten, and that it was quite hard and green. “No,” said Timme, “Dass ist die Sorte, sie bleibt immer grün” (“It is that kind of melon: an evergreen”). He added later, “Man sollte immer unreifes Obst essen. Die Thiere suchen sich immer unreifes Obst aus” (“One ought always to eat unripe fruit. Animals eat unripe fruit for choice”).

I used often to visit the two aunts, Dr. Timme’s sisters. They had a charming little house and a conservatory. Little Aenchen said one day that many people in the summer went to Switzerland or to Italy, but die Tante did no such thing—she merely moved into the conservatory. (Sie zieht nur in die Blumenstube.) One of the aunts had a passion for the opera, and knew the plot of every opera ever written, and kept the programmes, and was a mine of information on the subject. I once said something rather disparaging about Switzerland to her, and she could not get over this, and for ever afterwards she would say that whenever she looked at her album of Swiss photographs she used to say: “Gott! nein! dass Herr Baring das nicht mag!” (“To think of Mr. Baring not liking that!”)

Sometimes she would invite us to tea, and we would have an Apfeltorte in the garden, and if it was fine the “Alte Tante” used to come down. Kurt’s future used to be discussed, and the army was mentioned as a possible career. “No,” cried the Alte Tante; “an officer’s life is a brilliant misery” (“Ein glänzendes Elend”). I said that in other professions you had the Elend without the Glanz, the misery without the brilliance, and she was delighted with this mot.

My father, who finished his education in Germany, at Gotha (after having gone to school at Bath at the age of six in a[131] stage-coach), used always to say that there was nothing in the world for simplicity and charm to compare with the life in a small unpretentious household in the Germany of old days. He used to tell a story of some Coburg royal lady whom he met at Gotha saying to him after Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert, “Wenn Sie nach England kommen, suchen Sie meinen Vetter Albrecht aus and grüssen Sie ihn von mir” (“When you go back to England, look up my Cousin Albert and give him my love”).

The simplicity and the charm he described were to be found in the Timme household at Hildesheim. In the cosy winter evenings, in the little drawing-room with its warm stove, when the lamp used to be put on the table opposite the place of honour, the sofa, against the wall at the end of the room, a bottle of beer and glasses would be brought, and Dr. Timme would light his cigar and suggest a game of Skat, and Onkel Adolph would stroll behind my chair and say: “Nein, Herr Baring, das dürfen Sie nicht spielen.” Then perhaps Frau Timme’s mother would look in and occupy the place of honour, and perhaps Tante Agnes (who was an unappreciated poetess) or Tante Emile (the opera lover), and perhaps a neighbour, Fräulein Schultzen, who received English girls in her house, or Frau Ober-Förster. Then Frau Doktor’s mother would take out her knitting and the children would be discussed. “Nächsten Monat,” someone would say: “Bekomme Ich neue Mädchen.” Onkel Adolph and Dr. Timme would talk mild politics, and faintly deprecate the present state of things; perhaps Herr Wunibald Nick would be there and sing a song—“Es liegt eine Krone im tiefen Rhein”—and deplore the amount of operas by well-known composers which were never performed. “Wird nicht gegeben,” he would exclaim, after every item of his long list, or would almost weep from enthusiasm for the second act of Tristan, although no Wagnerite he. While this talk went on in the major key, in a subdued minor the aunts and Frau Doktor and Frau Ober-Förster would tell the latest developments of a neighbour’s illness, and the climax of the tale would be reached by someone saying: “Dann liess sie den Arzt rufen” (“Then she sent for the doctor”). There would be a pause, and someone else would inevitably ask, “Welchen Arzt?” (“Which doctor?”), as there were many doctors in Hildesheim, and opinions were sharply divided on their merits. The answer[132] would perhaps be: “Brandes,” and then there would be a sigh of relief from some, a resigned shrug from others, as if to say: “Poor things, they knew no better.”

And the conversation would be vernünftig, and the old people would say that the big towns were spoiling everything, that life was a hustle and a rush, that Fräulein So-and-so was ein unverschämtes Wesen, and would bewail, as in Heine’s lovely poem, that everything had been better in their time:

And over all this scene, and through this talk, there would hang an indefinable wrapping of cosiness and warmth and Gemüthlichkeit, and one had the same sense of utter simplicity and intimate comfort that a fairy-tale of Grimm gives one. I wonder whether the charm and the simplicity have disappeared from Germany, and whether, in spite of Imperialism, the war, frightfulness, or anything else, the same thing goes on in the same way, in hundreds of houses and families!

In any case, whether it exists now or not, it existed then; and I was privileged to experience it, to enjoy it to the full, and to look back on it now, after so many years and when so much that is irreparable has come between it and me, with undying affection and gratitude, and with an infinitely sad regret.

Once during the war, I had luncheon with one of the R.F.C. Squadron Messes, where I met a pilot who had learnt German at the Timmes’. We talked of them, of Atho and of Kurt, whom he had known grown-up, and at the end of luncheon that pilot, who was just off to fight the Germans in the air, and who was so soon to meet with death in the air fighting the Germans, said to me: “Prosit Timmes.”

In the summer, we would have tea in a little arbour in the garden, and in the mornings, both in winter and in the summer, towards eleven o’clock, when I was hungry, I would go and tell Frau Doktor, and she would take me to the kitchen and fry me herself some Spiegeleier and Speck. Towards the beginning of my first summer at Hildesheim a new lodger arrived in the shape of a German boy called Hans Wippern, the son of a neighbouring landowner, who had a large farm just outside Hildesheim. Hans was at the school and was always[133] hungry. One day he had a slight bilious attack and didn’t come down to Mittagessen, although he was much better. Frau Doktor said she thought Hans might fancy a pigeon. “Nein,” said Timme, “Er soll hungern” (“He must fast”). But Frau Doktor surreptitiously sent up three pigeons to his bedroom. The food was delicious at the Timmes’, and the great days were when we had Kartoffeln-puffer for Mittagessen, a sort of pancake made of potatoes, or as a great treat “Gänzebraten.” I used to go to the market in the lovely old Markt-platz with Frau Doktor on the days when she would buy a goose, and on the way back we would stop at Frau Brandes’ confectionery and have a slice of Apfeltorte. Frau Brandes was a warm, welcoming saleswoman, and her confectionery was perfect.

When the long holidays began it was settled that I would do best to go on a Rundreise and see what I could of Germany. Dr. Timme arranged my itinerary and I took a Rundreise Billet. I was to go to Frankfort, Nuremberg, Dresden, Leipzig, and perhaps Berlin, and so home again. I went back to Heidelberg first and found Hubert Cornish had become an expert fencer. We attended many a Kneipe and saw a lot of the students, and once more I stayed with Professor Ihne.

My recollections of this second visit to Heidelberg are merged with those of my first visit, and I cannot distinguish between the two. Hubert Cornish had to go home, and we settled to go to Cologne by steamer down the Rhine. We went past Bingen and Coblenz and Bonn and the rocks of the Lorelei, and we stayed a night at Cologne. There Hubert left me and went home, and I went back by train to Frankfort. Hubert had fired me with the desire to hear Wagner. He had heard many operas at Dresden. The result of his talk was that I decided to go to Bayreuth. We went one night to Mannheim to the opera, but I cannot recollect what we saw. At Frankfort I heard the Mikado, and the Cavalleria Rusticana, which I had already heard at Hanover. From Frankfort I went to Nuremberg, and from Nuremberg to Bayreuth. I had tickets for one series of performances of the Bayreuth Festival, but when I arrived I found that there was a performance of the Meistersinger that very day, and I got a ticket for it at the station. I took lodgings in a little room in the town. I went off to the theatre, and the first notes of the orchestra enlarged one’s conception of what an orchestra could be. It was a[134] wonderful experience to hear these operas for the first time, at the age of eighteen before hearing any discussions about them, before knowing what they were about, when every note of the music and every scene of the drama were a revelation and a surprise. I heard the Meistersinger, Parsifal, Tristan und Isolda, and Tannhäuser. After the Meistersinger and Tristan, Tannhäuser seemed tawdry and thin. These operas were all of them magnificently performed that year. Scheidemantel, Malten, Materna, and other stars from Vienna and Dresden were taking part in the Festival, but even then I thought the scenery ugly, especially the garden scene in Parsifal, which was made of crude vermilion and yellow tulips; in the other operas, Tristan and the Meistersinger, the scenery was sober and adequate, and the lighting effects were wonderfully well managed, but all that was lost sight of in the orchestra conducted by Mottl. I do not suppose there has ever been any finer orchestra playing in the world than that which I heard when Tristan was performed that year. It seemed a pity the curtain ever went up, for Tristan, although he sang well, was an old man (Heinrich Vogt), and Isolda (Rose Sucher) was a little too massive. At Bayreuth, during the first series I attended, there were some people I knew, and during that series and the others I made friends with many other people whom I had never seen before. One day, during the entr’acte, the crowd automatically divided as two people passed by—a lady and her husband—and a space was made round them. The lady had a small, flowerlike head, and the dividing crowd near her looked, as she passed, more commonplace and commoner than it did already. On one of the off-days I saw the same lady again sitting at a table in a restaurant garden and reading aloud out of a Tauchnitz novel. At my table there were a Frenchman and his wife. “Dieu qu’elle est belle,” said the Frenchman, staring. “Je ne dis pas qu’elle ne soit pas jolie,” said the French lady, rather nettled. My best friend at Bayreuth was one of the second violins in the orchestra. He thought the operas were far too long, especially the second act of Tristan and Isolda, which he said was for the players more than flesh and blood could bear. He said it would be no offence to Wagner to cut it, and after the performance he used to come out from the theatre terribly exhausted. We often had dinner together, and he told me a great deal about musical life in Germany. I[135] also made friends with an English musician who lived at Sydenham, and we spent the off-days in the country together. I think I must have stayed for three series of performances, and I heard each of these operas three times. I went after this to Dresden, where I enjoyed the picture gallery, and so back to Hildesheim. In September I received a letter from Professor Ihne asking me to go back there. The Duke of York was with him, learning German, so I went once more to Heidelberg and stayed there over a fortnight. I went back to Hildesheim, and I had not been there long when I got a telegram telling me to come home at once. I knew my mother was ill, but a letter giving me details just missed me, as it went to Heidelberg. I found my brother-in-law, Bobby Spencer, in London. He took a special to Bristol, as we had missed the ordinary night train, and we got to Membland next morning. Never had Membland looked more beautiful. The days were cloudless and breathless; the foliage was intact but turned to gold, and bathed in the quiet October sunshine. I arrived just in time. A specialist came down from London, but there was nothing to be done. Chérie came down from Hampshire, and D., who had married Mr. Crosbie, came back and stayed in the house, but it was only for a few days.

I went to London and stayed a day or two in Charles Street with my brother John. I spent a night at King’s College, Cambridge, and then I went to Hildesheim on my way to Berlin, where it was settled I was to go.

I was only a day or two at Hildesheim. Nothing could have been kinder than the Timmes were to me then, and Onkel Adolph, when he heard I had lost my coat, said: “Wenn alle Menschen so harmlos wie Sie wären, Herr Baring, so würde die Welt ein reines Paradies sein, aber! aber!”

In Berlin I stayed at first at an hotel, and then I took two rooms on the top floor of a house in the Unter den Linden. I knew no one in the town at first, but a few days after I was settled in my rooms I met my cousin, Arthur Ponsonby, who was learning German there too, and who was staying at a pension in the Potsdamer Strasse. Although I had seen him all my life I had not known him before, and we gradually made each other’s acquaintance. As we were both fond of the theatre we went to plays together and saw a great many[136] interesting things. Ibsen’s Doll’s House, which was admirably played at the Berliner Theater, and Sudermann’s Die Ehre, some Shakespeare performances, in which Ludwig Barnay played, and many plays translated from the French. At the Residenz Theater there was an excellent comic actor called Alexander. One night we went to see Faust, Goethe’s Faust, not Gounod’s, performed at the Schauspielhaus, and when the opening speech, “Habe nun, ach, philosophie,” was declaimed the effect was tremendous. The scenes which followed were less effective on the stage, except those where Gretchen appears. One day we heard that a famous Italian actress was to perform in Berlin. Her name was Eleonora Duse. We had never heard her name mentioned, but the man who sold theatre tickets said she was a rival of Sarah Bernhardt. She was to open in the Dame aux Camélias. We took tickets, read the play beforehand in German, as we neither of us knew Italian, and we went on the first night. To see a play in a language you do not understand, however well you know the story, takes away half the pleasure, but we never had a doubt about the quality of her art. The beauty and pathos of her death scene were so great as to be independent of words and speech. Had she been acting in Chinese the effect would have been just as great. We saw her afterwards in the Doll’s House, in which she was equally remarkable, and the scathing irony with which she lashed Helmer, the husband, was unforgettable.

We also went to concerts, and once or twice to the opera, but the opera in Berlin was not a good one.

I knew hardly any Germans while I was at Berlin. I had a letter of introduction to a Frau von Arnim, and one night I had dinner at her house. There were five or six officers present, all in uniform, and one of them described a day’s hunting in England, and said that the meet was crowded with bildschöne Frauen. The Ambassador at Berlin was Sir Edward Mallet, and he asked us to dinner sometimes.

It had been my intention to attend the lectures of the Berlin University, and I was formally enrolled as a student. I matriculated at the University, but the formalities before this was accomplished were so long, that by the time they were finished, I had little time left for a University career. However, I received a card which placed me outside the jurisdiction of the Berlin police and under the jurisdiction of the University authorities,[137] but I only went to one lecture. I had private lessons in German throughout my stay.

I read a good many miscellaneous books during my stay in Berlin, and Arthur Ponsonby introduced me to many new things, and opened many doors for me, especially in French literature. He gave me Tolstoy and Loti to read, and we both had a passion for Ibsen. I, on the other hand, plied him with Pater, Stevenson, and Swinburne. I was just at the age when one can digest anything in the way of books, and the sweeter it is the more one enjoys it. Afterwards much of the stuff I was greedily devouring then was to seem like the almond paste on the top of a wedding-cake. But in those days nothing was too luscious or too sweet. Arthur’s taste was already more sober and grown-up; the drama appealed to both of us, and we would spend hours discussing plays and players, and deploring the state of the English stage.

At the end of December I went back to England and spent the last Christmas but one at Membland I was ever to spend there.

[138]

After Christmas I stayed a few days with Chérie at her house at Cosham and with the Ponsonbys at the Isle of Wight. Uncle Henry Ponsonby said he had taken one book with him in the Crimean War, and he had read it through. This was Paradise Lost. The conversation arose from his quoting the lines:

and I happened to know where the quotation came from. I stayed for a few days with the Bensons at Addington. Arthur and Fred Benson were there, but none of the rest of the family. Fred Benson had just finished his novel, Dodo, and was correcting the proofs of it. I read the proofs. Arthur Benson had written a great many poems, which he read out to me. They were published later in the year. During the time I had spent at Hildesheim I had continued to write verse every now and then, and I used to send my efforts to Arthur Benson for his criticism. I had also written what must have been a childish play, a modern drama, but I had published nothing except a little verse in a Plymouth newspaper. While I was staying at Osborne with the Ponsonbys and also at Addington with the Bensons I heard a great deal about a Miss Ethel Smyth. Arthur Benson had told me about her at Eton. She was a friend of his family, and he used often to hear from her. She was a newer friend of my aunts and my cousins, and they talked a great deal about her. I heard about her wonderful singing, her energy, her vitality, her talk, how she had said that Mrs. Benson was “as good as God and as clever as the Devil”; how I must hear her sing “l’Anneau d’argent,” and her own Mass. It was arranged that I was to make her acquaintance.[139] Her Mass was to be given at the Albert Hall, and I was invited by Mrs. Charles Hunter (Miss Smyth’s sister) to hear it from her box. The box was full of Miss Smyth’s hunting friends, who gave the music a respectful hearing, and when it was over we went to the Bachelors’ Club and had supper. I sat next to Miss Smyth and we made friends at once. The next night I had dinner at Dover Street, where Mrs. Hunter was staying, and there I met General Smyth, Miss Smyth’s father, and Mr. Brewster, an American by birth, a Frenchman by education, an Italian by residence. His appearance was striking; he had a fair beard and the eyes of a seer; à contre jour, someone said he looked like a Rembrandt. His manner was suave, and at first one thought him inscrutable—a person whom one could never know, surrounded as it were by a hedge of roses. When I got to know him better I found the whole secret of Brewster was this: he was absolutely himself: he said quite simply and calmly what he thought. Nothing leads to such misunderstandings as the truth. Bismarck said the best of all diplomatic policies was to tell the truth, as nobody believed you. But even when you are not prepared to disbelieve, and suspect no diplomatic wiles, the truth is sometimes disconcerting when calmly expressed. I recollect my first conversation with Mr. Brewster. We talked of books, and I was brimful of enthusiasm for Swinburne and Rossetti. “No,” said Brewster, “I don’t care for Rossetti; it all seems to me like an elaborate exercise. I prefer Paul Verlaine.” I knew he was not being paradoxical, but I thought he was lacking in catholicity, narrow in comprehension. Why couldn’t one like both? I thought he was being Olympian and damping. When I got to know him well, I understood how completely sincere he had been, and how utterly unpretentious; how impossible it was for him to pretend he liked something he did not like, and how true it was that Rossetti seemed to him as elaborate as an exercise.

That night we went to a concert at St. James’s Hall, and I saw again the familiar green benches where for so many years my mother had seats in Row 2. “You remind me,” said a lady I was introduced to that night, “of a lady who used to come and sit here at the Pops in the second row, a long time ago.”

I can’t remember where it was I first heard Ethel Smyth sing,[140] whether it was in Dover Street or in her own little house, “One Oak.” I remember the songs she sang—some Brahms, some Schubert, among others “Pause” and “Der Doppelgänger,” “l’Anneau d’argent,” and “Come o’er the Sea,” and I knew at once that I had opened a window on a new and marvellous province. The whole performance was so complete and so poignantly perfect: the accompaniment, the way the words and the music were blended, and the composer’s inmost and most intimate intention and meaning seemed to be revealed and interpreted as if he were singing the song himself for the first time; the rare and exquisite quality and delicacy of her voice, the strange thrill and wail, the distinction and distinct clear utterance, where every word and every note told without effort, and the whirlwind of passion and feeling she evoked in a song such as “Come o’er the Sea” or Brahms’ “Botschaft.”

It was settled that I was to learn Italian, and for that purpose I went to Florence. I stayed in Paris a few days on the way at the Hôtel St. Romain, Rue St. Roch, and I went to several plays and saw Bartet at the Théâtre français, in Le Père Prodigue. Then I travelled to Florence in a crowded second-class carriage. I had expected Florence to be a dismal place, full of buildings like Dorchester House, grey and cold. It was cold when the Tramontana blew, but I had forgotten or rather I had not imagined the Italian sun. I arrived late, at one in the morning, and when I got up and saw the sun streaming from a cloudless blue sky on warm, yellow, sun-baked houses with red flat roofs, I was amazed. I stayed the first night I arrived at an hotel, and then moved into a pension at Lung’Arno della Borsa 2 bis, which belonged to Signora Agnese Traverso. I began to learn Italian at once, and had lessons from a charming old Italian called Signor Benelli. Signor Benelli had been a soldier in Garibaldi’s Army; he was an intense enthusiast both in politics and literature—a Dante scholar and an admirer of the moderns: Carducci, and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s early poems, which were not well known then. I never had a better master before or afterwards. He knew English well and revelled in English poetry, especially in Shelley and Keats. As soon as I got to understand Italian we read Dante, and I read the whole of the Divina Commedia aloud with Signor Benelli, all Leopardi, and a great deal of Tasso and Ariosto. I also made other discoveries for[141] myself in other branches of literature. There was a large lending library at Florence, full of books in every European literature. I there discovered by myself the works of Anatole France and read Thaïs, Balthazar, and L’Etui de Nacre, le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, and La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque. I read a great deal of Maupassant as well, the complete works of Merimée, some Balzac, and the plays of Dumas fils, and all the Sardou I could get hold of. I also had a few Russian lessons from a lady, but I did not go on with them as I had not the time. I made the acquaintance of Miss Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), who lived in a lovely little villa called “The Palmerino” on the Fiesole side of the town.

The spring in Florence is a wonderful pageant. At first you do not see where there can be any room for it. The trees seem all evergreen—cypresses and silvery olives. The landscape seems complete as it is. Then suddenly the brown hills are alive with wild, fluttering, red jagged-edged tulips. Large bunches of anemones, violets, and lilies of the valley are sold in the streets, and soon roses. Then the young corn shoots up, and all the hills become green and the cornfields are fringed with wild dog-roses, and soon the tall red and white lilies come out, and then the wistaria, and the Judas trees—a dense mass of blossom against the solid, speckless blue sky.

In May I met Hubert Cornish at Naples and spent a few days with him, and we went for a night to Sorrento, and in June I went to Venice by myself and stayed there for one long and deliciously hot week. I saw the pictures, drifted about on the lagoon, and bathed at the Lido in the Adriatic, the only sea that is really hot enough.

At the end of June I was back again in England. I was to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but to do either of these things it is necessary to pass an examination in which sums had to be done. At first I was going to Oxford, but it was thought that I would never be able to pass Smalls, so it was decided I should go to Cambridge, but in order to pass the examination before matriculating I had to go to a crammer’s to brush up my Latin and Greek and try to learn Arithmetic.

At the end of July I went to Eton and stayed with the Cornishes. Mr. Cornish had just been made Vice-Provost, and was moving into the Cloisters from Holland House. It was a hot, beautiful August and we spent most of our days on the[142] river. One day there was a regatta going on at Datchet. As we passed it we made triolets on the events of the regatta. “My shirt is undone, here comes the regatta,” one of them began. The incident that struck us most was the passage of Miss Tarver in a boat. She appeared to be in distress, and was weeping. This incident was at once put to verse in this triolet:

At Arthur Benson’s one night I met Mr. Gosse, who was kind to me, and from that moment became a lifelong friend.

I had written an essay on Collins, and Arthur Benson had sent it for me to Macmillan’s Magazine. The editor did not print it, but he wrote me a letter about it, urging me to go on writing. While I had been at Florence I had written a complete novel, which I had sent to the publishers. The publishers’ reader reported that it was worth printing, and offered to publish it on the half-profits system. I had the sense to put it in the fire. Everyone, said Vernon Lee to me once, should write a novel once, if only so as never to want to do it again.

In August I went to Mr. Tatham, who lived near Abingdon, to prepare for my examination. At his house several boys were struggling with the same task and preparing to go to Oxford. Mr. Tatham did not teach me arithmetic—nobody could do that—but he taught me some Greek and Latin. We read the Plutus of Aristophanes, and some Catullus, and he led me into new fields in English literature. I enjoyed myself at his house quite immensely. Sometimes at dinner Mr. Tatham would laugh till tears poured down his cheeks, and once he laughed so much that he was almost ill and had to go upstairs to his room to recover.

We used to make up triolets at meals, and at all times of the day, and while I was at Abingdon I had two little books of them printed called Northcourt Nonsense.[143] One of them was written while dressing for dinner and after having been stung by a fly, and addressed to Mr. Tatham and sent to him by the maid. It ran thus:

to which Mr. Tatham at once sent this answer:

One of the boys who was preparing for Oxford was called Ralli, and he had great facility as a planchette writer. He could not write by himself, but as soon as anyone else put their hands on planchette at the same time as he did, it would write like mad. The things it wrote seemed to be nearly always what he had read and forgotten, sometimes an article from the Figaro, sometimes a passage from a French novel. Sometimes it wrote verse. Ralli was a fluent poet, but wrote better verse without the aid of planchette than with. Sometimes the planchette board answered his questions, but with a flippant inconsequence.

In October I went to Cambridge and passed into Trinity, leaving the Little Go to be tackled later. I had rooms in Trinity Street. Hubert Cornish was at King’s. I was to go in for the Modern Language Tripos, which meant languages about as modern as Le Roman de la Rose and Chaucer. I went to a coach for mathematics, but this was sheer waste of time, as not one word of what I was taught ever entered my brain, nor did I improve one jot.

I belonged to two debating societies—the Magpie and Stump, and the Decemviri—and used to speak at both of them quite often; and to a society where one read out papers, called[144] the Chit-Chat. I also belonged to the A.D.C., and played the part of the butler in Parents and Guardians, and that of the footman in the Duchess of Bayswater.

In the summer term, during the May week, Hubert Cornish, R. Austen Leigh, and myself edited an ephemeral newspaper called the Cambridge A B C, which had four numbers and which contained an admirable parody of Kipling by Carr-Bosanquet.

Here are some lines from it:

Aubrey Beardsley was just becoming known as an artist, and we wrote to him and asked him to design a cover, never thinking he would consent to do so. He did, for the modest sum of ten guineas, and many people thought it was a clever parody of his draughtsmanship.

At Trinity, Carr-Bosanquet was the shining light of the Decemviri Debating Society. At Eton he had edited the Parachute, which was far the best schoolboy periodical that had appeared there for years, and had written, in collaboration with two other boys, a book called Seven Summers, about Eton, which was afterwards withdrawn from circulation because for some reason or other the authorities objected to it. Next to A Day of my Life at Eton it is the best book about Eton life that has ever been written, and the only book of its kind. It certainly ought to be republished. The curious thing is that the objections to it, which to the lay mind are not perceptible (for a more harmless book was never written), were only made after it had been published for some time.

Carr-Bosanquet used often to contribute poems of a light kind about topical events to the Eton Chronicle, and at Cambridge he wrote as wittily as he talked and spoke. He had rather a dry, kind sense of humour, saltlike sense, and an Attic[145] wit, which pervaded his talk, his speeches, his finished and scholarly verse. We thought he was certain to be a bright star in English literature, a successor to Praed and Calverley, and perhaps to Charles Lamb; but his career was distinguished in another line—archæology—and he allowed himself no rival pursuit. Had he opted for literature, and the province of the witty essay and the light rhyme, he certainly could have achieved great things, as he had already done far more than show promise. His performance as far as it went was already mature, finished, and of a high order. There was at Trinity and at King’s at this time, as I suppose there is at all times, a small but highly intellectual world, of which the apex was the mysterious Society of the Apostles, who discussed philosophy in secret. I skirted the fringe of this world, and knew some of its members: Bertrand Russell, the mathematician; Robert Trevelyan, the poet; and others. One day, one of these intellectuals explained to me that I ought not to go to Chapel, as it was setting a bad example. Christianity was exploded, a thing of the past; nobody believed in it really among the young and the advanced, but for the sake of the old-fashioned and the unregenerate I was bidden to set an example of sincerity and courage, and soon the world would follow suit. I remember thinking that although I was much younger in years than these intellectuals, and far inferior in knowledge, brains, and wits, no match for them in argument or in achievement, I was none the less older than they were in a particular kind of experience—the experience that has nothing to do either with the mind, or with knowledge, and that is independent of age, but takes place in the heart, and in which a child may be sometimes more rich than a grown-up person. I do not mean anything sentimental. I am speaking of the experience that comes from having been suddenly constrained to turn round and look at life from a different point of view. So when I heard the intellectuals reason in the manner I have described, I felt for the moment an old person listening to young people. I felt young people must always have talked like that. It was not that I had then any definite religious creed. I seldom went to Chapel, but that was out of laziness. I seldom went to church in London, and never of my own accord.

While I was at Heidelberg the religious tenets which I had kept absolutely intact since childhood, without question and[146] without the shadow of doubt or difficulty, suddenly one day, without outside influence or inward crisis, just dropped away from me. I shed them as easily as a child loses a first tooth. In the winter of 1893, when I came back from Berlin, someone asked me why I didn’t go to church. I said it was because I didn’t believe in a Christian faith, and that if I were ever to again I would be a Catholic. That seemed to me the only logical and indeed the inevitable consequence of such a belief. In spite of this, dogmatic disbelief was to me always an intolerable thing, and when I heard the intellectuals talk in the manner I have described, I used to feel that people like Dr. Johnson had known better than they, but that in his day it was probable that the young and he himself talked like that; it was one of the privileges of youth. I did not say this, however. I kept my thoughts to myself. I remember my spoken answer being that I did not care if my landlady thought an upright poker placed in front of the fire made it burn or not. If she liked to believe that, it was her affair. I didn’t mind if she worshipped the poker.

At King’s my great friends were Hubert Cornish, Ramsay, who was afterwards Lower Master at Eton, and R⸺ A⸺, the son of a distinguished soldier. A. was the most original of all the undergraduates I knew. He was a real scholar, with the most eclectic and rather austere taste in literature, and a passion for organ music. He was shy and fastidious beyond words. He could not endure being shaved at Cambridge, and used to go up to London twice a week for that purpose. He took no part in any of the clubs or societies. At the same time he was a devoted friend and a fiery patriot. He was so difficult to please about his own work that when he went up for his Tripos and had to do a set of Latin hexameters, he showed up a series of unfinished lines, “pathetic half-lines,” a suggested end of hexameter, a possible beginning, the hint of a cæsura, a few epithets, and here and there an almost perfect line, with a footnote to say “these verses are not meant to scan.” He was a bibliophile, but collected faded second editions and never competed. He had a passionate admiration for Thomas Hardy’s works, and a great deference for the opinion of his friends. One day when he was discussing literature with Hubert Cornish, Hubert said he liked a book which A. disliked. When A. heard this he said gently: “Of course if you like it, Hubert, I like it too.”

[147]

This all happened in the period of the ’nineties. When people write about the ’nineties now, which they often do, they seem to me to weave a baseless legend and to create a fantastic world of their own creation. The ’nineties were, from the point of view of art and literature, much like any other period. If you want to know what literary conversation was like in the ’nineties you can hear it any day at the Reform Club. If you compare the articles on literature or art that appeared in the Speaker of 1892-3 with the articles in the New Statesman of 1921, you will find little difference between the two. The difference between the Yellow Book and periodicals of the same kind (The Owl, for instance), which were started years later, was chiefly in the colour of the cover. The fact is there are only a certain number of available writers in London, and whenever a new periodical is started, all the available writers are asked to contribute; so in the Yellow Book you had practically the available writers of the time contributing—Henry James, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Crackenthorpe, William Watson, John Davidson, John Oliver Hobbes, Vernon Lee, Le Gallienne, Arthur Benson, Arthur Symons, and Max Beerbohm. I think there is seldom any startling difference between the literature of one decade and another. When I was at Cambridge, England was said by the newspapers to be a nest of singing birds; again the same thing was said when the Georgian poets began to publish their work; but the same thing might be said of any epoch. Throughout the whole of English history there never has been a period, as yet, when England was not a nest of singing birds, and when a great quantity of verse, good, bad, and indifferent, was not being poured out. But it was said in the ’nineties that poetry was a paying business; second-hand booksellers were speculating in the first editions of the new poets, just as they do now; and to get the complete works of one poet, who had published little, one had to pay a hundred pounds. A society called the Rhymers’ Club published two books called respectively the Book of the Rhymers’ Club, and the Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club, both of which were anthologies by living authors, and somewhat the same in intention as the Books of Georgian Poetry. Both these books are now rare and sought after by collectors. It is interesting to look at them now, and to look back in general on the poets of that day, and to see what has survived and what[148] has been forgotten. These two anthologies by no means represented the whole of the poetic output and production of the day. They were not comprehensive anthologies of all the living poets, but the manifesto of one small Poetical Club. Taking a general bird’s-eye view of literature and the literary world of that day, this is what you would have noted. Tennyson was just dead. Swinburne was still writing, and published some of the finer poems of his later manner in a volume called Astrophel, in 1894. Stevenson was alive, and had just published The Ebb Tide. Meredith had but lately come into his own, and was hailed by old and young. Tess of the D’Urbervilles had enlarged the public of Thomas Hardy. Robert Bridges was issuing fastidious pamphlets of verse printed by Mr. Beeching at Oxford. Christina Rossetti was alive. Mr. Kipling published what are perhaps his greatest achievements in the short story in Life’s Handicap in 1891, and his Many Inventions came out in 1892. His Barrack Room Ballads were published in 1892. His loud popularity among the public was endorsed by critics such as Henry James, Edmund Gosse, and Andrew Lang. Andrew Lang was still writing “books like Genesis and sometimes for the Daily News,” besides a monthly causerie in Longman’s Magazine, and a weekly causerie in the Illustrated London News. Mrs. Humphry Ward’s David Grieve was published in 1892 and acclaimed by the whole press. Edmund Gosse was collecting and preparing a volume of the verse of his maturity (published in 1894), and once a year produced a volume of delicate and perspicuous prose. Henley was writing patriotic verse and barbed prose in the National Observer, which was full of spirited, scholarly and brilliant writing. Charles Whibley was making a name. Max Beerbohm was making his début. William Watson was discovered as a real new poet, and his “Wordsworth’s Grave,” and his “Lachrymæ Musarum” won praise from the older critics, and attracted, for verse, great attention. He was named as a possible laureate. John Davidson was said to have inspiration and fire, and to have written a fine ballad; Norman Gale’s Country Lyrics were praised; Arthur Benson represented the extreme right of English poetry, and Arthur Symons the extreme left. Wilde had published a play in French, and his Lady Windermere’s Fan was hailed as the best comedy produced on the English stage since Congreve. Pinero had startled London with his Second Mrs. Tanqueray[149] and the discovery of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. In the Speaker Quiller-Couch wrote a weekly causerie, and George Moore put some of his best work in weekly articles on art, and Mr. Walkley some of his wittiest writing in weekly articles on the stage. Henry James was struggling with the stage, and John Oliver Hobbes was making a name as a coiner of epigrams. Harry Cust was editing the Pall Mall Gazette and concocting delightful leaders out of the classics, with fantastic titles. E. F. Benson had published Dodo. Turning from the general to the particular, and to the Book of the Rhymers’ Club, published in 1892, the names of the contributors were: Ernest Dowson, Edwin Ellis, C. A. Greene, Lionel Johnson, Richard le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, T. W. Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, and W. B. Yeats. In the second series the same names occur with an additional one—Arthur Cecil Hillier.

A reaction against supposed foreign influences was started and preached, and Richard le Gallienne called his book of verse English Lyrics to accentuate this; but it is difficult to find any trace of this foreign influence in the verse of that day, except in some of the poems of Arthur Symons. When people write of the ’nineties now, they say that the verse of that period is all about pierrots, powder, and patchouli. The reason is perhaps that the most startling feature in the creative art of the period was the genius of Aubrey Beardsley, whose perfect draughtsmanship seemed to be guided by a malignant demon. I have looked through the Books of the Rhymers’ Club carefully, and I cannot find a single allusion to a pierrot, or even to a powder-puff. Here are the titles of some of the subjects: “Carmelite Nuns of Perpetual Adoration”; “Love and Death”; “The Pathfinder”; “The Broken Tryst”; “A Ring’s Secret”; “A Burden of Easter Vigil”; “Father Gilligan”; “In Falmouth Harbour”; “Mothers of Men”; “Sunset in the City”; “Lost”; “To a Breton Beggar”; “Song in the Labour Movement”; “Saint Anthony”; “Lady Macbeth”; “Midsummer Day”; “The Old Shepherd”; “The Night Jar”; “The Song of the Old Mother”; “The First Spring Day”; “An Ode to Spring.” These subjects seem to me singularly like those that have inspired poets of all epochs; it is difficult to detect anything peculiar to the ’nineties in a title such as “The First Spring Day,” or “A Ring’s Secret.”

[150]

The first Rhymers’ Book contains Yeats’ exquisite poem on the Lake of Innisfree, and some dignified verse by Lionel Johnson; the second series contains a well-known poem by Ernest Dowson: “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.” But I think I am right in saying that it was neither Yeats nor Lionel Johnson nor Dowson’s work in these anthologies that attracted the greatest attention, but a lyric of Le Gallienne’s called “What of the Darkness?” which I remember one critic said wiped out Tennyson’s lyrics. Tennyson’s lyrics, however, went on obstinately existing, no doubt so as to give another generation the pleasure of thinking that they had wiped them out. While these singing birds were twittering, I remember one day at Cambridge buying a new book of verse by a man called Francis Thompson. Here, I thought, is another of the hundreds of new poets, but directly I caught sight of the “Hound of Heaven,” I thought to myself “Here is something different.” I remember showing Hubert Cornish a poem called “Daisy,” and saying to him, “Isn’t this very good?” It begins:

“Yes,” said Hubert, “but the trouble is that everyone writes so well nowadays that it is hardly worth while for any new poet to write well. All can raise the flower because all have got the seed.”

The undergraduates had no great enthusiasm for any of these new writers. I mean the intellectuals among the undergraduates. But the booksellers were always urging us to buy them on the plea that they would go up. Some of them did, and those who speculated in Francis Thompson and Yeats did well. The curious thing is that the prose writers and the poets were supposed to be great sticklers for form, to be absorbed by the theory of art for art’s sake, and to be aiming at impeccable craftsmanship. Looking back on the work of those poets now, their technique, compared to that of more modern poets, seems almost ludicrously feeble, but they seem to have had just what they were supposed to be without: a burning ideal to serve literature; to have been consumed with the desire to bring about a renaissance in[151] English literature and an English renaissance. There was one poet’s name which was sometimes mentioned then, and which had come down to the ’nineties from other and older generations. The name has gone on being mentioned since, and will one day, I think, reach the safe harbour of lasting fame, and this was Michael Field. Michael Field was a pseudonym which covered the remarkable personalities of two ladies, an aunt and a niece, who were friends of Robert Browning and of all the literary lights of their day, and who wrote a series of most remarkable dramas in verse and some extremely beautiful lyrics.

John Lane, the publisher, used to come down to Cambridge sometimes, and I made his acquaintance and, through him and Mr. Gosse, that of many of the writers I have mentioned: John Davidson, Le Gallienne, and others. There was a society at this time in London called the Cemented Bricks, to which some of the littérateurs and poets belonged, which met at Anderton’s Hotel in Fleet Street, and I was made a member, and on one occasion made a speech, and was down to read a paper, but I had to go abroad and this never came off. But what I chiefly remember about it is one occasion when Le Gallienne read a paper in which he passionately attacked the theory of art for art’s sake, and insisted on the relative unimportance of art compared with Nature, saying that a branch of almond blossom against the sky was worth all the pictures in the world. His paper was answered a month later by a young man who said this was the most Philistine sentiment he had ever heard expressed. This was while I was at Cambridge.

I did little work at Cambridge, and from the Cambridge curriculum I learnt nothing. I attended lectures on mathematics which might just as well have been, for the good they did me, in Hebrew. I spent hours with a coach who wearily explained to me things which I didn’t and couldn’t understand. I went to some lectures on French literature, but all I remember of them is that the lecturer demonstrated at some length that the French written by many well-known authors was often ungrammatical and sometimes full of mistakes. The lecturer cited to support his case pages of Georges Ohnet. One hardly needed a lecturer to point out that Georges Ohnet was not a classical writer. The lecturer’s aim was not to show the badness of certain authors, but to prove that the French of modern current literature was an independent living[152] organism that was growing and developing heedless of classical models, grammatical rules, and academic authority. I think he would have done better had he pointed out how certain other authors were writing prose and verse of so great an excellence that in the course of time their works might become classics. Boileau was one of the books to be read for the Tripos, and I had already read a great deal of Boileau and learnt his verse by heart as a child. I copied out the following lines in 1888:

When I told Dr. Verrall that we were reading Boileau he was delighted. He said: “How I wish I was reading Boileau; instead of which, when I have time to read, I read the latest Kipling story.” He said he spent his life in vain regret for the books he wanted to read, but which he knew he never would read. He could not help reading the modern books, but he often deplored the sad necessity. I stuck up for the modern books; I said I would far rather read Kipling than Boileau. I supposed in Boileau’s time people said: “Here I am, wasting my time reading Boileau, which I must read so as to follow the conversation at dinner, when I might be reading le Roman de la Rose.”

Dr. Verrall was an amusing story-teller, and I remember his telling a story of two old ladies who, while they were listening to the overture of Lohengrin, looked at each other with a puzzled, timid expression, until one of them asked the other: “Is it the gas?” Dr. Verrall told me he thought Rossetti’s poem, the “Blessed Damozel,” was rubbish. On the other hand, he admired his ballad, “Sister Helen.”

He said: “Why did you melt your waxen man, Sister Helen?” was a magnificent opening to a poem.

In spite of having learnt nothing in an academic sense at Cambridge, I am glad I went there, and I think I learnt a good[153] deal in other ways. I look back on it and I see the tall trees just coming out in the backs, behind King’s College; a picnic in canoes on the Cam; bookshops, especially a dark, long bookshop in Trinity Street where a plaintive voice told one that Norman Gale would be sure to go up; little dinner-parties in my rooms in Trinity Street, the food arriving on a tray from the College kitchen where the cook made créme brûlée better than anyone else in the world; one night fireworks on the window-sill and the thin curtains ablaze; rehearsals for the A.D.C., and Mr. Clarkson making one up; long, idle mornings in Trinity and King’s; literary discussions in rooms at Trinity; debates of the Decemviri in Carr-Bosanquet’s room on the ground floor of the Great Court; summer afternoons in King’s College gardens, and the light streaming through the gorgeous glass of the west window in King’s Chapel, where, listening to the pealing anthem, I certainly never dreamed of taxing the royal Saint with vain expense; gossip at the Pitt Club in the mornings, crowds of youths with well-brushed hair and straw hats telling stories in front of the fireplace; the Sunday-evening receptions in Oscar Browning’s rooms full of Arundel prints and crowds of long-haired Bohemians; the present Provost of Eton mimicking the dons; and the endless laughter of those who could say:

I left Cambridge after my first summer term as I could not pass the Little Go, nor could I ever have done so, had I stayed at Cambridge for years. My life during the next five years was a prolonged and arduous struggle to pass the examination into the Diplomatic Service. When I left Cambridge I went to Versailles, and stayed there a month to work at French. Then after a few days at Contrexéville, with my father, I went back to Hildesheim and stopped at Bayreuth on the way.

That year Parsifal and Tannhäuser were given, and for the first time at Bayreuth, Lohengrin. Mottl conducted; Vandyk sang the part of Lohengrin. When I arrived at the station, after a long night’s journey, I was offered a place for the performance of Parsifal that afternoon. I took it, but I was so tired after the journey that I fell asleep during the first act, and[154] slept so soundly, that at the end of the act, I had to be shaken before I woke up. In the third act, it will be remembered that Lohengrin, when he reveals his parentage, his occupation, and his name, at Elsa’s ill-timed request, mentions that his father’s name was Parsifal. A German lady who was sitting near me, when she heard this, gave a gasp of relief and recognition, as if all were now plain, and sighed: “Ach der Parsifal!”

At Leipzig I ran short of money, and nobody would cash me a cheque, as I could not satisfy either the Hotel or the Bank or the British Consul (Baron Tauchnitz) that I was who I claimed to be. I telegraphed to the Timmes for money, and they sent it to the Bank for me by telegram, but even then the Bank refused to give it to me, as they were doubtful of my identity. Finally I got the Timmes to telegraph it to the Hotel. The Consul was annoyed, and said that Englishmen always appeared to think they could go where they liked and do what they liked. I told him this was the case, and I had always supposed it to be the duty of a British Consul to help them to do so. I stayed at Hildesheim till Mr. Scoones’ establishment for candidates for the Diplomatic Service examination opened at Garrick Chambers in London in September. The examination for the Diplomatic Service was competitive. Candidates had to qualify in each of twelve subjects, which included three modern languages, Latin, modern history, geography, arithmetic, précis-writing, English essay-writing, and shorthand. The standard in French and German was high, and the most difficult task was the translation of a passage from a Times leading article into French and German as it was dictated. Life at Scoones’ meant going to lectures from ten till one, and again in the afternoon, and being crammed at home by various teachers. Mr. Scoones was a fine organiser and an acute judge of character. He was half French, and his personality was electric and fascinating; he was light in hand, amusing, and full of point. He used to have luncheon every day at the Garrick Club, which was next door to Garrick Chambers, and he lectured himself on French. He was assisted by the Rev. Dawson Clarke, who in vain tried to teach me arithmetic, and did manage to teach me enough geography, after five years, to qualify, and Mr. J. Allen, who gave us brilliant lectures on modern history. There was also a charming French lecturer, M. Esclangon, who corrected our French essays.[155] The first time I wrote him an essay he wrote on it: “Le Français est non seulement pur mais élégant.”

I lived alone in a room at the top of 37 Charles Street, and worked in the winter months extremely hard. Special coaches used to come to me, and special teachers of arithmetic. One of them had a new system of teaching arithmetic, which was supposed to make it simple, but in my case the system broke down.

Mr. Scoones told my father after I had been there a little time that I was sure to pass eventually.

On Sunday evenings I used often to have supper with Edmund Gosse at his house in Delamere Terrace, and there I met some of the lights of the literary world: George Moore, Rider Haggard, Henry Harland, and Max Beerbohm. Sometimes there would be serious discussions on literature between George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Arthur Symons. I remember once, when Swinburne was being discussed, Arthur Symons saying that there was a period in everyone’s life when one thought Swinburne’s poetry not only the best, but the only poetry worth reading. It seemed then to annihilate all other verse. Edmund Gosse then said that he would not be at all surprised, if some day Swinburne’s verse were to appear almost unintelligible to future generations. He thought it possible that Swinburne might survive merely as a literary curiosity, like Cowley. He also said that Swinburne in his later manner was like a wheel that spun round and round without any intellectual cog.

George Moore in those days was severe on Guy de Maupassant, and said his stories were merely carved cherry-stones. Edmund Gosse contested this point hotly. Still more amusing than the literary discussions were those occasions when Edmund Gosse would tell us reminiscences of his youth, when he worked as a boy at the British Museum, and of the early days of his friendship with Swinburne.

There was an examination for the Diplomatic Service that autumn, and I was given a nomination for it, but I was ill and couldn’t compete.

I went back to Hildesheim for Christmas. Christmas is the captain jewel of German domestic life, and no one who has not spent a Christmas with a German family can really know Germany, just as no one who has not lived through the Easter festival with a Russian family can really know Russia. It is[156] only in Germany that the Christmas tree grows in its full glory. The Christmas tree at Hildesheim was laden with little tangerine oranges and sprinkled over with long threads of silver snow. When it was lighted, the carol: “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht,” was sung round it. The presents were arranged, or rather displayed, on a table under the tree: new presents, and a present of many years’ standing, the Puppenstube, which took on a new life every Christmas by being redecorated, and having the small kitchen utensils in its dolls’ kitchen refurbished. The presents were not wrapped up in parcels, but they were exposed to the full view of those who were about to receive them, and so arranged that they appeared at their very best, as though Santa Claus and a fairy godmother had arranged them themselves. My present was a beautiful embossed dicky.

On New Year’s Eve, the Christmas tree was relit, and as the bells rang for New Year, we clinked glasses of punch and said: “Prosit Neujahr.” If you want to know what is the spirit of a German Christmas you will find its quintessence distilled in the poem of Heine about “Die heil’gen drei Kon’ge aus Morgenland,” which ends:

While I was going through this complicated and protracted training, the date of the examination was, of course, only a matter of conjecture, but when an Ambassador died there was always an atmosphere of excitement at Garrick Chambers, and on Scoones’ face one could clearly read that something momentous had occurred. As a rule the examinations happened about once a year. Having missed my first chance, which was fortunate, as I was woefully unprepared, I had to wait a long time for my second chance, and I spent the time between London, which meant Garrick Chambers, Germany, which meant Hildesheim, and Italy, which meant Madame Traverso’s pension at Lung’Arno della Borsa 2 bis, at Florence.

One night, at Edmund Gosse’s, in the winter of 1895, Harland was there, and the conversation turned on Anatole France. I quoted him some passages from Le Livre de Mon Ami, which he had not read. The name of Anatole France had not yet[157] been mentioned in the literary press of London, and Harland said to me: “Why don’t you write me an article about him and I will print it in the Yellow Book?” The Yellow Book by that time had lost any elements of surprise or newness it had ever had and had developed into an ordinary review to which the stock writers of London reviews contributed. I said I would try, and I wrote an article on Anatole France, which was accepted by Harland and came out in the April number. This was the first criticism of Anatole France which appeared in England. In the same number there was a story by Anatole France himself, and a long poem by William Watson. When the proof of my article came, I took it to Edmund Gosse, and read it aloud to him in his office at the Board of Trade in Whitehall. He was pleased with it, and his meed of generous and discriminating praise and encouragement was extremely welcome and exhilarating. He said there was a unique opportunity for anyone who should make it his aim and business to write gracefully and delicately about beautiful and distinguished things, and that I could not do better than try to continue as I had begun. No one could have been kinder nor more encouraging. The University is not a stimulating place for aspiring writers. The dons have seen it all before so many times, and heard it all so often; the undergraduates are so terribly in earnest and uncompromisingly severe about the efforts of their fellow-undergraduates; so cocksure and certain in their judgments, so that at Cambridge I hid my literary aspirations, and when I left it I had partially renounced all such ambitions, thinking that I had been deluding myself, but at the same time cherishing a hidden hope that I might some day begin again. Edmund Gosse’s praise kindled the smouldering ashes and prevented them from being extinguished, although I was too busy learning arithmetic, geography, and long lists of obscure terms in French and German to think much about such things.

One night that winter I went with my father and my sisters to the first night of the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith at the Garrick Theatre. Sir John Hare and Mrs. Patrick Campbell both played magnificently, and Mrs. Campbell enjoyed a triumph. She held the audience at the beginning of the play by her grace, and by her quiet magnetic intensity, and then swept everyone off their feet by her outbursts of vituperation. Mr. Shaw,[158] writing in the Saturday Review about it, said that one of the defects of the play, the unreality of the chief female character, had “the lucky effect of setting Mrs. Patrick Campbell free to do as she pleases in it, the result being an irresistible projection of that lady’s personal genius, a projection which sweeps the play aside and imperiously becomes the play itself. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in fact, pulls her author through by playing him clean off the stage. She creates all sorts of illusions, and gives one all sorts of searching sensations. It is impossible not to feel that those haunting eyes are brooding on a momentous past, and the parting lips anticipating a thrilling imminent future, whilst some enigmatic present must no less surely be working underneath all that subtle play of limb and stealthy intensity of tone.” After the third act the audience applauded deliriously, and the next day the critics declared unanimously that Mrs. Campbell had the ball at her feet. They all prophesied that this was the beginning of undreamed-of triumphs. They little dreamed how recklessly she would kick the ball.

At Easter I went to Florence once more and stayed there far into June. I think it was that year I spent a little time at Perugia. One day I drove to Assisi. The country was in the full glory of spring. We passed groaning carts drawn by slow, white oxen; poppies flared in the green corn; little lizards sunned themselves on the walls; one felt one was no longer in Italy, but in an older country, in Latium; in some little kingdom in which Remus might have been king, or that kindly monarch, Numa Pompilius, with Egeria, his gracious consort. I saw the Italy that I had dreamt of ever since as a child I had read with Mrs. Christie in the Lays of Ancient Rome of “where sweet Clanis wanders through corn and vines and flowers,” of milk-white steer grazing along Clitumnus, and the struggling sheep plunging in Umbro. And when at last Assisi appeared, with its shining snow-white basilica crowning the hill like a diadem, one seemed to be driving up to a celestial city.

On the 18th of May, life was made exciting by an earthquake. It happened about nine o’clock in the evening. We had just finished dinner at the pension. I had walked to my bedroom to fetch something, when there came a noise like a gas explosion or a bomb exploding, and I was thrown on to my bed. The pictures fell from the walls, and the ground seemed to be slipping away from one. Outside on the landing—we[159] lived on the second floor of the Palazzo Alberti, up two flights of stairs—I heard the servants crying: “Sono i Ladri” (“The thieves are upon us”), and there was a scamper down the stairs, as the maid and the cook rushed down to bolt the front door and keep out the thieves. Then various objects of value were saved, or at least a mysterious process of salvage was begun. A box containing family deeds was carried from one room to another, and some American children were carried downstairs in a blanket. The shock, I think, lasted only seven seconds, but had been, while it lasted, intense. Then there was a good deal of bustle and discussion, and everybody suggested something different that ought to be done; and Madame Traverso carried on a conversation with the landlady of the house, who lived on the first floor. Relations between the two households had hitherto been strained, and a state of veiled hostilities had existed between them. The earthquake changed all this and brought about a reconciliation. From her window Madame Traverso called to the landlady and assured her that we were: “Nelle mani di Dio” (“We are in the hands of God”). “Si,” answered the landlady: “Siamo nelle mani di Dio” (“Yes, we are in the hands of God”). Signora Traverso said we could not sleep in the house that night. It was not to be thought of, and we joined the population in the streets. No sooner had people begun to say it was all over, and that we could quietly go home, than another faint tremor was felt. People encamped in carriages; others walked about the streets. The terror inspired by an earthquake is unlike any other, because you feel there is no possible escape from it. At eleven o’clock in the evening there was another faint shock. We got to bed late; some of the inmates of the pension slept in a cab. The next day one could inspect the damage done. The village of Grassina near the Certosa had been destroyed. I had just been to the Certosa, and one of the monks there, an Irishman, when we asked him what the green liqueur was made of, that he sold, said: “Shamrocks and melted emeralds.” Grassina was a village where on Good Friday I had seen the procession of Gesù Morto by torchlight, in the April twilight, with its centurions in calico and armour, its tapers, its nasal brasses and piercing lamentation, and crowd of nut-sellers; a ceremony as old as the soil, and said to be a new incarnation of the funeral of Pan.

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The Palazzo Strozzi was rent from top to bottom with a huge crack. Pillars in Piazza dell’Anunziata had fallen down; and at San Miniato, the school of the Poggio Imperiale had been seriously damaged. Had the shock lasted a few seconds longer the destruction in Florence would have been extremely serious, and many irreplaceable treasures would have been destroyed.

The afternoon after the earthquake I bicycled out to see Vernon Lee, and she said that the butcher boy in her village declared that in the afternoon before the earthquake he had seen the Devil leap from a cleft in the ground in a cloud of sulphurous fumes and fires. In the night there was another slight shock towards one in the morning. I was asleep and I was woken suddenly, and experienced the strange sensation of feeling the floor slightly oscillating, but it only lasted a second or two, and that was the last of the earthquake.

I made that year the acquaintance of Professor Nencioni, a poet and a critic, and a profound student of English literature and English verse. He was saturated with English literature, and his poems show the influence and impress of the English poets of the nineteenth century. He used to give lectures on English poetry in Italian; he was a stimulating, eloquent lecturer, and his knowledge of English was amazing. I went to his lectures and made his acquaintance, and we had long talks about literature. He asked me if I had written anything, and I told him I had some typed poems, but that I had given up trying to write verse. He asked me to show them him. The next time I went to his lecture I took my typed MSS. and left it with him. The next Sunday after the lecture he came up to me with the MSS. in his hand and said: “Lei è poeta,” and he said: “Never mind what anyone may tell you, I tell you it is a fact.” I was greatly exhilarated by Nencioni’s encouragement, but I thought that being a foreigner he was perhaps too indulgent, and I would have felt uncomfortable had a Cambridge undergraduate overheard his conversation. It had nevertheless an effect, and I thought that I would some day try to write verse again.

Towards the end of the summer, I went back to Germany. Edward Marsh joined me at Hildesheim and stayed at the Timmes’. E. was the most painstaking and industrious pupil Professor Timme ever had, and he enjoyed the German life to the full, but it was his misfortune rather than his fault[161] that he offended the easily ruffled susceptibilities of the Timme family.

On one occasion he made what turned out to be an unfortunate remark about the river Innerste, which is Hildesheim’s river. He said it was dirty; upon which Professor Timme, much nettled, said: “Das will ich nicht sagen. Sie ist viel reiner als mancher Fluss, der von einer Grosstadt kommt, und vielleicht ganz rein aussieht.” [I won’t say that; it is much cleaner than many a river that comes from a big town and perhaps looks quite clean.]

There was a delightful German pupil living in the house called Erich Wippern, a brother of Hans Wippern, who had been there before. We arranged to give a Kneipe for him and the other boys in one of the villages. The matter had been publicly discussed and seemed to be settled, but at the last minute, Professor Timme objected to it, and we had a long and painful interview on the subject. He said the Kneipe was not to be, and when I reminded him that he had already given his consent, he lost his temper. We decided after this distressing scene to go away, and we left for Heidelberg, our ultimate objective in any case, the next day.

E. and I had invented a game which I think I enjoyed more than any game I have ever played at, with the exception of a good game of Spankaboo. It was called: “The Game.” You played it like this: One player gave the other player two lines or more of poetry, or a sentence of prose, in any language. The other player was allowed two guesses at the authorship of the quotation, and, if he said it immediately after the second guess, breathlessly so to speak, a third guess; but there must not be a second’s pause between the second and the third. They had to be “double leads.” The third had to come, if at all, helter-skelter after the second guess. If you guessed right you got a mark, and if you guessed wrong you got a nought; the noughts and crosses were entered into a small book, which went on getting fuller and fuller. They were added up at the bottom of every page; but as The Game is eternal, we shall never know who won it, until the Last Day, and then perhaps there won’t be time. We both played it well on the whole, although we both had strange lapses. I never could guess a line out of Lycidas and E. never could guess a line out of Adonaïs. I attributed one[162] day one of the finest lines of Milton to the poet Montgomery, and E. made an equally absurd mistake, which happened to have a profound effect on my future, or rather on my future literary aspirations. We were playing the game in the Biergarten at Hildesheim. The band was playing the overture from Tannhäuser. Schoolboys were walking round the garden, arm in arm, and when they met an acquaintance took off their hats all together, in time, and by the right, or by the left, as the case might be, held them at an arm’s length and put them back stiffly. At many little tables, groups and families were sitting enjoying the music, drinking beer and eating Butterbrote. I said to E.: “Who is this by in The Game?” which was the recognised formula for saying you had begun to play, because the game began suddenly in the midst of conversation and circumstance quite remote from it: no matter how inappropriate or inopportune. The lines I quoted were these:

“Oh,” said E., without any hesitation, “it’s magnificent—Shakespeare.”

“No,” I said, “it is not by Shakespeare; it is the end of a sonnet by Maurice Baring, written at Hildesheim in 1892.”

Now I had shown the poem in which these lines occurred with others to some undergraduates at Cambridge, possibly to E. himself, and had been told the stuff was deplorable, which no doubt it was, but this had so damped my spirits that I had resolved never to try and write verse again. Then came Nencioni’s praise (who had marked these very lines in blue pencil), and I partially reconsidered my decision. Now came this incident, which opened a shut door for me. It was not that I didn’t know that in this Game one was capable of any aberrations. It was not that I took myself seriously, but the mere fact of E. making such a mistake convinced me that mistakes in my favour were possible. Nencioni might be right after all. In any case, there was no reason why I should not try; and two days later I produced a sonnet, which E. entirely approved of, and which I afterwards published.

It was a great game; it included not only verse and prose, but sayings of great and small men, and even of personal[163] acquaintances. We were both at our best in guessing things from books we had never read. I had an unerring ear for Zola’s prose, which I had then read little of, and E., whose reading was far wider and deeper than mine, was very hard to baffle except, as I have already said, by quoting Shelley’s Adonaïs, which he ended by learning by heart.

At Heidelberg I introduced E. to Professor Ihne. Professor Ihne, confronted, in the shape of E., with an undergraduate, or rather with a graduate, who had just taken his degree, and had won academical distinctions, was in his most Johnsonian mood, and contradicted him even when he agreed with him. He asked E. what degree he had taken at Cambridge, and when E. said: “Palæography,” Ihne, with a smile, said: “Oh, that’s all nonsense.” The Professor turned the conversation on to his favourite topic: the superfluity of the Norman element in the English language; the sad occurrence of the word pullulate in a Times article was mentioned, and E. made a spirited defence of the phrase: “Assemble and meet together,” which he said was a question of rhythm. “Pooh!” said Ihne, “it’s only association makes you think that.” The word “to get,” he said, was used to denote too many things. Poor E. was interpellated, as if he, and he alone, had been responsible for the shortcomings of the English language. He used, said Ihne, the word education when he meant instruction. “One is instructed at school,” he said. He asked E. for the derivation of the word caterpillar. E. had no suggestion to offer. Ihne said he derived it from Kater and to pill, but he had also given καθερπίζω a thought. Then the talk veered round to literature. “Schiller,” said Ihne, “is a greater dramatic poet than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s tragedies are too painful; King Lear and Othello are unbearable.” E. said, unwisely, that Schiller’s women were so uninteresting. Ihne said that that was a thing E. could know nothing about, as he was not a married man. For his part, and he had been a married man, Schiller’s characters, and especially Thekla, were the most beautiful women characters that had ever been drawn. E. tried to defend Shakespeare, and pointed out the qualities of Shakespeare’s women. He mentioned Portia. “No,” said Ihne; “Portia is not a good character, because she oversteps her duties as counsel and tries to play the part of a judge.” “I consider Lord Byron,” said Ihne,[164] “the finest English poet of the century.” E. said Byron had a great sense of rhythm. “If he had merely a great sense of rhythm,” said Ihne, “he wouldn’t have been a great poet.” E., to propitiate him, said something laudatory about Goethe’s Faust. Ihne at once said that Schiller was a greater poet than Goethe, because Faust was a collection of detached scenes, and Schiller’s plays were complete wholes.

We saw Professor Ihne several times, and what I have described is typical of all our conversations.

After staying at Heidelberg for about a week I went back to London, and the routine of Garrick Chambers began once more.

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The time soon came when I had to go up for my first examination, and before it there was a period of intensive cramming. I had scores of teachers, and spent hour after hour taking private lessons in Latin, German, shorthand, and arithmetic. A great deal of this cramming was quite unnecessary, as it did not really touch the vital necessities of the examination. I read a great deal of German; all Mommsen, a great deal of French, and all Renan; but literary French and German were not what was needed; long lists of technical words were far more necessary. The clichés of political leader-writers; the German for a belligerent, and the French for a Committee on Supply; an accurate knowledge of where the manufacturing cities of England were situated, and the solution of problems about one tap filling a bath half again as quickly as another emptied it. I spent a great deal of time, but not enough as it turned out, making lists of obscure technical words. I learnt the Latin for prize-money, which I was told was a useful word for “prose,” but unfortunately the word prize-money did not occur in the Latin translation paper. The word is manubiæ. I am glad to know it. It is indeed unforgettable.

We were examined orally in French, German, and in Italian. When I was confronted with the German examiner, the first thing he asked me was whether I could speak German. I was foolishly modest and answered: “Ein wenig” (“A little”). “Very well,” he said, “it will be for another time.” I made up my mind that next time I went up I would say I spoke German as well as Bismarck, and wrote it better than Goethe.

I kept my resolution the last time I went up for the examination, and it was crowned with success.

Here is one of the arithmetic questions from the examination paper set in 1894:

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“What vulgar fraction expresses the ratio of 17½ square yards to half an acre?” (I am told this is an easy sum.)

Here is a sentence which had to be translated into German as it was dictated in English:

“Factions are formed upon opinions; which factions become in effect bodies corporate in the state;—nay, factions generate opinions in order to become a centre of union, and to furnish watchwords to parties; and this may make it expedient for government to forbid things in themselves innocent and neutral.”

Here is a geography question of the kind I found most baffling:

“Make a sketch of the country between the Humber and the Mersey on the south, and the Firth of Forth and Clyde on the north.”

When I went up for the examination, I think it was in January 1896, I failed both in geography and arithmetic, and so had to begin the routine of cramming all over again. All the next year I rang the changes again on Florence, Hildesheim, and Scoones. When the examination was over, I went abroad with Claud Russell, and we went to Paris and Monte Carlo. Lord Dufferin was Ambassador in Paris, and we dined with him once or twice.

We saw Guitry and Jeanne Granier perform Maurice Donnay’s exquisite play, Amants.

At Monte Carlo we stayed with Sir Edward Mallet in his “Villa White.” A brother of Lord Salisbury, Lord Sackville Cecil, was staying there. He had a passion for mechanics; we had only to say that the sink seemed to be gurgling, or the window rattling, or the door creaking, and in a moment he would have his coat off, and, screwdriver in hand, would set to work plumbing, glazing, or joining.

One night after dinner, just to see what would happen, I said the pedal of the pianoforte seemed to wheeze. In a second he was under the pianoforte and soon had it in pieces. He found many things radically wrong, and he was grateful to me for having given him the opportunity of setting them right. Sir Edward Mallet had retired from the Diplomatic Service. The house where we stayed, and which he had designed himself, was a curious example of design and decoration. It was designed in the German Rococo style, and in the large hall stucco[167] pillars had for capitals, florid, gilded, coloured, and luxuriant moulded festoons which represented flames, and soared into the ceiling.

One afternoon Lord Sackville Cecil said he wanted to see the gambling-rooms. We went for a walk, and on our way back stopped at the rooms. Lord Sackville Cecil was not an elegant dresser; his enormous boots after our walk were covered with dust, and his appearance was so untidy that the attendant refused to let him in. I suggested his showing a card, but his spirit rebelled at such a climb-down, and we went home without seeing the rooms.

From Monte Carlo I went to Florence. I went back to my pension but also stayed for over a week with Vernon Lee at her villa. Her brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who had been on his back a helpless invalid for over twenty years, had suddenly, in a marvellous manner, recovered, and his first act had been to climb up Mount Vesuvius.

I recollect the great beauty and the heat of that month of March at Florence. Giotto’s Tower, and the graceful dome of the Cathedral, seen from the plain at the foot of San Gervasio, looked more like flowers than like buildings in the March evenings, across vistas of early green foliage and the delicate pageant of blossom.

We went for many delightful expeditions: to a farmhouse that had belonged to Michael Angelo at Carregi; to the Villa Gamberaia with its long grass terrace and its tall cypresses—a place that belongs to a fairy-tale; and I remember more vividly than all a wine-press in a village with wine-stained vats, large barrels, and a litter of farm instruments under the sun-baked walls—a place that at once conjured up visions of southern ripeness and mellowness. It seemed to embody the dreams of Keats and Chénier, and took me once more to the imaginary Italy which I had built when I read in the Lays of Ancient Rome of “the vats of Luna” and “the harvests of Arretium.”

Then came a summer term at Scoones, distracted and dislocated by many amusements. I went to the Derby that year and backed Persimmon; to the first performance of Mrs. Campbell’s Magda the same night; I saw Duse at Drury Lane and Sarah Bernhardt at Daly’s; I went to Ascot; I went to balls; I stayed at Panshanger; and at Wrest, at the end of the summer, where a constellation of beauty moved[168] in muslin and straw hats and yellow roses on the lawns of gardens designed by Lenôtre, delicious with ripe peaches on old brick walls, with the smell of verbena, and sweet geranium; and stately with large avenues, artificial lakes and white temples; and we bicycled in the warm night past ghostly cornfields by the light of a large full moon.

In August I went back to Germany, and heard the Ring at Bayreuth. Mottl conducted. But of all that sound and fury, the only thing that remains in my mind is a French lady who sat next to me, and who, when Siegfried’s body was carried by to the strains of the tremendous funeral march, burst into sobs, and said to me: “Moi aussi j’ai un fils, Monsieur.” Then in London I made a terrific spurt, and worked all day and far into the night to make ready for another examination which took place on November 14. I remember nothing of this long nightmare. As soon as the examination was over, I started with Claud Russell for Egypt. We went by train to Marseilles, and then embarked in a Messagerie steamer. I spent the time reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the first time. The passengers were nearly all French, and treated us with some disdain; but Fate avenged us, for when we arrived at Alexandria, we were, in obedience to the orders of my uncle (Lord Cromer), allowed to proceed at once, while the rest of the passengers had to wait in quarantine. We went to Cairo, and stayed at the Agency with my uncle. The day we arrived it was pouring with rain which, we were told, was a rare occurrence in Cairo.

We used to have breakfast on a high verandah outside our bedrooms, off tiny little eggs and equally small fresh bananas.

At luncheon the whole of the diplomatic staff used to be present, and usually guests as well. The news came to Cairo that I had failed to pass the examination, in geography and arithmetic. Claud Russell, I think, qualified, and was given a vacancy later.

In the evening my uncle used sometimes to read us passages of abuse about himself in the local press. One phrase which described him as combining the oiliness of a Chadband with the malignity of a fiend delighted him. He gave us the MSS. of his book, Modern Egypt, which was then only partly written, to read. He was never tired of discussing books: the Classics, French novels, the English poets of the eighteenth century.[169] He could not endure the verse of Robert Browning. His admiration for French prose was unbounded and for the French gift of expression in general, their newspaper articles, their speeches, and, above all, their acting.

Sometimes we rode to the Pyramids, and one day we had tea with Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt in their Arab house.

We did not stay long in Cairo; we went up the Nile. The first part of the journey, to a station whose name I forget, was by train; and once, when the train stopped in the desert, the engine-driver brought Claud Russell a copybook and asked him to correct an English exercise he had just done. Claud said how odd we should think it if in England the engine-driver brought us an exercise to correct.

Then we embarked in the M.S. Cleopatra and steamed to Luxor, where we saw the sights: the tombs of the kings, the temple of Carnac, the statue of Memnon. We bathed in the Nile, and smoked hashish.

We were back in Europe by Christmas, and spent Christmas night in the waiting-room of Turin railway station playing chess; and when we arrived in London the momentous question arose, what was I to do to pass the examination? We were only allowed three tries, and my next attempt would be my last chance.

The large staff of teachers who were cramming me were in despair. I was told I must pass the next time.

The trouble was that the standard of arithmetic demanded by this examination was an elementary standard, and I had now twice attained by cramming a pitch I knew I should never surpass. At Scoones’ they said my only chance lay in getting an easy paper. It was said that my work had been wrong not in degree but in kind. I had merely wasted time by reading Renan and Mommsen; other candidates, who had never read a German book in their lives, by learning lists of words got more marks than I did. Herr Dittel, who gave me private lessons in German, said that he could have sent a German essay of mine to a German magazine. But not knowing the German for “belligerent,” I was beaten by others who knew the language less well. The same applied to the French in which I was only second, although perhaps in some ways the best French scholar among the candidates.

It seemed useless for me to go back to Scoones’ and useless to go abroad. After much debate and discussion the matter[170] was settled by chance. I made the acquaintance of Auberon Herbert in the winter, and instead of going to a crammer’s I settled to go and live at Oxford, and I took rooms at King Edward Street and went to coaches in Latin and arithmetic. For two terms I lived exactly as an undergraduate, and there was no difference between my life and that of a member of Balliol except that I was not subject to College authority.

Then began an interlude of perfect happiness. I did a little work but felt no need of doing any more, as, if anything, I had been overcrammed and was simply in need of digestion. I rediscovered English literature with Bron, and shared in his College life and in the lives of others. Life was a long series of small dramas. One night Bron pulled the master’s bath-chair round the Quad, and the matter was taken with the utmost seriousness by the College authorities. A College meeting was held, and Bron was nearly sent down. Old Balliol men would come from London and stay the night: Claud Russell and Antony Henley. Arnold Ward was engrossed in Turgenev; Cubby Medd,—or was that later?—who gave promise of great brilliance, was spellbound by Rossetti. And then there were the long, the endlessly long, serious conversations about the events of the College life and athletics and the Toggers and the Anna and the Devor. It was like being at Eton again. Indeed, I never could see any difference between Eton and Balliol. Balliol seemed to me an older edition of Eton, whereas Cambridge was to me a slightly different world, different in kind, although in many ways like Oxford; and, although neither of them know it, and each would deny it vehemently, they are startlingly like each other all the same.

I knew undergraduates at other Colleges as well as at Balliol and a certain number of the Dons as well.

I also knew a good many of the old Balliol men who used to come down to Oxford and sometimes stay in King Edward Street.

Then came the summer term. We had a punt, and Bron Herbert, myself, and others would go out in it and read aloud Wells’ Plattner Story and sometimes Alice in Wonderland, and sometimes from a volume of Swinburne bound in green shagreen—an American edition which contained “Atalanta in Calydon” and the “Poems and Ballads.” That summer I made friends with Hilary Belloc, who lived at Oxford in Holywell and was coaching young pupils.

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I had met him once before with Basil Blackwood, but all he had said to me was that I would most certainly go to hell, and so I had not thought it likely that we should ever make friends, although I recognised the first moment I saw him that he was a remarkable man.

He had a charming little house in Holywell, and there he and Antony Henley used to discuss all manner of things.

I had written by now a number of Sonnets, and Belloc approved of them. One of them he copied out and hung up in his room on the back of a picture. I showed him too the draft of some parodies written in French of some French authors. He approved of these also, and used to translate them to his pupils, and make them translate them back into French.

Belloc was writing a book about Danton, and from time to time he would make up rhymes which afterwards became the Bad Child’s Book of Beasts. The year before I went to Oxford he had published a small book of verse on hard paper called Verses and Sonnets, which contained among several beautiful poems a poem called “Auvergnat.” I do not think that this book excited a ripple of attention at the time, and yet some of the poems in it have lived, and are now found in many anthologies, whereas the verse which at this time was received with a clamour of applause is nearly all of it not only dead but buried and completely forgotten.

We had wonderful supper-parties in King Edward Street. Donald Tovey, who was then musical scholar at Balliol, used to come and play a Wagnerian setting to a story he had found in Punch called the “Hornets,” and sometimes the Waldstein Sonata. He discussed music boldly with Fletcher, the Rowing Blue. Belloc discoursed of the Jewish Peril, the Catholic Church, the “Chanson de Roland,” Ronsard, and the Pyrenees with indescribable gusto and vehemence.

People would come in through the window, and syphons would sometimes be hurled across the room; but nobody was ever wounded. The ham would be slapped and butter thrown to the ceiling, where it stuck. Piles of chairs would be placed in a pinnacle, one on the top of the other, over Arthur Stanley, and someone would climb to the top of this airy Babel and drop ink down on him through the seats of the chairs. Songs were sung; port was drunk and thrown about the room. Indeed we had a special brand of port, which was called throwing port,[172] for the purpose. And then again the evenings would finish in long talks, the endless serious talks of youth, ranging over every topic from Transubstantiation to Toggers, and from the last row with the Junior Dean to Predestination and Free-will. We were all discovering things for each other and opening for each other unguessed-of doors.

Donald Tovey used to explain to us how bad, musically, Hymns Ancient and Modern were, and tried (and failed) to explain me the Chinese scale; Belloc would quote the “Chanson de Roland” and, when shown some piece of verse in French or English that he liked, would say: “Why have I not known that before?” or murmur: “Good verse. Good verse.” Antony Henley used to quote Shakespeare’s lines from Henry V.:

as the most satisfying lines in the language. And I would punctuate the long discussions by playing over and over again at the pianoforte a German students’ song:

and sometimes translate Heine’s songs to Belloc.

Best of all were the long summer afternoons and evenings on the river, when the punt drifted in tangled backwaters, and improvised bathes and unexpected dives took place, and a hazy film of inconsequent conversation and idle argument was spun by the half-sleeping inmates of the wandering, lazy punt.

During the Easter holidays I went back to Hildesheim for the last time as a pupil. Sometimes when I was supposed to be working, Frau Timme would find me engaged in a literary pursuit, and she would say: “Ach, Herr Baring, lassen Sie diese Schriftstellerei und machen Sie Ihr Examen” (“Leave all that writing business and pass your examination”).

Before saying a final good-bye to Hildesheim, I will try to sum up what chiefly struck me in the five years during which I visited Germany constantly. Nearly all the Germans I met, with few exceptions, belonged to the bourgeois, the professional class, the intelligentsia; and they used to speak their mind on politics in general and on English politics in particular with frankness and freedom.

I believe that during all this period our relations with Germany[173] were supposed to be good. Lord Salisbury was directing the foreign policy of England, and his object was to maintain the balance of power in Europe: friendly relations with both Germany and France, without entangling England in any foreign complications.

The English then, as Bismarck said, were bad Europeans. It would have perhaps been better for England if it had been possible for them to continue to be so.

But the Germans I saw never thought that the relations between the two countries were satisfactory, and they laid the whole blame on England. I never once met a German who said it would be a good thing for Germany and England to be friends, with the exception of Professor Ihne. But I constantly met Germans who said Germany might be friends with England but England made it impossible. England, they said, was the spoil-sport of Germany. I was at Hildesheim when the cession of Heligoland to Germany was announced. “England,” said the Germans, “ist sehr schlau” (“The English are very sly”). They thought they had made a bad bargain.

So even, when they had gained an advantage, it escaped their notice; and they always thought they had been cheated and bamboozled. What opened my eyes more clearly still was the instruction given to the schoolboys; the history lessons during which no opportunity was ever lost of belittling England, and above all the history books, the Weltgeschichten (World-histories), which the boys used to read for pleasure.

In these histories of the world, the part that England played in mundane affairs was made to appear either insignificant, baleful, or mean. England was hardly mentioned during the earlier periods of history. There was hardly anything about the England of the Tudors, or the Stuarts, but England’s rôle in the Napoleonic Wars, in which England was the ally of Germany, was made to appear that of a dishonest broker, a clever monkey making the foolish cats pull the chestnuts out of the fire. The whole of England’s success was attributed to money and money-making. “Sie haben,” the Timmes used constantly to say, “den grossen Geldbeutel” (“You have the large purse”). It was not only the Timmes who used to rub this in, in season and out of season, but casual strangers one met in the train or drinking beer at a restaurant.

[174]

My impression was that Germans of this class detested England as a nation, in a manner which Englishmen did not suspect.

“Die Engländer sind nicht mutig aber prahlen können Sie” (“The English are not brave, but they know how to boast”), a boy once said to me.

They constantly used to lay down the law about English matters and conditions of life in England which they knew nothing of at all. In England, they used to say, people do such and such a thing. The English have no this or no that. Above all, “Kein Bier,” and when I said there was such a thing as beer in England, they used to answer: “Ach, das Pale-Ale, aber kein Bierkomment,” which was indeed true.

During the time I spent in Hildesheim you could have heard every single grievance that was used as propaganda in neutral countries during the European War, and when I was in Italy during the war, Italians expressed opinions to me which were obviously German in inspiration and were echoes of what I used to hear in Hildesheim.

I never met a German who had been to England, but they always had the most clearly defined and positive views of every branch of English life. When I was at school at Hildesheim, the book the boys used to read to teach them English was a book about social conditions and domestic life in England, described by a German who, I suppose, had been to England. He had a singular gift for misunderstanding the simplest and most ordinary occurrences and phenomena of English life and the English character.

I suppose it would be true to say that the English did not know the Germans any better than the Germans knew them. English statesmen, with one exception, certainly knew little of Germany, but there is this difference. The English admitted their ignorance, their indifference, and passed on. They never theorised about the Germans, nor dogmatised. They never said: “There is no cheese in Germany,” or: “The Germans cannot play football.” They did not know whether they did or not, and cared still less.

During the Boer War, the German Press voiced with virulence all that the middle class in Germany had thought for years, and we were astonished at this explosion of violence; but in reality this was no new phenomenon; it was the natural[175] expression of feelings that had existed for long and which now found a favourable outlet.

Of course, in the upper classes, things, for all I know, may have been quite different. I know that there were influential Germans who always wished for good relations between the two countries, but even there they were in a minority.

I left Germany grateful for many things, extremely fond of many of the people I had known, but convinced that there was not the slightest chance of popular opinion in Germany ever being favourable towards England, as the feeling the Germans harboured was one of envy—the envy a clever person feels for someone he knows to be more stupid than himself yet to be far more successful, and who succeeds without apparent effort, where he has laboriously tried and failed.

Bismarck used to say there was not a German who would not be proud to be taken for an Englishman, and when Germans felt this to be true it only made them the more angry.

Years later I heard foreign diplomatists who knew Germany well sometimes say that the English alarm and suspicion of German hatred of England was baseless, and that the idea that Germany was always brooding on a possible war with England was unfounded.

When asked how they accounted for the evidence which daily seemed to point to the contrary, they would say they knew some German politicians intimately who desired nothing so much as good relations with England. This was no doubt true, but in speaking like this, these impartial foreigners were thinking of certain highly cultured, liberal-minded aristocrats. They did not know the German bourgeoisie. Indeed they often said, when someone alluded to the violence of German newspapers: “That’s the Professors.”

It was the Professors. But it was the Professors who wrote the history books, who taught the children and the schoolboys, lectured to the students, and trained the minds of the future politicians and soldiers of Germany.

During my last sojourn at Hildesheim I went to stay with Erich Wippern, who was learning forestry in the Harz Mountains. He lived in a little wooden house in the forest. The house was furnished entirely with antlers, and from morning till night, he associated with trees and was taught all about them by an old forester.

[176]

I never went back to Hildesheim again for any time, although I used sometimes to stay a night there on my way to or from Russia. The last time I heard of the Timmes was just before the outbreak of war, when I received a letter from Kurt Timme, whom I had known twenty-two years before as a little boy, telling me his father was dead, and inviting me to attend his own wedding. Kurt was an officer, now a lieutenant. I sent him a wedding present. Two weeks later we were at war with Germany.

At the end of the summer term, Bron, Kershaw, and myself gave a dinner-party at the Mitre, to which forty guests were invited. Slap’s band officiated. The banquet took place in a room upstairs. This was the menu:

The caterers of the dinner were loth to print such a menu.

They hankered for phrases such as Purée à la bonne femme, and Poulets printaniers, but I overruled them. Very soon, during dinner, the musical instruments were smashed to bits, and towards the end of the meal there was a fine ice-throwing competition. After dinner the guests adjourned to Balliol Quadrangle.

It was Jubilee year—the second Jubilee. Preparations were being made in London for the procession and for other festivities, and the atmosphere was charged with triumph and prosperity. For the third time in my life I saw Queen Victoria drive through the streets of London. I saw the procession from Montagu House in Whitehall. This was the most imposing of all the pageants, and the most striking thing about it was perhaps the crowd.

There was a great deal of talk about the Fancy Dress Ball at Devonshire House. I had a complicated costume for it, but none of my family went to it as our Uncle Johnny died just before it came off. We went to see some of the people in their clothes at Lord Cowper’s house in St. James’s Square, where I remember a tall and blindingly beautiful Hebe, a dazzling[177] Charlotte Corday, in grey and vermilion, a lady who looked as if she had stepped out of an Italian picture, with a long, faded Venetian red train and a silver hat tapering into a point, and another who had stepped from an old English frame, a pale figure in faded draperies and exquisite lace, with a cluster of historic and curiously set jewels in her hair, and arms and shoulders like those of a sculpture of the finest Greek period.

Later on in the summer, my father, who had not been well for some time, died, and we said good-bye to 37 Charles Street, and to Membland after the funeral was over, for ever.

I went to a crammer’s at Bournemouth and spent the whole of the winter in London being intensively crammed, and all through the Christmas holidays. In the spring there was a further examination.

This time I qualified in all subjects, and I was given half-marks in arithmetic. The gift of these half-marks must have been a favour, as, comparing my answers with those of other candidates, after the examination, I found that my answers in no way coincided with theirs.

Years later I met a M. Roche, who had been the French examiner. He told me that I was not going to be let through; (as I suspected, I had not passed in arithmetic), but that he had gone to the Board of Examiners and had told them the French essay I had written might have been written by a Frenchman. When the result of the examination was announced I was not in the first three, but when the first vacancy occurred later, I was given it, and on 20th June 1898 I received a letter from the Civil Service Commission saying that, owing to an additional vacancy having been reported, I had been placed in the position of a successful candidate, and asking me to furnish evidence of my age.

I was able to do this, and was admitted into the Foreign Office and placed in the African Department.

I enjoyed my first summer at the Foreign Office before the newness of the work and surroundings wore off. The African Department was interesting. It has since been taken over by the Colonial Office. Officials from West Africa would drift in and tell us interesting things, and there was in the Department a senior clerk whose devotion to office work was such that his leave, on the rare occasions he took it, used to consist in his coming down to the office at eleven[178] in the morning instead of at ten. At the end of the summer I was moved up into the Commercial Department, which was a haven of rest in the Foreign Office, as no registering had to be done there, and no putting away of papers; and the junior clerks used to write drafts on commercial matters—tenders and automatic couplings. In the other departments they had to serve a fifteen-year apprenticeship before being allowed to write a draft.

Suddenly, in that autumn, the whole life of the Office was made exciting by the Fashoda crisis. We were actually on the brink of a European war. The question which used to be discussed from morning till night in the Office was: “Will Lord Salisbury climb down?” The Office thought we always climbed down; that Lord Salisbury was the King of Climbers-down. But Lord Salisbury had no intention of climbing down this time, and did not do so. I remember my Uncle Cromer saying one day, when someone attacked what he called Lord Salisbury’s vacillating and weak policy: “Lord Salisbury knows his Europe; he has an eye on what is going on in all the countries and on our interests all over the world, and not only on one small part of the world.” During this crisis, the tension between France and England was extreme; it was made worse by the inflammatory speeches that irresponsible members of Parliament made all over England at the time. I believe they shared the Foreign Office view that Lord Salisbury would climb down at the end, and were trying to burn his boats for him; but they need not have troubled, and their speeches did far more harm than good. They had no effect on the policy of the Foreign Office, which was clearly settled in Lord Salisbury’s mind; all they did was to exasperate the French, and to make matters more difficult for the Government. This was the first experience of what seems to me to recur whenever England is in difficulties. Directly a crisis arises in which England is involved, dozens of irresponsible people, and sometimes even responsible people, set about to make matters far more difficult than they need be. This was especially true during the European War. I never saw Lord Salisbury in person during the time I spent in the Foreign Office, except at a garden-party at Hatfield, where I was one of several hundreds whom he shook hands with. But I had often the opportunity of reading his minutes, and sometimes his reports,[179] written in his own handwriting, of conversations he had held with Foreign Ambassadors. These were always amusing and caustic, and his comments were wise and far sighted.

The internal arrangements and organisation of the Office were in the hands of Lord Sanderson. Many of the clerks lived in terror of him. He was extremely kind to me, although he always told me I should never be a good clerk and would do better to stick to diplomacy. Even on the printed forms we used to fill up, enclosing communications, which we called P.L.’s, and which he used to sign himself, in person, every evening, a clerk standing beside him with a slip of blotting-paper, his minute eye for detail used constantly to discern a slight inaccuracy, either in the mode of address or the terminology. He would then take a scraper and scratch it out and amend it. The signing of all these forms must have used a great deal of his time, and I believe the custom has now been abolished.

In those days all dispatches were kept folded in the Office, an immensely inconvenient practice. All the other public offices kept them flat, but when it was suggested that the Foreign Office papers should be kept flat, there was a storm of opposition. They had been kept folded for a hundred years; the change was unthinkable. Someone suggested a compromise: that they should be half-folded and kept curved, but this was abandoned. Ultimately, I believe, they were allowed to be kept flat.

Later on, the whole work of the Foreign Office was reformed, and the clerks no longer have to spend half the day in doing manual clerical work. In my time it was most exhausting, except in the Commercial Department, which was a haven of gentlemanlike ease. Telegrams had often to be ciphered and deciphered by the clerk, but not often in the Commercial Department. But on one Saturday afternoon I remember having to send off two telegrams, one to Sweden and one to Constantinople, and I sent the Swedish telegram to Constantinople and the Turkish telegram to Sweden, and nothing could be done to remedy the mistake till Monday, as nobody noticed it till it was too late, and the clerks went away on Saturday afternoon. Sending off the bags was always a moment of fuss, anxiety, and strain. Someone nearly always out of excitement used to drop the sealing-wax on the hand of the clerk who was holding the bag, and sometimes the bag[180] used to be sent to the wrong place. One day both Lord Sanderson and Sir Frank Bertie came into one of the departments to make sure the bag should go to the right place. The excess of cooks had a fatal result on the broth, and the bag, which was destined for some not remote spot, was sent to Guatemala by mistake, whence it could not be retrieved for several months.

After Christmas that year I stayed with the Cornishes at the Cloisters at Eton, and we acted a play called Sylvie and Bruno, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s book. The Cornish children and the Ritchies took part in it. I played the part of the Other Professor, and one act was taken up by his giving a lecture. The play was successful, and Donald Tovey wrote some music for it and accompanied the singers at the pianoforte.

In January I was appointed attache to the Embassy at Paris, and I began my career as a diplomat.

[181]

I had rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the Chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir Edmund Monson; the Councillor, Michael Herbert; the head of the Chancery, Reggie Lister. Both of these had rooms to themselves where they worked. The other secretaries worked in the Chancery.

In the morning, the bag used to arrive from the Foreign Office. It used to be fetched from Calais every night, and twice a week a King’s Messenger would bring it. The business of the day began by the bag being opened, and the contents were entered in a register and then sent to the Ambassador. The dispatches were then sent back to the Chancery in red boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put away in a cupboard. Later on in the day, a box used to come down from the Ambassador with draft dispatches, which were written out by us on typewriters, if we could, or with a pen.

Work at the Embassy meant writing out dispatches on a typewriter, registering dispatches and putting them away, or ciphering and deciphering telegrams. That was the important part of the work. It was for that one had to hang about in case it might happen, and it was liable to happen at any moment of the day, or the night.

Besides this, there was a perpetual stream of minor occurrences which came into the day’s work. People of all nationalities used to call at the Embassy and have to be interviewed by someone. A lady would arrive and say she would like to paint a miniature of Queen Victoria; a soldier would arrive from India who thought he had been bitten by a mad dog, and ask to see Pasteur; a man would call who was the only legitimate[182] King of France, Henry V., with his title and dynasty printed on his visiting card, and ask for the intervention of the British Government; or someone would come to say that he had found the real solution of the Irish problem, or the Eastern question; or a way of introducing conscription into England without incurring any expense and without English people being aware of it. Besides this, British subjects of every kind would come and ask for facilities to see Museums, to write books, to learn how to cure snake bites, to paddle in canoes on the Oise or the Loire, to take their pet dogs back to England without muzzles (this was always refused), or to take a book from the Bibliothèque Nationale, or a missal from some remote Museum. All these people had to be interviewed and their requests, if reasonable, had to be forwarded to the French Government, for which there were special stereotyped formulæ. Drafts had to be written for notes to the French Government, and there was a large correspondence with the various Consulates.

In the morning, the head of the Chancery used to interview the Ambassador and report to the Chancery on the state of his temper; sometimes he would go and see a French Minister and come back laden with news and gossip; various secretaries, the naval and military attachés, or the King’s Messenger, would stroll into the Chancery, and discuss the latest news, and sometimes other visitors from England would waste our time.

The Ambassador never appeared in person in the Chancery, and his displeasure with the staff, when it was incurred, used to be conveyed to them in memoranda, written in red ink, which were sent to them in a red leather dispatch box.

Sir Edmund Monson had the pen of a ready dispatch-writer, and he would write very long and beautifully expressed dispatches.

We used to have luncheon generally at the same restaurant, and be free in the afternoons, although we had to come back towards tea-time to see if there was anything to do and often remain in the Chancery till nearly eight o’clock; one resident clerk had to live in the house in case there were telegrams at night. If there was a lot of telegraphing, the work would be heavy.

The Chancery hours were always gay. One day one of the[183] third secretaries and myself had an argument, and I threw the contents of the inkpot at him. He threw the contents of another inkpot back at me. The interchange of ink then became intensive, and went as far as red ink. All the inkpots of the Chancery were emptied, and the other secretaries ducked their heads while the grenades of ink whizzed past their heads. The fight went on till all the ink in the Chancery was used up. My sitting-room was then drawn on, and the fight went on down the Chancery stairs, into the street, and I had a final shot from my sitting-room window, the ink pouring down the walls.

We were drenched with ink, red and black, but still more so was the Chancery carpet, the staircase, and the walls of the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. Reggie Lister was told what had happened, and said: “Really, those boys are too tiresome.”

We were alarmed at the state of the carpet, a handsome red densely thick pile. We bought some chemicals from the chemist and tried to wash it out, spending hours in the effort after dinner. The only result was that the corrosive acids burnt the carpet away, which made the damage much worse.

The next morning Herbert arrived at the Embassy and noticed that the Chancery staircase was splashed with black stains. He asked the reason and was told. We were sent for. In quiet, acid, biting tones he told us we were nothing better than dirty little schoolboys, and we went away with our tails between our legs. But all that was nothing; Reggie’s plaintive remonstration and Herbert’s biting censure left us calm; what we were really frightened of was the Ambassador—would he find it out?

The next three days were days of dark apprehension, overclouded with the shadow of a possible ink-row; especially as the stain caused by the acids on the Chancery carpet had turned it grey and white, and left a dreadful cavity in the middle of the stain. We ordered a new carpet and prayed that the Ambassador might not be led by an evil mischance to visit the Chancery. He did not, and the episode passed off unnoticed by him.

Our relations with France at this time were not of the best. The Fashoda incident was just over; the Boer War was going[184] on, which the French said was: “Une guerre d’affaires”; a speech had been made recently by Sir E. Monson at the banquet of the Chamber of Commerce which had made a great sensation. The majority of the French Cabinet were in favour of asking that the British Government be asked to recall Sir E. Monson, but M. Delcassé was strongly opposed to this as he feared war. In spite of all this, the French were friendly to us personally. I was elected to the “Cercle de l’Union” and seconded by General Galliffet.

The French were absorbed in the Dreyfus case. Nothing else was discussed from morning till night. Wherever one went one heard echoes of this discussion, and in whatever circle or group you heard the problem discussed the disputants were generally divided in a proportion of five to three; three believing in the innocence of Dreyfus, and five believing in his guilt.

One night I dined with Edouard Rod and Brewster. The burning topic engrossed us to such an extent, we discussed it so long and so keenly that I still remember the only other subjects we mentioned; they stood out, isolated and rare, like oases in the vast Dreyfus desert. I remember Rod saying he didn’t care for Verlaine’s poetry, because it wasn’t banal enough. Brewster and I quoted some lines; but Rod thought them all too subtle and not direct enough. Finally I quoted:

This he passed.

We discussed plays for a brief moment. Rod said he liked bad plays played by good actors—for instance, Duse in La Dame aux Camélias; Brewster said he liked good plays done by bad actors—Musset played by refined amateurs; I said I liked good plays acted by good actors. Then we talked of Dreyfus once more, and Rod said plaintively: “De quoi est-ce-qu’on parlera lorsque l’affaire sera finie?”

I made acquaintance of Anatole France and attended some of his Sunday morning levées at the Villa Said in the Bois de Boulogne.

When I first went there, I never heard any topic except L’affaire mentioned, and indeed the only people present at these meetings were fanatical partisans of Dreyfus who did not[185] wish to talk of anything else. In other houses I met equally fanatical believers in Dreyfus’ guilt. While one was sitting at a quiet tea, an excited academician would rush in and say: “Savez-vous ce qu’ils ont fait? Savez-vous ce qu’ils osent dire?” I find this entry in my notebook dated 5th July 1899, from Boswell:

On the other hand, I remember someone saying at the time that although the decisions of court-martials were nearly always wrong, technically, in their form, they were nearly always right in substance.

Most English people whom I saw during this period believed in Dreyfus’ innocence, but not all. Among the fervent believers in his guilt was Arthur Strong, then librarian in the House of Lords.

I had made Arthur Strong’s acquaintance at Edmund Gosse’s house, and he was from that moment kind to me. In appearance he was like pictures of Erasmus (not that I have ever seen one!)—the perfect incarnation of a scholar. He knew and understood everything, but forgave little. And the smoke from the flame of his learning and his intellect sometimes got into people’s eyes. I frequently saw him in London, and once he came to see me in Paris. I remember his looking at the bookshelf and the pictures on my walls, photographs of pictures by Giorgione and Titian.

He approved of Dyce’s Shakespeare; Dyce’s, he said, was a good edition. He disapproved of Stevenson; Stevenson, he said, had fancy but no imagination. Giorgione, he said, was to Titian what Marcello was to Gluck. Talking of the Dreyfus case, he said if English people would only understand that the Dreyfusards are the same as pro-Boers in England they would talk differently. He said the French were supreme critics of verse. They were like the Persians, they stood no nonsense about poetry. To them it was either good or bad verse. He used to say that there had never been since Johnson’s Lives of the Poets a critical review of English literature as[186] big and as broad. We might find fault with some of Dr. Johnson’s judgments, but there had been nothing to replace it.

He admired Byron as much as my father did, and in the same way. He thought him a towering genius. Shelley likewise, but not Wordsworth. Wordsworth, he said, was like Taine and Wagner. They were all three just on the wrong lines, each one of them on a tremendous scale, but wrong nevertheless.

We used to have fierce arguments about Wagner. Wagner’s work, he used to say, was not dramatic but scenic. He invented a vastly effective situation but left it at that; neither the action nor the music moved on. He thought Mozart was infinitely more dramatic. He said that Wagner could not write a melody, and that if he did, with the exception of the Preislied in the Meistersinger, it was commonplace and vulgar. The “Leit-Motivs” were not complete melodies.

I was at that time a fervent Wagnerite, and used to contest his points hotly. Curiously enough, six years later, his ideas on Wagner found an echo in a letter which I received from Vernon Lee, after she had been to Bayreuth. This is what she wrote:

I think Arthur Strong would have agreed with every word of this.

I had not been at Paris long before one evening after dinner the telephone bell rang; I went to answer it and was told that President Faure was dead. The staff of the Embassy walked in the funeral procession to Notre Dame, in uniform. It was a radiant day. The mourning decorations—a veil of crape flung negligently across the façade of the Chamber of Deputies—the banners, the wreaths, the draperies, were a fine example of the French discretion and artistic instinct in decoration. On the balcony of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Bernhardt was sitting wrapped in furs; with us were the Corps Diplomatique, some officials from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one a composer of dance tunes, Sourires d’Avril, etc., once celebrated all over Europe, now more forgotten than the songs of Nineveh or Tyre. We laughed, we chattered, we ate chocolate, we enjoyed the sunshine and the exercise, we gave no thought to the man in the gorgeous coffin who had taken so much trouble to ape and observe the forms of majesty, and who had been rewarded with such merciless ridicule.

During the first fortnight I spent in the Diplomatic Service there was a plethora of funerals which we had to attend; one at the Greek Church; one at the Madeleine. Attending funerals, and going to the station to meet royalties were both important factors in Diplomatic life. Indeed, at a small post[188] one seemed to spend half one’s life at the railway station. Some of the secretaries were keen race-goers, and when, as sometimes happened, they were not allowed to go because of possible work, and they would point out that there was not likely to be any work to do, Reggie Lister used wisely to remark that we were not paid for the amount of work we did, but for hanging about in case there should be any work. In spite of this, he used generally to arrange things in such a manner that anyone who wanted to go to the races could go.

Reggie Lister was an artist in life and the organisation of life. He built his arrangements and those of others with a light scaffolding that could be taken down at a moment’s notice and rearranged if necessary in a different manner to suit a change of circumstance. He was radiantly sensible. He had a horror of the trashy and the affected, and his gaiety was buoyant, boyish, and infectious. If he was really amused himself, his face used to crinkle and his body shake like a jelly, “comme un gros bébé,” as a Frenchman once said. His intuition was like second-sight and his tact always at work but never obtrusive, like the works of a delicate watch. I never saw anyone either before or after who could make such a difference to his surroundings and to the company he was with. He made everything effervesce. You could not say how he did it. It was not because of any exceptional brilliance or any unusual wit, or arresting ideas; but over and over again I have seen him do what people more brilliant than himself could not do to save their lives, that is, transfigure a dull company and change a grey atmosphere into a golden one. It was not only that he could never bore anyone himself, but that nobody was ever bored when he was there. You laughed with him, not at him. He took his enjoyment with him wherever he went and he made others share it.

His taste was fastidious, but catholic, and above all things sensible. He was acutely appreciative of external things: a walk down the Champs Elysées on a fine spring morning; good cooking; dancing and skating, and he danced like mad; he was never tired of telling one of his summer travels in Greece; his first disappointment and his subsequent delight in Constantinople—and nobody in the world could tell such things as well. It was difficult to be more intelligent; but his intelligence (and after a minute’s conversation[189] with him you could not but be aware of its acuteness), his love and knowledge of artistic things, his shrewdness, his humour, and rollicking fun, although taken all together, are still not enough to account for the fascination that his personality exercised over so many different people—over, I believe, almost anyone he pleased, if he took the trouble. If his diplomatic duties called for trouble of this kind, there was none he would not take; if only his own private social life was concerned he sometimes permitted himself the luxury of indifference; but he never indulged in “le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire”; although the company of celebrities tried him almost beyond endurance, leaving a peevish aftermath for his friends to put up with.

One instance is better than pages of explanation and analysis.

One day Reggie Lister and myself each received a letter from a friend in England asking us to be civil to a young French couple who were newly married, and were just setting up house in Paris. Reggie left cards on them, and they asked us both to luncheon.

We found them in a small but extremely clean apartment on the other side of the river, and as we went into the drawing-room it seemed to be crowded with relations in black—mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and aunts. All of them in deep mourning. It reminded me of the opening scene of a one-act play, which used to be popular many years ago, called La joie fait peur. In that play, the curtain rises on a bereaved family who are all of them steeped in inspissated gloom.

We went into the little dining-room and sat down to a shiny mahogany table. An old servant tottered and pottered about the room with a bunch of keys and a bottle of wine covered with cobwebs. A rather grim mother-in-law sat at the head of the table. The young, newly married couple were shy. There was an atmosphere of stern, rigid propriety and inflexible tradition over the whole proceeding. Formal phrases were bandied, and all the time the mother-in-law, the aunts, and the sisters-in-law, all of them dressed in crape with neat white frills, never ceased to throw on the bashful young couple the full searchlight of their critical observation. But we had not been at the table many minutes before Reggie had captivated the company, and at the end of five minutes they[190] were all screaming with laughter and talking at the top of their voices. They were not laughing at him. They were laughing with him.

This is just what Reggie Lister could do, and what I have never seen anybody else succeed in doing, to that extent and in such difficult circumstances. He had something which made you, whoever was in the room, wish to listen to him, and made you wish him to listen to you. He had also the gift of making the witty wittier, the singer, the talker, the musician, the reciter, do better than his best, of drawing out the best of other people by his instantly responsive appreciation.

The French of all classes appreciated and loved him, and when he died they felt as if an essential part of Paris had been taken away, and a part that nothing could replace. To be with him at the same Embassy, as I was for a year and a half, was an education in all that makes life worth living. But what was life to me was, I am afraid, sometimes death to him, as I tried him at times highly.

The Ambassador, Sir Edmund Monson, was academic with a large swaying presence and an inexhaustible supply of polished periods. A fine scholar and a master of precise and well-expressed English and an undiminishing store of vivid reminiscence; in the matter of penmanship he was passion’s slave. Possibly my opinion is biased from having had to write out so many of his dispatches on a typewriter, and so often some of them twice, owing to the mistakes. Typewriting, it is well known, is an art in which improvement is rarely achieved by the amateur; one reaches a certain degree of speed and inaccuracy, and after that, no amount of practice makes one any better. If there were too many mistakes in a dispatch it would have to be written out again. There never seemed to be any reason why Sir Edmund’s dispatches should ever end, and they were just as remarkable for quantity as for length. He was exceedingly kind and always amiable, to talk to or rather to listen to; he was the same in his dispatches; one had the sensation of coasting pleasantly downhill on a bicycle that had no break, and save for an accident was not likely to stop.

Michael Herbert, the Councillor, was a complete contrast to Sir Edmund in many ways. With him one felt not only the[191] presence of a brake, but of steel-like grasp on that brake—a steel-like grasp concealed by the suavest of gloves and a high, refined courtesy and the appearance of a cavalier strayed by mistake into the modern world. Never was there an appearance more deceptive in some ways; in so far, that is to say, as it seemed to indicate apathy or indifference or lack of fibre. He had a will of iron and a fearless and instant readiness to shoulder any responsibility, however grave or perplexing. He was a man of action, and an ideal diplomat. At one of his posts they called him “the butcher.” At that time the men who enjoyed the highest reputation in the Diplomatic Service, and who seemed to be the most promising, were perhaps Charles Eliot, Cecil Spring-Rice, and Arthur Hardinge; and in every one of these cases the promise was fulfilled; but as a diplomat, I think anyone would agree, that Herbert excelled them all and easily, although the others might be in one case more intellectual or more brilliant, in another more erudite. Herbert had a steely strength of purpose, a quick eye, and the power of making up his mind at once, as well as a shrewd understanding of the world and especially of the foreign world, and a quiet far-sightedness. Moreover, he had the charm that arises from natural and native distinction, and a subtle flavour which came from his being intensely English, and at the same time a citizen of the world, without any admixture of artificial cosmopolitanism. He would have been at home in any period of English history; whether at the Black Prince’s Court at Bordeaux, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at Kenilworth, at Whitehall, or at the Congress of Vienna.

Had he dressed himself up in the shimmering and sombre satins and the waving plumes of the Vandyk period they would have seemed to be his natural, his everyday clothes.

I could imagine him putting his inflexible determination, expressed in thin, metallic tones of deferential and courteous deprecation, lit up by gleams of a sharp and shy humour, against the perhaps equally obstinate, but unfortunately less wise and less constant, wishes of Charles I. I can imagine him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet appreciation to the jokes of Falstaff, at the first performance of Henry IV.; or signing, without a flicker of hesitation, a dispatch to Drake or Raleigh that would mean war with Spain; or shutting his snuff-box with a sharp snap, as he saw through[192] some subtle wile of Talleyrand; or listening, civil but quite unabashed, to a storm of invective from Napoleon.

One day someone in the Chancery remarked on the peculiarly nauseous odour of the food that is given to foxhounds. “I like it,” he said. “I used to eat it as a child.”

I have always thought the most crucial test to which a new piece of verse or a modern picture can be put is to imagine what effect the verse would produce in an anthology of another epoch or the picture in a gallery of old masters. Herbert as a personality and as a diplomatist could have stood any test of this kind, and placed next to any of the old masters or the old masterpieces, in character and statesmanship, without suffering from the comparison; indeed, so far from suffering any eclipse, his personality would only have emerged more signally and more distinctly, with the melancholy suavity of its form and the unyielding resilience of its substance.

In April 1899, the second centenary of the death of Racine was celebrated in Paris by a performance of Racine’s Bérénice at the Théâtre français. This performance was one of the landmarks in my literary adventures. Bartet played Bérénice, and I do not suppose that Racine’s verse can ever have been more sensitively rendered and more delicately differentiated. Between the acts, M. Du Lau, a fine connoisseur of life and art, took me behind the scenes and introduced me to Bartet. They talked of the play. Around us hovered an admiring crowd, and whispered homages were flung to the artist, like flowers. It was like a scene in a Henry James novel, a page from the Tragic Muse. They agreed that Racine’s loveliest verses were in this play: “Des vers si nuancés,” as Du Lau said. Bartet wore a lilac cloak over white draperies, and a high ivory diadem, and when we said good-bye Du Lau kissed her hand and said: “Bon soir, charmante Bérénice.”

If anyone is inclined to think Racine is a tedious author they cannot do better than read Bérénice. It is the model of what a tragedy should be. The drama is simple and arises naturally and inevitably from the facts of the case, which are all contained in one sentence of Suetonius: “Titus Reginam Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.” That is to say, Titus loved Bérénice and, it was believed, had promised her marriage. He[193] sent her away from Rome, against his own will as well as against hers, as soon as he came to the throne.

It is the eternal conflict between public duty and personal inclination.

Coventry Patmore’s Ode sums up the whole tragedy. The sentiments the characters express are what any characters would have said in such a situation now or a thousand years ago, and would be just as appropriate and true if the protagonists of the drama belonged to Belgravia or to the Mile End Road. The verse is exquisite.

Antiochus, who loved Bérénice in vain, says to her as he leaves her:

The tragedy is full of musical lines, sad and suggestive and softly reverberating, with muted endings such as:

and some of the most poignant words of farewell ever uttered:

The Prince of Wales passed through Paris and stayed there a night that winter and dined at the Embassy, and we had to wear special coats and be careful they had the right number of buttons on them.

I got to know a good many French people, and some of those who had been famous in the days of the Second Empire: Madame de Galliffet and Madame de Pourtalès. Madame de Pourtalès had grey hair, but time, which had taken away much from her[194] and stamped her with his pitiless seal, had not taken, and was destined never to take, away the undefinable authority that alone great beauty possesses, and never loses, nor her radiant smile, which would suddenly make her look young.

Once at a party at Paris many years after this, at the Jaucourts’ house, I again saw Madame de Pourtalès. It was not long before she died. Her hair was, or seemed to be, quite white, and that evening the room was rather dim and lit from the ceiling; her face was powdered and she appeared quite transfigured; the whiteness of her hair and the effect of the light made her face look quite young. You were conscious only of dazzling shoulders, a peerless skin, soft shining eyes, and a magical smile. She put out everyone else in a room. She looked like the photographs of herself taken when she was a young woman. One saw what she must have been, and everybody who was there agreed that here was an instance of the undefinable, undying persistence of great beauty that just when you think it is dead, suddenly blooms afresh and gives you a glimpse of its own past.

Reggie Lister told me that he had once asked Madame de Pourtalès what was the greatest compliment that had ever been paid her. She said it was this. Once in summer she had been going out to dinner in Paris. It was rather late in the summer, and a breathless evening, she was sitting in her open carriage, dressed for dinner, waiting for someone in the clear daylight. It was so hot she had only a tulle veil round her shoulders. While she was waiting a workman passed the carriage, and when he saw her he stood and gaped in silence; at last he said: “Christi! que tu es belle!”

I had already written some short parodies of four French authors which I wished to get published. A friend of mine sent them to Henri de Régnier and asked his advice. His opinion was extremely favourable. He said, and I quote his words, so that he may bear the responsibility for my publishing such a thing in Paris: “J’ai lu les amusants pastiches de M. Baring. Bourget, Renan, Loti ou France pourraient avoir écrit chacun des pages qui soient moins eux.” “Il faut pour avoir fait cela une science bien délicate de la langue française. Conseillez donc à Monsieur Baring de faire imprimer une petite plaquette. Elle representerait à elle seule de gros livres, ce qui sera délicieux.” I sent the parodies to Lemerre and he accepted[195] them, and they were published in Paris by his firm. The pamphlet was called Hildesheim, and the small edition was soon sold out. The little book was well received by the French, and I got a good deal of fun out of it.

Another literary adventure I had at this time was a correspondence I started in the Saturday Review. Max Beerbohm, in an article on a French translation of Hamlet, said something about the French language being lacking in suggestiveness and mystery. I wrote a letter saying that the French language was as suggestive to a Frenchman as the English language was to an Englishman, upon which a professor wrote to say that the French language was only a bastard language, and that when a Frenchman wrote of a girl as being beaucoup belle he was talking pidgin-Latin. Many people then wrote to point out that the professor was talking pidgin-French, and a certain H. B. joined in the fray, quoting the “Chanson de Roland,” and saying that an Englishman who used the phrase beaucoup belle in France would be treated with the courtesy due to strangers, but a Frenchman would be preparing for himself an unhappy manhood and a friendless old age. It was a terrible comment, he added, on the modern system of primary education. The controversy then, as nearly always happens, wandered into the channel of a side-issue, where it went on merrily bubbling for several weeks.

English people used to stream through Paris all the year round. One was constantly asked out to dinner, both by them and by the French. One night I dined with Admiral Maxse, and the other guest was M. Clemenceau. M. Clemenceau was in those days conducting a violent campaign for Dreyfus in the Press, and was a thorn in the flesh of the Government. I was severely reproved for dining with him the next day. I knew a few Frenchmen of letters: M. Henri de Régnier, Melchior de Vogüé, André Chevrillon, Edouard Rod, Madame Darmesteter.

I remember at one of Anatole France’s receptions (I only attended very few, as in those days a foreigner felt uncomfortable in circles where the Dreyfus case was being discussed—it was too much of a family affair) Anatole France talked of Æschylus. He said the texts we possess of Æschylus are shortened, abbreviated forms of the plays, almost, speaking with exaggeration, like the libretto of an opera founded on a well-known drama, almost as if we only possessed an operatic[196] libretto of Hamlet or Faust, but he added: “Pourtant ceux qui ont admiré Aschyle ne sont point des imbéciles.”

But literature was rarely discussed anywhere in those days, as L’affaire dominated everything and excluded all other topics.

In August came the Rennes trial, and the excitement reached its climax. Galliffet was minister of war, and I heard him make his first speech in the Chamber. “Assassin!” shouted the left. “C’est moi, Messieurs,” said Galliffet, and waited till they had finished. During the month of August, he used to dine every night at the “Cercle de l’Union.” The club was quite deserted. I used often to sit at his table.

He told me that many people in the Club would probably not speak to him when they returned, for his having accepted the portfolio at such a time. “They will turn their backs on me probably,” he said. “Mais,” he added, with a chuckle, “ils ne se permetteront pas une impertinence.” He used to tell me many interesting things. He said the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life was Georgiana, Lady Dudley, at one of the early Paris Exhibitions, and after her, Madame de Castiglione. I never knew whether he had believed in the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, but I knew he was determined the case should end somehow and by a verdict which should bring about an apaisement.

The General was a picturesque and striking figure, not tall nor imposing, but carved, as it were, in some enduring granite-like substance, with steely eyes, a quick, rather hoarse, jerky utterance, and a very direct manner, a little alarming to a newcomer, owing to its abrupt frankness, and his way of saying what he thought in the most pointed, Gallic manner. His illustrations, too, and his confessions were sometimes startling.

In conversation he leapt over all conventions, with the same gaiety and gallantry that had made him say at Sedan: “Tant que vous voudrez, Mon Général.” In the early days of the case he had been strongly in favour of revision.

When the verdict of the Court of Rennes was announced, and Dreyfus subsequently pardoned, a curious thing happened. Although the topic had been raging daily for years to the exclusion of everything else, exciting everywhere the fiercest passions, and dividing every family in France, estranging friendships, and breaking careers, the very moment the decision[197] was made known, the topic dropped from the minds of men instantly and finally, as though it had never existed.

My own point of view, which I sometimes found was shared by others, was that I believed Dreyfus to be innocent, but I loathed the Dreyfusards. Commenting on this, Andrew Lang wrote to me: “People like us, who hate vivisection and anti-vivisectionists, who believe Dreyfus was innocent and loathe Dreyfusards (though anti-Dreyfusards were really worse), have no business on this foolish planet.”

I often went to the play, and the chief enjoyment I derived was from what Sarah Bernhardt did in those days, about most of which I shall deal with separately. She must have a chapter to herself. Of the rest I remember but little except a revival of La Belle Hélène with its enchanting tunes, and some funny songs at Montmartre; Réjane in Zaza and La Robe Rouge, and a terrifying play at the Théâtre Antoine called En Paix, about a man who is shut up in a lunatic asylum, when he is sane, and who ends by going mad. This play was said not only to have been founded on fact, but to have been written by a man whose brother had been shut up in a private lunatic asylum by some conspiring greedy relations.

The man whose brother was thus treated went to Law, but without avail, so as a last resource he wrote a play in which he exposed the facts, which were briefly these: A greedy family wish to get one of their members out of the way. They say he is mad and get him sequestered in a mad-house. He has a just brother who tries to get him released, but the brother finds himself faced with the obstinacy of professionalism when he declares the sequestered man is not mad; the lunatic experts say he does not understand the intricacies of the disease, and when he loses his temper, the doctors say: “You, too, are showing signs of the family madness.” The man who is shut up is quick tempered; a sojourn with lunatics sharpens his temper, and the play ends by his being dragged out by sinister-looking warders, crying out: “A la douche!” I could not sleep after seeing this spectacle, which lost nothing in the realistic interpretation of actors such as Antoine and Gémier.

In September, I went for a short time on leave, and stayed at Lynton, North Devon, with the Cornishes in a delightful little house called the Chough’s Nest. It was a warm, soft[198] windy Devonshire September. Hubert and I bathed in the great breakers. We had wonderful teas in the valley, and followed the staghounds on Exmoor. We talked of all the books under the sun, and I wrote a poem in blank verse which was afterwards published in the Anglo-Saxon Review.

Later in the autumn, I stayed a few days at a château near Fontainebleau, and saw the forest in all the glory of its autumn foliage, with the tall trees ablaze, like funeral torches for the dying year; and the gardens of the château, and the splendid rooms seemed more melancholy than ever, as though the ghosts of the kings and queens of France were there unseen; and, looking at the gorgeous raiment of the fading forest, I thought of Mary Stuart putting on her most splendid robes on the morning of her execution, and mounting the scaffold in flaming satin.

There are no sadder places in the world than Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne; those empty, deserted shells where there was once so much glory and so much gaiety, so much bustle and so much drama, and which are now hollow museums laid bare to the scrutiny of every profane sight-seer.

During the autumn of 1899, in Paris, I received a visit from Reggie Balfour, whom I had known at Cambridge, although he went to Cambridge after I had left. He was a brilliant scholar and had done great things at Cambridge. He had been staying at Angers to study French. We talked of books, of the Dreyfus case, and he suddenly said that he felt a strong desire to become a Catholic. I was extremely surprised and disconcerted. Up till that moment I had only known two people who had become Catholics: one was a relation, who had married a Catholic, and the other was an undergraduate, who had never discussed the matter except to say he must have all or nothing. When Reggie Balfour told me this I was amazed. I remember saying to him that the Christian religion was not so very old, and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of mankind; but that if he believed in the Christian revelation, and in the Sacraments of the Anglican Church, he would find it difficult to turn round and say those Sacraments had been an illusion. I begged him to wait. I said there was nothing to prevent his worshipping in Catholic churches without committing[199] himself intellectually to a step that must cramp his freedom. I advised him to live in the porch without entering the building. I said finally: “My trouble is I cannot believe in the first proposition, the source of all dogma. If I could do that, if I could tell the first lie, I quite see that all the rest would follow.”

He took me one morning to Low Mass at Notre Dame des Victoires. I had never attended a Low Mass before in my life. It impressed me greatly. I had imagined Catholic services were always long, complicated, and overlaid with ritual. A Low Mass, I found, was short, extremely simple, and somehow or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings of the Early Christians. One felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me too. To them it was evidently real.

We worked together at some poems I had written, and Reggie arranged to have a small pamphlet of them privately printed for me, at the Cambridge University Press, which was done that Christmas.

When we got back to London, he sent me this epitaph, which is translated from the Latin, and is to be found at Rome in the Church of St. John Lateran, the date being about 1600:

“Ci-gît Robert Pechom, anglais, catholique, qui après la rupture de l’Angleterre avec l’église, a quitté l’Angleterre ne pouvant y vivre sans la foi et qui, venu à Rome y est mort ne pouvant y vivre sans patrie.”

The next year saw the opening of the Exhibition. On the 17th of March, I went with Reggie Lister to the first night of L’Aiglon. It was a momentous first night. All the most notable people in the literary and social world of Paris were there: Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Halévy, Sardou, Robert de Montesquiou, Albert Vandal, Henry Houssaye, Paul Hervieu, Coquelin, Madame Greffuhle. The excitement was tense. Sarah had a tremendous reception. When she spoke the line, which occurs in the first scene, “Je n’aime pas beaucoup que la France soit neutre,” there was a roar of applause, but this, one felt, was political rather than artistic enthusiasm. The first quiet dialogue between the Duke and the courtiers held the audience, and we felt that Sarah’s calm and biting irony portended great reserves held in store, and when the scene of the[200] history lesson followed, which Sarah played with an increasing accelerando and crescendo, and when she came to the lines:

she carried them off with a pace and an intensity that went through the large theatre like an electric shock. People were crying everywhere in the audience, and I remember Reggie Lister saying to me in the entr’acte that what moved him at a play or in a book was hardly ever the pathetic, but when people did or said splendid things.

The rest of the play, from that moment until the end, was a triumphant progression of cunningly administered electric thrills which were deliriously received by a quivering audience.

When it was all over and people talked of it the next and the following days in drawing-rooms and in the press, the enthusiasm began to cool down.

The following extracts from an article which I wrote in the Speaker about it, immediately after the performance, give an idea of the impression the play made at the time:

“Monsieur Rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, and the colossal success of Cyrano de Bergerac, is certainly the French author of the present day who attracts the greatest amount of public attention in France, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with the greatest vehemence. His popularity in France is as great as that of Mr. Kipling in England; and in France, as is the case with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many and determined advocates of the devil. Some deny to M. Rostand the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he has no poetical talent whatsoever. In the case of poetical plays the public is probably in the long run the only judge. Never in the world’s history has it been seen that the really magnificent poetical play has proved a lasting failure,[201] or a really bad poetical play a perennial success. Of course there have been plays which, like other works that have come before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate; while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of surprising mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the hand of time. But in the main the public has been right, and those who take the opposite view generally belong to a class alluded to by Pope:

Certainly in M. Rostand’s case, whatever may be the exact ‘place’ of his plays in the evolution of the world’s poetical drama, one thing is quite certain: his plays are triumphantly successful. This for a play is a merit in itself. After the triumph of Cyrano it was difficult to believe that L’Aiglon would attain the same level of merit and success, and never was a success more discounted beforehand. For weeks L’Aiglon was the main topic of conversation in Paris, and provided endless copy for the newspapers. Another thing is certain: however the æsthetic value of L’Aiglon may be rated in the future, it constitutes for the present another gigantic success. Never did a play come at a more opportune moment. At a time when the French are thinking that their country has for a long time been playing too insignificant a part in European politics, when the country is still convalescent and suffering from the vague discomfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, fretting and chafing under the colourless mediocrity of a régime that falls short of their flamboyant ideal, M. Rostand comes skilfully leading a martial orchestra, and sets their pulses throbbing, their ears tingling, and their hearts beating to the inspiring tunes of Imperial France.

“M. Rostand’s play is certainly a forward step in his poetical career. It has the same colour and vitality as Cyrano; the same incomparable instinct for stage effect, the same skill and dexterity in the manipulation of words which amounts to jugglery, the same fertility in poetical images and felicitous couplets that we find in his earlier works; but, besides this, it has something that they have not—a graver atmosphere, a larger outlook, a deeper note; the fabric, though the builder’s skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, more irregular, but[202] in it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the Epic Muse, which compensates for the unevenness of the carpentry.

“In L’Aiglon we breathe the atmosphere of the epic of Napoleon. Although the scenes which M. Rostand presents to us deal only with the sunset of that period, the glories and vicissitudes of that epoch are suggested to us; we do not see the things themselves, but we are conscious of their spirit, their poetic existence and essence. M. Rostand evokes them, not by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in the images of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see them more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form of elaborate tableaux or spectacular battle-pieces.

“The existence of Napoleon II. was in itself a tragic fact. Yet more tragic if, as Metternich is reported to have said of him, he had ‘a head of iron and a body of glass.’ And a degree more tragic still is M. Rostand’s creation of a prince whose frail tenement of clay is consumed by ambition and aspiration, and who is conscious, at times, of the vanity of his aspiration and the hopelessness of his ambition. Thus tossed to and fro, from ecstasy to despair, he is another Hamlet, born, not to avenge a crime against his father, but to atone for his father’s crimes. Perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is when the prince realises, on the plain of Wagram, that he himself is the atonement; that he is the white wafer of sacrifice offered as an expiation for so many oceans of blood. M. Rostand has chosen this theme, pregnant with pathos, as his principal motif. It is needless to relate the play… The close of the Fifth Act is perhaps the finest thing in conception of the whole; in it we see Napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape to France, alone on the battlefield of Wagram, pale in his white uniform on the great green moonlit plain, with the body of the faithful soldier of the Old Guard, who killed himself rather than be taken by the Austrians, lying before him. Gradually in the sighing winds Napoleon imagines he hears the moans of the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the fancy grows into hallucination, until he sees himself surrounded by regiments of ghosts, and hears the groans, the call, and the clamour of phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate in the cry of ‘Vive l’empereur.’ He hears the tramping of men, the champing and neighing of chargers, and the music of the band; he thinks the ‘Grande Armée’ has come to life, and[203] rushes joyfully to meet it; the vision is then dispelled, and the irony of the reality is made plain, for it is the white uniforms of the Austrian regiment (of which he is Colonel) that appear in the plain. The scene is almost Shakespearean in its effect of beauty and terror.

“Finally, in the last Act, we see the Roi de Rome dying in his gilded cage while he listens to the account of his baptism in Paris, which is read out to him as he dies. He who as a child ‘eut pour hochet la couronne de Rome’ is now an obscure and insignificant Hapsburg princeling, dying forgotten by the world, without a friend, and under the eye of his imperturbable enemy.

“The play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthiness, and inequality; of too rapid transitions, of a clash in style between preciosity and brutality. It has been compared unfavourably with Cyrano… Fault is found now, as it was before, with the form of M. Rostand’s verses; they are no doubt better heard on the stage than read in the study, and this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions. His verses are not those of Racine, of Alfred de Vigny, or of Lecomte de Lisle … but they have a poetic quality and a value of their own; and while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears I should think it foolish to quarrel with them and to criticise them in a captious spirit; possibly on reading L’Aiglon the impression may be different. For the present, still under the spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause which his couplets inspired on the memorable first night of the play, I can but thank the author who brought before my eyes, with the skilful and clamorous music of his harps and horns, his trumpets and fifes and drums, the vision of an heroic epoch and the shadows of Homeric battles—the red sun and the cannon balls shivering the ice at Austerlitz, the Pope crowning another Cæsar at Notre Dame, Moscow in flames and the Great Army scattered on the plains of Russia, and the lapping of the tideless sea round St. Helena.”

Many of those who had been most enthusiastic at the first night of L’Aiglon lost no time in saying they had been mistaken, and that it was after all but a poor affair. Someone said that Rostand’s verse was made en caoutchouc. I heard someone ask Robert de Montesquieu his opinion soon after the play was produced. He said he thought the verse was in the best[204] Victor Hugo tradition; some of it, Metternich’s monologue on Napoleon’s hat, very fine. Somebody mentioned the more sentimental verses on La Petite Source: “Cela doit être,” said Montesquiou, “de Madame Rostand.”

Arthur Strong, after he saw the play, told me it had carried him away, and the fact of Sarah Bernhardt being a woman, and not a young woman, had mattered to him no more than the footlights or the painted scenery; he had accepted it, he had been made to accept it gladly, by the fire of the play and the power of the interpretation.

The Paris Exhibition of 1900 was opened on the 14th of April, and the whole of the Embassy staff attended that ceremony in uniform. I remember little of it. The features of the Exhibition were the trottoir roulant, a moving platform, that took visitors all round the Exhibition without their having to stir a foot; the pictures in the Grand Palais; the little city on the left bank of the Seine, where every nation was represented by a house, and where, in the English house, there was a room copied from Broughton Castle, full of Gainsboroughs; the Petit Palais, a gem in itself; and, besides these, there were the usual features of all exhibitions—side-shows, bales of chocolate, and galleries full of machinery and implements.

Towards the end of April I was taken by M. Castillon de Saint Victor for an expedition in a free balloon. I had been up twice in a captive balloon in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and had not enjoyed the experience, especially once on a windy day. I was not at all sure I was not going to dislike the free balloon, and I felt a pang of fear whenever I thought of it beforehand; but when the moment of starting came, and the balloon was released, and rose as gently and as imperceptibly as a puff of smoke from Saint Denis, and soared higher and higher into the dazzling sky without noise, without our experiencing any effect of motion or breeze, I felt intoxicated with pleasure. We went up to three thousand feet. It was like reaching another planet, an Olympic region of serenity and light, and one had no desire to leave it or to descend again to the earth.

We ate luncheon from a basket and drank a little rum, which was said to be the best beverage in a balloon, and we took photographs from the air. I little thought that I should one day have something to do with aircraft, air photographs, and all the many details of air navigation. We floated on[205] across Paris in a south-easterly direction. We came down low over a château belonging to the Rothschilds’ and over the forest of Creçy; later in the afternoon, we dropped a guide rope and floated over the country at a height of about two hundred feet, and as the evening came on, the balloon came down still lower and sailed along just over the tree-tops. Finally we landed. The balloon hopped like a football, the basket car was overturned, and the gas was let out. We landed in a deserted piece of flat country, but no sooner was the balloon on the ground than, as always happens, a crowd sprang from nowhere and helped us. The balloon was put in a cart, and we walked to the town of Provins, which was not far off, and there we took the train to Paris. The next time I visited Provins it was the General Headquarters of the French Army during the latter part of the European War.

I spent a week of that spring at Fontainebleau and Chantilly. There were a great many English people in Paris. One night, at the opera, in a box, an English lady was sitting, a large emerald poised high on her hair; the audience looked at nothing else, and an old Frenchman, who had been an ornament of the Second Empire, came up to me in the entr’acte and said: “Il est impossible d’être plus jolie que cette femme.” Shortly after this I travelled up to Paris from Fontainebleau with this same lady. The train was crowded, and we just managed to find room in the barest of provincial railway carriages. There were some private soldiers in the carriage, and some substantial women in sabots with large baskets. They gazed at her with childish delight, unmixed admiration, and surprised wonder, as she sat, making the boards of the third-class carriage look like a throne, in cool, diaphanous, lilac and white muslins and a large bunch of flowers, a vision of radiance and grace; it reminded me of the large masses of lilies of the valley and roses you suddenly meet with in a dark, narrow street corner on the first fine day of spring in Florence.

We went to a shop in Paris where she wanted to buy a pair of gloves. When she asked how much they were, the lady who was serving her said: “Pour vous rien, Madame, vous êtes trop jolie!”

I used to see a great deal of Monsieur and Madame de Jaucourt, whom I could remember ever since the early days of my childhood. Monsieur de Jaucourt had the most delightful[206] way of expressing things. One day when Madame de Jaucourt was pressing myself and another of the secretaries to stay with them in the country, he said: “Ma chère, les jeunes gens ont beaucoup mieux à faire que d’aller passer des heures à la campagne!” He was passionately fond of Paris. “On me gâte mon cher Paris,” he used to say. After luncheon, he would interview the cook and discuss every detail of last night’s dinner, praising this and criticising that, with extraordinary nicety and precision; and when he gave a dance in his house for boys and girls, on the afternoon preceding it, he would have different samples of lemonade and orangeade sent up to taste and choose from, to see if they were sweet enough but not too sweet. The lemonade was for the juvenile buffet. Women’s bets used to amuse him, and when they talked about racing, he would say: “Les paris des femmes sont à crever de rire.” He was a connoisseur of artistic things, and enjoyed a fine house, and beautiful objets d’art. He insisted on my going to see the château of Vaux, which he said was the finest house he knew. He said what distinguished it from other houses was that it was not crammed with valuable things for the sake of ostentation, show, or ornament, but where a piece of furniture was wanted, there it would be, and it would be a good one.

Monsieur de Jaucourt had a house not far from Paris in the country, and I remember playing croquet one day there. His daughter, Françoise, aimed carefully at the ball and missed the hoop, upon which M. de Jaucourt said, with a sigh: “Ma pauvre fille, tu as joué sans réfléchir.” I often used to dine at the “Cercle de l’Union.” There were about four or five old men who used to dine there every night; a few, a very few, younger men, but no quite young Frenchmen.

One night someone arrived and asked for some cold soup. There was none. In a fury of passion this member asked for the book of complaints. When it was brought, he wrote in it: “N’ayant pas pu trouver un consommé froid j’ai dû diner hors du Club.”

One night the new house, built by Count Boni de Castellane in the Bois de Boulogne, was being discussed. Someone said it was like Trianon, and that it would be difficult to keep up. Someone else who was there said: “Mais Boni est beaucoup plus riche que Louis XIV.” M. Du Lau and General Galliffet used often to dine there to discuss the days of their youth and talk[207] over the beauties and even the wines of the past; General Galliffet told us one night how he won sums of money by playing with a piece of rope taken from a gibbet in his pocket, and that the best wine he had ever drunk in his life was in the Rhine country. Now they are all dead, and I suppose their place is taken by those who were the older young men in those days, but I have no doubt that they sit round in the same chairs and sometimes complain if there is no consommé froid to be had.

In the summer of 1900, I went on leave to London for a few weeks and attempted to pass an examination in International Law after a few weeks’ preparation. I went up for the examination, and I don’t think I was able to answer a single question; my crammer told me I had not the legal mind. At the end of the summer, I was told that the Foreign Office wanted me to go to Copenhagen, and at the beginning of August I started for Denmark as Third Secretary to Her Majesty’s Legation.

[208]

I arrived at Copenhagen in August. I went there direct from Paris and crossed whatever intervening seas lie between Denmark and Germany via Hamburg and Kiel. I had been given an ointment made of tar by a French hair specialist to check my rapidly increasing baldness, and I applied it before I went to bed in my cabin, which contained three other berths. When the other passengers, who had intended to share my cabin, put their heads into it, they were appalled by the smell of tar, and thought that they had been given berths in the sail-room by the steward. They complained loudly, and refused to sleep there, so I had the cabin to myself.

I stayed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and on the morning of my arrival presented myself to the Minister, Sir Edward Goschen. He was alone at the Legation. I took rooms in a street not far from the Legation, and settled down to the quiet routine of Legation life in a small capital.

Copenhagen in August seemed unusually quiet. The sentries outside the Amalienborg Palace looked like big wooden dolls in their blue uniforms, white trousers, white belts, and bearskins.

I immediately began to have Danish lessons from the British Vice-Consul, who was a Dane, and we soon began to read Hans Andersen in Danish. The diplomatic world in Copenhagen was a little world by itself. It consisted of the Russian Minister, Count Benckendorff, who, when I arrived, was there by himself; the Austrian Minister, Count Wildenbruch, who lived at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and never went out and rarely saw anybody; the French Minister, M. Jusserand, one of the most erudite of English scholars besides being one of the most charming of Frenchmen; and the German Minister, M. Schön,[209] who had a passion for dressing up in fancy dress; the Norwegian Minister, M. de Knagenhjelm; and the Italian Minister.

The diplomatic world mixed little with the Danes. I once heard a Dane say to another Dane: “Do you receive diplomats?” in the same tone of surprise as would have been appropriate had the question been: “Do you receive police-spies?”

I think the theatres were shut when I arrived, and the only amusements were to go out sailing which I used to do often with Sir Edward, who had a yacht, and in the evenings to have dinner at the Tivoli music-hall, which was an out-of-door park full of side-shows and was pleasantly illuminated.

The staff of the British Legation consisted of a First Secretary, Sir Alan Johnstone, and a Chancery servant: a Dane called Ole, who was a charming, simple person like a character in Hans Andersen, vaguely intoxicated sometimes, paternal, easily upset, and endlessly obliging.

Sir Alan Johnstone had a little house in the country, and there I often used to spend Sunday, and there I made the acquaintance of Count Benckendorff. The first time I met him we had a violent argument about the Dreyfus case. He was a firm believer in Dreyfus’ innocence and so was I, but that did not prevent us arguing as though we held diametrically opposite opinions.

In the middle of August, Edmund Gosse paid a visit to Denmark and I went to him meet at Munkebjerg, which entailed a long cross-country journey over many canals and in trains that were borne on steamers. Munkebjerg was a lovely place on the top of a high hill with little woods reaching down to the water. There, for the first time, I experienced the long, green, luminous twilights of the north. Edmund Gosse was inspired by the surroundings to write a book called Hypolympia, which he afterwards dedicated to me. He imagined that the gods of Greece arrived at Munkebjerg immediately after their exile, and on that theme he wove a fantasy.

One of the most important duties at Copenhagen was to go to the railway station to meet the various royalties who used to visit the King of Denmark, and another one was to receive English Royalties at the door of the English church when they attended divine service on Sundays. We used often to see the King of Denmark out riding, and although I think he was[210] then eighty years old, he looked on horseback, so extraordinarily young was his figure, like a man of thirty.

I learnt Danish fairly quickly and soon I could follow the plays at the Kongelige Theatre and at other theatres. The Kongelige Theatre was a State-supported institution with an ancient tradition and an excellent troupe of actors and dancers. They performed opera: Gluck, Mozart, and Wagner; ballets; the classic Danish comedies of Holberg; Molière; Shakespeare; modern comedies and the dramas of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Holger Drachman. The Shakespeare productions were particularly interesting and far more remarkable than any I ever saw in Berlin. They made use of the Apron Stage; on a small back-cloth at the back of the stage changed with the changing scene; the back-cloth was framed in a Gothic arch, which was supported by pillars raised on low steps. A curtain could be lowered across this arch, and the actors could proceed with the play in front of this curtain, without necessitating the lowering of the larger curtain. This small scene was extremely effective. It was just enough to give the eye the keynote of the play; and in the historical plays of Shakespeare, in Richard III. for instance, it was ideal. I saw Richard III., King Lear, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the latter was a beautiful and gay production; the actor who played Bottom had a rich vein of humour and a large exuberant personality, and the fairy dances were beautifully organised and executed. Of the modern drama I saw Tolstoy’s Powers of Darkness, which made a shattering effect, Ibsen’s Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, and Holger Drachman’s Gurre, and some comedies by Otto Benzon.

The performance of the Doll’s House with Fru Hennings’ Nora was unforgettable. I have seen many Noras; Eleonora Duse and Réjane and Agnes Sorma in Berlin; but Fru Hennings played the part as if it had been written for her; she was Nora; she made the whole play more than natural, she made it inevitable. “Quelle navrante ironie! quel désenchantement à fond!” said Jules Lemaître, writing about Duse’s performance of Magda. In Fru Hennings’ interpretation of Nora, the irony was indeed harrowing, and the disenchantment complete; but irony, disillusion, weariness, disgust were all merged into a wonderful harmony, as the realities of life gradually dawned on the little singing-bird, and the doll changed into a woman. She made the transformation, which whenever I had[211] seen the play before seemed so difficult to believe in, of the Nora of the first act into the Nora of the last act seem the most natural thing in the world. Then Fru Hennings had the advantage of being a Dane and of speaking the words of the play in the language in which they had been written. She had a musical rippling voice and a plaintive grace of gesture. Holger Drachman’s drama Gurre was a terrible and intensely dramatic poetic drama, with a love duet of impassioned lyricism and melody, and an almost unbearable scene, in which the Queen has her rival scalded to death in a steam-bath. Hedda Gabler I confess to not being able to endure when I saw it; it was beautifully acted; too well acted; there seemed to be no difference between what was going on on the stage and in the audience. I had a sudden uprush of satiety with Norwegian drama: with Ibsen, with problem plays, with Denmark, with the North; and I remember going out of the theatre after the second act, in revolt and disgust, and not being able to stand any more of it. But that was an accidental impression arising from a surfeit of such things, and from an overdose of Scandinavian gloom and Norwegian complexity; a short course of musical comedies would have soon enabled one to appreciate the drama of Ibsen once more; as it was, I heard it after a year and a half’s stay at Copenhagen, and at that moment I had had just a drop too much of that kind of thing.

I also saw When we dead awaken when it was first produced, and this again had no effect on me, save one of vague and teasing perplexity.

The music at Copenhagen was as interesting as the drama. Mozart’s operas were admirably given at the Kongelige Theatre. I remember a fine performance of Don Giovanni, the Nozze di Figaro, and Gluck’s Orpheo, concerts where Beethoven’s Symphonies were played, and a recital of Paderewski where he played Liszt’s arrangement of the Erlkönig. When he came to the end of it, the impression was that he himself had experienced that ride in the night; that he had battled with the Erl King for the life of the child, and that it was he and not the child who was dead.

As soon as I could speak Danish, I made several friends among the Danes. I sometimes spent the evening at Dr. George Brandes’ house, and more often at that of Otto Benzon, the playwright, who was extremely kind to me. The intelligentsia[212] of Copenhagen were highly cultivated; they were well-to-do and had fine collections of modern pictures. The meals were long and were often followed by a still longer supper. The days were short in winter at Copenhagen; the sun appeared to set at two; the wind blew in every direction at once down the Bred Gade. Copenhagen in winter had depressing elements.

I had, in the meantime, made great friends with the Benckendorffs at the Russian Legation.

Just as in the art of writing, and in fact in all arts, the best style is that where there is no style, or rather where we no longer notice the style, so appropriate and so inevitable, so easy the thing said, sung, or done is made to appear, so in diplomacy the most delightful diplomats were those about whom there was no diplomatic style, nothing which made you think of diplomacy. Michael Herbert was one of these, and so pre-eminently was Count Benckendorff. When he was Ambassador in London he took root easily in English life, and made friends instantly and without effort in many different worlds, so his personality and his services are well known to Englishmen. I doubt, however, whether they know how great the services were which he rendered at times both to our country as well as to his own.

All through the war, till a few days before his death, he was giving his whole heart and soul to his work, and every nerve of his being was strained to the utmost. The war killed him as certainly as if he had fought in the trenches. He was astonishingly far-sighted and clear-sighted. In 1903 he told me there would be a revolution in Russia directly there was a war. At the time of the Agadir crisis, he told me that the future of Europe entirely depended on the policy of the German Government: on whether the German Emperor and his Government decided or not to embark on a Louis XIV. policy of ambition and aggression, and try to make Germany the only European power.

When the Emperor of Russia issued the manifesto of 17th October, and the Russians were bedecking their cities with flags, because they thought they had received a constitution, he made it excruciatingly clear that it was nothing of the kind; and he predicted no less clearly what would be the results of so ambiguous an act, and so dangerously elastic a charter.

His public career belongs to history. I had the privilege[213] of knowing him as a private person and of finding in him the kindest and the wisest of friends.

I think his most striking quality was his keenness. The way he would throw himself into the discussion, the topic, or the occupation of the moment, whether it was a book, a play, a picture, a piece of music, a political question, a wolf-hunt, a speech, a problem, even an acrostic to be guessed, or the dredging of a pond.

Whenever I wrote anything new he always made me read it aloud to him, and he was in himself an extraordinarily exhilarating and encouraging public.

He was all for one’s doing more and more, for finding out what one could not do and then doing it.

He once tried to persuade me to go into Parliament. When I objected that I had no power of dealing with political questions, and no understanding of many affairs that a member of Parliament is supposed to understand, he said: “Rubbish! You could do all that part, just as you wrote a parody of Anatole France; people would think you knew.”

He hated pessimism. He hated the Oriental, passive view of life, especially if it was preached by Occidentals. The looking forward to a Nirvana and a closed door. He hated everything negative. Suicide to him was the one unpardonable sin. He hated affectation, especially cosmopolitan affectation, what he used to call “le faux esprit Parisien.” “Je préfère,” he used to say, “le bon sens anglais.” He was extremely argumentative and would put his whole soul into an argument on the most trivial point; and he was as unblushingly unscrupulous as Dr. Johnson in his use of the weapons of contradiction, although, unlike Dr. Johnson, however heated the argument, he was never rude, even for a second; he didn’t know how to be rude. He spoke the most beautiful natural French, the French of a more elegant epoch than ours, with a slightly classical tinge in it. He spoke it not only as well as a Frenchman, but better; that is to say, he spoke without any frills or unnecessary ornament, either of phrase or accent, with complete ease and naturalness.

He spoke English just as naturally. I remember on one occasion, shortly after he arrived in London, his being taken for an Englishman throughout a whole dinner-party by his host. But he used to say that this was sheer bluff and that[214] his command of the language was limited. His beautiful manners, and the perfection of his courtesy came from the same absence of style I have already alluded to. He was natural and unaffected with everyone, because he was chez soi partout; and his distinction, one felt, was based on a native integrity, a fundamental horror of anything common, or mean, or unkind, the incapacity of striking a wrong note in word or deed: the impossibility of hurting anyone’s feelings. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, writing in a provincial newspaper in Russia, about one of the many European crises that threatened Europe before the outbreak of the Great War, said: “We should have been dragged into a war, had we not had at the time, as our Ambassador in London, the first gentleman in Europe.” That is, I think, his best and most fitting epitaph.

I shall never have the benefit of his criticism any more, his keenness, his almost boyish interest, his decided, argumentative disagreement leaping into a blaze over a trifling point, and never again enjoy that glow of satisfaction—worth a whole world of praise—which I used to feel when he said about something, whether a poem, a newspaper article, a story, or a letter, or the most foolish of rhymes: “C’est très joli.”

I moved from my rooms in the town to the Legation and had most of my meals with the Goschens. Sir Edward’s inimitable humour, his minute observation of detail, and his keen eye for the ludicrous, the quaint and all the absurd incidents of daily life—and especially of diplomatic life—made all the official side of things, the dinner-parties, the interviews with ministers, the ceremonies at the station, the pompousness of the diplomats, extraordinarily amusing. Besides this, he was childishly fond of every kind of game, such as battledore and shuttlecock, and cup and ball.

Sir Edward went on leave in the autumn of 1900, and for a fortnight, from 10th October to 22nd October, I had the glory of being in charge, of being acting Chargé d’Affaires of the Legation, so that when the Foreign Office wrote to me they signed dispatches, “Yours with great truth.” The first thing which had to be done was to leave cards on all the Corps Diplomatique. This duty was always carried out by Ole, the Chancery servant. I gave him a sheaf of my cards to leave; he left some of them, but I think he considered that I was altogether too young to be taken seriously as a Chargé d’Affaires,[215] so he left no cards on the minor diplomats, who lived out of the immediate radius of the British Legation. About three days after I had been in charge, Count Benckendorff told me that the minor diplomats who had received no cards from me had held a meeting of indignation; I was to lose no time in smoothing down their ruffled sensibilities, so I left the cards myself. The only diplomatic interview I remember having was with the future King of Greece, who came to see me in my room and talked about something I didn’t understand. My brief era of sole responsibility was put an end to after a fortnight by the arrival of a new First Secretary in place of Alan Johnson. His name was Herbert. Shortly after his arrival Ethel Smyth paid a visit to Copenhagen on her way back to England from Berlin, where she had been negotiating for the performance of her opera, Der Wald. She wanted to make the acquaintance of the Benckendorffs, and she sang her opera to us, her Mass, and many songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, besides many English and Scotch ballads. Count Benckendorff, who was musical, was enchanted with her singing, with her interpretation of the songs she sang, “la richesse de son exécution,” her vitality, her good humour, her keenness, her passionate interest in everything. She played golf in the daytime and made music in the evening.

At Christmas, Sir Edward’s sons arrived and we had a Christmas-tree in the house, and a treat for the church choir, and endless games of battledore and shuttlecock in the Legation ballroom. Then, suddenly, came the unbelievable news that Queen Victoria was dead. A telegram arrived on the 22nd January, worded thus:

I was just going home for a little leave, but now it seemed impossible: there would be too much to do. But Sir Edward insisted on my going, all the same. Herbert was arriving back from leave, and he said he could get on without me; so I went. I saw the funeral procession from a house near the Marble Arch. The only splash of colour in the greyness and gloom of the long procession was the regalia and the bright pall on the gun-carriage that bore the coffin, and everyone agreed that the most imposing[216] figure in the procession was the German Emperor in a great grey cloak. But the most impressive feature of the whole ceremony was the attitude of the crowd: its size, its silence, the universal black. London was like a dead city, and as someone said at the time: “One went about feeling as if one had cheated at cards.” I felt that what “Onkel Adolph” used to say at Hildesheim was true: “Die Engländer lieben ihre alte Königin” (“The English love their old Queen”).

In February I went to Karlsruhe to hear Ethel Smyth’s first opera, Fantasio, performed at the Hofteater with Mottl conducting. Fantasio is an opera in two acts written on Musset’s play. Ethel Smyth wrote the libretto herself in German. The opera contains some lovely songs, especially one that begins: “Reite ohne Sattelpferd,” and some of the most delicate music Ethel Smyth ever composed, but the libretto is undramatic, and there are not enough bones in the framework to support the musical structure. Mottl conducted the orchestra beautifully; the opera was respectfully received, but without any great enthusiasm. When the performance was over, we had supper with the Grand Duchess of Baden, and there I met a cousin of mine, Charlie d’Otrante, whom I had not seen since I was a child. He was now, though a Swedish subject—his father was a Swede—an officer in the German Army.

I stayed at Copenhagen till the spring. The spring in Denmark comes with a rush. All is wintry, without any hint of the coming change, and then all of a sudden, and in one night, the beech trees are green, and of so startling, vivid, and fresh a green that it almost hurts the eye, and through them you see the sea, a milky haze, and the sky looks as if it had been washed clean.

In May, I went to London for my first spell of long leave since I had passed my examination. I stayed all June and July in London, and in the middle of July I went over to Brittany to stay a few days with Sarah Bernhardt at her house, the Fort des Poulains on the island of Belle-Isle, which is at the extreme north of the island. This visit entailed a terrific journey: first, a long train journey with many changes, then several hours on board a steamer, and then a two hours’ drive. The house was a little white, square, flat-roofed building among the rocks and a stone’s-throw from the sea—a great roaring[217] grey sea, with huge breakers, leaping cataracts of foam, and beaches of grey pebbles. Sarah Bernhardt’s son was staying there, Clairin, the artist, and one or two other people. The house was built entirely of pitch-pine inside. Sarah used to appear at déjeuner.

She spent all the morning working. In the afternoon she played lawn-tennis on a hard court; after dinner we played every kind of game. She was carrying on at the time a heated discussion by telegraph with the poet Catulle Mendès about the forthcoming production of a poetical play of his, called La Vierge d’Avilon. The dispute was about the casting: the poet wished one of the female parts to be played by a certain actress; Sarah wished otherwise. Telegram after telegram was sent and received, each of them several pages in length. The poet’s telegrams were lyrical and beautifully expressed. One of them began: “Vous êtes puissante et câline,” and another addressed her as “La grande faucheuse des illusions.” How the matter was settled ultimately, I never knew. During the whole time I stayed there, Sarah never mentioned the theatre, acting, or actors, except as far as they concerned this particular business discussion. On the other hand, she talked a great deal of her travels all over the world. She talked of Greece, and I quoted to her the line of some French poet about “des temples roux dans des poussières d’or,” and asked her whether it was an accurate description. She said: “Yes, of the Greek temples in Italy”; but, in Greece, she said it was a case of “des temples roses dans des poussières d’argent.” She said the most remarkable sight she had ever seen in her life was in Australia, when, in a large prairie, she had seen the whole sky suddenly filled with a dense flock of brilliantly coloured birds, which had risen all at once from the ground and obscured the whole horizon with their dazzling coloured plumage.

She was irresistibly comic at times, full of bubbling gaiety and spirits, and an admirable mimic. Jules Huret wrote, while I was at Paris, an article about her, in which he described this side of her admirably.

“Quand elle veut,” he said, “Sarah est d’un comique extraordinaire, par l’outrance de ses images toujours justes, et la violence imprévue de ses reparties. Cette gaieté de Sarah est bien caractéristique de sa force. C’est évidemment un trop plein de sève qui se résout en joie. Elle a des trouvailles,[218] des mimiques, des répliques, une verve, des silences mêmes, qui font irrésistiblement éclater le rire autour d’elle. Elle imite certains de ses amis avec une vérité comique incroyable.”

What struck me most about her, when I saw her in private life, was her radiant and ever-present common-sense. There was no nonsense about her, no pose, and no posturing. She was completely natural. She took herself as much for granted as being the greatest actress in the world, as Queen Victoria took for granted that she was Queen of England. She took it for granted and passed on. She told me once she had never wished to be an actress—that she had gone on to the stage against her will; she would greatly have preferred to have been a painter, and all her life she continued to model as it was, and did some interesting things in this line, especially some bronze fishes and sea-shapes for which she found models at Belle-Isle, but when she found she had got to be an actress, she said to herself: “If it has got to be, then I will be the first.”

She said she had never got over her nervousness in playing a new part, or for the first time before a new audience; if she felt the audience was friendly, this knowledge half-paralysed her; if, on the other hand, she knew or guessed the audience to be hostile, every fibre in her being tightened for the struggle. She said that first nights at Paris, when she knew there would be hostile elements and critics ready to say she could no longer act, always gave her the greatest confidence; she felt then it was a battle, and a battle she could win; she would force the critics to acknowledge that she could act. She told me, too, she had never gone an inch out of her way to seek for friends or admirers; she had always let them come to her; she had never taken any notice of them till they forced their attention on her. At Belle-Isle I never once heard her allude to any of her parts or to any of her triumphs; but she talked a great deal about current events—of the people and politicians she had met in her life, in all the countries of Europe—and said some very shrewd things about the men who were ruling England at that time.

I stayed at Belle-Isle three or four days, then I went back to London, and at the end of July I started for Russia. I had been invited to stay with the Benckendorffs at their house in the country, Sosnofka in the Government of Tambov. I did not yet know one word of Russian. At Warsaw station I had to get out and change. I left my bag for a moment on the seat[219] of the carriage. This bag contained my money, my ticket, my passport, and several other necessaries. When I came back it was gone. I couldn’t even tell anyone what had happened. As the result of a conversation in dumb show, I was put into a train; it was not the express it should have been, but a slow train, and then I had my first experience of the kindness and obligingness of the Russian people, for a fellow-traveller registered my luggage, bought me a ticket, telegraphed to the Benckendorffs for me, to the hotel at Moscow, and supplied me with food and money for the journey, which in this train took three days.

Thanks to the kindness of this traveller, I arrived safely at Moscow, and at Sosnofka the next day. It was a blazing hot August that year in Russia. The country was burnt and parched; the green of the trees had been burnt away. Sosnofka is a large straggling village, with thatched houses. Once every seven years the whole village would probably be burnt down. Russia was very different from what I had expected. I had read several Russian books in translations—Tolstoy and Tourgenev—but the background they had formed in my mind was not like Russia at all. In fact, I had never thought of these books as happening in Russia. The people they described were so like real people, so like people that I had known myself, that I had always imagined the action taking place in England or France. I imagined Anna Karenina happening in London. Not only did the characters seem real and familiar to me, but they struck me as being the only characters I had ever met in any books which gave me the impression that I had myself known them. Dickens’ characters are real enough, and Thackeray’s characters are realistic enough; I believe absolutely in Sam Weller, in Mr. Micawber, in Mr. Guppy, in Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, and any you like to mention; the genius of Dickens has made me believe in them; I also believe in the existence of Major Pendennis and Becky Sharp; I feel I might meet people like that, but I never have; whereas with the characters in Tolstoy’s books I am not sure whether they belong to bookland at all; I am not at all sure they do not belong to my own past, my own limbo, which is peopled by real people and dream people. The background which I called up in my mind was something quite unconnected with Russian books, and something far removed from reality.[220] It was the conventional background borrowed from detective stories, and Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, and from many melodramas. That is to say, I imagined barbaric houses, glittering and spangled bedizened Asiatic people. The reality was so different. Russia seemed such a natural country. Everybody seemed to be doing what they liked, without any fuss; to wear any clothes they liked; to smoke when and where they wished; to live in such simplicity and without any paraphernalia at all.

As for the landscape, my first impression was that of a large, rolling plain; a church with blue cupolas; a windmill and another church. The plain is dotted with villages, and every village is like the last; the houses are squat, sometimes built of logs and sometimes built of bricks, and the roofs are thatched with straw. The houses stand at irregular intervals, sometimes huddled close together and sometimes with wide gaps between them; it was dusty when I arrived; the broad road, which is not a real road, but an immense stoneless track like the roads in America and Australia, was littered with straw and various kinds of messes, and along it the creaking carts groaned, the peasants driving them leisurely and sometimes walking beside them. Every now and then there was a well with a large wooden see-saw pole to draw the water with; and everywhere, and over everything, the impression of space and leisureliness and the absence of hurry. The peasants wore loose shirts, with a leather coat thrown carelessly over their shoulder, or left in the cart, and the women looked picturesque in their everyday clothes; the folds of their prints and calicoes, which had something Biblical and statuesque about them, were more impressive to the eye than the silken finery which they wore when they went to church on Sunday.

The Benckendorffs lived at Sosnofka in two small separate two-storied houses, which were close together. The kitchen was in a separate building apart. In the pantry, the night-watchman, André, would play draughts in the daytime with Alexei, who cleaned the boots. By night the watchman watched; and every now and then blew a whistle. The butler, Alexander, was an old soldier in every sense of the word. His ingenuity had no end; nor had his resource. He could make anything and do anything; and in the course of one revolving noon he could be chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. He[221] could not only play, but he could make any musical instrument. He was an expert mixer of fireworks, an inspired carpenter, and he could mend anything. He bore the traces of an early military training and drill in his upright shoulders; and about once a month he would disappear and be drunk for two or three days. The house was housemaided by two old Russian peasants, Mavra and Masha, who wore kerchiefs over their heads and speckled calico shawls. Mavra’s devotion to the Benckendorff children passed all expression; she cared little for her fate and fortune and for that of her own family as long as they were alive and well. Michael, the coachman, was another great character; he wore a black cap with peacocks’ feathers sticking upright in it, and a black tunic with red sleeves. He drove the troika, three horses abreast, and no road, or rather no absence of road, daunted him; on the edge of an impossible hill, with no track through it, and nothing in sight but bushes and logs, and nothing to guess at except holes, if asked whether it was possible to go on, he would always laconically answer, “Moshno” (“Possible”), and it always was possible. There was an under-coachman called Fro. He had his qualities too; and one of these was the way in the winter he would find and recognise a track after there had been a blizzard, which had entirely obliterated all semblance or trace of any path or roadway. Sometimes a little bit of paper or a stray twig would give him the clue. Only one felt just this: that Michael would have been quite unshaken in face of any catastrophes; the earth might have opened in front of one, a hostile aeroplane might have barred the way, a regiment of machine-gunners might have been reported to be in ambush—he would just have nodded and quietly said, “Moshno,” and nothing more.

After dinner, that summer we used to sit on the balcony or on a stone terrace on one side of the house, and watch the message of light, the warning halo the rising moon sent up from behind the hill before she rose:

and listen in the thick dark night, while the peasants in the village stamped their rhythmical dances to the accompaniment of bleating accordions or three-stringed balalaikas; some watchman’s rattle beat time; the frogs croaked, and sometimes a[222] voice—a rather hoarse, high, slightly sharp voice—began a long-drawn-out, high wail, and other voices chimed in, singing the same melody in a rough counterpoint. We sat at a little green garden-table drinking our coffee, and our nalivka, the delicious clean liqueur distilled from cherries. There seemed to be no time in Russia. People slept when they felt inclined, not necessarily because it was night. Once when I went to stay with a friend near Kirsanof he advised me to arrive at four o’clock in the morning, if possible, as the servants would enjoy the bustle of someone arriving when it was still dark.

One evening we went out riding through the woods, and over the plains, and no sooner had we left the front door than my pony, altogether out of control, galloped away into space. One morning we were called at one, and went out to the marshes to shoot wild duck before the dawn. It was quite dark when we started, and after the shooting was over, and I shot two wild duck dead, we drove home in the dawn across the dewy plains, when the whole country was awakening, the cocks crowing and the birds singing, and the plains were bathed in lemon-coloured light, and faint pink and grey clouds hung like shreds from Aurora’s scarf across the horizon.

One night we camped out in the woods. We took bottles of beer and water-melons, and playing-cards, and a camera, and many rugs. We slept little; the wood was full of flies and mosquitoes, but we enjoyed ourselves much all the same, and came back with that pleasant headache which is the result of sleeping on straw in the open air on a hot August night, and covered with bites. The morning after, we had a wolf-shoot, but it was too early in the year for wolves, and nobody saw one. But there was a great display, nevertheless; a man rode on a white horse and blew a trumpet, and there were a multitude of beaters. I remember a short dialogue bawled slowly, quietly, and sonorously in prolonged accents across a whole field between André, the night-watchman, and Wassili, the keeper. “Who is that man yonder?” asked Wassili. “He is a shepherd,” said André; “he feeds sheep.” “On pastukh, on past korov.” It was so dignified, so slow, like a fragment of dialogue from the Old Testament. In the morning we used to have breakfast out of doors, in the garden, under a tree, with a pleasant after-breakfast interlude of smoking[223] and conversation; then Alexander and the gardener would stroll into the garden, and there would be endless discussion about the pulling down of some paling, or the repairing of some fence or chair, or the painting of some room or gate; Alexander’s volubility had no limit, and the gardener was extraordinarily ingenious in twisting the meaning of anything into the opposite of what had been said. We had luncheon at half-past twelve, and sat afterwards on the terrace, till the great heat was over, and then we would go out in the troika, and take tea and a samovar with us, or find a samovar somewhere, and perhaps bathe in the river. After dinner, when it was too cold to stay out, we would sit indoors and play cards at the green table, marking the score in chalk on the table; and Pierre Benckendorff, who was not yet an officer, but still at the cadet college, used to read out Mark Twain in German, or draw pictures, or make me draw pictures, while he gave advice, or played the treble of tunes on the pianoforte.

There were three little rooms on the ground floor of the first house, which was built of wood. The first room into which the small front hall led was Count Benckendorff’s sitting-room. It had a writing-table; a table where there was an array of long pipes, neatly arranged; a round table with a green cloth on it, and a wooden cup and ball on a plate; a bookcase full of books of reference, which were constantly consulted, whenever, as so often occurred, there was a family argument. In this room, near one of the windows, there was a deal drawing-table. There were prints on the wall. The next room had some old French wooden furniture painted with little flowers, and a large grand pianoforte, and a comfortable corner round the fireplace; in front of a window, which went down to the ground and opened like a door, there was a stone terrace with orange trees in pots on it and agapanthus plants (later there were rose trees as well). Beyond this there was a third room full of books, old books, the library of Count Benckendorff’s grandfather—the books that had been modern in the eighteenth century, in their dark brown calf bindings, and old marbled papers; here was the newest edition of Byron in French, the poems of Pope and Corneille and Voltaire and Gresset, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the memoirs of Madame de Caylus, Napoleonic memoirs and the poems of Ossian, Schiller’s plays, and an early edition of Gogol. Upstairs on[224] the landing, there was a cupboard full of every imaginable kind of novel: the Tauchnitz novels of many ages, and French novels of every description, the early Zolas, the early Feuillets, and Maupassant’s first stories. Before going to bed, we would dive into that cupboard, and one was always sure, even in the dark, of finding something one could read. I have always thought since then, the ideal bookcase would be that in which you could plunge a hand into in the dark and be sure of extracting something readable. In the stone-house, the boys had each of them a sitting-room on the ground floor, and I had a bedroom and sitting-room upstairs. Next to the school library at Eton, that sitting-room proved to be my favourite room in all the world and in all my life; and at its big table I painted innumerable water-colours, and wrote four plays in verse, two plays in prose, three long books in prose, besides translating a book of Leonardo da Vinci and writing endless letters and newspaper articles. In this room, one had the feeling of the world forgetting by the world forgot, and one was recalled to reality by a bell, or by Alexander coming up to the room, as he always did, to say that tea was ready or dinner, or that the horses were at the door.

I felt the charm of Russia directly I crossed the frontier; and after a three weeks’ stay there I was so bitten by it that I resolved firstly to learn Russian, and, secondly, to go back there as soon as I could.

I went back to Copenhagen, and stopped some hours at Moscow on the way, and saw the Kremlin, and had some amusing adventures at Testoff’s restaurant. Pierre Benckendorff had written down for me a list of things to ask for; one of which was caviare, which in Russian is ikra. But when I said ikra the waiters thought I said igra, which means play, and merely turned on the great mechanical organ which that restaurant then boasted of, and I could not get any caviare.

When I got back to Copenhagen, I at once had lessons in Russian from the psalomtchtchik at the Russian Church.

On the 19th of September, King Edward VII. arrived in Denmark to pay his first visit to Denmark as King of England. The King was to arrive at Elsinore in the Osborne. The Staff of the Legation had received orders to go to Elsinore and meet His Majesty on board the yacht. His Majesty was to land in time to meet the King of Denmark, the Crown Prince and all[225] the Danish Royal Family, the King of Greece, Queen Alexandra, the Emperor and Empress of Russia, the Dowager Empress of Russia, Prince and Princess Charles of Denmark, and other members of the various Royal Families. We were to go in uniform. The train started at eight. I have already said I was living at the Legation, but my rooms were completely isolated from Sir Edward’s house, and had no connection with them. I had a Danish servant called Peter. He had been told to call me punctually at seven. He forgot, or overslept himself. I woke up by accident, and automatically, and found to my horror it was twenty-five minutes to eight, and the station was far off, and I had to dress in uniform. I dressed like lightning, but it is not easy to dress like lightning in a diplomatic uniform; the tight boots are a special difficulty. I had no time to shave. I got a cab, and we drove at full gallop to the station, and I got into Sir Edward’s carriage as the train was moving out of the station. At Elsinore, we had fortunately some time to spare before going on board the Osborne, and I was able to get shaved in the village. Then we went on board and were presented to the King, and kissed his hand on his accession.

That same night there was a banquet at the Palace of Fredensborg for the King, to which the staff of the Legation were invited. I remember only one thing about this dinner, and that is that we were given 1600 hock to drink. It was quite bitter, and had to be drunk with about five lumps of sugar in a glass.

After dinner, we stood round a large room while the Kings and Queens, the Emperor and Empresses and Princesses, went round and talked to the guests; and this was the end of a tiring day.

A few days later the King came to luncheon at the Legation.

There was one other Royal arrival which I shall never forget. I cannot place its date, but I think it must have been Queen Alexandra’s first visit as Queen to Copenhagen. But what I remember is this, that while we were waiting on the station platform, Queen Alexandra descended from the train all in black, with long floating veils, and threaded her way through the crowd of Royalties and officials, looking younger than anyone present, with still the same fairy-tale-like grace of carriage and movement that I remembered as a child, and with the same youthful smile of welcome, and with all her[226] delicacy of form and feature heightened by her mourning and her long black veils, whose floating intricacy were obedient and docile to the undefinable rhythm of her beauty, and I remember thinking of Donne’s lines:

I spent that Christmas at Copenhagen, and on the 7th of January 1902 a dispatch came to say I had been transferred from the post of a Third Secretary at His Majesty’s Legation at Copenhagen to that of a Third Secretary of His Majesty’s Embassy at Rome. Before I left Copenhagen I had finished an article on Taine, an article on modern French literature, and an article on Sully Prudhomme, for the new edition of the British Encyclopædia.

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I said that Sarah Bernhardt should have a chapter to herself.

“Les Comédiens,” said Jules Lemaître, “tiennent beaucoup de place dans nos conversations et dans nos journaux parce qu’ils en tiennent beaucoup dans nos plaisirs.” Amongst all the many pleasures I have experienced in the theatre, the acutest and greatest have been due to the art and genius of Sarah Bernhardt. Providence has always been generous and yet economical in the allotment of men and women of genius to a gaping world. Economical, because such appearances are rare; generous, because every human being, to whatever generation he belongs, will probably, at least once during his lifetime, have the chance of watching the transit, or a phase of the transit, of a great comet.

This is especially true of actors and actresses of genius. Their visits to the earth are rare, yet our forefathers had the privilege of seeing Mrs. Siddons and Garrick; our fathers saw Rachel, Ristori, and Salvini; and we shall be able to irritate younger generations, when they rave about their new idol, with reminiscences of Sarah Bernhardt.

Sometimes, of course, as in this case, the comet shines through several generations. I have talked with people who have seen both Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, and with some who declared that in the first two acts of Phèdre, Sarah Bernhardt surpassed Rachel. Such was the opinion of that sensible and conservative critic, Francisque Sarcey.

The actor’s art dies with him; but the rumour of it, when it is very great, lives on the tongue and sometimes in the soul of man, and forms a part of his dreams and of his visions. The great of old still rule our spirits from their urns; and we, who never saw Rachel, get an idea of her genius from the accounts of her[228] contemporaries, from Théodore de Banville and Charlotte Brontë. Her genius is a fact in the dreams of mankind; just as the beauty of Helen of Troy and the charm of Mary Stuart, whom many generations of men fell in love with. So shall it be with Sarah Bernhardt. There will, it is to be hoped, be great actresses in the future—actresses filled with the Muses’ madness and constrained to enlarge rather than to interpret the masterpieces of the world; but Providence (so economical, so generous!) never repeats an effect; and there will never be another Sarah Bernhardt, just as there will never be another Heinrich Heine. Yet when the incredible moment comes for her to leave us, in a world that without her will be a duller and a greyer place, her name and the memory of her fame will live in the dreams of mankind. Sarah Bernhardt delighted several generations, and there were many vicissitudes in her career and many sharp fluctuations in the appreciation she won from the critical both in France and abroad; nor did her fame come suddenly with a rush, as it does to actors and actresses in novels. Even in Henry James’ novel, The Tragic Muse, the development of the heroine’s career and the establishment of her fame happens far too quickly to be real. Henry James was conscious of this himself. He mentions this flaw in the preface he wrote for the novel in the Collected Edition of his works.

Sarah Bernhardt’s career shows no such easy and immediate leap into fame, nor is it the matter of a few star parts; it was a series of long, difficult, laborious, and painful campaigns carried right on into old age (in spite of the loss of a limb), and right through a European war, during which she played in the trenches to the poilus; it was a prolonged wrestle with the angel of art, in which the angel was defeated by an inflexible will and an inspired purpose.

She made her début at the Théâtre français in 1862, in the Iphigénie of Racine. Sarcey, writing of her performance, said:

“Elle se tient bien et prononce avec une netteté parfaite. C’est tout ce qu’on peut dire en ce moment.” It was not until ten years later that she achieved her first notable success in Le Passant, by François Coppée, and that she was hailed as a rising star as the Queen in Ruy Blas, at the Odéon, and became, in her own words, something more than “la petite fée des étudiants.”

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In 1872 she left the Odéon and entered the Théâtre français once more. She reappeared in Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle[9] with partial success. In writing of this performance, Sarcey expressed doubt of Sarah Bernhardt ever achieving power as well as grace, and strength as well as charm. “Je doute,” he wrote, “que Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt trouve jamais dans son délicieux organe ces notes éclatantes et profondes, pour exprimer le paroxysme des passions violentes, qui transportent une salle. Si la nature lui avait donné ce don, elle serait une artiste complète, et il n’y en a pas de telles au théâtre.”

It was during a performance of Voltaire’s Zaïre, on a stifling night in 1873, that Sarah Bernhardt discovered she had undreamed-of stores of energy and electric power at her disposal, and under her control. She had rebelled against having to act during the summer months. Perrin, the director of the Théâtre français, had insisted. When the night came when she was due to appear in Zaïre (August 6), she determined to exhaust all the power that was in her, and as she was at that time as frail as a sylph and was thought to be perilously delicate (spitting blood), she decided to spite Perrin by dying. She strained every nerve; she cried in earnest; she suffered in earnest; she gave a cry of real pain when struck by the stage dagger; and when it was all over she thought her last hour must have come; and then she found to her amazement that she was quite fresh, and ready to begin the performance all over again. She realised then that her intellect and will could draw when they pleased on her physical resources; and that she could do what she liked with her vocal chords. This explains a secret that often puzzled the spectators of her art—her power of letting herself go, and after a violent explosion, just when you thought her voice must be broken for ever by the effort, of opening as it were another stop, and letting flow a ripple from a flute of the purest gold.

It was in Phèdre that Sarah Bernhardt proved she possessed not only grace but power; her rendering of Doña Sol in Hernani (November 1877) definitely sealed her reputation, not only as a tragic actress, but as the incarnation of something[230] new and exotic. And the world recognised her incomparable talent for speaking verse.

In 1879, the Comédie française visited London, and all London went mad about Sarah Bernhardt. She was not then the star in a cast of mediocrities, she was a star in a dazzling firmament of stars. Her fellow actors and actresses were Coquelin, Got, Delaunay, Mounet Sully, Worms, Maubant, and Febvre among the men; and among the women, Croizette, Baretta, Madeleine Brohan, Reichemberg, and Madame Favart. A more varied, excellent, and complete cast could not be imagined. It was a faultless ensemble for tragedy and comedy, for Racine, for Molière, for Victor Hugo, and for Alexandre Dumas fils.

In 1880, the glory of this theatrical age of gold was eclipsed and diminished by the flight of Sarah Bernhardt. After a quarrel arising out of the performance of L’Aventurière, she suddenly resigned, and, after a short season in London, in May 1880, started for America.

This rupture with the Théâtre français, which was largely due to the adulation she received and the sensation she made in London, was a momentous turning-point and break in her career. When it happened, the whole artistic world deplored it, and there are many critics in France and in England who never ceased to deplore it; but a calm review of the whole career of Sarah Bernhardt forces one to the conclusion that it could not have been otherwise.

The whole motto of her life was: “Faire ce qu’on veut.” And sometimes she added to this: “Lemieux est l’ennemi du bien.”

The Théâtre français at that time was indeed an ideal temple of art for so inspired a priestess. But Sarah Bernhardt was more than a priestess of art—she was a personality, a force, a power, which had to find full expression, its utmost limits and range; and if we weigh the pros and cons of the matter, I do not think we have been the losers. Her art certainly did suffer at times from her travels and her unshackled freedom; she played to ignorant audiences, and sometimes would walk through a part without acting; she played in inferior plays. On the other hand, had she remained in the narrower confines of the Théâtre français, we should never have realised her capacities to the full. In fact, had she remained at the Théâtre français, she would not have been Sarah Bernhardt. We should have[231] lost as much as we should have gained. It is true we should never have seen her in plays that were utterly unworthy of her. On the other hand, we should never probably have seen her Dame aux Camélias, her Lorenzaccio, her Hamlet. We should never have had the series of plays that Sardou wrote for her: Fédora, Théodora, La Tosca, etc. Some will contend that this would have been a great advantage. But, despise Sardou as much as you like, the fact remains it needs a man of genius to write such plays, and not only a woman of genius, but Sarah Bernhardt and none other, to play in them. In Fédora, Eleonora Duse, the incomparable Duse, could not reach the audience. And now, when these plays are revived in London, we realise all too well, and the public realises too, that there is none who can act them. It is no use acting well in such plays; you must act tremendously or not at all. La Tosca must be a violent shock to the nerves or nothing. When it was first produced, Jules Lemaître, protesting against the play, said the main situation was so strong, so violent, and so horrible, that it was in the worst sense actor-proof, and so it seemed then. Now we know better; we know by experience that without Sarah Bernhardt the play does not exist; we know that what made it almost unbearable was not the situation, but the demeanour, the action, the passivity, the looks, the gestures, the moans, the cries of Sarah Bernhardt in that situation. Had Sardou’s “machine-made” plays never been written, we should never have known one side of Sarah Bernhardt’s genius. I do not say it is the noblest side, but I do say that what we would have missed, and what Sardou’s plays revealed, was an unparalleled manifestation of electric energy.

The high-water mark of Sarah’s poetical and intellectual art was probably reached in her Phèdre, her Hamlet, and her Lorenzaccio; but the furthest limits of the power of her power were revealed in Sardou’s plays, for Sardou had the intuition to guess what forces lay in the deeps of her personality, and the insight and skill to make plays which, like subtle engines, should enable these forces to reveal themselves at their highest pitch, to find full expression, and to explode in a divine combustion.

There is another thing to be said about Sarah Bernhardt’s emancipation from the Théâtre français. Had she never been independent, had she never been her own master and her own stage manager, she would never have realised for us a whole[232] series of poetical visions and pictures which have had a deep and lasting influence on contemporary art. We should never have seen Théodora walk like one of Burne-Jones’s dreams come to life amidst the splendours of the Byzantine Court:

We should never have seen La Princesse Lointaine crowned with lilies, sumptuous and sad, like one of Swinburne’s early poems; nor La Samaritaine evoke the spices, the fire, and the vehemence of the Song of Solomon; nor Gismonda, with chrysanthemums in her hair, amidst the jewelled glow of the Middle Ages, against the background of the Acropolis; nor Izéïl incarnating the soul and dreams of India. Eliminate these things and you eliminate one of the sources of inspiration of modern art; you take away something from D’Annunzio’s poetry, from Maeterlinck’s prose, from Moreau’s pictures; you destroy one of the mainsprings of Rostand’s work; you annihilate some of the colours of modern painting, and you stifle some of the notes of modern music; for in all these you can trace in various degrees the subtle, unconscious influence of Sarah Bernhardt.

The most serious break in the appreciation of her art, on the part of the critics and the French public, did not come about immediately after she left the Théâtre français. On the contrary, when she played the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur for the first time—this was in May 1880—in London, her triumph among the critical was complete. I have an article by Sarcey, dated 31st May 1880, in which he raves about the performance he had come to London to see, and in which he says, had the performance taken place in Paris, the enthusiasm of the audience would have been boundless. The most serious break in the appreciation of her art came about after she had been to America, toured round Europe many times, with a repertory of stock plays and an indifferent company, and acted in such complete rubbish as Léna, the adaptation of As in a Looking-Glass, of which I have already given a schoolboy’s impressions. People then began to say they were tired of her. It is true she woke up the public once more with her performance of La Tosca in 1889, but in July 1889 Mr. Walkley voiced a general feeling when he said: “I suspect she herself understands the risks of ‘abounding in her own sense’[233] quite as well as any of us could tell her. She knows her talent needs refreshing, revitalising, rejuvenating.” He speaks of “her consciousness of a need for a larger, saner, more varied repertory. But,” he adds, “she will never get that repertory so long as she goes wandering from pole to pole, with a new piece, specially constructed for her by M. Sardou, in her pocket.”

Fortunately this consciousness of a need for a newer, saner repertory took effect in fact, after Sarah Bernhardt came back from a prolonged tour in South America. In the ’nineties she took the Renaissance Theatre in Paris, and she opened her season with a delicate and serious drama called Les Rois, by Jules Lemaître.

I am not sure of the date of this performance, but she played Phèdre at the Renaissance in 1893, and Lemaître said that “Jamais, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, ne fut plus parfaite, ni plus puissante, ni plus adorable.” She produced Sudermann’s Magda in 1896, and Musset’s Lorenzaccio in December 1896, and then she discovered Rostand, whose first play, Les Romanesques, had been done at the Français, and turned him into the channel of serious poetical drama.

She then built a theatre for herself, and gave us Rostand’s Samaritaine, Hamlet, L’Aiglon, and a series of Classical matinées; and from that time onward she never ceased to produce at least one interesting play a year. That was a fine average, a high achievement, and a real service to art. People seldom reflect that it is necessary for managers and actors to fill their theatre, and they cannot always be producing interesting experiments that do not pay. Small blame, therefore, to Sarah Bernhardt, if she sometimes fell back on Sardou, and all praise and gratitude is due to her for the daring experiments she risked.

Among these experiments one of the most remarkable of all was that of Jeanne d’Arc in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc; another was as Lucrezia Borgia in Victor Hugo’s play; and a third the hero of the charming poetical play Les Bouffons. She found a saner, larger repertory, and crowned her career by triumphing in Athalie in 1920.

Some French critics think her Lorenzaccio was the finest of her parts. Lemaître said about it: “Elle n’a pas seulement joué, comme elle sait jouer, son rôle: elle l’a composé. Car il ne s’agissait plus ici de ces dames aux camélias, et de ces princesses lointaines, fort simples dans leur fond, et qu’elle a su[234] nous rendre émouvantes et belles, presque sans réflexion et rien qu’en écoutant son sublime instinct. A ce génie naturel de la diction et du geste expressifs, elle a su joindre cette fois, comme lorsqu’elle joue Phèdre (mais que Lorenzaccio était plus difficile à pénétrer!) la plus rare et la plus subtile intelligence.”

This is what M. J. de Tillet wrote about the performance in the Revue Bleue of December 1896:

“Cette fois ç’a été le vrai triomphe, sans restrictions et sans réserves. Je vous ai dit la semaine dernière qu’elle avait atteint, et presque dépassé le sommet de l’art. Je viens de relire Lorenzaccio, et ç’a été une joie nouvelle, plus rassise et plus convaincue, de retrouver et d’évoquer ses intonations et ses gestes. Elle a donné la vie à ce personnage de Lorenzo, que personne n’avait osé aborder avant elle; elle a maintenu, a travers toute la pièce, ce caractère complexe et hésitant; elle en a rendu toutes les nuances avec une vérité et une profondeur singulières. Admirable d’un bout à l’autre, sans procédés et sans ‘déblayage,’ sans excès et sans cris, elle nous a émus jusqu’au fond de l’âme, par la simplicité et la justesse de sa diction, par l’art souverain des attitudes et des gestes. Et, j’insiste sur ce point, elle a donné au rôle tout entier, sans faiblesse et sans arrêt, une inoubliable physionomie. Qu’elle parle ou quelle se taise, elle est Lorenzaccio des pieds à la tête, corps et âme; elle ‘vit’ son personnage, et elle le fait vivre pour nous. Le talent de Mme Sarah Bernhardt m’a parfois plus inquiété que charmé. C’est une raison de plus pour que je répète aujourd’hui qu’elle a atteint le sublime. Jamais, je n’ai rien vu, au théâtre, qui égalât ce qu’elle a donné dans Lorenzaccio.”

In Mr. Bernard Shaw’s collected dramatic criticism, Dramatic Opinions and Essays, there is an interesting chapter comparing the two artists in the part of Magda, in which he says that Duse’s performance annihilated that of Sarah Bernhardt for him. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it did the same for everyone. I saw Sarah Bernhardt play the part superbly in Paris, and I saw Duse play the part superbly in London, and I should have said that Duse lent the character a nobility and a dignity that are not to be found in the text of the play, and that Sarah Bernhardt made of Magda what the author wanted her to be: a rather noisy, exuberant, vulgar, successful prima donna, a cabotine, not without genius, and with moments, when her human feelings were touched, of[235] greatness; that she portrayed the ostentation of the actress, and the sudden intoxication of success and celebrity, with their attendant disillusions, on a talented middle-class German girl; and, when the note called for it, the majesty of motherhood, to perfection; but let us assume that Duse in this part gave something more memorable, and the part certainly suited her temperament, her irony, her dignity, perhaps better than any other, and gave her a unique opportunity for self-expression, even at the cost of reality, and of the play. Let us go further, and say that in Dumas’ La Femme de Claude Duse played the part of Césarine, a Sarah Bernhardt part if ever there was one, the part of a wicked, seductive woman; and made of her creation in that part a trembling, quivering, living, vibrating thing; an unforgettable study of vice and charm and deadly wickedness and lure, which Sarah Bernhardt never excelled. Even if we admit all this, the fact still remains that Sarah Bernhardt could play a poetic tragedy in a fashion beyond Duse’s reach; that she could play Phèdre and Cleopatra and Doña Sol; and that Duse, in the rôle of Cleopatra, dwindled and was overwhelmed by it. The critics forgot, when they compared the two artists, the glory of Sarah Bernhardt’s past, the extent of range of her present, the possibilities of her future; her interpretations of Racine, of Victor Hugo; her understanding of poetry and verse; they did not compare the whole art of Duse with the whole art of Sarah Bernhardt, and had they done so they would have at once realised the absurdity of doing such a thing—an absurdity as great as to compare Keats’ poetry with Tolstoy’s novels, or Burne-Jones with George Sand.

The French critics were more discriminating, and anyone who has the curiosity to turn up what Lemaître says of Duse in La Dame aux Camélias will find a subtle and discriminating contrast between the art of these two great actresses. Personally I am thankful to have seen them both, and to have thought each unapproachable in her own way.

From 1893 to 1903 Sarah Bernhardt’s career broadened and shone in an Indian summer of maturity and glory, and it was during this period that she produced the most interesting plays of her repertory, and it was certainly during this period that she received from French criticism the highest meed of serious praise. But her career was by no means over in 1903. In 1920 all the theatres in Paris closed one day, so that all the actors[236] of Paris might see her play in Athalie; and as I write she is still producing new plays.

In what did the magic, the secret of Sarah Bernhardt consist? The mainsprings of her life and her career were indomitable determination, blent with a fine indifference to the opinion of the crowd, and a saving sense of proportion enabling her to keep a cool head and a just estimate of worldly fame amidst a tornado of praise, and sometimes in face of volleys of abuse. But as to the secret of her art, when one has said that Sarah Bernhardt worked like a slave until she attained a perfect mastery over the means at her disposal; that her attitudes and gestures were a poem in themselves; that if she played Phèdre in dumb-show it would have been worth while going to see; and that if she played Doña Sol in the dark it would have been worth a pilgrimage to hear—when one has said this, one has said nearly all that can be put into words, and one has said nothing; one has left out the most important part, and in fact everything that matters, because one has omitted her personality, a blend of gestures, look, voice, movement, intonation combined, and something else, the charm, the witchery, the spell which defy analysis.

When as Cleopatra she approached Antony, saying: “Je suis la reine d’Egypte,” the fate of empires, the dominion of the world, the lordship of Rome, could have no chance in the balance against five silver words and a smile, and we thought that the world would be well lost; and we envied Antony his ruin and his doom.

But this magic, this undefinable charm, is a thing which it is useless to write about. One must state its existence, and with a thought of pity for those who have not had the opportunity of feeling it, and still more for those who are unable to feel it, pass on. There is no more to be said. It is impossible, too, to define the peculiar thrill that has convulsed an audience when Sarah rose to an inspired height of passion. When the spark fell in these Heaven-sent moments, she seemed to be carried away, and to carry us with her in a whirlwind from a crumbling world. It is fruitless to dwell at length on this theme, but I will recall some minor occasions on which the genius of Sarah Bernhardt worked miracles.

I remember one such occasion in the autumn of 1899. The South African War had been declared, and a concert was being[237] held at the Ritz Hotel in aid of the British wounded. It was a raw and dark November afternoon. In the drawing-room of the Ritz Hotel there was gathered together a well-dressed and singularly uninspiring crowd, depressed by the gloomy news from the front, and suffering from anticipated boredom at the thoughts of an entertainment in the afternoon. Sarah Bernhardt walked on to the platform dressed in furs, and prepared to recite “La Chanson d’Eviradnus,” by Victor Hugo, and an accompanist sat down before the piano to accompany the recitation with music. I remember my heart sinking. I felt that a recitation to music of a love-song in that Ritz drawing-room on that dark afternoon, before a decorous, dispirited crowd, mostly stolid Britishers, was inappropriate; I wished the whole entertainment would vanish; I felt uncomfortable and I pitied Sarah from the bottom of my heart. Then Sarah opened her lips and began to speak the wonderful lyric (I quote for the pleasure of writing the words):

Ritz and the well-dressed crowd, and the raw November air, and the gloom of the war, the depression and the discomfort all disappeared.

We heard the champing of the steeds in an enchanted forest,[238] the song of the calling bird, and the laughter of adventurous lovers.

In the second line of the last stanza quoted:

her voice suddenly changed its key and passed, as it were, from a minor of tenderness to an abrupt major of childlike wonder or delighted awe; it half broke into something between a sob of joy and a tearful smile; we saw the dew-drenched grasses and the gleaming thickets, and then as she said the two next lines the surprise died away in mystery and an infinite homage:

And when further on in the poem she said:

we heard the call of youth, the soaring of first love, the spirit of adventure, of romance, and of spring. When she came to the last stanza of all:

she opened wide her raised arms, and one could have sworn a girl of eighteen, “April’s lady,” was calling to her “lord in May.”

When she had done, a great many people in the audience were crying; the applause was deafening, and she had to say[239] the whole poem over a second time, which she did, with the same effect on the audience.

Another occasion which I shall never forget was the first night that she played Hamlet in Paris. The audience was brilliant and hypercritical, and the play was received coldly until the first scene between Polonius and Hamlet. When Hamlet answers Polonius’s question: “What do you read, my Lord?” with his “Words, words, words,” Sarah Bernhardt played it like this. (She was dressed and got up like the pictures of young Raphael, with a fair wig; she was the soul of courtesy in the part, a gentle Prince.) Hamlet was lying on a chair reading a book. The first “des mots” he said with an absent-minded indifference, just as anyone speaks when interrupted by a bore; in the second “des mots” his answer seemed to catch his own attention, and the third “des mots” was accompanied by a look, and charged with an intense but fugitive intention: something

with a break in the intonation, that clearly said: “Yes, it is words, words, words, and all books and everything else in life and in the whole world is only words, words, words.” This delicate shadow, this adumbration of a hint was instantly seized by the audience from the gallery to the stalls; and the whole house cried: “Bravo! bravo!” It was a fine example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate intelligence of a good French audience.

Personally I think her Hamlet was one of the four greatest achievements of her career. I will come to the others later. Excepting Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet, it was the only intelligible Hamlet of our time. One great point of difference between this Hamlet and that of any other actors I have seen is, whereas most Hamlets seem isolated from the rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart from the play and speaking to the audience, this Hamlet spoke to the other persons of the play, shared their life, their external life, however wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and Hamlet. This Hamlet was in Denmark; not in splendid isolation, on the boards, in order to show how well he could spout Shakespeare’s monologues, or that he was an interesting fellow.

Another point: her Hamlet is the only one I have seen in[240] which there was real continuity, in which one scene seemed to have any connection with the preceding scenes.

She had already shown what she could do in the progression of a single scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and modulation, in the dialogue with Ophelia—“Get thee to a nunnery.” The transition between the tenderness of “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” and the brutality of “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough,” was made plausible by Hamlet catching sight of the King and Polonius in the arras—a piece of business recommended, I think, by Coleridge; but the naturalness and the progression of this scene were a marvel; the profound gravity and bitterness with which she spoke the words: “I am myself indifferent honest: but I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious.” One seemed to be overhearing Shakespeare himself in a confessional when she said that speech, and the cynicism of the final words of the scene were whispered and hissed with a withering, blighting bitterness, her voice sinking to a swift whisper, as though all the utterance of the body has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of a broken heart. But an example of what I mean by the continuity of the interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, when Hamlet breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling behaviour. In that scene Sarah Bernhardt was like a tiger; her glance transfixed and pierced through the King, and towards the end of the play within the play she crept across the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied dais on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and stared straight into his face with the accusing, questioning challenge of an avenging angel. But the point I want to make is this: when that scene is over, most players take the interview with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which follows immediately after it, as though nothing had happened. Not so Sarah Bernhardt; during the whole of this interview she played in a manner which let you see that Hamlet was still trembling with excitement from what had happened immediately before; and this not only brought out the irony and the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s flat conventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that they were face to face with life itself. So was it throughout[241] her Hamlet; each scene depended on all the others; and the various moods of the Dane succeeded one another, like clouds that chased one another but belonged to one sky, and not like separate slides of a magic lantern.

The fight with Laertes was terribly natural; the business of the exchange of swords, and the expression in Hamlet’s eyes when he realised, and showed that he had realised, that one of the swords was poisoned and now in his hands, which, in the hands of mediocre players, becomes so preposterously extravagant, was tremendous.

The whole performance was natural, easy, life-like, and princely, and perhaps the most poignant scene of all, and what is the most poignant scene in the play, if it is well played, was the conversation with Horatio, just before the final duel when Hamlet says: “If it be not to come, it will be now.” Sarah charged these words with a sense of doom, with the set courage that faces doom and with the underlying certainty of doom in spite of the courage that is there to meet it. It made one’s blood run cold.

Another occasion when Sarah Bernhardt’s acting seemed to me tremendous, was a performance of La Dame aux Camélias not long before the war. I had seen her play the part dozens of times, and during a space of twenty years both in Paris and in London. She was not well; she was suffering from rheumatism; the stage had to be marked out in chalk for her, showing where she could stand up. She was too unwell to stand up for more than certain given moments. I went to see her with a Russian actress who had seen her play in St. Petersburg or Moscow, and not been able to endure her acting; she had seen her walk through a part before an indifferent audience that wondered what her great reputation was founded on. We arrived late after the second act, and I went behind the scenes and talked to Sarah, and told her of this Russian actress. She played the last three acts in so moving and simple a manner, and the last act with such agonising poignancy and reserve that not only was my Russian friend in tears, but the actors on the stage cried so much that their tears discoloured their faces and made runnels in their grease paint.

As we went away my Russian friend said to me that was the finest bit of acting she had ever seen or hoped to see again.