In my early days in London one event moved me profoundly, the death and burial of Charles Reade. Somehow or other he had got the name of being bad tempered and quarrelsome and his lovable and great qualities were almost forgotten. Indeed, were it not for the fact that a prominent journalist, George Augustus Sala, took up the cudgels for his private character and wrote of him as kind-hearted as well as noble-minded, judgment against him would have gone by default. Of course, like all the younger ones, I measured him wholly as a writer and accepted at once every word of Sala's eulogy and went far beyond it. Unlike most Englishmen, I regarded Reade as a far greater writer than Dickens, and indeed had no hesitation in putting The Cloister and the Hearth side by side with Vanity Fair in my admiration, and perhaps a little higher in my love. Again and again I talked of Reade's masterpiece as the greatest English novel, though the spirit of opposition may have added a tinge of challenge to my passionate superlative.
The announcement of his death reminded me that I might have known him, had I wished. Rossetti's passing some two years before, my regret was keen and lasting. But I went to his burial and from it learned how careless, or rather how chanceful, is England's sympathy with her great men. True, that Easter Tuesday was a vile day: it rained and the air was raw. He was to be buried too at Willesden, miles away from the centre, but there was not a great crowd even at Shepherd's Bush, whence the funeral procession started.
A more dismal burial would be hard to imagine. And so I resented even Sala's praise of It is never too late to mend as a "magnificent work," and his comparison of Hawes, the governor of the gaol, and Eden the chaplain, as "distinctly original and dramatic characters," with the Faust and Mephistopheles and the Gretchen of Goethe. Such over praise seemed as impertinent-odious as his talking of two Charles Reades: "One a very pugnacious and vituperative old gentleman, always shaking his fist in somebody's face and not infrequently hitting somebody over the head," and "the other Charles Reade I knew and revered as a valiant, upright and withal a charitable and compassionate Christian man, inexhaustible in his pity for suffering, implacable only in his hatred of things shameful and cruel and mean. He was throughout his life a militant man; but his soldiering is over now; there he rests in a peaceful tomb by the side of the Friend whom he loved so long and so deeply."
Only three months before, Tennyson had been made a peer amid universal eulogy; yet here was as great a man put away forever without pomp or circumstance; the ordinary English reader thought more of Maud or The May Queen than The Cloister and the Hearth; still what did it matter? I for one walked through the rain and slush while the gallant Denys, with his "the Devil is dead", went with me and Gerard and Catherine and the rest of the glorious and ever-living company; and perchance one man's understanding and admiring, passionate love is more than most of us get in this earthly pilgrimage. Surely it is well with dear Charles Reade: I saw his coffin lowered into the grave, but I find it hard to forgive myself. I ought to have seen and known him in order at least to have thanked him for his deathless gift to humanity and the many hours of pure delight I had had with his brave heart and noble spirit.
But now I must say a word or two of other occurrences that throw a certain light on English character and conditions. An American actress, Mary Anderson, took London by storm. It was said that Lord Lytton bought a row of the stalls night after night and filled the seats with chosen guests; his admiration surprised everyone who knew him, because he was regarded as an avowed admirer of the ephebos, rather than of woman's beauty; but he certainly fell for "our Mary," as some tried to nickname her. This was the Lord Lytton, who in The New Timon sneered at Tennyson:
The jingling medley of purloined conceits, Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats.
And Tennyson's answer was even more savage:
What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper boot, a little hand,
If half the little soul is dirt?
Before Mary Anderson appeared I had called on her and done a sketch of her career for the Evening News. She was a tall, graceful, good-looking blonde, but I never dreamed of her huge success. Her mind was as commonplace as her voice. She had no special gift, but on the stage she was beautiful: the foot-lights set her off peculiarly, though she could not act for nuts. To compare her as an actress with Ellen Terry or even with Ada Rehan would be ridiculous: she was comparatively inarticulate. Yet her appearances were events; she went from triumph to triumph. Through her success I realized that there are special scenic qualities demanded by the stage. She was very tall and when she came down the stage in white, she dominated it and dwarfed all the other women; in talking she had a slight American accent that would have ruined her as a Shakespearean actress, but by the time she played in The Winter's Tale she had shed her twang and spoke fairly; her eyes were a little deep set, her nose perfectly cut: in a room she was just pretty, on the stage a goddess. How much of her success was due to her statuesque grace and how much to Lytton's passionate advocacy can never be known.
Her career taught me how susceptible the English are to mere physical beauty. They rate it in all animals higher than any other race and study it more intimately: shorthorn bull or Berkshire sow, bulldog or greyhound, terrier or mastiff, Southdown ram or Welsh sheep, race-horse or hunter- all are admired for their perfect conformity to type, which argues a most passionate and imaginative understanding of what type is or should be.
Were it not for their idiotic Puritanism the English would be the greatest sculptors in the world and world-renowned besides for their extraordinary understanding of every form and type of bodily beauty.
I visited the British Museum with Rodin later to study the figures from the Parthenon. He went into ecstasies over them; they were as sensuous, he declared, as any figures in all plastic art. George Wyndham went with me at another time but he would not be seduced. The Greek feet and ankles were too large and ill-shaped, he argued; the womens' necks, too, and breasts were coarse. He preferred the figures from the Temple of Nike Apteros, and even they had bad faults. At length he asserted that the facial type was too wooden: the nose in a straight line from the forehead was ugly. In fine, the best English type, he insisted, was far finer, lovelier at once and more spiritual than the Greek ideal, and I agreed with him.
Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year.
Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely.
There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany.
And as the trees, so are the men and women: one can find more types of exquisite girlhood and splendid manhood in an hour in New York than one can find in a day in London or a week in Paris or Berlin or Moscow. How is it that American athletes hold all the records? How is it that they can run faster and jump higher than any of the English athletes, though the other day the English were supposed to be supreme in all forms of sport and athletics?
In forty years there has not been a single English heavyweight boxer of the first class simply because the mass of the people have been impoverished to a degree that is not yet realized even in England. The physical manhood of the race has been dwarfed by destitution.
But this argument had led me away from my theme. Shortly after my first meeting with Mary Anderson, I saw Tommaso Salvini as Othello. Salvini had every personal qualification: fine presence and in especial a magnificent and perfectly trained voice, now splendidly sonorous, now sweet, always grateful to the ear. The speech containing the lament, "Othello's occupation gone," was never so superbly rendered: the breaking voice, the tears falling from the convulsed face, the hands even knitting and relaxing, formed an unforgettable picture. Salvini at that moment was Othello and when he suddenly turned on Iago he was terrific; but the famous soliloquy in the bed376 chamber before he murders Desdemona was given in far too loud a voice: he would have waked the dead. He had no conception of the complex English passion, that a man can admire, love, even, what he's resolved to destroy, lest "she should sting more men": Shakespeare's own passion, far too complex for the Italian nature. And in Macbeth Salvini had no inkling that he was acting the thought-plagued Hamlet. His Macbeth never hesitates, never falters: he has not the "if 'twere done, when 'tis done," and so forth. Yet he was the best Othello I've ever seen.
Why are actors, like politicians, always over praised? It would take a dozen of the best of them to portray Hamlet to my satisfaction. I should want Irving to look the part, and Forbes-Robertson to recite some of the soliloquies, and Terriss to stab Polonius, and Sarah Bernhardt to send Ophelia to a nunnery with ineffable tenderness; and even then, whom should I get to show the passion of Hamlet's jealousy or the contempt he felt for Kemp, the clown, who gagged probably and did not say the lines set down for him because he was lifted out of himself by the applause of the groundlings; and worst omission of all, who would impersonate the supreme poet who sings of "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns," though he has just been talking to his father's ghost?
It was at a dinner that Arthur Walter gave in his house off Queen's Gate, that I got to know Henry Irving. I had met him before, notably at a supper given by Beerbohm Tree in the Garrick Club after he had played Shylock at the Lyceum.
I had come from Munich to see his Shylock and compare it with the best Shylock I had ever seen, that of Ernst Possart Irving, having been told by Tree that I had come a thousand miles to see him play, was very gracious and hoped I had liked his impersonation. Naturally, I said, "It was very wonderful, but not Shakespeare's-quite!" Irving insisted on knowing what I meant.
Everyone who saw him will remember the scene when Shylock prays to be allowed to go home as a beaten and broken man:
Shy. I pray you give me leave to go from hence I am not well; send the deed after me, And I will sign it.
Duke. Get thee gone, but do it.
Or. In christening shall thou have two godfathers:
Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not the font: (Exit Shylock) It is the only case, I think, in which our gentle Shakespeare allows a gentleman to insult a beaten man. I was therefore outraged by Irving's conception: he was near the door when Gratiano spoke; at once he turned, walked back to Gratiano, drew himself up, crossing his arms, and scanned him contemptuously from head to foot amid the wild applause of the whole house. When Irving challenged me to explain, I said it seemed to me that if Shylock had treated Gratiano in this way, Gratiano would probably have spat in his face and kicked him off the stage.
"I can't agree with you," retorted Irving dryly. "I think the applause showed I was right in my conception of Shylock as a great tragic figure."
"But Shylock himself tells us," I replied, "that the hero Antonio spat upon his Jewish gabardine."
Irving turned away and began talking to someone else. His rudeness annoyed the more because I was reproaching myself for having been too frank.
Long afterwards, when Mounet-Sully played Hamlet in Paris and Lemaitre, the great French critic, wanted to know how he compared with Irving, I could not help telling the truth. "Irving," I said, "is the ideal Hamlet for the deaf and Mounet-Sully for the blind!"
But in 1884-85,1 met Irving frequently, and Bram Stoker, his manager, always sent me tickets for the Lyceum when I asked for them.
One night I gave a supper party and had Lord Lytton and Harold Frederic, both passionate admirers of Irving; and when we drew together to smoke with the Turkish coffee, Irving talked better than I had ever heard him talk; indeed, till then I had thought him rather inarticulate. I had mentioned, I remember, that Lord Randolph Churchill had promised to come to "the apotheosis of the God," as he phrased it, but at the last moment had to excuse himself because of an important debate in the House. "Please tell Mr. Irving," he added in his letter, "how I should have liked to describe the prodigious effect of his Mephistopheles made upon me." Of course Irving was delighted and went off at score, speaking in his natural voice and with no trace of his stage mannerisms and mumblings, which I found so insupportable.
"I met Lord Randolph first in 1880 in Dublin," he began. "His father was there as Viceroy and Lord Randolph had gone to live in Dublin. We went across to play a week of Shakespeare and the first night we opened with Hamlet. To my surprise, there was no great reception, no special recognition. At the end of the first act Bram Stoker came to me. "There's someone in the Vice regal box,' he said. 'I think it's Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke.'
Now Blandford, his elder brother, had made himself notorious a little while before through a very ugly divorce case; but after all, those affairs are private. I shrugged my shoulders therefore. At the end of the next act Bram Stoker came to say that Lord Randolph would like to make my acquaintance and thank me for my wonderful acting, etc. I told him to bring him round, and at the end of the act he brought Lord Randolph to me in my dressing room.
He came to me at once with outstretched hands. 'I have to thank you, Mr.
Irving,' he began, 'for one of the greatest pleasures of my life, an incomparable evening!' I bowed of course, but he went on. 'I had no idea that Hamlet was such a great play.' "I stared at him: was he trying to be humorous? I replied dryly: ' Hamlet is usually supposed to be a great play.' "'Really!' he said, 'I hadn't heard of it.' This was too much for me: he was either a fool or trying to pull my leg. I turned away. At once Randolph added in a very courtly way, 'I mustn't take up your time by exposing my ignorances; you are no doubt busy.' "'No,' I replied, 'this act is chiefly taken up by the fair Ophelia.' "'Really!' he burst out again. 'I think Miss Terry too is wonderful. I mustn't lose a word of what she says.' I smiled and he added, 'I can't go without hoping to meet you again; won't you dine with me on Sunday next in the lodge in Phoenix Park, which my father has been good enough to place at my disposal?' "His manner, something ingenuous and enthusiastic in his youth, pleased me, and I accepted at once, conscious of a certain sympathy. During the week I was told that he had been in the Vice regal box every night. On the Sunday I went to dine with him a little intrigued: what would he say? He met me in the hall: 'Oh, Mr. Irving,' he began, 'I can't reckon what I owe you: through you I've come to know Shakespeare; what a man he was! Half a dozen of his plays are great plays, and interesting-' "'But surely you must have known them before?' I asked. 'Surely at Oxford you must have read some of them, even if in our schooldays the great things get neglected?' "'No, no, I assure you,' he replied. 'I never read him at school nor at Oxford. I'm afraid I was very lazy and idle all through, but his Lear is a great, great play:
I'd love to see you in it; and there's something in the Antony and Cleopatra that appeals to me peculiarly. Do you ever play it?' "'It's a little difficult to stage,' I answered, and while explaining we took our seats at the table and I found him a first-rate host.
"Lord Randolph made a profound impression on me," Irving went on. "As soon as I realized that he was not posing I said to myself, "This is a great man, too; unconsciously he thinks that even Shakespeare needs his approval! He makes himself instinctively the measure of all things and of all men and doesn't trouble himself about the opinions or estimates of others.' Afterwards, when they made fun of him in Parliament, as they did at first with silly caricatures of him as an impudent boy, I knew the day would come when they'd have to take him seriously."
I was delighted with the story and with the simple, sincere way Irving told it. I think still it shows intellect in him and an appreciation of greatness that I did not at all expect.
Sometime later Arthur Bourchier, the actor, told me an amusing story that shows Henry Irving in another light.
"When Benson at Oxford was drilling his amateur company in Shakespeare and Aeschylus, he asked Irving down once for the opening night of the Agamemnon. I was in Benson's company and delighted when he showed me Irving's charming letter of acceptance. He was flattered, he said, by the invitation and would come gladly. We were all on the alert, as you may imagine, on the great night. Well, the performance went without a hitch and afterwards Irving came round on the stage and congratulated Benson in the handsomest way. "A great play," he said, "and a very great actor. I'm delighted to feel, Mr. Benson, that the University, too, has come to enrich the stage. I think you gave the chief things superbly"; and he really spoke simply, as if he meant every word of it, and we drank it all in greedily, as young men do. His praise affected Benson so much that shortly afterwards he confessed,
"Your appreciation, Sir, gives me courage"-he began-"I think I shall give the Trilogy."
"Do, my dear fellow," cried Irving, clapping him on the shoulder, "do. It's a part that'll suit you admirably."
"After that," said Bourchier, grinning, "the curtain came down of itself."
I have given this story as well as the others because it illustrates a side of the actor; and now I'll make a further personal confession that tells against myself and puts a certain nobility of Irving in a fair light. In my later years in London I seldom went to the Lyceum and took little stock in Irving's later achievements, though right up to the end of the century his "first nights" were something more than social events.
Irving always gave the impression of being more than an actor: he had a great personality; his marked peculiarities of figure, face and speech set him apart and gave him unique place and distinction. Of the three or four chief personages of the eighties, he was the most singular-more arresting even than Parnell. Randolph Churchill and Gladstone had to be seen in the House of Commons to win full recognition, but Irving, like Disraeli, took the eye everywhere and excited the imagination. As Shylock, even, Irving made everyone else upon the stage appear common, an effect surely not contemplated by the creator of the "Ebrew Jew"! There can be no doubt that his peculiar enunciation and accent on the stage were deliberately adopted in order to increase the effect of his appearance, for in private life he spoke almost like anyone else. His "make-up," in fact, went so far as to include his speech and voice. If we are to believe tradition, Garrick in this was his exact opposite: he was always simple and natural on the stage, we are told, but in private was always acting, always playing a part.
With Goethe, I felt that the admission of young girls had a more laming effect on the theatre than it had even upon books. "Young girls," said the great German, "have no business in the theatre; they belong to the cloister and the theatre is for men and women only and the elemental human passions. But as it is impossible to get the maidens and their emasculating influence out of the theatre, I have stopped going to it. I would have to shut my eyes to all the feebleness and foolery, or accept it all, without even trying to improve it, and that's not my role."
In those first years in London, I had a paltry little spite against Irving: he denied me the advertisement of the Lyceum Theatre on the ground that the Evening News was a ha'penny paper; and I thought it mean and shabby of him, and Stoker put the blame on Irving himself. About the same time, I discovered Wilson Barrett's inordinate ambition to oust Irving from his pride of place. After the Fortescue triumph, I had been introduced to Miss Terry and had flattered her to the top of her bent; and, indeed, I admired her hugely: I thought her far and away the best English actress. Somewhere or other I heard now that Miss Terry's engagement with Irving had run out and that he did not want to increase her salary. At once I flew to Wilson Barrett and induced him to give me a letter offering Ellen Terry double what she was getting with Irving and a percentage in the profits of the Princess's Theatre to boot. I took it to Miss Terry and after reading it she laughed.
"May I keep it?"
"Certainly," I replied. "You would be the chief person in the Princess's."
She laughed again. "You tempt cleverly; why?"
"Frankly, because I don't think Irving appreciates you properly." Miss Terry smiled but would not commit herself.
When I announced in the Evening News that it was just possible that Miss Terry would soon go to help Wilson Barrett at the Princess's, I had my revenge. In half an hour Bram Stoker was at my office with a flaming contradiction which I refused to insert, saying I had reason to believe that Miss Terry might change her "leading man." I thought Stoker would have had a fit. Away he rushed and in a short while brought Irving back with him, who assured me that Miss Terry had renewed her engagement with him. "It was signed, sealed and delivered."
"I am very glad for your sake," I said, "and will give the news in tomorrow morning's edition," and, I added, "though you may not care for the announcement in a ha'penny paper." Bram Stoker, I saw, understood what I meant, for afterwards the Lyceum advertisement was sent to the Evening News without being asked for.
It was a mean and paltry revenge to take, but Bram Stoker had been needlessly curt and disdainful in his initial refusal, and consequently I had no idea how wrong I had been till some years afterwards, when I assisted at Irving's bankruptcy and the first meeting of his creditors, and learned to my amazement that he had nearly thirty old actresses and actors on his civil list, to whom he gave weekly pensions of from thirty shillings to five pounds. To all the weaker members of his craft that had ever played with him he behaved with a princely generosity: he had filled his great position nobly and I had made it more difficult for him. I was ashamed of myself to suffering.
From that time on I tried to atone to Irving for my forgotten meanness, but I wish to record it here simply as showing that some of our worst deeds are due to want of knowledge and to a too low estimate of our fellow men.
What judges of literature these journalists are! Froude has just published his Life of Carlyle and The Times compares it with Boswell's Johnson. "Carlyle," says The Times, "is a greater person than Johnson," and, it adds, "all the reading world will allow that there can be no comparison between Mr.
Froude and Boswell"; all of which might be true without establishing the conclusion. The great portraits of the world are not of the greatest persons, nor written by the greatest men, of what life-history would compare with Plato's pictures of Socrates? If the great master of prose and thought had only written one dialogue between Socrates and Xanthippe, telling us of their intimate relations and reactions and giving us the woman's and wife's point of view, he might have painted a companion portrait to the Crito and the Phaedo that would have completed his work.
Carlyle was not as human as Johnson. Let us take one phrase of the great Doctor: he has visited Garrick behind the scenes and breaks out with the confession that "the black legs and snowy bosoms of your actresses, David, excite my amorous propensities." Has he not here painted himself to the life?
And then Froude: a better stylist perhaps than Boswell, but without Boswell's intense interest in his subject. What weaknesses has Froude discovered in Carlyle? Why he doesn't even tell us how Carlyle managed to save?. 30,000. Why didn't Carlyle go to visit Goethe in Weimar? That would have been better than putting bawbee to bawbee; and when he made his wife jealous, how did he console her and win forgiveness? Froude is interested in literature rather than life, and not in this spirit are great biographies written, or indeed great anything else.
Erdachtes mag zu denken geben
Doch nur Erlebtes wird beleben.
But already everyone was talking of Joseph Chamberlain and his "Unauthorized Programme" in the Fortnightly Review, and of Gladstone and the mess he had got himself and his government into, partly through his dislike of Chamberlain and of Parnell, who, since the Kilmainham business, and because of the perpetual unfair attacks in The Times, was coming more and more into prominence.
It was in reference to Parnell and his rise that I first said to myself, "Great men, like kites, go up against the wind." But Parnell, thoroughly English as he was and magnificently handsome to boot, certainly the handsomest man in my time in the House of Commons, never succeeded in England, though towards the end he was on the point of succeeding in the House of Commons, a fact which to me deepens the tragedy of his untimely death.
But Chamberlain was the central figure on the political stage. I measured him perhaps harshly on our first meetings. I've told how surprised I was at the noble way Lord Salisbury acted in regard to his tenants' houses at Hatfield, rebuilding as many as he could, year by year, and then fixing a rental not to exceed three per cent on the cost of the building; and above all refusing from the outset to accept any rent at all on the houses he regarded as unfit for habitation.
"Are you sure?" Chamberlain asked me peevishly when I brought him my report. "Can it be that this whole detailed indictment of Archibald Forbes is wrong with any justification?"
Time and again he returned to the charge: "Forbes had no motive, no reason to be unfair: he's supposed to be a great reporter. It's extraordinary, you'll admit that, most extraordinary."
At length I could stand it no longer: he was so petty, so ungenerous to his rival. "It's Salisbury's nobility," I said, "that strikes me as extraordinary. If the Liberal manufacturers and industrial monopolists of England had behaved as well to their workmen as this great landlord had behaved to his tenants, there would be no strikes in England, no trade unions either, no industrial discontent." Chamberlain looked at me with undisguised antagonism in his eyes but said nothing, and soon afterwards I took my leave. One day I waited for him in his dining-room, where there were several Leighton pictures, and he introduced them to me pompously as, "All by Leigh ton, the President, you know of our Academy." I nodded and Chamberlain went on, "I gave 2000 pounds for that one."
"Really?" I gasped.
"Yes," he replied, "what do you think it's worth?"
I could not help it; I replied, "I don't know the value of the frame."
It's hardly necessary to say that he didn't want to see me again for many a day. But another incident occurred some time later which explains, I think, my early misjudgement of the man. The gist of Forbes's article appeared in Truth, Labouchere's weekly paper. I asked Escott had he given it to Labouchere but he denied it, saying that it must have been given by Chamberlain himself. I wrote of it as false and foolish and made fun of it in the Evening News and Lord Salisbury's agent wrote thanking me for my defence, at the same time telling me that Lord Salisbury had forbidden him to write any correction to the press; and had added finely, "It's impossible for us to praise each other." But my defence of the truth stood me in good stead with Lord Salisbury much later, as I may tell when I come to the Venezuelan difficulty.
Now I had to read Chamberlain's "Unauthorized Programme" as it appeared month by month in the Fortnightly Review, for all this time I was in close touch with Escott and his family. I found it difficult to explain Chamberlain's extraordinary success. He had no idea that Bismarck's work in nationalizing the German railways was the best way of lifting the labouring classes to a higher level; he preferred the old individualistic lenitives: for years he believed in unrestricted free trade; he didn't even know that joint-stock management of industry had every fault of state management and none of its virtues; from a continental point of view he was extraordinarily ignorant; he had read practically nothing and was curiously uneducated.
He had driving force of will and for years I saw little more in him. All this, I think, accounts for Gladstone's dislike of the man, as was shown by the low position he gave the Radical leader when forming his Cabinet in 1886, though Chamberlain was even then absolute master of six seats in Birmingham alone.
Kimberley and Granville, old worn out war horses, became Indian and Colonial Ministers respectively, whereas Chamberlain had only a minor appointment as head of the Local Government Board. This Ministry showed curious weaknesses and justified my sneer that there was "a screw loose in the Cabinet." Everyone knew of course that Chamberlain's great fortune lay in his monopoly of the trade in screws. But Gladstone should have taken him into his confidence and given him whatever place he wanted, for he was undoubtedly at this time the head of the Radical party and the most influential member of the majority after Gladstone himself. When the Home Rule Bill came before the House, pressed forward, as Randolph Churchill said aptly, by "an old man in a hurry," Gladstone must have realized his blunder in underrating Chamberlain, for Chamberlain and Hartington both resigned, and their resignation, or rather Chamberlain's, made the bill Impossible. Gladstone nicknamed the rebels "dissentient Liberals," but the name didn't stick; they soon came to be known as "Liberal-Unionists," and no one could deny that Chamberlain had given up the succession to the leadership of the party rather than sacrifice his principles. But if Gladstone had handled him to the height of his deserving in 1886, some Home Rule Bill would have passed the House and the history of "the distressful country" would have been different.
I could not even account for Chamberlain's extraordinary influence in Birmingham till I made up my mind to go and visit it. Then I was soon convinced; everyone in Birmingham knew his work and spoke in warmest admiration of him. In the very first year he was Mayor, in 1874, he bought up the gas works on behalf of the Corporation; he increased the efficiency of the services public and private in the most extraordinary way and transferred the growing profits into the pockets of the taxpayers. A year or so later he dealt with the water supply in the same spirit and with even more wonderful results, while showing himself a really democratic English statesman of the best. In the gas business he used all the growth of revenue in relief of the rates, while in the water service he ordained a minimum of profit in order that the continually growing supply should be distributed throughout the community and should especially benefit the poorest classes. In his third term he did even better at a greater personal cost. There were slums in Birmingham of unimaginable foulness, where long continued poverty had festered into disease. One or two facts will give some idea of the situation: infant mortality in the slum was three times as high as in the more decent quarters, the length of life was not one half as long, and the ratio of crime was tenfold higher. Chamberlain conceived the idea of cleansing this Augean stable, and in order to judge him fairly, it must be remembered that his powers were severely limited; and a certain resentment, based on the overgrown love of Englishmen for individual liberty, and hatred of authoritative interference or molly-coddling, made itself felt unpleasantly from the beginning. Yet he triumphed over every difficulty: bolder than Haussmann in Paris, he drove a great boulevard through the heart of slumland and called it Corporation Street. Today Corporation Street has the best shops in Birmingham, and he leased out the sites for only seventy years, so that when the leases fall in before the middle of this century, the Birmingham rates will be relieved to the tune of over?. 100,000 a year.
On my return from Birmingham I couldn't help asking Chamberlain one day how he had managed it. "Your gas and water improvements were easy," I began. "Indeed, in Germany they would be merely usual, but how did you manage your street through slum-land? Didn't some slum owners object to selling and ask extortionate, extravagant prices for their houses?"
"Some," he replied laughing. "Dozens held me up as boldly resolved as highway robbers. But I had various ways of dealing with them. I had obtained powers over more than the slum area, so, if they were determined, I said, 'All right, my friend, I'll alter the direction of my avenue and leave you in the slum you prefer. You'll not profit by my improvement, that's all.' To another I'd say, 'Look here, if you won't come in, I'll leave your tumbled down old shack in the middle of my avenue and I'll take care you don't get permission from the Corporation to rebuild on the site for many a year.' And yet another I'd influence by an appeal to his sense of fair play, and that's very
strong in Englishmen. I showed them that I dealt out even-handed justice: no one should profit more than his neighbour, and that finally was my most persuasive argument; but on the whole I had to pay twice or thrice the value of the land to the individual owner."
He told it all with such laughing good humour, showed besides such a rich human sympathy, even with the meanest and most grasping, and such unconquerable resolution to boot, that he won me completely. I had tears in my eyes when he finished and I murmured, "Well done, good and faithful servant!"
He took my words up seriously, and putting his hand on my shoulder said, "I love my house here and my ease, but if I could blot out the shameful, criminal poverty of these islands as I have in Birmingham, I'd consent to go penniless into the streets tomorrow. And yet I've no imitators even. The slums of Glasgow are worse than the worst in Birmingham, but no Scot takes the matter in hand and solves it as I have in Birmingham-and more, much more could be done. One spends half one's life before one comes to realize the problem and understands how easy it would be to solve it; and how important! But oh! the time's so short; one can do so little!" And he sighed deeply.
As he sat down again at his writing-table I noticed for the first time his extraordinary likeness to the younger Pitt: I was carried away by sympathy and had to say something. "I'm very glad I went to Birmingham," I began. "I misjudged you; I'm heart-glad to see that a Bismarck is also possible in England. At any rate, your spirit shows that the problem will be tackled sooner or later and brought to a noble issue."
"That's the hope," he said, smiling. "I'm glad we feel alike on the chief thing," he added.
"I wonder if that's true," I replied. "Your free trade views always make me shudder."
"Aren't you a free-trader?" he exclaimed, in open-mouthed astonishment.
"Indeed, no," I retorted. "Free trade creates your slums, and I admire the despot who transforms them."
He shrugged his shoulders; he was evidently too busy then to embark on a new discussion. "Won't you take a cigar?" he said, holding out the box, and I felt that I was dismissed. But ever afterwards I cherished a profound admiration for the statesman who had turned Birmingham from an ordinary English town into probably the best ordered and healthiest large town in the kingdom. Often afterwards I wished that instead of butting my head against his free trade prepossessions, I had asked him why he didn't found a municipal opera house and theatre in Birmingham and so lift its spiritual life to the level of life in Marseilles or Lyons.
Gladstone's Home Rule bill was defeated because he yielded to small personal prejudice, and yet every Englishman who knew this thought Gladstone a great man; and he commanded a personal reverence greater even than Bismarck in Germany. For my part, I never esteemed him, save as an orator, and at this time had not yet been introduced to him.
All this while the discontent of the working classes in Great Britain, as in Ireland, grew steadily and increased in bitterness. In London it found determined defenders in the Social Democratic Federation. Mr. H. W.
Hyndman had started this association a couple of years or so before as a follower more or less convinced of Karl Marx. The first time I heard Bernard Shaw speak was at a meeting of the Federation, but I had left it before he joined and he left it soon afterwards. On a Monday early in February, 1886, the Federation called a meeting in Trafalgar Square which ended in a riot.
The mob got out of hand and marched to attack the clubs in Pall Mall and soon proceeded to loot shops in Piccadilly and hold another meeting at Hyde Park Corner. The ringleaders were arrested and tried: they were Hyndman, Williams, Burns and Champion. Williams and Burns, both workingmen, were bailed out by William Morris, the poet. Hyndman seemed to me an ordinary English bourgeois with a smattering of German reading: he was above middle height, burly and bearded; Champion, the thin, well-bred officer type with good heart and scant reading; Williams, the ordinary workingman full of class prejudices; and John Burns, also a workingman, but really intelligent and thoughtful, who afterwards proved himself an excellent minister and resigned with Lord Morley rather than accept the world war. In spite of deficient education, Burns was even then a most interesting man; though hardly middle height, he was sturdy and exceedingly strong and brave. He had read from boyhood and we became great friends about the beginning of the century through the South African War. Burns was an early lover of Carlyle, and the experiences of a workingman's life had not blinded him to the value of individual merit. In many respects he stood on the forehead of the time to come, and if his education had been equal to his desire for knowledge, he would have been among the choicest spirits of the age. Even in 1886 I'm glad to say I rated him far above most of the politicians, though he never reached any originality of thought.