My stepfather, Mr. Ellice, having been in two Ministries—Lord Grey’s in 1830, and Lord Melbourne’s in 1834—had necessarily a large parliamentary acquaintance; and as I could always dine at his house in Arlington Street when I pleased, I had constant opportunities of meeting most of the prominent Whig politicians, and many other eminent men of the day. One of the dinner parties remains fresh in my memory—not because of the distinguished men who happened to be there, but because of the statesman whose name has since become so familiar to the world.

Some important question was before the House in which Mr. Ellice was interested, and upon which he intended to speak. This made him late for dinner, but he had sent word that his son was to take his place, and the guests were not to wait. When he came Lord John Russell greeted him with—

‘Well, Ellice, who’s up?’

‘A younger son of Salisbury’s,’ was the reply; ‘Robert Cecil, making his maiden speech. If I hadn’t been in a hurry I should have stopped to listen to him. Unless I am very much mistaken, he’ll make his mark, and we shall hear more of him.’

There were others dining there that night whom it is interesting to recall. The Grotes were there. Mrs. Grote, scarcely less remarkable than her husband; Lord Mahon, another historian (who married a niece of Mr. Ellice’s), Lord Brougham, and two curious old men both remarkable, if for nothing else, for their great age. One was George Byng, father of the first Lord Strafford, and ‘father’ of the House of Commons; the other Sir Robert Adair, who was Ambassador at Constantinople when Byron was there. Old Mr. Byng looked as aged as he was, and reminded one of Mr. Smallweed doubled up in his porter’s chair. Quite different was his compeer. We were standing in the recess of the drawing-room window after dinner when Sir Robert said to me:

‘Very shaky, isn’t he! Ah! he was my fag at Eton, and I’ve got the best of it still.’

Brougham having been twice in the same Government with Mr. Ellice, and being devoted to young Mrs. Edward Ellice, his charming daughter-in-law, was a constant visitor at 18 Arlington Street. Mrs. Ellice often told me of his peculiarities, which must evidently have been known to others. Walter Bagehot, speaking of him, says:

‘Singular stories of eccentricity and excitement, even of something more than either of these, darken these latter years.’

What Mrs. Ellice told me was, that she had to keep a sharp watch on Lord Brougham if he sat near her writing-table while he talked to her; for if there was any pretty little knick-knack within his reach he would, if her head were turned, slip it into his pocket. The truth is perhaps better than the dark hint, for certainly we all laughed at it as nothing but eccentricity.

But the man who interested me most (for though when in the Navy I had heard a hundred legends of his exploits, I had never seen him before) was Lord Dundonald. Mr. Ellice presented me to him, and the old hero asked why I had left the Navy.

‘The finest service in the world; and likely, begad, to have something to do before long.’

This was only a year before the Crimean war. With his strong rough features and tousled mane, he looked like a grey lion. One expected to see him pick his teeth with a pocket boarding-pike.

The thought of the old sailor always brings before me the often mooted question raised by the sentimentalists and humanitarians concerning the horrors of war. Not long after this time, the papers—the sentimentalist papers—were furious with Lord Dundonald for suggesting the adoption by the Navy of a torpedo which he himself, I think, had invented. The bare idea of such wholesale slaughter was revolting to a Christian world. He probably did not see much difference between sinking a ship with a torpedo, and firing a shell into her magazine; and likely enough had as much respect for the opinions of the woman-man as he had for the man-woman.

There is always a large number of people in the world who suffer from emotional sensitiveness and susceptibility to nervous shocks of all kinds. It is curious to observe the different and apparently unallied forms in which these characteristics manifest themselves. With some, they exhibit extreme repugnance to the infliction of physical pain for whatever end; with others there seems to be a morbid dread of violated pudicity. Strangely enough the two phases are frequently associated in the same individual. Both tendencies are eminently feminine; the affinity lies in a hysterical nature. Thus, excessive pietism is a frequent concomitant of excessive sexual passion; this, though notably the case with women, is common enough with men of unduly neurotic temperaments.

Only the other day some letters appeared in the ‘Times’ about the flogging of boys in the Navy. And, as a sentimental argument against it, we were told by the Humanitarian Leaguers that it is ‘obscene.’ This is just what might be expected, and bears out the foregoing remarks. But such saintly simplicity reminds us of the kind of squeamishness of which our old acquaintance Mephisto observes:

Man darf das nicht vor keuschen Ohren nennen,
Was keusche Herzen nicht entbehren kÖnnen.

(Chaste ears find nothing but the devil in
What nicest fancies love to revel in.)

The same astute critic might have added:

And eyes demure that look away when seen,
Lose ne’er a chance to peep behind the screen.

It is all of a piece. We have heard of the parlour-maid who fainted because the dining-table had ‘ceder legs,’ but never before that a ‘switching’ was ‘obscene.’ We do not envy the unwholesomeness of a mind so watchful for obscenity.

Be that as it may, so far as humanity is concerned, this hypersensitive effeminacy has but a noxious influence; and all the more for the twofold reason that it is sometimes sincere, though more often mere cant and hypocrisy. At the best, it is a perversion of the truth; for emotion combined with ignorance, as it is in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, is a serious obstacle in the path of rational judgment.

Is sentimentalism on the increase? It seems to be so, if we are to judge by a certain portion of the Press, and by speeches in Parliament. But then, this may only mean that the propensity finds easier means of expression than it did in the days of dearer paper and fewer newspapers, and also that speakers find sentimental humanity an inexhaustible fund for political capital. The excess of emotional attributes in man over his reasoning powers must, one would think, have been at least as great in times past as it is now. Yet it is doubtful whether it showed itself then so conspicuously as it does at present. Compare the Elizabethan age with our own. What would be said now of the piratical deeds of such men as Frobisher, Raleigh, Gilbert, and Richard Greville? Suppose Lord Roberts had sent word to President Kruger that if four English soldiers, imprisoned at Pretoria, were molested, he would execute 2,000 Boers and send him their heads? The clap-trap cry of ‘Barbaric Methods’ would have gone forth to some purpose; it would have carried every constituency in the country. Yet this is what Drake did when four English sailors were captured by the Spaniards, and imprisoned by the Spanish Viceroy in Mexico.

Take the Elizabethan drama, and compare it with ours. What should we think of our best dramatist if, in one of his tragedies, a man’s eyes were plucked out on the stage, and if he that did it exclaimed as he trampled on them, ‘Out, vile jelly! where is thy lustre now?’ or of a Titus Andronicus cutting two throats, while his daughter ‘’tween her stumps doth hold a basin to receive their blood’?

‘Humanity,’ says Taine, speaking of these times, ‘is as much lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them.’

Heaven forbid that we should return to such brutality! I cite these passages merely to show how times are changed; and to suggest that with the change there is a decided loss of manliness. Are men more virtuous, do they love honour more, are they more chivalrous, than the Miltons, the Lovelaces, the Sidneys of the past? Are the women chaster or more gentle? No; there is more puritanism, but not more true piety. It is only the outside of the cup and the platter that are made clean, the inward part is just as full of wickedness, and all the worse for its hysterical fastidiousness.

To what do we owe this tendency? Are we degenerating morally as well as physically? Consider the physical side of the question. Fifty years ago the standard height for admission to the army was five feet six inches. It is now lowered to five feet. Within the last ten years the increase in the urban population has been nearly three and a half millions. Within the same period the increase in the rural population is less than a quarter of one million. Three out of five recruits for the army are rejected; a large proportion of them because their teeth are gone or decayed. Do these figures need comment? Can you look for sound minds in such unsound bodies? Can you look for manliness, for self-respect, and self-control, or anything but animalistic sentimentality?

It is not the character of our drama or of our works of fiction that promotes and fosters this propensity; but may it not be that the enormous increase in the number of theatres, and the prodigious supply of novels, may have a share in it, by their exorbitant appeal to the emotional, and hence neurotic, elements of our nature? If such considerations apply mainly to dwellers in overcrowded towns, there is yet another cause which may operate on those more favoured,—the vast increase in wealth and luxury. Wherever these have grown to excess, whether in Babylon, or Nineveh, or Thebes, or Alexandria, or Rome, they have been the symptoms of decadence, and forerunners of the nation’s collapse.

Let us be humane, let us abhor the horrors of war, and strain our utmost energies to avert them. But we might as well forbid the use of surgical instruments as the weapons that are most destructive in warfare. If a limb is rotting with gangrene, shall it not be cut away? So if the passions which occasion wars are inherent in human nature, we must face the evil stout-heartedly; and, for one, I humbly question whether any abolition of dum-dum bullets or other attempts to mitigate this disgrace to humanity, do, in the end, more good than harm.

It is elsewhere that we must look for deliverance,—to the overwhelming power of better educated peoples; to closer intercourse between the nations; to the conviction that, from the most selfish point of view even, peace is the only path to prosperity; to the restraint of the baser Press which, for mere pelf, spurs the passions of the multitude instead of curbing them; and, finally, to deliverance from the ‘all-potent wills of Little Fathers by Divine right,’ and from the ignoble ambition of bullet-headed uncles and brothers and cousins—a curse from which England, thank the Gods! is, and let us hope, ever will be, free. But there are more countries than one that are not so—just now; and the world may ere long have to pay the bitter penalty.