In beginning this chapter, I very nearly fell into the old mistake of saying “I suppose young people don’t read Dickens nowadays.” It is curious how generation after generation of us seniors fall into that trap. Miss Linthorpe said it to me once, when I was in the schoolroom, upon which I offered to submit to a Dickens examination, and passed it with flying colours. I said it myself to Francis one day, when he was lying on the floor with a book, and he held up the book, which was Martin Chuzzlewit. So I will make no apology this time for talking of Mrs. Leo Hunter as if she were a character familiar to my readers. She was a real old lady, who lived at Ipswich (I think) and had some phenomenal number of children, and wrote verses quite as bad as the “Dying Frog.” But indeed she was not one woman, she was every woman—every woman who has sufficient station in the world to be able to choose her own company. We all want to collect lions—none the less since we ourselves began to be Managing Directresses, and Q.C.’s, and Members of Parliament. So I am not ashamed of having hunted the lions in my day; and I have kept them for a separate chapter—just a few of them, who will be worth exhibiting, because everybody still remembers their names, and yet my younger readers never saw or only saw them at a distance.

I suppose it would be generally agreed that the greatest man of the period (I am speaking of the period round about 1960) was Lord Chief Justice Poltwhistle. He dated from the old days of the English Bar, before women could plead (“barbarous days, Lady Porstock”) or sit on juries. In his young days, he said, it was still customary for lawyers to demand their fees, even when they lost the case; and he could quote instances in which men had risen to great fame at the Bar without ever winning a single important case. “We took it all in a more sporting spirit then,” he would say, in his quaint old way. “You might win a moral victory as a pleader, although you failed to get a verdict owing to the intrinsic badness of your cause. But of course at that time counsel weren’t required to take any oath as to what they thought of the rights and wrongs of the case, and it was not contrary to etiquette to defend a man although you were morally certain he was guilty. Even the moral theologians allowed that; and you must understand, Lady Porstock, that a moral theologian has a conscience just one point less elastic than a lawyer’s. I recollect when the Act was passed in ’42 an old company-promoter called Blofeld sitting next to O’Leary, who was a prominent K.C. in those days, and saying, ‘Well, the next time I get into the Courts it seems as if I’d have to find either a knave or a fool to defend me.’ ‘And you’ll have your pick of the Bar,’ says O’Leary. Wonderful smart chap he was, O’Leary. ‘It isn’t fair on us Catholics,’ he’d say to me (there weren’t very many of us practising in those days), ‘for the Protestants all think we’re such liars, when I’ve defended a man it’s all I can do to prevent him getting up and pleading Guilty.’ In those days, too, you could accept any brief you liked, and accepted the party that offered the biggest retaining fee, instead of having to wait your turn. It nearly broke O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill went through. I remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t defend the old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel because he can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the best counsel the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich people who can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a wonderful smart chap, O’Leary.” And so the old gentleman would wander on, charming us with anecdotes of the bad old times that, just because they are so distant, still win our rebellious sympathies.

Another of our guests was Mrs. Justice Partridge, who was one of the first of my sex to take the silk, and actually the first, I believe, to attain the Bench. She used to tell the story of one of the first cases she had to try. The offence was criminal wife-beating, and everybody was expecting her, as a woman, to be particularly severe over it. The accused, an Irishman, was equal to the occasion, and explained that he was “just taychin’ her her place in the house, the same as you would your old man, yer Honour.”

Talking of Irishmen reminds me of another distinguished visitor of ours, Daniel Geraghty, the Prime Minister of Ireland at that time. I remember asking him why it was that Ireland, since her liberation in the twenties, had never done much that was memorable in the way of literature, having produced so much till then. “It’s a simple thing,” he said, “it’s just that we Irishmen have no imagination. We’re hard, business folk by nature. When you English had it all your own way, you always liked to believe, and always wanted us to believe, that we were just dreamy sort of fellows, only fit to dream in a pig-sty or a garret, the way we’d starve contented. It’s always the way with you conquering races, you admire your subjects for the qualities that won’t be dangerous to you. Excudent alii—it’s the same all the world over.” I have never made up my mind whether he was right, but it certainly looks as if he was justified.

At another time, we entertained Fothergill—the younger Fothergill, of course, not the one who wrote Fifteen Years in a Fijian Larder. He came to us when he had just had the distinction of discovering the last race that was left to be discovered—the Ibquo’s in South America. He said they were a fascinating people, very simple in their character and very primitive in their habits. They knew nothing of flying, of electricity, or even of steam, and they used petrol only as an intoxicant. When they had to travel a long distance, or to pull heavy weights, they would take one of their tame mustangs and fasten it to a wheeled cart, and then drive it along with a whip, pulling the cart behind it. Their cooking was done over a fire, usually of coal; and their sacrificial meals were always cooked in vessels of iron, not aluminium, because it would be “bad magic.” They believed in a good Spirit which ruled the world, and in a bad Spirit which only had power to hurt them if they did wrong. They had great respect for old age, and generally chose some of the older men of the tribe to be their counsellors; if a child disobeyed its parents, it was punished. They also regarded their women with great veneration, and you would often see a man getting up from his place by the fire to make room for a woman who had none. When there was a marriage, the bride was solemnly escorted by her friends to the house of her future husband, where she was henceforward to live. The men worked in the fields; the women stayed at home and cooked for them, and also looked after the children, of whom there were often as many as eight or nine in one family. I seldom remember spending such an interesting evening.

It was not at my own house but at Lady Leek’s that I used to meet the literary men of the period. I did not care for having them at Greylands, or even at Chiswick, because they were liable to wear such odd clothes, and to talk so very loud, and to bring the strangest people in with them, quite uninvited. But they were very interesting people to meet, there is no doubt. The trouble about their writings was that they spent almost all their time writing about one another; sometimes in appreciation, sometimes in criticism. Occasionally one of them would break away from the tradition by writing about the men of a previous generation—there was Bernard Sykes, for example, who wrote a book that was very much talked about at the time, in which he tried to show that Lord Kitchener was a bad general, and that Herbert Wells was not really religious. But mostly they stuck to their own generation and criticized each other’s works about each other. The novelists could not do this exactly, but even in the novels the heroes were always novelists and the heroines female novelists, and they all settled down in Chelsea and lived unhappily ever after. Novels were very long in those days, running to three, or four, or even five volumes. Archie Lock used to say that he always took Debrett with him when he went on a journey, because it was the only book you could still get in one volume. “And very creditable to them,” he added, “considering the pressure on their space.” Of course the old “adventure stories” had not quite died out, but they were dying out rapidly—the Tarzan Syndicate, for example, decided to confine itself to films about this time. Publishing was already so expensive that all books except technical ones had to be produced by subscription. So the only novels one had were very long and very literary. It was only Jenkins’ invention in the seventies that made them cheap again.

I once met Henricourt and heard from him the story of his early struggles. He was a Civil Servant on £600 a year when he wrote his first masterpiece, The Kleptomaniac. It was one of the most realistic books of the century, and critics said that Chapter LXVII of the first volume, which begins with the hero falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, and ends just before he wakes up, was one of the most powerful things ever written. He took it to a publisher, who said there was a printers’ strike on, and they were not producing anything but school books at the moment; why didn’t he film it? He said he had thought of that, but the manager had said it would want a reel about as long as the Equator, and asked him to cut it: he said that would be false to his Art. The publisher said he’d better store the manuscript somewhere and write another book that would catch on with the public—his reminiscences, for example—and then have the Klep. in reserve. He said it was the one thing they weren’t allowed to do in the Civil Service, write Reminiscences, it was so apt to create a false impression. Couldn’t the publisher see his way to producing the first volume, anyhow, dividing the risks? The publisher said it couldn’t be done unless he could guarantee a sale of 4,000. In despair, he went to a Touting Agency, and asked them if they could find him 4,000 subscribers for what was really rather a remarkable novel. They asked if any important public characters came into the book under pseudonyms. He said no, that was against the principles of his Art. Finally the agent said he thought he could get the signatures if Henricourt wouldn’t mind his pretending that the book was a translation from the Lithuanian, written by a blind Lithuanian patriot. Henricourt agreed to this, and so the subscribers were procured and the great work was produced after all.

Poetry in those days had hardly felt the influence of the neo-classical school, and our poets still went in for using the language of common life, the commoner the better. To show the sort of thing that was popular, I don’t think I can do better than give you a page from the Index of First Lines in a volume of collected Edwardian Poetry, which Lady Travers-Grant^[14] gave me on my fiftieth birthday:

I suppose the mechanical school of poets are hardly to be found at all in modern bookshelves, and yet there was a time when Edgar Pirbright was enthusiastically reviewed, and you would see his book, “By Helico to Helicon,” lying on the tables of all his personal friends. He was obsessed with the idea that mechanical triumphs, being part of Man’s self-assertion on the planet, are infinitely better subjects to be celebrated by the poet’s typewriter than Nature, “that irrelevant mass of geological strata and atmospheric effects,” as he called it. He even went so far as to bring out an anthology from the older poets, in which he included a great deal of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold and other writers who had shown themselves hostile to the march of civilization; but he had, as he said, adapted them—which meant that he had altered them freely so as to suit his own doctrines. Some of it was ingenious, and even contained a good deal of original work: for instance, when you read the stanza:

when you read a stanza like that, you did not realize all at once that it was the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse which Pirbright was “utilizing” to celebrate the glories of the tide-trap. And there was a certain forcefulness about lines like:

but you felt the thing was going too far when you came across a poem called “Sky-writing,” which opened:

I used to have the book, but I have lost it; it was full of things like that.

And then, of course, there was the Futurist school, which ran into all sorts of extremes; but none more curious, I think, than the “Page-decorating” group of writers, who said that neither sense nor grammar nor even sound counted for anything in poetry; an immediate, telling effect ought to be produced by the mere look of the letters on the page. I can give an example of it from an old album of mine: it is no use trying to make head or tail of it, but if you look at it with your eyes half-shut, so to speak, you can just see that the first verse contains pretty and the second contains ugly letters, or groups of letters:

Perhaps it was time the neo-classical school came along to give us a new lead! But of course it was far more of a revolution in Art than it was in letters. I am afraid I am a very poor first-hand witness about the artistic movements of my time, for the old painters used to expect such a lot of you! They exhibited, of course, at the Academy and other accessible places every now and then, but even so it was rather trying to have the artists standing on guard, as they always did, and explaining to the sight-seer, not what their pictures were about, but what sort of emotions they ought to evoke! Some of them went further, and said you must not look at their pictures unless you were fasting, or unless you had recently taken opium. (Opium-smoking was not as common then as it is now, but already you were sometimes offered it in Chelsea.) I was too busy in one way and another to devote my life to picture-inspecting; and indeed, it was only a small group of people who took any interest in painting at all.

But I did once come in close touch with it, when I sat for my own portrait to Sanderson, the great PrÆteritist. In those days, when chromography gave very little help to the artist, you would often have to “sit” twice or three times before the painter caught what he considered a likeness. It was during the enforced idleness of one of these “sittings” that I had a long conversation with him which interested me so much that I wrote down notes of it afterwards.

We talked of Futurism; he said it was all very well, but the trouble about it was it had no future. He told me (what I did not know) that the term “futurism,” when it was first invented, in the early part of the century (“before you were born, my dear”—waving his brush at me), meant simply a dissatisfaction with present standards in art and a determination to find new methods: it was only with Lennox and Burstall that it took on its new meaning. The old Futurists refused, indeed, to draw the thing as they saw it, but they had not reached the idea of portraying things as one day they would be. It was Lennox’s Ruins of Westminster Cathedral that first heralded this much-criticized departure; and it was Burstall who developed the notion in portrait-painting. He was something of a missionary: unhappily married himself, he maintained that it was one of the functions of Art to show the evanescence of beauty, and when dÉbutantes came to sit to him he represented them as those wrinkled old women whom we still see and admire (he was speaking, of course, in 1960) in his portraits. He was a missionary, and something of a martyr; in consequence of his decision, he had to struggle for a long time with neglect and poverty; and it was only his portrait of Prince Albert, then three years old, as six foot high and a Colonel of Hussars, that drew attention to him once more. He got all the babies after that.

I said I supposed the Futuribilists were a necessary, or at least a logical, sequel to the Futurists. He said no, except in so far as they continued the tradition of drawing anything rather than what you saw in front of you; “and that, after all,” he added, “we PrÆteritists maintain as strongly as anybody.” The idea of painting what might have been was a quite different inspiration from the idea of painting what probably would be. (The names, he said, were all wrong; the Futurists ought to have been called Futuribilists, and the Futuribilists Potentialists, or something of that sort.) Besides, Futuribilism started in Belgium, and came out of the Electricist school, which we in England had barely heard of; had I ever seen an Electric picture, such as Bavet’s Windmill? I said no. “Well,” he said, “it represents simply a mass of electrons butting in and out. It was a craze that caught on for a bit, but there was a sameness about it. Then there were the Vitalists, but they never mattered much; and then Mosheim and his crowd began the Potentialist movement. It was still life, chiefly, game and so on; and the idea was to represent it not as what it was, but as what it might have become ... well, they weren’t very pleasant pictures, and our modern taste has decided, perhaps rightly, against them. It hardly started in England till Murchison’s Decay of a Leaf was exhibited: and even then it didn’t catch on until they began to treat human subjects, like Moffatt with his Influenza Patient, and Rosenstein with his Triumph of the Red Corpuscles.”

Here he had to get up and readjust the convex lenses, so our conversation was interrupted. When he was back at the easel I asked him why he said Futurism had no future. He said because it lived by innovation; it did not develop gradually, like the mind or the tastes of a man as he grows up, but found its successive inspirations in continual revolt from the latest fashion: “it’s a series of kicks,” he said, “like the old petrol tanks.” That meant that the public simply didn’t care about pictures, because they—the laymen—hadn’t leisure to follow all the latest movements in art criticism. In the old days you took years to learn how to paint a picture, and only a fortnight to learn how to criticize one; now it was the other way about. Only artists looked at pictures, and they chiefly to see how they could invent a new method, and turn the old ones on to the scrap-heap. “They didn’t always succeed,” he explained. “You’d be too young to remember the commotion there was in the early thirties, when nobody would talk about anything but relativity, and Manning Barker suddenly laid it down that there could be no such thing as Truth, even in Art, without velocity. His school would only paint for the screen, and you had to sit for a quarter of an hour to see the portrait of a Cabinet minister. I remember Lady Marrett, who was a beauty in those days, being released in nearly a quarter of a mile of film, and you never saw more than a square inch of her at any given moment. It was hard for the sculptors, you see: they wanted Billing to do an avenue of statues up the old Hammersmith Broadway, but the police wouldn’t allow it on account of the cars having to go forty miles an hour to get the values properly. Some of the movements fail, and some stick, but it can’t go on like this.”

“But what about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you one of the revolts?” I am afraid my question was a tactless one, because he painted for a time in complete silence, and then said, yes, he was only one of the reactions; he was only a fashion: one day people would see no more in him than they saw in Whistler or Pennell. (“Not that I should be surprised if some of those fellows came into vogue again,” he put in. “I was at a smart house the other day where my hostess, who is rather a crank, was thinking of having her house decorated with pictures, as they used to in our young days.”) But he painted in his way because he believed in it. “Every line on your face,” he said, “and every play of movement on your face, was predetermined for it by your smiles and frowns and pouts and fidgetings when you were a baby in arms. I must track Truth to its source, so I see you as a baby still—you must excuse me saying that, but it’s my creed. It will last my time; but you’re young, and you may live to see a reaction. These neo-classical people are attracting a lot of attention: I’m an old fogey, and I can’t see anything in these new ideas, but I daresay your daughters will.” It was a bold prophecy for a man to make in the early sixties; but he was quite right. What would he have said to our neo-romantics!

Talking of Futurism, I noticed in the paper the other day that Dame Beatrice Goodge was criticizing the old Futurists on the ground that they never produced any architecture: she would not be old enough to remember it, but I have actually seen a row of Cubist houses! It was when I was house-hunting, with Juliet Savage, in ’41, and we were trying our luck at the “Garden City” at Welwyn. The architect’s idea was a very simple one, which was to build a series of octagonal passages, just like a honeycomb: after all, bees built like that, and bees ought to know. Juliet said if I were shaped like a bee and spent all my time in the City making honey, one of these would just suit me. Only a very few tenants were ever secured, and these did not last long: profane neighbours, I believe, used to call them the Hivites. What a mad world it is, and how few men and women you will find who have not a blind spot somewhere.

“Men and women”—we still write the words in that order, though the Feminists, at the period of which I am typing, did their best to get it inverted. I cannot say that I sympathized at all with this agitation; I have always been old-fashioned, and felt that the proper sphere of woman is the flat. But I used to see a good deal in those days of Esther Margate, who was one of our most fanatical Feminists; and I think she ought to have her mention in this chapter, because there was a sort of mad consistency about her, which I believe to be a necessary element in all greatness of the reforming kind. She would always say, for example, “I do not suppose there is a woman, man or child in this country ... etc.,” because she maintained that woman was intellectually and morally man’s superior, and ought therefore to have the place of honour. I can still remember her asking Lord Billericay at dinner whether he didn’t think the women and men of London were better dressed now than they used to be: he said he was a bad judge, because he only came up to London once a year, for the Harrow and Eton match (he meant the cricket match, of course), and as a rule only stayed there till the Cambridge and Oxford match. Nobody ever quite knew whether Esther Margate realized what he was getting at. She used to dilate, too, on the unfairness of talking about “Man,” when you meant the human race in general: Archie Lock asked her if we ought to say “The proper study of mankind is Woman”; she answered quite sharply, no, “womankind,” of course. I believe some of her disciples went so far as to change their names; and you certainly do meet people called Goodwoman and Newwoman now, which you never used to. But her attempt to confine the suffrage to women was foredoomed to failure, even if Juliet Savage had not organized her campaign against it. It was conclusively shown that at least 27 per cent. of the men who had votes regularly exercised their right.

This seems to be a very rambling sort of chapter, but who has a right to ramble if it be not an old lady who has seen more than seventy summers? I must not finish this chapter without giving a place in it to George Hammond the historian. I never knew, I think, a more delightful conversationalist. He was often at Greylands, and I was always trying to draw him out, having that worst habit of hostesses, the habit of making a man talk on his own subject. Once, for example, I asked him what he thought was the really salient characteristic of the early twentieth century (his special period) which distinguished the people of that time from ourselves. “I have often wondered,” he said, “but I think you get nearest to the truth by saying that they had no sense of humour—that is, they had not got what we mean by the sense of humour. I’ve been at the British Museum a good deal lately (that it, at the Cippenham annexe), looking through the old newspapers of that period, the cheap newspapers especially, and I think it’s quite impossible to suppose that the people who liked to have that kind of thing served up with their breakfasts had any sense of humour at all. If you took one of our grandfathers and put him down opposite a series of drawings like, say, McGillivray’s, I don’t think he’d see anything in them. Or take that joke in Punch last week—did you see last week’s Punch? Well, there are two men travelling by railway, and one looks out of the window and says, ‘Cholsey and Moulsford, change for Wallingford.’ And the other man says, ‘I should jolly well think you did.’ Clever, isn’t it? But, you know, I don’t believe they’d have seen anything funny in it in the twenties.”

There, I had forgotten the humorists! Lancelot Briggs-Wilde, what a creator of merriment! And then there was the old Bishop of Birkenhead, who had the reputation of being quite unrivalled as a raconteur. It was he, I remember, who described to us how once at a missionary festival he had a very shy curate staying with him; and at breakfast, it seems, the eggs were not all that they should have been. The curate had one that was really very far gone, and the Bishop, by way of apology, said, “I’m afraid, Mr. So-and-so, your egg’s not very good.” “Oh, not at all,” was the mild reply, “it’s excellent in parts.” We all told the Bishop that he ought to send that up to Punch, but I don’t know if he ever did.

We did not, I am afraid, see a great deal of the Anglican episcopate, but of course Cardinal Smith was our near neighbour at Hare Street. He was a great walker: and when he came over to luncheon he would nearly always come on foot, although the distance was nearly three miles, and he had an excellent helico. “I don’t like going the pace in this part of Hertfordshire, Lady Porstock,” he once told me. “You see, I was brought up in these parts—twelve years of my life—and somehow I’ve got the leisurely spirit of them into my bones. When I die, I want them to bury me under the station platform at St. Margaret’s, so that I can wait for the Day of Judgment there; it’s easier waiting when you’re accustomed to it.”