  The writing of memoirs is a pleasant exercise. At any rate, I have found it so. It has led me back to many curious and delightful things which I had wholly forgotten. They came unbidden in the train of events which I had always remembered "in principle" and was at pains to evoke in detail. But though the process has obvious advantages, it has had one drawback. My recollections, and still more my reflections, and what I may call my self-comments Conscious and Subconscious, have been so many that at times I have felt like a man struggling in a mighty torrent. The result has been that, though I have written more than I intended to write, I have not covered anything like the amount of ground which I hoped to cover. I am left staring at a list of unwritten chapters. A list as long as that of those chapters included in my book or else eliminated lest the volume should swell to the size of the London Directory or to one of those portentous catalogues which Mr. Bernard Quaritch used to put forth in the days when I first began to love books, not merely for their contents, but as books. The titles of the unwritten chapters have, however, so fascinated me, and seem so necessary to my life and, therefore, to my book, that I must, at any rate, put their names on record, together with some faint indication of their nature, lest my readers should think there is some deep reason why I do not touch them. It is, I feel, only natural that people should think the worst of an Autobiographer. The unwritten chapter which I most deeply regret is that chapter on the War Hospital which we opened in the house in which I am writing—a Hospital which my wife, though I suppose I ought not to say this, managed, in spite of ill-health and many difficulties, with extraordinary success. Though physically disabled, she, for nearly five years, maintained practically single-handed, the organisation and direction of a well-equipped surgical and medical institution in a house not built for that purpose, though, oddly enough, one which in certain ways lent itself to hospital purposes. The Newlands Corner Hospital had an average of forty beds. Four and a half years is a long time to be out of one's house. It is a still longer time in which to turn your home into an institution and yourself into a matron. Altogether some eight or nine hundred men passed through the hospital. The doctors of the Royal Herbert Hospital, Woolwich, with which we were affiliated, and Colonel Simpson, the A.D.M.S. of that Hospital,—a man of marked ability in his profession and with a natural gift for administration,—soon found out that Newlands air and Newlands care were excellent things for difficult and anxious cases. Therefore we had our full share of bad, or, as the Sisters and nurses put it, good, cases. As I had nothing to do with the hospital except on the proprietory side— I was very busy with war—work of my own—I cannot be accused of self- laudation if I say that my wife won the praise, not only of the Medical Authorities, but, which was still more to her and to me, the confidence and gratitude of her patients. No small part of her success was due to a very simple fact. She early saw the necessity of dividing the administrative side of the hospital from the nursing side. Nursing is so fascinating in itself that many Commandants were drawn from their proper sphere of administration into surgical and medical work. My wife, partly from an instinct for sound administration, and partly also because at the moment she lacked the physical strength, confined herself strictly to her own side. In a hospital in which the patients were continually changing, which was four miles from a town and two miles from a railway station, that side was in war-times and during the period of rationing, by no means a light job. But the fact that there was one person, and that the person in supreme charge of the institution, who did nothing else except attend to the smooth running of the machine, meant that there were no arrears of correspondence, that all Army forms were filled up exactly and not, as many Commandants were inclined to think was far better, in accordance with what they themselves judged to be reasonable and necessary. Indeed, I was wont to tell my wife that I was appalled at the bureaucratic spirit which she developed! I believe I am right in saying that she never got an Army form wrong, though on several occasions she was able to point out to her official superiors that they had mistaken, or at any rate forgotten, their own elaborate rules. The result was an extremely easy functioning of the official engine. While other Commandants could be heard complaining that they could not get answers from the authorities, or get the Army payments made properly, my wife, I believe, never once failed to get the War Office cheque, on the day it was due. There were never any complaints that she was in arrears with her correspondence or with necessary information. But then, instead of raging, as no doubt, she might have been quite as much inclined to do as anyone else, at the absurdities of "red tape" and so forth, she accepted them as necessary evils, like hailstorms and the "all dreaded thunder-stroke." Six months before the War, believing the catastrophe was coming, she took instructions from an R.A.M.C. staff sergeant-major in all the intricacies of yellow, blue, and red tickets, and of forms from A to Z, or rather, from the first wound to the burial, required by the R.A.M.C. The result was that when the War broke out she knew a great deal more about the details of the Army Medical system than did many Staff or Regimental Officers, and even more than many Medical Officers. But I am breaking my rule of not writing about living people, and I must stop. I may, however, say something about my own place in the hospital, for my position was curious, and of very great interest to me. During the four and a half years that the hospital was open, I lived in it as what might be called a parlour-boarder. I kept my own bedroom, but my house contained, as it were, forty guests, and guests of a very fascinating kind. Our family life was embedded in the hospital. My daughter was working in the wards, and my son used to come back from Eton to spend his holidays in his hospital home. I was working at the time, not only at The Spectator, but also at recruiting for the Regular Army, which I regarded as my special duty, for I happened that year to be Sheriff of my county. In addition I was at the head of a curious little corps called the Surrey Guides and further was a member of the Executive Committee for the Volunteer Training Corps—a body whose activities alone would be well worth a chapter. But though my work lay outside Newlands, and though I always spent two nights a week in London, conducting, besides my editorial duties at The Spectator office, the duties I have already described in connection with the American Correspondents, I gained a most valuable experience from the hospital. In the first place, I did something which was almost unique. I lived for four and a half years in a community of women-the only man amongst nine. The house, of course, was full of male patients, but I lived with the staff. Besides my wife and daughter, there was a Sister-in-Charge, and, when needed, an additional professional nurse, a staff of masseuses which varied in number in accordance with the nature of the cases sent to us, and four or five resident V.A.D.'s, including the night nurses. In a house in such an isolated position as ours it was not possible for the V.A.D.'s to live at home and come in for their duty hours. I suppose the conventional cynic will expect me to say that I found out how much more quarrelsome, jealous, and feline is a community of women than one of men. Though I amused myself very much by watching how women work in association, I am bound to say that I saw nothing which led me to any such conclusion. I have seen plenty of men's quarrels in offices, in clubs, in the common rooms of colleges, at schools, and still more, perhaps, in mess-rooms and barracks, and I am bound to say that, according to my experience, my sex is quite as bad as, and, on the whole, rather worse than, women at the communal quarrel. Women are a little less noisy in their quarrels, and little more ingenious, but that is as far as I should care to generalise. "They did not let you see."—That will not do as an explanation, for I am sure that after the first seven or eight months, the ladies of the staff came to ignore me completely, or to regard me rather as a part of the furniture. Consequently, I saw them in what, if they had been men, one might have called their shirt-sleeves. When you see hard-worked and anxious people, as they come down to breakfast in the morning, when they rush in to lunch, and when they sink, tired, into their chairs at dinner, you have a pretty good opportunity for finding out all about them. Under such conditions they cannot keep up the veil of convention and of company manners. However, I cannot go into all these details, much as I should like to, but must give only a general verdict. I ended up my four and a half years as a parlour-boarder in a semi- convent with a respect for women and their work, which had always been very high, made still higher. If perhaps I found women a little less sensitive than I thought, I certainly found them a great deal more sensible, and, of course, as I suppose is the universal experience, a great deal less easily shocked by things that ought not to shock them than they are supposed to be. I mean by this that women are much less afraid to look life full in the face and much more willing to understand and to pardon, than is supposed. Also, I came to the conclusion that women, though great disciplinarians, and often hard upon each other, are not essentially merciless. They are certainly, on the whole, less lazy than men, which is probably a misfortune. I think Matthew Arnold was right when he spoke of women being "things that move and breathe mined by the fever of the soul." The fever of the soul, especially in a Sister, who, as is the case with most of them, was grossly overworked in the hospital where she was trained, is apt to prove a great evil. If I learned a good deal about women at the hospital and if the result of that learning was respect and admiration, I acquired an equally great respect and admiration for the British soldier. I had always loved those "contemptible regiments" who, as Sir Thomas Browne says, "will die at the word of a sergeant," but I loved them still more when I saw their good-natured, unostentatious way of life. They were, above all things, easy and sympathetic livers. Almost the only thing that shocked and disgusted them was being treated as heroes. Dr. Johnson talked about the "plebeian magnanimity of the British common soldier" and meant the right thing, though, in truth, there was nothing plebeian in the said magnanimity,—nothing which would not have been worthy of the highest birth and the highest breeding. But the hospital did not raise my admiration merely for the soldier. It raised it equally for the British working-man, who composed by far the larger part of our patients. Ours, remember, was a soldiers' hospital, not an officers'. We had, I think, in the whole course of our hospital not more than four men who had been public-school boys or University men. All the rest were labourers or artisans. When the hospital doors closed, I respected the English working-man as much as ever, and added to that respect a love and sympathy which I may record, but shall not attempt to explain or to express in detail. I could fill a book with stories and studies of our friends, for so they became, and so they still remain. My wife is constantly in touch with her old patients, and this does not mean applications for help or for work, but letters and visits of pleasure. That is good, but what is even better is that we constantly come across references to the Newlands feeling, for around it quickly grew up an indefinable esprit de corps. For example, on the day on which I write these pages, one of our local newspapers contains a letter from a Yorkshireman who had somehow seen an article in the aforesaid paper in regard to some Red Cross work done by my wife. He talks of the happy hours he spent at Newlands Corner, "hours which will live for ever in my mind." That, of course, is commonplace enough and sounds trivial, but it is repeated often enough to provoke a sense of true communal fellowship. One of the things with which I think my wife and I were specially pleased about the hospital was the rapid way in which this sense of esprit de corps, i.e., the public-school feeling, grew up. After the first month or two, patients talked quite seriously and candidly about "the old hospital." Again and again men told us that they should never forget Newlands. Like the true Englishmen they were, they partly loved Newlands because of the beauty of the scenery. The Englishman, though generally insensible of, or at any rate irresponsive to, the arts, is never irresponsive to a view. (John Stuart Mill's Autobiography contains, by the way, a curious passage in regard to this point.) I remember my wife telling me, the day after she had admitted a very bad case, that the patient had said to her, "I am sure I shall get well here, Commandant. It's such beautiful scenery." But no more of the hospital here. I live in the hope that some day I may write its history, and may be able to say something which will not be open to the charge of, "Oh! Another boring book about the War!" As I conceive it, my hospital book will be an analysis of the mind and character of the British working-man with his defensive armour off, and not an attempt to give any views on military or medical reform and so forth. One word more. My position in the hospital with the men was a strange one. They soon saw that I played the game, and that if I saw them breaking rules, met them, when I was riding, out of bounds, or discovered them at any other of their wicked tricks, I never told tales, or got them into trouble, or evoked any disciplinary reprisals. This intensive cultivation of the blind eye raised me to the position of a friendly neutral and gained for me their confidence. Besides, I believe it soothed them to think that I, too, had to endure the regiment of women to which they were exposed. They suspected that I also quailed, as they must, before "the Sister in charge." Their manners, by the way, were always perfect without being formal or absurd. They seemed to have an instinct for absolute good breeding. Yet they were all the time what Whitman called "natural and nonchalant persons." Neither my wife, nor her staff, nor I ever made any pretence to ourselves that they were plaster saints because their manners were good. They were as wicked as demons and as mischievous as monkeys, and seized every occasion for natural wrong-doing. In fact, they were just like schoolboys, but they observed always the schoolboy law. Quarrel they might, and dislike each other as they often did very bitterly, they never told tales of each other. The Belgians, of whom we had some at the beginning, were very different. They, curiously enough, gave each other away quite freely, and complained of each other to the Commandant. But, as one of our men said to me in excuse for the bad behaviour of the Belgians, "They was never taught any better. They hadn't the training we've had." Another unwritten chapter, which I desire particularly to write, is a chapter on Newlands, the history of the house which I love only less than I love Sutton Court,—the house which I and my wife built, if not with our own hands, at any rate with our own heads,—the house in which my children were born, and two of my grandchildren,—the house from which my daughter was married,—the house which I have seen grow like a tree out of the ground,—finally, a house sanctified by the sufferings of brave men, who had fought for a great cause and laid us all under an obligation never to be expressed in words. Newlands, with its keen, almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am grateful for the health and strength which Newlands has given me. But this must be told, if I ever write it, in the history of the house. Still, I regret not to have done more honour to Newlands here, as I regret not to have been able to make my salute to the wounded in better form. Another chapter "arising out of" Newlands, which I should like to have written, would have been on my work as Chief of the Surrey Guides. My readers need not be afraid of some burst of amateur militarism. I should have treated the Surrey Guides simply as a kind of "new model" version of Cobbett's Rural Rides. It was my duty to explore all the paths and roads of the county, and delightful work it was. My experiences must certainly be put on record somewhere and sometime, for, alas! the horse is dying out and with him will die the bridle-paths and the pack-roads. The night-riding part of my Surrey Guide work was to me particularly attractive. No one who has not tried night-riding across country will realise how fascinating it is and, comparatively speaking, how easy. Provided you ride a pony, instead of a huge, long-legged, heavy- weighted, badly-balanced horse, there is neither danger nor difficulty. I will not say that the secret of night-riding is to give yourself up to your horse, for your horse may be as big a blunderer as you, and become a mixture of stupidity and anxiety. What I advise is, give yourself up to your sub-consciousness, if you can, and this will lead you through the darkest places and the roughest roads in ample security. Another chapter which I believed I was going to write in this book was to be devoted to inscriptions. I have always loved the art of the epigraphists, and I wanted to quote some examples, including (1) an inscription for a sun-dial, (2) an inscription for a memorial to Lord Halifax, the trimmer, the greatest of Whig statesmen, (3) another to William Pitt, and (4) an inscription to the Quakers who fought and died in the War,—men whose noble combination of patriotism and self- abnegation impressed me profoundly. Their ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, Their names a great example stand to show How strangely high endeavour may be blest When Piety and Valour jointly go. Another Surrey chapter might have dealt with my activities as Sheriff and my conceptions of that office. Still another chapter ought to have centred in my personal life at Newlands. It was at Newlands that my health broke down and I saw, or thought I saw, as did my doctors, the advance of the penumbra, the shadow of eclipse which was to engulf my life. I wanted very much, when I began this book, to put on record a description of how utterly different than is commonly supposed are the feelings of the occupant of the condemned cell. I should also like to have recorded certain reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts, and contribute each in his order to the central theme. But this and "The Adventure of Dying," a theme which has never yet been adequately treated, but ought some day to be, must await not, of course, the actual coming of the Gondolier, for that is too late, but that interval between life and death which the Emperor Diocletian boasted that he had created for himself. Another unwritten chapter on a subject which may sound dull, but which might very well have been one of the best, was to be called "The Consolations of the Classics." It would have told how in his later years new stars had risen for the adventurer in the voyage of life, while many of the planets that were in their zenith in his youth have suffered decline. As a boy, and even in the prime of life, I knew nothing of Racine. I now bend my head in adoration. Again, I knew little or nothing of Balzac. I now think of him as one of the greatest of the analysts of human conduct,—not as great as Shakespeare, but, all the same, very great, and almost as terrible as he is great. If ever a man fascinates and is intolerable, it is Balzac. I should have liked, but that is not a thing which can be compressed or sandwiched into any chapter, to have written quite frankly and fully about my religious beliefs. Here, indeed, I had planned with some care. I wanted to say not what I thought other men ought to believe, nor what I thought I ought to believe myself, or, again, what I ought not to believe in order to make my credo look reasonable and "according to plan." What I wanted to do was to say frankly, fairly, and truthfully what I do believe as a matter of fact and not as a matter of ought or ought not. I wanted to record an existing set of actualities, not to write a piece of philosophy or metaphysics. I wanted, in fact, to photograph my soul. But this, again, must wait, though I hope it will not wait very long. If I write such a paper I shall certainly take for my motto Lord I will neither be put off on the one side by making an effort to express belief in more than I can believe, nor, again, refuse to record my honest belief in some "fact of religion" because it will not be thought creditable for me, or because certain people will think me superstitious and unreasonable, just as other people will think me too rationalistic. I will yield nothing to the demand, "You cannot possibly believe this, when you have just said that you don't believe that. The two things must hang together. You cannot pick and choose like this at your fancy." My answer is, I can, I do, and I will. My endeavour is not an attempt to reconcile beliefs, but to say for good or for evil what I do believe. I believe that London lies to the Northeast of the place at which I am dictating these words. Faith is a fact, not a fragment of reasoning, and I mean to put down the said fact for what it is worth. How I wish I could write my chapter on the odd things that have happened to me in life, and record the strange and inexplicable things that I have heard of from other people. I don't mean by this that I have a number of second-hand ghost-stories to tell. All the same I could t-ell of certain things much more impressive because they are so much less sensational. It was my habit as a young man, a habit which I wish I had not abandoned, to ask everybody I came across, who was worth interrogating, what was the oddest thing that had happened in their lives. One would have supposed that I should often have got for my impertinence a surly answer, or, at any rate, an elegant rapier-thrust, or some other form of snub. Strangely enough, I never found anyone "shy" at my question, but I did get many curious answers, and some of these I have a perfect right to record. A section of this chapter should deal with accidental conversations and accidental confessions. It has been my good luck once or twice to listen to the most strange talk in trains and other public places, and again, by straight questions I have sometimes elicited very crooked answers. For example, when I was a young man I once heard an old gentleman in a third-class railway carriage remark vaguely and yet impressively to the company at large, as follows: "I once saw six men hanged in a very rustic manner." That, I think everyone will agree with me, was an excellent conversational opening. The full story, though I cannot tell it here, was quite as good. So was the story of William Harvey, "the girt big Somersetshire man" and what he did in a fight with Spanish Pilots in the Bilbao River. Of this story, told to me in the broadest Somersetshire dialect by a Somersetshire boatman who was present at the fight, I cannot resist quoting one passage: "They were all dressed in white and fighting with their long knives. But William Harvey, who was six feet six high, got hold of the axe we always kept on deck for cutting away the mast if it went in a storm, and he knocked them over with that. And as fast as he did knock them over, we did chuck the bodies into the water." Another of my accidental conversations opened with these words: "And she never knew till she followed her to her grave that she was her own mother." The personal pronouns are slightly mixed, but the story might well develop like a Greek play. Again, I planned a chapter to describe the four most beautiful human beings seen by me in the course of my life. Strangest of all, and perhaps most beautiful of all, using beauty in rather a strained sense, was the man alluded to in my dedication,—the man my wife and I saw in the Jews' Garden at Jahoni. We were resting in the garden after a very long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young man in a white tunic, with bare feet and legs. On his head was a wide hat of rough straw, and across his shoulder a mattock. His face and form could only be described in the famous words, "Beauty that shocks you." Why his beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of any sensibility, I cannot say. Thinking he was a gardener, we asked our Dragoman to ask him some simple question but he could not, or did not, obtain any information. The creature was like the figures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again in this amazing being. Far more really beautiful, far more interesting, and far more impressive was a woman whom I and my younger brother met with in a tram-car outside the Porta del Popolo in Rome. Up till then I had spent much time in wondering why the Italian population had declined in the matter of good- looks and why one never saw anyone like a Bellini or a Raphael Madonna. And then I looked up after having my ticket clipped and saw the perfect youthful mother of the Cinquecento painters sitting opposite me. A more exquisitely harmonious face and expression were never vouchsafed to my eyes. She was a countrywoman of the richer peasant class, and was apparently making her first visit to the city accompanied by her husband. One would gladly have taken oath at first sight that she was the perfect wife and mother, and yet there was no sentimental pose about her—only the most naive and innocent delight told in smiles, laughter, and blushes. The things she saw from the tram window seemed to make her whole being ripple with pleasure. Happily I cannot here be judged as a sentimental visionary for my companion will avouch the facts. Curiously enough, though I think English women, as a whole, far surpass the Italians in their looks, the other perfectly beautiful woman whom I have seen was also an Italian. I was taking an early walk, with my younger brother, from Baveno to the summit, or at any rate, to the shoulder of the Monte Moteroni. The time was between five and six o'clock in the morning, and the place a small peasant's farm just at the fringe of the land between the open mountain and the cultivated slopes. I looked over the hedge or wall, I forget which, and there was a bare- legged girl of some seventeen or eighteen working in the field with her father and her brothers, hoeing potatoes. Here, indeed, was something worth writing home about—a figure like the Lombard girl in Browning's "Italian in England, "—a face gentle, simple, kind, but, above all, beautiful, and a figure worthy of the face. The fourth figure in my gallery of the visions that the turn of the road took from my eyes and "swept into my dreams for ever" was seen during a purely prosaic walk in South Kensington. Unsuspecting, unperturbed, I was bent on a constitutional, or maybe a shopping expedition, when there suddenly arose before my astonished eyes, out of a man-hole in the middle of the street—I honestly believe it was the Cromwell Road—a young workman with flaxen hair and a short beard,—a man with something of the face and figure which the Italian painters gradually came to attribute to the Christ. But here again, as in the case of the Madonna of the tram-car, the man evidently had never been told of, or thought of, the resemblance. He seemed perfectly unconscious and natural. Though the trained eye might notice a resemblance in the outline of the face, the happy smile and negligent air showed nothing of the Man of Sorrows. He was just an ordinary Englishman. When I think of those four figures of resplendent beauty—and especially of the two women, for the Syrian had something sinister and uncanny about him and the young Englishman was too prosaic in essentials—I recall the passage which I know is somewhere in Sir Thomas Browne, though I am quite unable to find it, in which the Physician Philosopher declares that when he sees specially beautiful persons he desires to say a grace or thanksgiving to Heaven for the joy that has been vouchsafed him. As to the strange stories and strange things told me, I should have liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pass. The English mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb. Suddenly he saw to his astonishment a chamois, the shyest of all animals, standing stock- still on a steep glacier. She actually let him come so close to her that he could have touched her with his hand, and then he saw the reason. The chamois stood at the very edge of a deep crevasse, and up from its cold, blue depths came the cry of a terrified and agonised creature—cries that were answered by the mother chamois. The little chamois had fallen through the ice-bridge and lay some hundred feet or so below and beyond all recovery. The narrator was an ordinary table-d'hote Smoking-Room tourist, but he could hardly recount the story without tears. He tried, but it was impossible to effect a rescue, and he had to leave the wretched mother where she was. As he said, "Considering what chamois are, it sounds absolutely incredible that the mother should have been able to overcome her shyness of mankind and stay by the young one. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. She took no more notice of me and my guide than if we had been rocks. Poor brute!" Another chapter would have recorded the influence upon my life of great writers, great poets, great painters, great sculptors, and great musicians. Next, I should have loved to give in detail accounts of my travels, not in strange or dangerous parts of the earth, but through some of the most beautiful scenery of Europe and in the fringes of Africa and Asia. As a young man, I journeyed in sledges over most of the Alpine passes in the winter, for, owing to my uncle John Symonds being one of the discoverers of the High Alps in winter, I was early, so to speak, in the snow-field. To this day nothing attracts me more than the thought of a long day or night spent in a sledge. I crossed the Splugen by day in the winter, and by moon-light in the summer. I crossed the St. Gothard (before the tunnel was made) in a Vetturino carriage. I have crossed the Simplon, and I have many times crossed the Bernina and all the other passes of the Orisons in the snow in mid-winter. For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent sunlight, there is nothing more delightful, and if as sometimes happens, one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it, a pleasant spice of danger is added. But I did not love the Alps merely in the winter. Though no expert climber, I was fond of the mountains to the point of fanaticism, and though I never got higher than 11,000 feet, or a little over, I had the extremely interesting experience of falling into a crevasse. Fortunately I was well held by the rope against the white grey edge of the blue abyss, while my legs kicked freely in the illimitable inane. Is there anything in the world like being aroused in the grey of dawn by the man with the axe and the rope? Can anything equal that succession of scenes, the Alpine village in sleepy silence, the pastures and the cultivated land, the inevitable little bridge on the inevitable stream, then the belt of pines, then the zone of rocks and flowers, best and gayest of all gardens, and last the star gentians and the eternal snows? A holiday heart, twenty years of age, a friend, a book of poetry, and a packet of food in one's pocket!—Truly, "If there is a Paradise, it is here, it is here!" Horses that I have known and liked, and on whose backs I have felt supremely happy—rides on mules in Spanish or African mountains, rides in the Syrian or Libyan Deserts on true Arabs, or, perhaps most thrilling of all, night rides on the Downs, would make a tale, whether delightful to read by others I know not, but certainly delightful to be recorded by me. "Projects Fulfilled and Unfulfilled" would have made a good chapter, as would also "Quotations and the Effects of Poetry on Everyday Existence." Another chapter which I have not written, but should like to have written, would have been "Some Uncles"—I use the word "some" in both the common and the slang sense—for I may be said to have been specially rich in this relationship. Two of my Indian uncles were well known to the public. One was Sir John Strachey, for six months acting Viceroy of India, owing to Lord Mayo's assassination and the delay in his successor taking up the post. The other was Sir Richard Strachey, who began his Indian life as a subaltern in the Hon. East India Company's Corps of Sappers and Miners. He had a horse killed under him at the Battle of Sobraon, and afterwards became one of the greatest of Indian Civil Engineers, a Member of Council (Public Works Department), and one of the greatest of canal and railway constructors. Henry Strachey, another uncle, commanded a battalion of Gourkhas, and died over ninety years of age. Though little known to the world, he was a man of memorable character and in his youth accidentally and temporarily the talk of London as a Thibetan explorer. William Strachey, a fourth uncle, was the strangest of men. Like the "Snark," he breakfasted at afternoon tea and lived by candlelight instead of sunlight,—a wholly fantastic man, though one of great ability. At one time he was what our forefathers called "a man about town,"—a member of Brook's Club during the Fifties and Sixties, a friend of Thackeray and of "Flemming, the Flea," and a clerk in the Colonial office. He was often selected by Lord Palmerston for special work. Later, however, he developed such strangely nocturnal, though by no means noisy habits, that he almost disappeared from the ken of his family. He, by the way, once spoke to me of Lady William Russell, of whom I have already written, describing her as one of the most beautiful and in later years one of the most delightful people he had ever seen, and the best of all hostesses—"You used to look up at the fanlight over the door of her house in South Audley Street, and if you saw the gas-jet burning you knew that she was at home, expecting the company of her friends, and needed no further invitation. Whatever the hour was, if the light was burning you could go in and finish your evening in talk with her and her other guests." She was thus at home almost every evening to the people favoured enough to have the entry of her house. Another uncle was Mr. George Strachey, a diplomat, and for some thirty years Her Britannic Majesty's representative at Dresden,—a man of great ability, but with a nature better fitted to a man of letters than to an official. Of Strachey great-uncles I could tell many a curious and entertaining tale, and especially of the man whom my father succeeded,— the man we called "the second Sir Henry." It has been said of him that he was "odd even for a Strachey," and I could prove that up to the hilt. Almost as odd, from many points of view, though much more human, was his brother, Richard Strachey, one of the prize figures of the Military and Diplomatic Service of the East India Company. He is still commemorated in Persia on the leaden water-pipes of Ispahan, but how and why is too long a story for a chapter of apology. Dearly should I have loved to write a chapter on "The Art of Living," for unquestionably "life demands art,"—an aphorism, by the way, not, as most people think, of Pope but of Wordsworth. (Wordsworth, remember, had a great deal of the Eighteenth Century in him.) That chapter, however, would easily become a book or a serpent, as says the Italian proverb. Last of all, how many are the men and women, now dead, whom I should like to have mentioned and of whom I have something worth saying. They are included in a rough list which I drew up when I first thought of writing my autobiography. I give these names written down just as they occurred to me. Some of them have been referred to in the body of this book, but most of them are not even mentioned. Lord Roberts; Watts the painter; Sir John Millais; Sir William Harcourt; Lord Houghton; Walter Bagehot; Lord Carlingford; Lord Goschen; the Duke of Argyll of Gladstone's Cabinets; Mr. Macmillan, the publisher; Mr. George Smith; Lady Stanley of Alderley; Lord Carlisle; Lord Morpeth; Sir Edward Cook; Lord Kitchener; the late Duke of Northumberland; Admiral Dewey; Mr. William Arnold; Lord Burghclere; Sir William Jenner; Miss Mary Kingsley; Lord Glenesk; the late Lord Grey; the late Lord Astor; Sir William White, the naval constructor; the late Lord Sligo; Dean Beeching; Bishop Perceval; Archbishop Temple; my uncle, Professor T. H. Green; Professor Dicey; Professor Freeman; Bishop Stubbs; Mr. Lecky; Mrs. Humphry Ward; Lord Bowen; Mr. Baugh Allen, the last of the Special Pleaders; Professor Henry Smith, the mathematician; Lord Justice Fry, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh. There was another man, too little and too lately known, with whom I wanted to deal at length, for he exercised a distinct and special influence on my life. I mean Donald Hankey, "The Student in Arms." I had, indeed, designed to speak of him in a special chapter on the effect of the War on my life, but that chapter did not get written, or, rather, remains over to be written when the perspective is easier and better, and the world has given up its last, and to me very futile and foolish, mode of talking as if we ought to be ashamed of the War, or, at any rate, as if we ought to treat it as an utterly tiresome subject. Here, then, I shall say only that the essential thing about Hankey was that he was one of the true saints of the world, or, rather, one of the saints who matter. Yet never was there a less saintly saint. He was a man you could talk to rationally on any subject. I, who really knew him, would not have called him a man of the world, because it would have been in essence misleading; but I should have quite understood someone else saying it and should have known exactly what he meant. Not only had he not the temper of the zealot or the fanatic, but he was a kindly man, with no fierceness about him. Yet somehow, and this was the miracle, he contrived to have none of the easy unction of the pushing man of holiness who realises that if he is to succeed in accomplishing what he wants accomplished, he must assume a certain cunning suavity of manner which is really foreign to his character. Hankey had no pose. He was at bottom what Walt Whitman calls a "natural and nonchalant" person, who happened to be made all through of sweetness and light, though never the superior person, and never, as it were, too good for this world. Not for one moment did you find in him the chill of sanctity. In the phrase of John Silver, "he kept company very easy." I should imagine that confession was the very last thing that Hankey would ever have encouraged in anyone, for it is the most debilitating of the virtues. All the same, a penitent would have found him an extraordinarily easy occupant of the box. He was warm-hearted, sympathetic, and full of the victorious spirit. One felt with Hankey that he was born for whatever was arduous. In truth he was "God's soldier." What gives the extreme characteristic impression of Hankey is that last vision of him set forth in a letter by the soldier who, happening to look into a trench, saw him kneeling in prayer with his company gathered round him, just before they went over the parapet. If he had lived, he would, I am sure, have talked about the scene. I never saw a man so natural and so little embarrassed in discussing such matters as prayer or other spiritual experiences. He had in a marked degree that absence of mauvaise honte which marks the good man at all times, in all places, in all religions, and in all races. There is a man, now dead, who told me something which I want to record in this very convenient chapter. His words impressed me out of all proportion to their intrinsic importance. I feel indeed that there must be something in them which I cannot analyse, but which makes them worth preserving. The vitamines of food, we know, are not strictly analysable, though their presence can be detected. No one knows of what they consist, but, nevertheless, we know two things about them. They exist, and they have a great influence upon metabolism. So in the food of the mind there are vitamines which we can recognise, but not analyse, and, therefore, cannot wholly understand. My readers, if they will look into their own memories, will, I am sure, recall experiences of these mental vitamines, trivial or ordinary in themselves, and yet holding a place so clear and often indeed so vehement as to suggest that they contain some quickening quality of their own. The man with whom I connect certain of these vitamines of the mind was Sir George Grove, the compiler of the Dictionary of Music. I did not know him well; but, as a boy, he did me a kindly service. He accepted the first poem of any length that I ever published. When I was seventeen, that is a year before I went to Oxford, I sent him a poem, alluded to in another chapter of this book, called "Love's Arrows." He liked it and published it in Macmillan's Magazine, of which he was then Editor. Macmillan's was a magazine given up to good literature, and to get a place in it was considered no small honour. Grove possessed a keen sense of literature, and he had known many of the famous people of the Victorian era. True to my plan of asking questions, I asked him whether he had ever seen Cardinal Newman. He replied by a story which was revealing as to a certain fierceness in Newman's character and mental configuration. In any case, it had both rhetorically and intellectually a considerable influence on my mind. Here is a prÉcis of our conversation. "Did you ever see Newman?" "Only once, and then I heard him preach." "Was he in a big sense eloquent?" "Yes. Though he had none of the airs and graces of the orator, he had somehow in a high degree the power of thrilling you. I heard him in Lent preaching in a small Roman Catholic chapel in London. He was a gaunt figure, extremely emaciated and hollow-cheeked, with a very bad cough, and as he stood in the pulpit, coughing hoarsely, he beat his breast with his hand and forearm, till it sounded like the reverberation of a huge cavernous drum." Grove went on to describe how the time was one of great spiritual excitement in the Church of England and in the Roman Church,—a time when people thought that Rome was going to reassert her ascendancy over English minds. During the very week or month in which the sermon was preached, Stanley's Life of Arnold had appeared. "At the end of that book Stanley describes how when Arnold lay dying, he had, one evening, a very long talk with him about the Sacraments and the part they played in the religious life. He records that conversation and the Broad Church view of Arnold, and then tells how he rose next morning and went to enquire as to Arnold, and how he found that Arnold had died in the night. Newman was preaching on the old, old maxim, 'Nulla salus extra ecclesiam,' and dwelt, as a preacher with his views naturally would, on the contrast between the covenanted and uncovenanted mercies of God. Those who were in the Church were absolutely safe. For those who could trust only to the uncovenanted mercies of God there could be no such safety. 'But,' he went on, 'it is not for me to deal with them and their prospects of salvation and of life eternal.' And then, with great feeling and emotion, 'Nor shall I presume to canvass the fate of that man who, at night, doubted the efficacy of sacramental wine, and died in the morning.'" Though the words, of course, had no spiritual effect on Grove, he dwelt upon the difficulty he had in conveying the profound emotional force of these phrases when they were spoken by this strange figure in the pulpit. Grove need not have made any apology. He amply managed, and this was a proof of the preacher's power, to transfer the emotion of the moment to me. The words in the spiritual sense mean nothing to me. Indeed, they disgust, nay, horrify me as utterly irreligious. Yet I am bound to say that I feel, and always have felt, their emotional appeal urgently and deeply. Here, if anywhere, are the vitamines of oratory. Again, I should like to have had a chapter on the links of the past, because I have been fortunate in that respect. Some of these I have recorded in other chapters, but I should like to put on record the fact that I actually knew and spent several days in a country house with a lady who actually received a wedding-present from Keats and also one from Shelley. That lady was Mrs. Proctor, the widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet. When I first saw Mrs. Proctor, who, by the way, was well known to my wife and Mrs. Simpson, she was a fellow-guest with me and my wife at a house-party at the Grant-Duffs'. Though, I suppose, nearly ninety years old at that time (it was three or four years before her death), there was not a trace of extreme old age in her talk. She was neither deaf nor blind, but enjoyed life to the full. She did not seem even to suffer from physical weakness, but was capable of hours of sustained talk. She had known everybody worth knowing in the literary world and had vivid recollections of them. For example, besides mentioning the wedding-presents from Keats and Shelley, she was also proud to remember that she had received a present from the murderer, Wainwright, Lamb's friend,—who wrote under the name of Janus Weathercock—the man who insured his step-daughter's life and then poisoned her. Owing to the extraordinary way in which things were arranged in those days, the murderer, though found guilty, had his sentence commuted to transportation—apparently as a kind of recognition of his literary ability. Oddly enough, this was not the only time that accident put me in touch with this singular and sinister figure,—the man too who first talked about the psychological interest of colours and cared, as Mrs. Proctor said, for strange-looking pots and pieces of china. My friend Willie Arnold told me that when his mother was a girl, or a young married woman, I forgot which, in Tasmania, she had her picture drawn by a convict, and that convict was the celebrated Wainwright. According to Willie Arnold, his character was not supposed to be of the best even in those days, and great care was taken that during the sittings someone else should always be in the room! Another link with the past, which is worth recording, is that I knew well a man, Sir Charles Murray, who told me that he had seen Byron. When I cross-questioned him, he told me something that I think must have been an error of memory. He said it was at a ball in Paris that he saw the poet. Now, I feel pretty sure that Byron never was in Paris. In the earlier part of his life he could not have got there because of the war, and after the peace, as we all know, he began his travels at Antwerp, and journeyed up the Rhine into Switzerland and then crossed the Alps by the Simplon into Italy. Perhaps, however, my most sensational link with the past was as follows. When I first came into Surrey, the old Lord Lovelace—the man who married Byron's daughter, and who built Horsley Towers—was still alive and could be seen, as I saw him, driving about our Surrey lanes in a pony-chaise. Lord Lovelace is reported to have made the following entry in his diary about the year 1810, that is, when he was a boy some ten or twelve years old—"Today I dined with the old Lord Onslow [a neighbour then, presumably, of about ninety years of age], and heard him say that as a boy he had known one of the Cromwellian troopers—Captain Augustine—who was on guard round the scaffold when Charles I was executed." Oddly enough, I have another link with the Cromwellian Wars. I remember, some forty years ago, my uncle, Sir Charles Cave, of whom I am glad to say I can speak in the present tense, told me that he was shooting on one of his farms below Lansdowne, the hill that rises above Bath. The tenant of the land was a very old farmer, and he informed my uncle that his grandmother, who lived to a great age, but whom he had just known as a boy, used to say that she remembered how, when a girl, the soldiers came into the village after the Battle of Lansdowne and took every loaf of bread out of the place. An even more personal link with the past was afforded by my mother's aunt, Miss Sykes, and my great-aunt. She had seen George III walking on the terrace at Windsor, old, blind, and mad, with his family and courtiers curtseying to those poor blind eyes and vacant wits every time he turned in his constitutional. Another of her recollections, however, was far more thrilling to me as a lad. Miss Sykes, sister of my mother's mother, belonged to a naval family, and her mother's sister had married Admiral Byron, the seaman uncle of the poet. Therefore, Byron and Miss Sykes were in that unnamed relationship, or pseudo-relationship, which belongs to those who have an aunt or an uncle in common. It happened that my aunt was on a visit to the Byrons when the poet's body, which was consigned to the Admiral, was brought to London. The Admiral, who lived near Windsor, posted up to receive the barrel of spirits in which the remains were preserved. When he returned from his gruesome visit the ladies of his family, and none more so than my aunt, then a girl of fifteen or sixteen, were very anxious to know what he had seen and what the remains of the most-talked-of man in the Europe of his day looked like. "What did he look like, my dear? He looked like an alligator," said the Admiral, who did not mince his words. It is strange that men should prefer to put their kin in what, in the naval records after Trafalgar, is called "a pickle" rather than give them a burial at sea or in "some corner of a foreign field"! But on such matters there can be no argument. It is a matter of feeling, not of reasoning. So much for unwritten chapters and unwritten books, though, perhaps, I ought to add a postscript upon the writing of memoirs, describing how pleasant, though arduous a task it is. At any rate, it has proved so in my case. I began these memoirs with the feeling that, though it was quite worth while to record my part in the general adventure of living, I must expect that, even if I were to contrive to give pleasure to my readers, the part of the writer must be hard, laborious, and ungrateful. "Why," I asked myself, "should I munch for others the remainder biscuit of life?" Yet, strange to say, what I had looked forward to almost with dread, turned out to be by far the pleasantest literary experience of my life. I have never been one of those people who dislike writing, or find it, as some people do, agonising; but I was not in the least prepared to find how pleasant it could be to dive into the depths of memory and let, what the author of the anonymous Elizabethan play, Nero, calls "the grim churl" of memory lead you through the labyrinth of the past. But, though the path was pleasant, nay, exhilarating and stimulating, I must confess to the fact that I have had no psychological experiences, regrets, or disillusionments. I have had no temptation to write as to the shortness and precariousness of human existence, or to reflect how base I had found mankind, or, again, to deplore the past, curse the present, and dread the future. Life to me, in looking back, seems on the whole a very natural and simple show. No one, in one sense, feels more strongly than I do that we are being swept along by the mighty current of a vast river, without any clearer indication of what is the outlet of the river than of what is its source. But though these things may be an excuse for a great deal of rhetoric, they somehow seem to me, if I may use the word again, natural and non-inflammatory. It is far easier to trust what those who, liking the vagueness of theology, call "the larger hope," but which I should be content to call plainly the mercy of God—a mercy which I, for one, make bold to say I would rather have uncovenanted than covenanted. Covenanted mercies are a kind of thing which may do very well at an insurance office or for business purposes, but they are not the mercies one would ever dream of asking for or accepting from an earthly father. Then how can one dare to speak of them in the same breath with God? "But this," I hear some readers say, "is the illusion of faith and has nothing of the permanence of fact." Well, I, for one, am content to rest on faith, honest and instinctive. Faith, to my mind, is a fact and a very palpable fact,—a fact as vital as any of the other great incommensurables and insolubles of our existence. If I am asked to treat of the river, or rather, the ocean of life and the adventure of its voyage in terms that will satisfy those not fortunate enough to have faith, let me commend to them that memorable dream set forth by that most honest and exact of agnostics as of jurists, Mr. Justice Stephen. The dream, published some fifty years ago, is as noble a piece of literature as it is a monument of intellectual insight. I dreamt [he says, after Bunyan's fashion] that I was in the cabin of a ship, handsomely furnished and lighted. A number of people were expounding the objects of the voyage and the principles of navigation. They were contradicting each other eagerly, but each maintained that the success of the voyage depended absolutely upon the adoption of his own plan. The charts to which they appealed were in many places confused and contradictory. They said that they were proclaiming the best of news, but the substance of it was that when we reached port most of us would be thrown into a dungeon and put to death by lingering torments. Some, indeed, would receive different treatment; but they could not say why, though all agreed in extolling the wisdom and mercy of the Sovereign of the country. Saddened and confused I escaped to the deck, and found myself somehow enrolled in the crew. The prospect was unlike the accounts given in the cabin. There was no sun; we had but a faint starlight, and there were occasionally glimpses of land and of what might be lights on shore, which yet were pronounced by some of the crew to be mere illusions. They held that the best thing to be done was to let the ship drive as she would, without trying to keep her on what was understood to be her course. For the strangest thing on that strange ship was the fact that there was such a course. Many theories were offered about this, none quite satisfactory; but it was understood that the ship was to be steered due north. The best and bravest and wisest of the crew would dare the most terrible dangers, even, from their comrades, to keep her on her course. Putting these things together, and noting that the ship was obviously framed and equipped for the voyage, I could not help feeling that there was a port somewhere, though I doubted the wisdom of those who professed to know all about it. I resolved to do my duty, in the hope that it would turn out to have been my duty, and I then felt that there was something bracing in the mystery by which we were surrounded, and that, at all events, ignorance honestly admitted and courageously faced, and rough duty vigorously done, was far better than the sham knowledge and the bitter quarrels of the sickly cabin and glaring lamplight from which I had escaped. Was there ever a nobler parable more nobly expressed? It may well end the last page of the last chapter of The Adventure of Living. Academy, The, 182 Adams, John, 72 Advocate journalism, 319-320 Ainger, Canon, 18, 22 Alps, 482-483 America, iv, 313 American Civil War, 90-92, 444-446 American journalists, 326-342 Americans, 326 Anonymity, 320-322 Antwerp, Siege of, 64 Arnold, Dr., 489 Arnold, Matthew, 283-285 Arnold, Willie, 284, 491 Arthurian legend, 98-100 Asia and Europe, 231 Asquith, Herbert, 12, 17, 328-329, 334, 452, 453, 454 Aubers Ridge, 349 Autobiography, 27-28 BAGEHOT, WALTER, 184-186Bailleul, 344 Balfour, Lord, 401, 407 Barbellion's diary, 4 Barnes, Rev. William, 19-22 Bazaine, Marshal, 99, 101-102 Beaconsfield, Lord, 256, 387 Beautiful human beings, 478-481 Bedford, Duke of, 250 Beeching, Dean, 171-175, 200-204 Beggar's Opera, The, 182 Bell, Mr. Edward Price, 333 Berlioz, 80 Blenheim, 113 Brown, Mr. Curtis, 333 Browne, Sir Thomas, 3, 105, 481 Browning, Robert, 25, 285-289 Browning, imitation of, 132-133 Buckmaster, Lord, 336, 337 Bullen, F.T., 213-215 Buller, Charles, 48 Burke, 48,70,71 Byron, Admiral, 493 Byron, Lord, 124,254, 266,492-493 CAIRO, iv Callimachus, 47-48 Camelot, 99 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry,305 Campion, Thomas, 62-63 Capes, Bernard, 221 Carlyle, 48-49 Caste, 240-241 Cat, Spectator, 22, 24 Chamberlain, Mrs., 385-386 Chamberlain, Austen, 386 Chamberlain, Miss Beatrice, 389 Chamberlain, Joseph, 380-389,397-398 Chamberlain, Neville, 380 Chamois, 481-482 Charles I., 492 Cheap cottages, 402 Chicago riots, 418 Cicero, 157 Classics, 153, 161, 476 City Companies, 388-389 Civil War, 65 Clive, 66-70 Clough's Amours de Voyage, 86 Colvin, Mr. Ian, 228 Conversations and Journals in Egypt,280-281 Conversations with the Statesmen of the Third Empire, 277 Crabbe, 125 Cromer, Lord, 159, 308, 365-380,394,409 Cross, Sir Richard, 59 Curtis, Byron, 191-192 Damascus, iii Death, 58 De La Mare, Mr. Walter, 215-219 Delane, 313 Democracy, 425-433 Devonshire, Duke of, 11, 397-409 Devonshire, Elizabeth, Duchess of 272 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of, 272 Dibdin, 364 Dicey, E. and A., 182-183 "Dickybush," 345 Dictionary of National Biography, 196 Digitalis, 235 Donne and William Strachey, 61 Dream of my son's death, 88-89 Dream, Mr. Justice Stephen's, 495-496 Economics, 163-167 Economist, The, 183-184 Edinburgh Review, 194 Ely, Lady, 183-190 |
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