Early in the nineteenth century a famous lady, whose name, for obvious reasons, I forbear to indicate even by an initial, had inherited great wealth under a will which, to put it mildly, occasioned much surprise.
She shared an opera-box with a certain Lady D---, who loved the flowing wine-cup not wisely, but too well. One night Lady D--- was visibly intoxicated at the opera, and her friend told her that the partnership in the box must cease, as she could not appear again in company so disgraceful. "As you please," said Lady D---. "I may have had a gla.s.s of wine too much; but at any rate I never forged my father"s signature, and then murdered the butler to prevent his telling."
Beau Brummell, the Prince of Dandies and the most insolent of men, was once asked by a lady if be would "take a cup of tea." "Thank you, ma"am," he replied, "I never _take_ anything but physic." "I beg your pardon," replied the hostess, "you also take liberties."
The d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset, born Sheridan, and famous as the Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, was pre-eminent in this agreeable art of swift response. One day she called at a shop for some article which she had purchased the day before, and which had not been sent home. The order could not be traced. The proprietor of the establishment inquired, with great concern, "May I ask who took your Grace"s order? Was it a young gentleman with fair hair?" "No; it was an elderly n.o.bleman with a bald head."
The celebrated Lady Clanricarde, daughter of George Canning, was talking during the Franco-German War of 1870 to the French Amba.s.sador, who complained bitterly that England had not intervened on behalf of France.
"But, after all," he said, "it was only what we might have expected. We always believed that you were a nation of shopkeepers, and now we know you are." "And we," replied Lady Clanricarde, "always believed that you were a nation of soldiers, and now we know you are not"--a repartee worthy to rank with Queen Mary"s reply to Lady Lochleven about the sacramental character of marriage, in the third volume of _The Abbot_.
A young lady, who had just been appointed a Maid of Honour, was telling some friends with whom she was dining that one of the conditions of the office was that she should not keep a diary of what went on at Court. A cynical man of the world who was present said, "What a tiresome rule! I think I should keep my diary all the same." "Then," replied the young lady, "I am afraid you would not be a maid of _Honour_."
In the famous society of old Holland House a conspicuous and interesting figure was Henry Luttrell. It was known that he must be getting on in life, for he had sat in the Irish Parliament, but his precise age no one knew. At length Lady Holland, whose curiosity was restrained by no considerations of courtesy, asked him point-blank--"Now, Luttrell, we"re all dying to know how old you are. Just tell me." Eyeing his questioner gravely, Luttrell made answer, "It is an odd question; but as you, Lady Holland, ask it, I don"t mind telling you. If I live till next year, I shall be--devilish old."
For the mutual amenities of Melbourne and Alvanley and Rogers and Allen, for Lord Holland"s genial humour, and for Lady Holland"s indiscriminate insolence, we can refer to Lord Macaulay"s Life and Charles Greville"s Journals, and the enormous ma.s.s of contemporary memoirs. Most of these verbal encounters were fought with all imaginable good-humour, over some social or literary topic; but now and then, when political pa.s.sion was really roused, they took a fiercely personal tone.
Let one instance of elaborate invective suffice. Sir James Mackintosh, who, as the writer of the _Vindiciae Gallicae_, had been the foremost apologist for the French Revolution, fell later under the influence of Burke, and proclaimed the most unmeasured hostility to the Revolution and its authors, their works and ways. Having thus become a vehement champion of law and order, he exclaimed one day that O"Coighley, the priest who negotiated between the Revolutionary parties in Ireland and France, was the basest of mankind. "No, Mackintosh," replied that sound though pedantic old Whig, Dr. Parr; "he might have been much worse. He was an Irishman; he might have been a Scotsman. He was a priest; he might have been a lawyer. He was a rebel; he might have been a renegade."
These severe forms of elaborated sarcasm belong, I think, to a past age.
Lord Beaconsfield was the last man who indulged in them. When the Greville Memoirs--that mine of social information in which I have so often quarried--came out, some one asked Mr. Disraeli, as he then was, if he had read them. He replied, "No. I do not feel attracted to them. I remember the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton." This three-edged compliment has seldom been excelled. In a lighter style, and more accordant with feminine grace, was Lady Morley"s comment on the decaying charms of her famous rival, Lady Jersey--the Zen.o.bia of _Endymion_--of whom some gushing admirer had said that she looked so splendid going to court in her mourning array of black and diamonds--"it was like night." "Yes, my dear; _minuit pa.s.se_."
A masculine a.n.a.logue to this amiable compliment may be cited from the table-talk of Lord Granville--certainly not an unkindly man--to whom the late Mr. Delane had been complaining of the difficulty of finding a suitable wedding-present for a young lady of the house of Rothschild.
"It would be absurd to give a Rothschild a costly gift. I should like to find something not intrinsically valuable, but interesting because it is rare." "Nothing easier, my dear fellow; send her a lock of your hair."
When a remote cousin of Lord Henniker was elected to the Head Mastership of Rossall, a disappointed compet.i.tor said that it was a case of [Greek: eneka tou kuriou]; but a Greek joke is scarcely fair play.
When the _New Review_ was started, its accomplished Editor designed it to be an inexpensive copy of the _Nineteenth Century_. It was to cost only sixpence, and was to be written by bearers of famous names--those of the British aristocracy for choice. He was complaining in society of the difficulty of finding a suitable t.i.tle, when a vivacious lady said, "We have got _Cornhill_, and _Ludgate_, and _Strand_--why not call yours _Cheapside_?"
Oxford has always been a nursing-mother of polished satirists. Of a small sprig of aristocracy, who was an undergraduate in my time, it was said by a friend that he was like Euclid"s definition of a point: he had no parts and no magnitude, but had position. In previous chapters I have quoted the late Master of Balliol and Lord Sherbrooke. Professor Thorold Rogers excelled in a Shandean vein. Lord Bowen is immortalized by his emendation to the Judge"s address to the Queen, which had contained the Heep-like sentence--"Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness for the great office to which we have been called." "Wouldn"t it be better to say, "Conscious as we are of one another"s unworthiness"?" Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, the wittiest, most learned, and most genial of Irishmen, said of a well-known man of science--"His only fault is that he sometimes forgets that he is the Editor, not the Author, of Nature."
A great lawyer who is now a great judge, and has, with good reason, the very highest opinion of himself, stood as a Liberal at the General Election of 1880. His Tory opponents set on foot a rumour that he was an Atheist, and when Henry Smith heard it he said, "Now, that"s really too bad, for ---- is a man who reluctantly acknowledges the existence of a _Superior Being_."
At dinner at Balliol the Master"s guests were discussing the careers of two Balliol men, the one of whom had just been made a judge and the other a bishop. "Oh," said Henry Smith, "I think the bishop is the greater man. A judge, at the most, can only say, "You be hanged," but a bishop can say, "You be d---d."" "Yes," twittered the Master; "but if the judge says, "You be hanged," you _are_ hanged."
Henry Smith, though a delightful companion, was a very unsatisfactory politician--nominally, indeed, a Liberal, but full of qualifications and exceptions. When Mr. Gathorne Hardy was raised to the peerage at the crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and thereby vacated his seat for the University of Oxford, Henry Smith came forward as a candidate in the Liberal interest; but his language about the great controversy of the moment was so lukewarm that Professor Freeman said that, instead of sitting for Oxford in the House of Commons, he ought to represent Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia Minor.
Of Dr. Haig-Brown it is reported that, when Head Master of Charterhouse, he was toasted by the Mayor of G.o.dalming as a man who knew how to combine the _fort.i.ter in re_ with the _suav[=i]ter in modo_. In replying to the toast he said, "I am really overwhelmed not only by the quality, but by the _quant.i.ty_ of his Worship"s eulogium."
It has been a matter of frequent remark that, considering what an immense proportion of parliamentary time has been engrossed during the last seventeen years by Irish speeches, we have heard so little Irish humour, whether conscious or unconscious--whether jokes or "bulls." An admirably vigorous simile was used by the late Mr. O"Sullivan, when he complained that the whisky supplied at the bar was like "a torchlight procession marching down your throat;" but of Irish bulls in Parliament I have only heard one--proceeding, if my memory serves me, from Mr. T.
Healy: "As long as the voice of Irish suffering is dumb, the ear of English compa.s.sion is deaf to it." One I read in the columns of the _Irish Times_: "The key of the Irish difficulty is to be found in the _empty_ pocket of the landlord." An excellent confusion of metaphors was uttered by one of the members for the Princ.i.p.ality in the debate on the Welsh Church Bill, in indignant protest against the allegation that the majority of Welshmen now belonged to the Established Church. He said, "It is a lie, sir; and it is high time that we nailed this lie to the mast." But a confusion of metaphors is not a bull.
Among tellers of Irish stories, Lord Morris is supreme; one of his best depicts two Irish officials of the good old times discussing, in all the confidence of their after-dinner claret, the principles on which they bestowed their patronage Said the first, "Well, I don"t mind admitting that, _caeteris paribus_, I prefer my own relations." "My dear boy,"
replied his boon companion, "_caeteris paribus_ be d----d." The cleverest thing that I have lately heard was from a young lady, who is an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman.
Their irreverent compatriot has nicknamed them
"The storied Erne and animated bust."
Frances Countess Waldegrave, who had previously been married three times, took as her fourth husband an Irishman, Mr. Chichester Fortescue, who was shortly afterwards made Chief Secretary. The first night that Lady Waldegrave and Mr. Fortescue appeared at the theatre in Dublin, a wag in the gallery called out, "Which of the four do you like best, my lady?" Instantaneously from the Chief Secretary"s box came the adroit reply: "Why, the Irishman, of course ""
The late Lord Coleridge was once speaking in the House of Commons in support of Women"s Rights. One of his main arguments as that there was no essential difference between the masculine and the feminine intellect. For example, he said, some of the most valuable qualities of what is called the judicial genius--sensibility, quickness, delicacy--are peculiarly feminine. In reply, Serjeant Dowse said: "The argument of the hon. and learned Member, compendiously stated, amounts to this--because some judges are old women, therefore all old women are fit to be judges."
To my friend Mr. Julian Sturgis, himself one of the happiest of phrase-makers, I am indebted for the following gems from America.
Mr. Evarts, formerly Secretary of State, showed an English friend the place where Washington was said to have thrown a dollar across the Potomac. The English friend expressed surprise; "but," said Mr. Evarts, "you must remember that a dollar went further in those days." A Senator met Mr. Evarts next day, and said that he had been amused by his jest.
"But," said Mr. Evarts, "I met a mere journalist just afterwards who said, "Oh, Mr. Evarts, you should have said that it was a small matter to throw a dollar across the Potomac for a man who had chucked a sovereign across the Atlantic."" Mr. Evarts, weary of making many jokes, would invent a journalist or other man and tell a story as his. It was he who, on a kindly busybody expressing surprise at his daring to drink so many different wines at dinner, said that it was only the indifferent wines of which he was afraid.
It was Mr. Motley who said in Boston--"Give me the luxuries of life, and I care not who has the necessaries."
Mr. Tom Appleton, famous for many witty sayings (among them the well-known "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris"), heard some grave city fathers debating what could be done to mitigate the cruel east wind at an exposed corner of a certain street in Boston. He suggested that they should tether a shorn lamb there.
A witty Bostonian going to dine with a lady was met by her with a face of apology. "I could not get another man," she said; "and we are four women, and you will have to take us all in to dinner." "Fore-warned is four-armed," said he with a bow.
This gentleman was in a hotel in Boston when the law forbidding the sale of liquor was in force. "What would you say," said an angry Bostonian, "if a man from St. Louis, where they have freedom, were to come in and ask you where he could get a drink?" Now it was known that spirits could be clandestinely bought in a room under the roof, and the wit pointing upwards replied, "I should say, "Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel.""
Madame Apponyi was in London during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867, and, like all foreigners and not a few Englishmen, was much perplexed by the "Compound Householder," who figured so largely in the discussion. Hayward explained that he was the Masculine of the Femme Incomprise.
One of the best repartees ever made, because the briefest and the justest, was made by "the gorgeous Lady Blessington" to Napoleon III.
When Prince Louis Napoleon was living in impecunious exile in London he had been a constant guest at Lady Blessington"s hospitable and brilliant but Bohemian house. And she, when visiting Paris after the _coup d"etat_ naturally expected to receive at the Tuileries some return for the unbounded hospitalities of Gore House. Weeks pa.s.sed, no invitation arrived, and the Imperial Court took no notice of Lady Blessington"s presence. At length she encountered the Emperor at a great reception. As he pa.s.sed through the bowing and curtsying crowd, the Emperor caught sight of his former hostess. "Ah, Miladi Blessington! Restez-vous longtemps a Paris?" "Et vous, Sire?" History does not record the usurper"s reply.
Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869, lived at a beautiful villa near Torquay, and an enthusiastic lady who visited him there burst into dithyrambics and cried, "What a lovely spot this is, Bishop! It is so Swiss." "Yes, ma"am," blandly replied old Harry of Exeter, "it is very Swiss; only there is no sea in Switzerland, and there are no mountains here." To one of his clergy desiring to renew a lease of some episcopal property, the Bishop named a preposterous sum as the fine on renewal. The poor parson, consenting with reluctance, said, "Well, I suppose it is better than endangering the lease, but certainly your lordship has got the lion"s share." "But, my dear sir, I am sure you would not wish me to have that of the other creature."
Still, after all, for a bishop to score off a clergyman is an inglorious victory; it is like the triumph of a magistrate over a prisoner or of a don over an undergraduate. Bishop Wilberforce, whose powers of repartee were among his most conspicuous gifts, was always ready to use them where retaliation was possible--not in the safe enclosure of the episcopal study, but on the open battlefield of the platform and the House of Lords. At the great meeting in St. James"s Hall in the summer of 1868 to protest against the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, some Orange enthusiast, in the hope of disturbing the Bishop, kept interrupting his honeyed eloquence with inopportune shouts of "Speak up, my lord." "I am already speaking up," replied the Bishop in his most dulcet tone; "I always speak up; and I decline to speak down to the level of the ill-mannered person in the gallery." Every one whose memory runs back thirty years will recall the Homeric encounters between the Bishop and Lord Chancellor Westbury in the House of Lords, and will remember the melancholy circ.u.mstances under which Lord Westbury had to resign his office. When he was leaving the Royal Closet after surrendering the Great Seal into the Queen"s hands, Lord Westbury met the Bishop, who was going in to the Queen. It was a painful encounter, and in reminding the Bishop of the occurrence when next they met, Westbury said, "I felt inclined to say, "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?"" The Bishop in relating this used to say, "I never in my life was so tempted as to finish the quotation, and say, "Yea, I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity." But by a great effort I kept it down, and said, "Does your lordship remember the end of the quotation?"" The Bishop, who enjoyed a laugh against himself, used to say that he had once been effectually scored off by one of his clergy whom he had rebuked for his addiction to fox-hunting. The Bishop urged that it had a worldly appearance. The clergyman replied that it was not a bit more worldly than a ball at Blenheim Palace at which the Bishop had been present. The Bishop explained that he was staying in the house, but was never within three rooms of the dancing. "Oh, if it comes to that," replied the clergyman, "I never am within three fields of the hounds."
One of the best replies--it is scarcely a repartee--traditionally reported at Oxford was made by the great Saint of the Tractarian Movement, the Rev. Charles Marriott. A brother-Fellow of Oriel had behaved rather outrageously at dinner overnight, and coming out of chapel next morning, essayed to apologize to Marriott: "My friend, I"m afraid I made rather a fool of myself last night." "My dear fellow, I a.s.sure you I observed nothing unusual."
In a former chapter about the Art of Conversation I referred to the singular readiness which characterized Lord Sherbrooke"s talk. A good instance of it was his reply to the strenuous advocate of modern studies, who, presuming on Sherbrooke"s sympathy, said, "I have the greatest contempt for Aristotle." "But not that contempt which familiarity breeds, I should imagine," was Sherbrooke"s mild rejoinder.
"I have got a box at the Lyceum to-night," I once heard a lady say, "and a place to spare. Lord Sherbrooke, will you come? If you are engaged, I must take the Bishop of Gibraltar." "Oh, that"s no good. Gibraltar can never be taken."
In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the College, made the speech of the evening. His theme was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians. Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research. Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable. "For example," he said, "we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred. Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King. It seems to me that the New Historians prove too much--indeed, they prove the very point which they contest. If the lands had belonged to the King, he would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College."
Lord Beaconsfield"s excellence in conversation lay rather in studied epigrams than in impromptu repartees. But in his old electioneering contests he used sometimes to make very happy hits. When he came forward, a young, penniless, unknown c.o.xcomb, to contest High Wycombe against the dominating Whiggery of the Greys and the Carringtons, some one in the crowd shouted, "We know all about Colonel Grey; but pray what do you stand on?" "I stand on my head," was the prompt reply, to which Mr. Gladstone always rendered unstinted admiration. At Aylesbury the Radical leader had been a man of notoriously profligate life, and when Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before.
"What do you say to that, sir?" "I say that we all sow our wild oats, and no one knows the meaning of that phrase better than you, Mr. ----."
A member of the diplomatic service at Rome in the old days of the Temporal Power had the honour of an interview with Pio Nono. The Pope graciously offered him a cigar--"I am told you will find this very fine." The Englishman made that stupidest of all answers, "Thank your Holiness, but I have no vices." "This isn"t a vice; if it was you would have it." Another repartee from the Vatican reached me a few years ago, when the German Emperor paid his visit to Leo XIII. Count Herbert Bismarck was in attendance on his Imperial master, and when they reached the door of the Pope"s audience-chamber the Emperor pa.s.sed in, and the Count tried to follow. A gentleman of the Papal Court motioned him to stand back, as there must be no third person at the interview between the Pope and the Emperor. "I am Count Herbert Bismarck," shouted the German, as he struggled to follow his master. "That," replied the Roman, with calm dignity, "may account for, but it does not excuse, your conduct."
But, after all these "fash"nable fax and polite annygoats," as Thackeray would have called them, after all these engaging courtesies of kings and prelates and great ladies, I think that the honours in the way of repartee rest with the little Harrow boy who was shouting himself hoa.r.s.e in the jubilation of victory after an Eton and Harrow match at Lord"s in which Harrow had it hollow. To him an Eton boy, of corresponding years, severely observed, "Well, you Harrow fellows needn"t be so beastly c.o.c.ky. When you wanted a Head Master you had to come to Eton to get one." The small Harrovian was dumfounded for a moment, and then, pulling himself together for a final effort of deadly sarcasm, exclaimed, "Well, at any rate, no one can say that we ever produced a Mr. Gladstone."
XX.
t.i.tLES.
The List of Honours, usually published on Her Majesty"s Birthday, is this year[23] reserved till the Jubilee Day, and to sanguine aspirants I would say, in Mrs. Gamp"s immortal words, "Seek not to protic.i.p.ate."
Such a list always contains food for the reflective mind, and some of the thoughts which it suggests may even lie too deep for tears. Why is my namesake picked out for knighthood, while I remain hidden in my native obscurity? Why is my rival made a C.B., while I "go forth Companionless" to meet the chances and the vexations of another year?
But there is balm in Gilead. If I have fared badly, my friends have done little better. Like Mr. Squeers, when Bolder"s father was two pound ten short, they have had their disappointments to contend against. A., who was so confident of a peerage, is fobbed off with a baronetcy; and B., whose labours for the Primrose League ent.i.tled him to expect the Bath, finds himself grouped with the Queen"s footmen in the Royal Victorian Order. As, when Sir Robert Peel declined to form a Government in 1839, "twenty gentlemen who had not been appointed Under Secretaries for State moaned over the martyrdom of young ambition," so during the first fortnight of 1897 at least that number of middle-aged self-seekers came to the regretful conclusion that Lord Salisbury was not sufficiently a man of the world for his present position, and inwardly asked why a judge or a surgeon should be preferred before a company-promoter or a party hack. And, while feeling is thus fermenting at the base of the social edifice, things are not really tranquil at the summit.
It is not long since the chief of the princely House of Duff was raised to the first order of the peerage, and one or two opulent earls, encouraged by his example, are understood to be looking upward. Every const.i.tutional Briton, whatever his political creed, has in his heart of hearts a wholesome reverence for a dukedom. Lord Beaconsfield, who understood these little traits of our national character even more perfectly than Thackeray, says of his favourite St. Aldegonde (who was heir to the richest dukedom in the kingdom) that "he held extreme opinions, especially on political affairs, being a Republican of the reddest dye. He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders of men except dukes, who were a necessity." That is a delicious touch.
St. Aldegonde, whatever his political aberrations, "voiced" the universal sentiment of his less fortunate fellow-citizens; nor can the most soaring ambition of the British Matron desire a n.o.bler epitaph than that of the lady immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby:--
"She drank prussic acid without any water, And died like a Duke-and-a-d.u.c.h.ess"s daughter."