For luckily he had other resources to fall back upon, when affairs looked melancholy. He was able to take things philosophically because he was detached; and he was detached partly because politics were never to him the be all and the end all of existence. Though he had thrown himself with such surprising energy into his work, his character was not so far changed as to make him forgo his old enjoyments. He still read enormously. At the height of the disturbances of 1831 he contrived to find time to study the subject of the Druids and to explore the obscurer bypaths of Elizabethan dramatic literature—Heywood’s Apology for Actors and Rumbold’s Collection of Stage Plays.
He re-read old favourites, too, notably As You Like It. “It is the prettiest play in the world,” he once said. Moreover he liked it because he seems to have felt an affinity with the character of the melancholy Jacques. Into his commonplace book he copied Jacques’ remark after hearing Touchstone talk of Ovid,
“Oh knowledge ill inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched house!”
“A man,” comments Melbourne, “may be master of the ancient and modern languages, and yet his mind and his manners shall not be in the least degree softened or harmonized by discipline and by force and beauty of example. The elegance, grace and feeling which he is continually contemplating, cannot mix with his thoughts or insinuate itself into their expression: but he remains as coarse, as rude and as awkward, and often more so than the illiterate and the ill-instructed.”
Such a passage illustrates typically Melbourne’s attitude to literature. Books appealed to him primarily not for their learning or as a source of artistic pleasure but for the light they threw on experience. Always he relates what he reads to what he himself has observed. For—and here he is unlike most men of affairs—he never lost his interest and his curiosity as to life in general. His mind did not grow so tired and pre-occupied as to stop him questioning and reflecting. Seated in Cabinet, gossiping at a dinner party, he continued to notice and draw his characteristic conclusions. When he was back in his library at South Street he pulled out his commonplace book and jotted these conclusions down. They were varied, according to what aspect of life had stimulated them. Sometimes they arose from his political experience.
“People complain of the instability of human affairs, but in fact the state of man, if fixed and certain, would not be endured.”
Sometimes they are the results of his classical reading.
“Greek and Latin literature is thought so good because so much of it is lost.”
Social life was for him a great stimulus to reflection.
“A well-looking man should dress himself more carefully because his appearance attracts attention to his attire, and if the latter sits ill or be ungraceful it points out and strengthens the contrast: whereas an ill-looking fellow and an ill-made suit appear both of a piece.”
“Wit of all things suffers most by time.”
“Nothing hurts the character or degrades the understanding so much as suffering wit and humour to dominate and hold the first place in discussion . . . the ludicrous is an admirable auxiliary but it should not be depended upon as a principle.”
“Labour is so necessary to the health and vigour of the body, and consequently of the mind, that those who by their wealth are exempted from it as a means of subsistence are yet compelled to seek it as a diversion.”
“Persons who are foolish enough to do that which requires admonition are rarely wise enough to refrain from the practice for which they are admonished.”
His own character was another favourite object of his curious contemplations. He viewed it with an impartial detachment.
“I am very good-tempered if I have my own way; and that is not saying little for myself. For many are just as ill-tempered when their wishes are complied with as when they are thwarted.”
Such modified self-approval, however, as is implied in this saying is rare. The melancholy and sceptical view which Melbourne took of human life in general extended to himself; all the more as with advancing years he grew aware of the incurable nature of his own weaknesses and of the failure of his youthful hopes.
“Misfortunes are often accidents, yet the calamities inflicted on us by the hand of God are very few in proportion to those which come from our own errors.”
“The advantages of youth are those which we prize least and employ most when we possess them: and regret most when we lose them. There is no man who, at an advanced period of his life were he able to choose, would not at once ask for the restoration of the strength and health of his early years.”
“In youth we are anxious to affect the gravity and experience of age, and in age, still more vainly, the spirit and gaiety of youth.”
The best of these entries in Melbourne’s commonplace book are interesting as showing how his circumstances frustrated the full development of his talents. Why, with a mind so penetrating and individual, was he not one of the great aphorists, an English La Rochefoucauld, a nineteenth century Halifax? The answer is surely that he did not write well enough: his mode of expression is as a rule improvised and diffuse. This was not because he lacked a gift for words. The phrases he tossed off in conversation are unforgettably pithy and racy. But he never took trouble to acquire that sustained art which is needed to turn good conversation into good literature. His literary energy had been weakened and dispersed by too much politics and too many parties.
For he kept up his social life too: dined out, went to the club, above all took trouble to satisfy his need for feminine society. The bonnet and shawl, which Greville noticed with such interest in the hall of South Street, indicates that he sometimes took the opportunity to gratify his more agreeable passions. But passion in itself never meant very much to Melbourne. What he required from women was companionship of mind and sentiment; and these he could only find in his own civilized world. During the reform years two new female characters make their appearance in his story. One was not his usual type. Miss Emily Eden, the thirty-five-year-old sister of Lord Auckland, was an aristocratic example of the kind of English lady whose most distinguished representative is Jane Austen; a clever, sensible, delightful spinster, combining a rational belief in orthodox, solid virtue with a zestful worldly-wise interest in her fellows and a sparkling satirical humour. Melbourne used to meet her staying with his sister Lady Cowper at Panshanger, he found her charming company; and she, though she could not bring herself wholly to approve of him, was peculiarly qualified to appreciate his oddness and his wit. Soon they were close friends, meeting often and writing to each other about politics, theological points and the foibles of their acquaintances. Naturally enough, Lady Cowper and others soon began to talk of their marrying. Miss Eden would obviously be better off with a husband and what an excellent wife she would be to Melbourne! At once intelligent, pleasant and good, was she not exactly the woman he had all his life been in need of? Perhaps she was! Perhaps she and Melbourne would both have been happier if they had had the wisdom to marry each other! Alas, love is not the child of wisdom; and neither of them wanted to. Miss Eden was of a cool prudent temperament and had long ago decided that she much preferred staying at home and looking after her brother to running the risks of matrimony. Certainly not with Melbourne: “He bewilders me and frightens me and swears too much,” she said laughingly when she heard of the suggestion. Anyway, she was sure that she was not the sort of woman he could ever feel romantic about. “I stand very low on the list of his loves,” she remarked, “and as for his thinking well of my principles, it would be rather hard if he did not, considering the society he lives in.” These comments show her shrewdness. Cool and rational himself, Melbourne did not look for these qualities in his wife: his heart could only be set on fire by a personality that glowed with the passion and enthusiasm he lacked.
His other new woman friend was not deficient in this respect. In December, 1830, he got a letter from a Mrs. Norton, the grand-daughter of the great Sheridan, asking him, on the strength of his old acquaintance with her family, if he could find a job for her husband. Since he had heard she was an attractive woman, he resolved to answer her letter in person. And one evening he called on her at her house in Storey’s Gate, Westminster. He was ushered up into a minute drawing-room, bright with flowers and muslin curtains and almost filled by a large blue sofa, from which rose to greet him a young woman of glittering beauty—all opulent shoulder and raven’s wing hair, who bending forward a little, looked up at him meltingly from under sweeping lashes and whose blood, as she spoke, mantled delicately under a clear olive skin.
Her conversation was as vivid as her appearance. Her countenance alive with changing and dramatic expressions, and speaking in a softly modulated contralto, she poured forth a flood of words in which ardent opinions and flights of high-flown sentiment were interspersed by flattering attentive pauses and lightened by a free-spoken rollicking Irish humour. Melbourne found her society agreeable enough to make him want very much to see her again. Accordingly he set about getting Mr. Norton made a police court magistrate. Soon all London was gossiping about this Home Secretary’s new entanglement. Every morning, it was said, Mrs. Norton could be seen waving to Lord Melbourne from her balcony as he walked by to his office; and every evening on his way home, he called in to see her.
She cannot much have minded the gossip. Caroline Norton was a natural prima donna, born it would seem to move through life under a spotlight of publicity. She had in a high degree the characteristics of her type; was vital, warm-hearted, impulsive, temperamental, egotistic and not quite a lady. It would have been a wonder if she had been, considering her history. At twenty-two years old she had already seen a remarkable amount of the seamy side of human existence. The Sheridan family hovered on the fringes of society, showy and impoverished, and surrounded always by a faint aura of scandal. For three generations they had set the world talking of their brilliance, their debts and their elopements. Mrs. Sheridan, worried to death about the future of her penurious daughters—there were three of them all beautiful—had married them off as quickly as she could. At the age of nineteen Caroline became the wife of George Norton, the younger brother of Lord Grantley. From the first, the marriage had been a failure. It was not Caroline’s fault. Even her enemies—and she was to have many—have not a word to say for George Norton; a coarse, shifty cad, pathologically mean about money, subject to fits of brutal ill-temper and always talking about the state of his stomach. Within a few weeks of the honeymoon, he had thrown an ink bottle at his wife’s head. He followed this up later by kicking her, setting fire to her writing-table and scalding her with a tea kettle. Caroline was not the woman to take such treatment lying down. On the contrary, she now and again vented her outraged feelings by doing whatever she thought might most annoy him. With some skill; on one occasion, when they had returned squabbling very late from a ball and George Norton flung himself dog-tired into bed, she kept him awake by refusing to join him and instead standing at the window apparently in exalted contemplation of the dawn. For once we can hardly blame him for leaping up and throwing her heavily to the ground. She also retaliated on him by insulting his Scotch family pride, mocking at the dowdy dullness of the Nortons and pointing out their ludicrous inferiority to the radiant Sheridans.
However, she was neither sensitive nor spiritless enough to let her matrimonial troubles obsess her. If for once in a way Norton was in a friendlier humour, she was always ready to respond. For the rest, she turned her mind to other things. This was not difficult for her. Passionately she thirsted for pleasure, achievement, admiration. She also wanted money. George Norton had no fortune to compensate for his lack of other attractions. And since he was incapable of earning much himself, Caroline soon decided that, if they were to live in anything like the style she liked, she it was who must provide the means. Settling in London, she opened her campaign. Her chosen weapon was her pen. With some of her grandfather’s literary gift, she had inherited all his professional facility; that ability to master the tricks of the trade which later enabled her to turn out a well-made lively novel or pour out her feelings in fluent Byronic verse with a competent effectiveness which put her work from the first in quite a different category from that of the lady amateur. Already by 1830, she had with some success published two books of poems and had a play produced at Covent Garden. She also added to her income by writing articles and editing a fashionable magazine.
But writing, though it filled her pocket, did not satisfy her dreams. It was as a woman, a queen of fashion and the salons, that she aspired to shine. What with her looks and her wit, she found it easy. By the time Melbourne got to know her, we find her name in every social record of the day; at dinners, at balls, notably at a masquerade where she dazzled all beholders in the costume of a Greek slave. In fact, her position in society was not as good as it looked to an outsider. Most of the great ladies who were its rulers thought her altogether too flashy and theatrical—Miss Eden, we note with interest, did not take to her—and they never admitted her into the inner circle of their acquaintance. The gentlemen, however, were less particular. “A superb lump of flesh,” said one of them, “looking as if made of precious stones, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires.” When they discovered that her talk was as scintillating as her beauty, they gathered round her.
They also went to her house. The little drawing-room in Storey’s Gate—so conveniently close to the Houses of Parliament—became a centre where the cream of masculine London, statesmen and authors, artists and journalists, distinguished old gentlemen and rising young ones, met to relax and converse and sparkle. Caroline was well able to hold her own with them. Indeed she was not a woman to be trifled with. If interrupted while telling a story, or if anyone dared to raise a laugh at her expense, she was liable to lose her temper. But more often she sat on her sofa making animated contributions to a political or literary discussion: and when discussion lapsed, she would rise to entertain the company with an improvisation on the piano or a humorous song in the Irish brogue.
It was a delightful place for Melbourne to spend his evenings. There, forgetful for a blessed moment of bloodthirsty trade unionists and irascible Cabinet Ministers, he sat observing with amused curiosity the clever young men. Now and again his hostess would bring one up to be introduced and he would say a friendly word to him. “Well now, tell me—what do you want to be?” he asked the youthful Disraeli, flamboyant in satin trousers and ornate black ringlets. “I want to be Prime Minister,” replied Disraeli gravely. Melbourne was taken aback; odd as he realized that the new England was likely to be, he could not conceive of it being so odd as to make such an eventuality at all possible. Genially he tried to warn the queer entertaining young man not to place his ambitions quite so high.
Often there were no young men; and he saw Caroline tête à tête. She also visited him alone at South Street. Soon the relationship was a feature of importance in both their lives. It was natural. Intelligent, ambitious, at sea in a difficult world, Caroline was the sort of woman who always feels drawn to clever and older men. She delighted to learn from Melbourne’s knowledge and civilized wisdom; and she turned to his experience for advice. Soon he had heard the whole story of George Norton’s misdemeanours. These had not ceased with the improvement of his fortunes. He seems to have been one of those men who think that the best way to accept favours without incurring loss of self-respect, is to receive them with a bad grace. He did not cut much of a figure at his wife’s parties: when he did speak, he was truculent and uneasy. In the Spring of 1831 he caused a new trouble by insisting on having his sister to stay for a few months. Miss Augusta Norton was an unpleasing person of eccentric manners who wore her hair cropped short, and dressed in bloomers. Poor Caroline felt her social position too insecure for her to be able to face appearing in public with so unpresentable a companion. She refused to take Miss Norton about with her. Thereupon her brother said that she too must stay at home; otherwise, he declared, he would cut the traces of her carriage. The house rang with rows of ever-growing intensity, until the time came for Miss Norton and her bloomers to take their departure.
Politics too were a source of dispute between husband and wife. Caroline was a Whig; temperament and family tradition alike disposed her to take the progressive adventurous side. So also did the fact that the Norton family was Tory. She threw herself actively into the campaign for reform, talking, writing and canvassing Members of Parliament. Norton stormed at her for publicly acting against his opinions. All these troubles were poured out to Melbourne, who was amused and sympathetic and counselled patience.
Caroline felt the more warmly towards him because she was sorry for him. Lonely, burdened with responsibilities and with no home life of his own, he was not, she soon perceived, as happy as he looked. There was a strongly maternal streak in her emotional nature and she particularly sympathized with his anxieties about Augustus. The doctors had ordered that he should never be left alone for long and Melbourne was never sure whether his attendants obeyed this command when he himself was not there. In the middle of a conversation with her at South Street, he would suddenly become silent and inattentive; she realized he was listening tensely to hear if there was any ominous sound from Augustus’s room. Her impulsive heart welled out in pity.
She also entered into his other difficulties; listened if he was worried about what was happening to Lady Branden and took an interest in his political future. Since with her interest meant action, she also did what she could to help him. She brought him into contact with people who might be useful to him and tried to pick up information he might want to hear; so efficiently that he began to make use of her as a go-between when he wanted to get into unofficial communication with a member of the opposition. She also gave him advice herself. “Don’t dine with Ellice,6 and drink and say Damn Politics!” she writes on one occasion. “It hurts your Government and your reputation.” These were wise words. When her judgment was not clouded by her egotism Caroline Norton was both sharp-eyed and clear-sighted. It did not take her long to grasp the main facts about Melbourne’s character and the English political scene. Indeed she was unusually suited to satisfy his imperative need for a woman in his life. The difference of age did not matter. He had always enjoyed the role of mentor to the young; now more than ever when he was growing older and could drink in from his pupil some of the invigorating freshness of her youth. Caroline also knew just how to amuse him. How entertaining it was when she was away on a visit at a country house to open a letter from her describing gay evenings when “Mrs. Heneage was never out of Lord Edward Thynne’s arms and Lady Augusta Baring never off Mr. Heneage’s knee,” and Lord Edward said something to Caroline at which George Norton took offence so that everyone thought they were going to fight a duel on the spot; or giving a racy account of young Lord Ossulston bursting into her own bedroom in the middle of the night “with his large blue eyes opening and shutting like the wings of a Cashmere butterfly,” and so aflame with dishonourable intentions that it took her some time and all her tact to get rid of him without anybody hearing. In these lively communications Melbourne breathed once more the scandalous delightful atmosphere of that Regency world in which he had grown up.
But there was a more intimate reason why he was drawn to her. She possessed the one quality common to all the women he cared for most in his life; the zestful positiveness of nature, blending spontaneous joy in living with an inability to doubt or hesitate about anything, which was the antidote to his own sad questioning scepticism. It was this partly he had loved in that other Caroline who was his wife. Indeed the two women were not unlike. Caroline Norton was, in every sense of the word, a less uncommon phenomenon. She was not exquisite or elfin or mad. But she also loved the limelight; she also was dynamic and restless; she also was an incurable self-dramatist in the high romantic style. And in her, as in her namesake, these qualities exhilarated Melbourne and made him laugh and touched him.
Did they do more? Did he love her? Not certainly as he had loved Caroline Lamb. He was not young enough for one thing. And moreover with so much that appealed to him, Caroline Norton lacked the untarnished childlike quality that was needed to kindle his heart and his imagination into full flame. And the refinement. “All the Sheridans are a little vulgar,” he said to Queen Victoria some years later, in an unguarded moment. We remember that the Sheridan he knew best was Caroline Norton.
He grew very fond of her though, and there was something of the lover in his feeling. He was too much a man for it to be otherwise. The relationship between them was pitched in a slightly raised emotional key: it had its flirtatious gaiety, its moments of tender sweetness, and its spasms of jealousy. “You, I suppose, will be happy at Panshanger with the virtuous Stanhope and the virgin Eden,” she writes tartly to him. He equally could not help complaining a little when Caroline seemed to be enjoying herself wholeheartedly, away from him. She hastened to reassure him.
“My dear Lord,
Do not be angry with me if I say that it is selfish to be discontented with me for being amused here—you talk of my romping and flirting—and forgetting everything else. I have not forgotten anything. I am sure your name is always on my lips and there is hardly anything they can say or do that does not bring back some of your opinions or expressions. If I could be always with you, if you were with me in any country house you would find that you would seem the one person to talk to. But I cannot be with you always and therefore I amuse myself as I can—or rather I amuse others—for they come and coax me out of my room if I attempt to write there or sit by myself and they will do nothing without me . . . I can assure you I should much rather sit by your sofa in South Street than be Queen of the Revels here. You won’t believe me and yet it is true. God bless you.
Your affectionate,
Caroline.”
The tone of this letter, though light, is not that of a mere sensible sexless friendship.
Yet their relationship remained platonic.7 Nor, in the circumstances, was this so curious as a censorious world may suppose. Caroline had always professed a strict regard for virtue. “Adultery is a crime not a recreation”—thus she had firmly repulsed the attentions of the blue-eyed Lord Ossulston. Moreover she always maintained that it was friendship, not love, she wanted from men. “The saddest moment for me,” she confided to a friend, “is when a man seems uneasy at being left alone with me, when his voice lowers and he draws his chair nearer; I know then that I am about to lose a friend I love and to get a lover I don’t want.”
This remark does not ring absolutely true. In it, Caroline shows herself a little too obviously anxious to appear superior to the petty vanity of commonplace women and also to prove that she was not so fast as the malicious world liked to make out. But there is something in what she said. For all her temperament, she was not the amorous type. Prima donnas dream first of influence and admiration, not of love.
If she was unwilling, Melbourne on his side, was not the man to compel her inclinations. Thirty years older than her and scrupulously honourable and considerate in personal relations, he might well hesitate before involving her in the possibility of a scandal which, with a husband and a reputation like hers, would have meant her certain ruin. There was a streak too of the paternal in his sentiment for one young enough to be his daughter, inconsistent with violent passion: and after all, sympathy of spirit, not sensual satisfaction had always been what he wanted most from the other sex. Now in the cooler calm of his middle age, he was contented to ask no more of fate than pleasant evenings alone with beautiful Caroline in her drawing-room; evenings of lively talk, of easy laughter, of warm confidential intimacy; and caressed deliciously at moments by a light breath of romance.
6 Edward Ellice was a Government Whip in the Grey Administration.
7 Cynical persons have questioned this—not unnaturally in view of the character of the parties concerned. But for once cynicism appears unjustified. Mrs. Norton in a self-justifying pamphlet on English Laws for Women, published in 1854, quotes a letter from Melbourne, written in April, 1836, when her husband’s action against her was pending, in which he tells her she need have no fear since she is innocent. As the context shows this to be a private informal letter in which Melbourne has no need to disguise the truth, this would seem to settle the question. This conclusion is further confirmed by the fact, alluded to on page 31, that at his death Melbourne left a note asking his brother to continue the allowances he made to Lady Branden and Mrs. Norton, and reasserting his innocence in regard to Mrs. Norton.