For Cambridge, where he went at seventeen, he could never feel the same affection. He was even less industrious there than at Eton. Rich young men always find it hard to work at a university, especially if they have the Lamb gift for pleasure. It is only the poor-spirited or the morbidly conscientious, who can go on doing lessons, in the flush of their first appearance in the world as mature young men, able to do whatever they please. William did not even trouble to follow the regular course; along with the rest of the gilded youth at Cambridge he spent the next four years revelling, talking and making friends; sauntering the streets by day, and sitting up over the port at night. However, he was too active-minded to live without any intellectual occupation. He read a good deal in a desultory kind of way. And it is likely that he profited more by so doing than if he had kept himself to the narrow path of academic study. His strong young brain, rejoicing in its own activity, ranged over an enormous variety of subjects. Mathematics, indeed, he never cared for. They were too inhuman a science. But he read widely in the classics, ancient and modern, he devoured history books, he delved into the mysterious problems of ethical philosophy. With this intellectual development came a growing interest in public affairs. His realism had not yet learnt to apply itself to subjects outside his own experience; like other clever young men he was attracted to the idealistic, the daring, and the impractical; sentiments that roused a glow in the generous breast; opinions calculated to send a shiver down the spine of the timid and the conventional. His hero was Fox, his party the extreme Whigs. With a gloomy satisfaction he prophesied the ruin of his country under the sway of the contemptible Tories. “We have been for a long time the first nation in Europe,” he remarked to his mother, “We have now lost our sovereignty and shall shortly be the last.” As far as he could see the best thing for England would be to be defeated by the French under the enlightened Buonaparte. How dreadful it was to think that our arms might drive him out of Egypt. “I was in despair at hearing of the intentions of the French to evacuate Egypt. I was in hopes they would have been able to maintain themselves there in spite of Canning’s wit and Sir Sidney’s valour.” Canning, now at the height of his polemical brilliance, was castigating his opponents in the Anti-Jacobin. But William could not think much of his intelligence. He supported the Tories, he must be a fool.
The more theoretical aspect of William’s political ideas found expression in an oration he composed in competition for the university declamation prize. The subject was the progressive improvement of mankind. William treated it in a lofty vein. “Crime is a curse,” so runs his peroration, “only to the period in which it is successful; but virtue, whether fortunate or otherwise, blesses not only its own age but remotest posterity.” These edifying reflections met with a most gratifying reception. Not only did William win the prize, but the great Fox himself selected the passage in question to quote in the House of Commons. Nor was this William’s only public success. He wrote poetry as well as reading it; translations from the classics, and occasional verses, in the orthodox Augustan manner, full of classical allusions and noble commonplaces. In 1798 he blossomed forth in print as a satirist, crossing swords with Canning in a reply to some verses in the Anti-Jacobin. His poem was passed round the clubs and drawing-rooms of the Metropolis, to the general approbation. It was not very good. But, then as now, London society was disposed to look kindly on the literary efforts of handsome young men of good family.
In addition to applauding his writing, they asked him out to dinner. His intellectual debut coincided with his social: in the vacations he made his first entry into the beau monde as a grown-up man. No one could have done it in more advantageous circumstances. Born in the centre of its most entertaining circle, he found himself, without any effort on his part, elected to its best clubs, invited to its most brilliant parties. And he had the talents to make the most of his advantages. It was true that he did not always make a good first impression. He had some of the conceit of his time of life, and more of its shyness. Even Lady Melbourne’s training had not been able to free him from that self-consciousness which afflicts clever young men at nineteen years old: the thought of making a fool of himself in public haunted him. To escape it, he assumed an exaggeration of the family manner, adopted a contemptuous pose, as of one who disdained to compete in a world which he despised. Introduced to someone with whom he felt himself likely to be out of sympathy, an Anti-Jacobin, for instance, he turned away; now and again he would try and overcome his nervousness by asserting, unnecessarily loudly, some outrageous paradox. But all this was superficial. A few minutes talk revealed that he was in reality unassuming, appreciative, and as agreeable as Lady Melbourne herself. Within a short time he was one of the most fashionable young men in London.
Indeed, Whig society was his spiritual home; its order of life, at once leisurely and lively, suited him down to the ground. He rose late in the morning, breakfasted largely, strolled up St. James’s Street, to loiter for an hour or two in the window of his Club, hearing the news, surveying the world. Later might come a ride in the park or an afternoon call; the evening was the time for dinner parties followed by the opera, the theatre, or a ball; then back to the Club for some supper till four or five o’clock struck, and it was time to go to bed. William enjoyed it all. Music and dancing in themselves did not please him; they were not the fashion among smart young men of the day. But he was happy at any sort of social gathering. And dinner parties he found perfectly delightful: succulent sumptuous feasts twelve courses long, then the pleasant hour with the gentlemen over the wine, whence they emerged to join the ladies about midnight. Several of the men, he noticed, were always drunk; but this did not displease him. “It tended to increase the gaiety of society,” he said, “it produced diversity.” After the session came the social life of the country; week long visits to Petworth or Bowood, where the mornings were spent reading, while the ladies sketched or played the harp; followed by sporting afternoons, and evenings when, after another enormous meal, the party sat up till three in the morning, playing cards, writing verses, organizing theatricals. The theatricals were a trial to William’s self-consciousness. At Inverary he consented to take the part of Leander in a farce, but could not bring himself to appear publicly in the wreath of roses and bunches of cherry-coloured ribbon which the producer thought the correct costume for his role. Into the other amusements he entered with unalloyed enthusiasm. We find him editing a comic paper during a visit, contributing stanzas to Brummell’s album; and he was ready to talk to anyone. With such accomplishments to recommend him he soon got on friendly terms with the most agreeable conversationalists of the day; Fox, Sheridan, Canning—whom he found very pleasant on closer acquaintance—Rogers, Monk Lewis, Tom Moore.
Mainly his social life centred round four houses, Carlton House, Holland House, Devonshire House and his own home. It was not the Piccadilly home of his childhood. In 1789 the Duke of York had taken a fancy to that: and Lady Melbourne, always ready to oblige influential persons, had agreed to exchange it for the Duke’s own residence in Whitehall, that grey spreading pile of rusticated stone which is now the Scottish Office. However, re-decorated by its new mistress, the second Melbourne House was just as splendid as the first; and life there was equally brilliant, disorderly, and in the thick of things. Daily the gentlemen dropped in on their way to and from the House of Commons; nightly the courtyard re-echoed with the coach wheels that brought to dinner the Duchess of Devonshire, or the Prince of Wales. For a year or two there had been a coldness between the Prince and the Melbournes. He expected his friends to take his part in every chop and change of his endless quarrels. And when, after Mrs. Fitzherbert fell from favour, he discovered that Lady Melbourne continued to visit her he broke with her entirely. But now in 1798 Mrs. Fitzherbert was forgiven and the Prince back at Melbourne House, in wilder spirits than ever, and eating on a scale which even William, accustomed though he was to the appetites of the day, found amazing. The Prince took a fancy to him, that was why William went so much to Carlton House. Few weeks passed that he did not walk across the Mall to dine within its meretricious walls; where he sat, an observant young man, listening to his royal host as, hour by hour, he poured forth the kaleidoscopic effusions of his preposterous egotism; now abusing his parents, now bragging of his amorous conquests, now courting the applause of the company by his vivid mimicry of Mr. Pitt or Lord North, now soliciting their sympathy by sentimental laments on the unexampled misery of his lot. It was very entertaining; it was also instructive. At Carlton House William got his first lesson in an art that was to be the instrument of his greatest success in later life, the art of getting on with royal personages. Lady Melbourne carried this instruction a step farther; she showed him how to manage them for their good. One evening, when the Prince was dining at Melbourne House, news was brought that an attack had been made on the life of George III, while he was watching a play at Drury Lane. The Prince, to whom the misfortunes of his parents were agreeable rather than otherwise, was preparing to go calmly on with his dinner. But Lady Melbourne perceived at once that he ought to go and enquire. It would make him popular, it would do him good with the King; it was, in any case, the correct thing to do. He resisted, she coaxed and ordered the carriage. At last sulkily he went off. But before midnight he had come back to thank her for her advice. Certainly for William, to stay at home was to see the world: and to get an education in public life thrown in.
Holland House and Devonshire House were educative too; and in a more delightful wisdom. They represented, in their different ways, the apex of Whig civilization. In them all that made it memorable found its fullest expression. Holland House showed its masculine and intellectual side. Lady Holland was a divorced woman: she had eloped with Lord Holland from her first husband, Sir Godfrey Webster. With the consequence that, though the easy-going circle of Lady Melbourne and the Duchess of Devonshire were on terms with her, she was never received by the more rigid ladies; and the society that visited her was predominantly male. Every night of the week gentlemen used to drive down through the green fields of Kensington to dine and sleep at Holland House. Staying there had its drawbacks. It could be agonizingly cold for one thing; and the dinner table was always overcrowded, so that people ate as best they could, with arms glued to their sides. Moreover Lady Holland herself was in many respects a tiresome woman, capricious, domineering and extremely egotistic; given to a hundred deliberately cultivated fads, with which she expected everyone to fall in. She shifted her guests’ places in the middle of a meal, she turned people out of the room for using scent, she interrupted, she had hysterics at a clap of thunder, suddenly she would summon an embarrassed stranger to her sitting-room in order that he might entertain her with conversation, while her page, Edgar, kneeling before her and with hands thrust beneath her skirts, rubbed her legs to alleviate rheumatism. Yet she was a good hostess; talked cleverly in a charmless combative style, and had the dominating vitality that keeps a party alive. It was Lord Holland, though, who attracted people to the house. With the bushy black brows, the clumsy figure of his uncle, Charles Fox—“in a white waistcoat,” said a contemporary, “Lord Holland looks like a turbot standing on its tail”—he possessed also his culture, his bonhomie, his exquisite amenity of address. Perhaps he was a little detached—one needed to be, to live with Lady Holland—but this only seemed still further to emphasize the unvarying infectious good humour which spread like sunshine over every gathering of which he was host. Certainly life at Holland House had an extraordinary charm; there was nothing like it in Europe, people said. It was partly Lord Holland, partly the setting, the stately, red-brick, Jacobean mansion, with its carven painted rooms, mellow with historical memories; it was chiefly the conversation. Lady Holland complained that only men visited her; she complained of most things. But in fact it was this circumstance which gave the talk at her house its unique quality. It imbued it with that mental vigour found as a rule only in exclusively male society. The tone was free and sceptical, the subject matter rational and cultivated. There of an evening in the long library, soft in winter with candle shine, in summer fresh with the garden air blowing in through the open windows, would flow forth, concentrated and easy as it could never be in the rush of London life, the strength, the urbanity and the amplitude of Whig culture; passing from politics to history, from history to literature, Madame de Sévigné’s letters, the controversies of the early Church, the character of Buonaparte; and then Lord Holland would set everyone laughing with an imitation of Lord Chatham—he was an even better mimic than the Prince of Wales—and then someone would raise a point of scholarship, and taking a folio from the shelves would verify a reference. The company was always intellectually distinguished. There were a few habitués, Mr. Allen, the librarian, erudite and positive, his eyes always bright behind his spectacles, to argue on behalf of atheism; Sydney Smith, most humane of clergymen, crackling away like a genial bonfire of jokes and good sense and uproarious laughter; the sardonic Rogers; the epigrammatic Luttrell. But most of the remarkable men of the age came there at one time or another, statesmen, writers, artists, distinguished foreigners. Lord and Lady Holland were always on the look out for new talent; and William’s reputation soon got him an invitation. “William Lamb, a rising young genius, dines here for the first time to-day,” notes Lady Holland in her diary, 1799. He made his usual impression; “pleasant though supercilious”; and later, “clever and agreeable and will improve when he gets over his love of singularity”. He, for his part, appreciated them. In Holland House he discovered an intellectual life deeper than could be found at home. From this time on, whenever he came to London, he found time to pay it a visit. In the course of years he became a regular habitué whose association was only to be ended by death.
All the same it is to be doubted if he did not enjoy Devonshire House more. Here flowered the feminine aspect of Whiggism. The Duke, a stiff, shy man, preferred to follow his own way, aloof from others; and the social life of his home revolved round the Duchess, her sister Lady Bessborough, and her friend Lady Elizabeth Foster. Each, in her way, was conspicuously charming; the Duchess in particular, lovely, exuberant, her whole personality flushed with a glowing sweetness which no heart could resist, seemed born to get and to give pleasure. From the time she was eighteen, the great house gazing across its courtyard at Green Park was the scene of all that was gayest and most brilliant in London society. Life there had none of the ordered rationality of Holland House. It passed in a dazzling, haphazard confusion of routs, balls, card parties, hurried letter-writings, fitful hours of talk and reading. But in its own way it was also unique. Rare indeed it is to find a real palace inhabited by a real princess, a position of romantic wealth and splendour, filled by figures as full of glamour as itself. Moreover in Devonshire House, the graces were cultivated in the highest perfection. Here, in the flesh was the exquisite eighteenth century of Gainsborough, all flowing elegance, and melting glances and shifting silken colour. Its atmosphere was before all things personal. The characteristic conversation of the Devonshire House ladies was “tête-à-tête,” in a secluded boudoir, or murmured in the comer of a sofa amid the movement of a party; it was delightful for its charming gaiety, its intimate sympathy, its quick perception of nuance. Their culture—for they too were cultivated—was of a piece with the rest of them, an affair of enthusiasm and sensibility. They read and wrote poems, they listened to music, they appreciated subtle analyses of emotion and character, La Nouvelle Héloise, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In politics they were all for the ideal, for honour and liberty and enlightenment. Above everything they prized warmth and delicacy of feeling, abhorred cynicism, vulgarity and harshness. People spoke gently in Devonshire House, smiled rather than laughed, expressed disapproval, if they had to, by a hint or an intonation. Their less sensitive acquaintances criticized them as sentimental and insincere; laughed at the gushing terms, interspersed at every turn with French phrases, in which they expressed themselves, their cooing ecstatic Voices, “the Devonshire House drawl.” But the Duchess and her sister, at any rate, were in reality the very reverse of artificial. They seemed affected because they were unselfconscious; their privileged position had always allowed them to express their naturally refined and warm-blooded temperaments with uninhibited freedom. Impulsive, spontaneous, uncontrolled, they followed in everything the mood of the moment, the call of the heart. They danced till dawn, they gambled wildly, they mourned and rejoiced with equal lack of restraint. In them the affections, for friends, for relations, swelled to fever pitch; while into love they flung themselves with a reckless abandon. Love was indeed their vocation, the centre and mainspring of their lives. From earliest youth to the threshold of old age, the ladies of Devonshire House had always an affair of the heart on hand; ranging from light flirtation to the most agonizing drama of passion. For privilege did not save them from suffering. How should it, blown about as they were by every gust of desire, and without the slightest vestige of self-control? The life of feeling does not make for happiness in this rough world. The very basis of Devonshire House life was complicated by it. Lady Elizabeth Foster, a penniless grass widow, living by her wits, and of a more designing character than her friends, had, in addition to being the Duchess’s friend, contrived also to become the Duke’s mistress. And though a vigilant tact enabled them all to get along together without open explosions, they lived at an unceasing tension, rendered still sharper by the vicissitudes of the Duchess’s own hectic amours. At once gorgeous and dishevelled, frivolous and tragic, life at Devonshire House was a continual strain on the spirit; beneath its shining surface seethed always a turmoil of yearning and jealousy, crisis and intrigue, gnawing hope and unavailing despair. All the same the source of its unrest was also the chief secret of its attraction. For it meant that it was quickened by that delicious emotional stir only found in societies whose chief concern is love. It was love that breathed warmth into the social arts in which its inhabitants were so accomplished: love suffused the atmosphere, in which they moved, with a soft enticing shimmer of romantic sentiment and voluptuous grace.
William responded to it at once. His animal nature and his taste for women’s society united to make him amorous: and natural tendency had been encouraged by the tradition of his home. Already, we gather, he had sown some wild oats. Like the other young men of his circle he thought chastity a dangerous state: and he seems early to have taken practical steps to avoid incurring the risks attendant on it. But he never became a regular habitué of the Regency demi-monde as his brothers did. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to get much satisfaction from its boisterous revellings, the showy seductions of its sirens. This was all the more reason he should like Devonshire House. And he did. Beside its civilized femininity even that of Lady Melbourne looked crude: all the poetic and fastidious elements in him sprang to it, as to something he had always been seeking. It was not the Duchess herself so much who attracted him. By the time he was grown up, the wear and tear of her existence had begun to tell on her; she was only the wreck of what she had been, melancholy, abstracted, and with her figure gone. William found her kindly but inattentive. Nor did he succumb to the insinuating allurements of Lady Elizabeth Foster. But he was immediately drawn to Lady Bessborough. It is not to be wondered at. For though her attraction was not so immediately compelling as that of the Duchess in her prime, it was of a rarer and more lasting quality. Alike her enthralling letters and her portrait—with its slanting glance, its amused, pensive mouth, its air of indescribable distinction—proclaim her to have been one of the most enchanting creatures that have ever lived; combining her sister’s overflowing generosity of spirit, and a refinement of feeling, that years of dissipation failed to tarnish, with a vivid, responsive intelligence and an instinctive subtlety of the heart that enabled her to penetrate a friend’s every mood and thought. Alas, no more to her than to the Duchess did her gifts bring happiness. She lacked those colder qualities which carry the Lady Melbournes of this world securely to prosperity. Too soft-hearted, too ungoverned, she could not take a firm line with herself or anyone else. With the result that her existence passed in a series of shattering emotional entanglements, and that she died with her reputation gone, and the dearest wish of her heart unsatisfied. “I must put down what I dare tell nobody,” she noted in later years. “I should be ashamed were it not so ridiculous . . . in my fifty-first year I am courted, followed, flattered and made love to . . . thirty-six years, a pretty long life, I have heard and spoken that language, for seventeen years of it loved almost to idolatry the man who has probably loved me least of all of those that professed to do so—though once I thought otherwise.” Lord Granville, to whom she devoted her life, whose career she had furthered against her own political opinions, and of whose very infidelities she had forced herself to become the sympathetic confidante, had never prized her at her true worth; and in the end had forsaken her to marry her niece. However, this was many years ahead yet; when William got to know her, Lady Bessborough was still light-hearted enough. He was never seriously in love with her: but he paid her marked attention. And London soon recognized him as one of her established train of beaux. He was always supping at her house in Cavendish Square with Sheridan and Lord Holland and the rest of her admirers, or staying at her country villa at Roehampton where they spent delightful days walking, talking and reading aloud. One day at Brocket he met another member of the family. A flock of child visitors were playing about the house: the young Devonshires, and among them a skimpy, elf-like little figure with a curly blonde head, Lady Bessborough’s daughter, Caroline. She was an extra-ordinary child: at one moment a wild tomboy, galloping bareback round the field, the next conversing on poetry and politics like a woman of forty, her whole being vibrant with an electric vitality which dominated any room she entered. Precociously susceptible to the influence of her environment, she was much concerned with love. William’s black eyes and his celebrated oration on progress seemed to make him a worthy object of her choice; she conceived a violent fancy for him. In his turn he found her very engaging. She appealed to his particular taste both for little girls and for entertaining characters. At times, as he lounged back in his chair listening to the flow of her odd, impudent charming chatter, a more sentimental interest began to tinge his amusement. In four or five years what a paragon she seemed likely to become; more irresistible, because more original even than her mother. A captivating vision of the future fleeted before his musing eyes. “Of all the Devonshire House girls,” he remarked half laughingly to a friend, “that is the one for me.”
Meanwhile he was twenty-one and she fourteen, and he had to finish his schooling. In 1799 his four years at Cambridge came to an end: but Lady Melbourne still felt that something remained to be done. The Whig aristocracy had a high standard of education. Commonly they sent their children on the grand tour, after they had finished the ordinary academic course. But during the Napoleonic Wars this was impracticable: so it became the fashion for those young noblemen, whose minds seemed susceptible of further development, to be sent to one of the northern universities, famous at that time as leaders of all that was newest in philosophical and scientific thought. In the winter of 1799 therefore, William and Frederic proceeded for two winters to Glasgow: where they lodged with a distinguished philosopher, Professor Millar. It was an extraordinary contrast to the luxurious sophistication of the world they had left. Earnest, industrious and provincial, the rawboned inhabitants of Professor Millar’s house passed their time in an ordered round of plain living and hard thinking. However, the Lambs threw themselves into their new surroundings with their customary sardonic zest. “There is nothing heard of in this house but study,” writes Frederic to his mother, “though there is much idleness, drunkenness, etc., out of it as in most universities. We breakfast at half past nine, but I am roused by a stupid, silly, lumbering mathematician, who tumbles me out of bed at eight. During the whole of the day we are seldom out of the house or the lecture rooms for more than an hour, and after supper, which finishes a little after eleven, the reading generally continues till near two. Saturday and Sunday are holidays, on Monday we have examinations in Millar’s lectures. Millar himself is a little jolly dog, and the sharpest fellow I ever saw. All the ladies here are contaminated with an itch for philosophy, and learning, and such a set of fools it never was my lot to see. William quotes poetry to them all day, but I do not think he has made any impression yet.” Neither did they, nor the place they lived in, make any formidable impression on him. “The town is a damnable one and the dirtiest I ever saw,” he said, “and as for the company and manners I do not see much different in them from the company and manners of any country town.” Still he set himself to make the most of such compensations as he could find in his new surroundings. He dined out with the merchants of the town, where he thoroughly enjoyed the local custom of serving brandy with dinner; he gave rein to his passion for argument in a debating club where he became noted for his “caustic brilliance in reply”; and he absorbed himself in Professor Millar’s philosophical ideas. So much so, that when he came to London in vacation he could talk of little else. This was not altogether approved of by his old friends. Lady Holland was critical; while Lord Egremont, whose interest in his career was noticeably paternal, became worried. It would be dreadful, he thought, if William turned into a doctrinaire prig. Lady Melbourne communicated these fears to William, who brushed them aside. Indeed, no one was less disposed to be a doctrinaire. Further, enriched as he was by the practical experience of mankind to be learnt in Melbourne House, he was not, except on purely intellectual subjects, impressed by the naïve and self-assured dogmatizings of the middle-class intelligentsia with whom he associated. Life had taught him—this is the advantage of living in the thick of things—always to relate thought to experience, to estimate theory in terms of its practical working. He might be a little wild in his political ideas; but he knew that statesmen were human beings, not embodied institutions. In consequence, he listened to his companions good-humouredly, but with an inner amusement that must have disconcerted them, had they realized it. “No place can be perfect,” he told Lady Melbourne, “and the truth is, that the Scotch universities are very much calculated to make a man vain, important, and pedantic. This is naturally the case where there is a great deal of reading . . . We have two fellows in the house with us, who think themselves, each of them, as wise as Plato and Aristotle put together, and asked, with a supercilious sort of doubt, whether Pitt is really a good orator, or Fox has much political knowledge. This will all wear off in time; though, to be sure, one of them is three and twenty and has been in France since the revolution . . . the other is an Irishman, about my age, who knew nothing before he came here last year, and who therefore thinks that nobody knows anything anywhere else . . . You cannot have both the advantages of study and of the world together. The way is to let neither of them get too fast a hold of you, and this is done by nothing so well as by frequent changes of place, of persons and of companions.”
These words show a remarkably mature judgment for twenty-one. And William was old for his age. Lady Melbourne, watching him arrive in London, at last to take up that active role on the stage of the world for which she had prepared him so assiduously, could feel her work was thoroughly done. She had reason to be satisfied with it. He was, on the whole, all she thought a young man ought to be; handsome, agreeable, self-confident. Perhaps a shade too self-confident: William had not altogether outgrown his youthful intransigence; he still proclaimed his contempt for stupidity too openly. And his manners were not all she could have wished. “Although I have the highest opinion of your skill,” she writes to Lady Holland about her sons, “yet I believe even you would find bringing them to what is called polish a very arduous undertaking.” However, Lady Melbourne sympathized with his contempt; and manners to her were of small importance compared with the point of view that they expressed. William’s point of view she found quite satisfactory. It would have been odd if she had not: for it was largely the same as her own. His ductile mind had been unable to resist the influence of a philosophy, exerted so continuously and so persuasively. Further, such experience of life as he had known had gone to confirm it. William early noticed that, if he differed from his mother about a character or a course of action, he generally turned out to be wrong. “My mother was the most sagacious woman I ever knew,” he used to say in later years, “as long as she lived, she kept me straight.” Her cynicism did not put him off. Clever young men like cynicism if it is agreeably presented. It makes them feel both bold and wise, imbues them with a sense of daring superiority to the timid gullible herd of common mankind. Like Lady Melbourne’s, William’s outlook was realistic and rational, thinking highly of the world’s pleasures and poorly of its inhabitants; sensibly determined to adjust itself to life so as to be as comfortable as possible; cheerfully convinced that idealists—excepting always the Foxite Whigs—were fools or hypocrites. In the exuberance of his youth he expressed these opinions more explicitly than she did herself. “I do not like the dissenters,” he remarked to her . . . “they are more zealous and consequently more intolerant than the established church. Their only object is power. If we are to have a prevailing religion let us have one that is cool and indifferent . . . toleration is the only good and just principle, and toleration for every opinion that could possibly be formed.” It was not Lady Melbourne’s habit to generalize in this fashion: she showed her religious views simply—by never going to church. But she would have agreed with every word William said.
All the same, she was not completely satisfied with him. His opinions, his demeanour, were all they should be; but there were elements in his character which she found baffling; what in her rare moments of irritation she called “his laziness and his selfishness.” These were not quite the right words, but they meant something. Hidden beneath his exterior pliability lay a force impervious to her will. It arose from that other conflicting strain in his personality. Education had driven it underground; but had not been able to expel it. The romantic and the philosopher still stirred restlessly in the depths of his subconsciousness, colouring his reactions, disturbing his equilibrium. Now and again they rose to the surface, revealing themselves, as people noticed, in his conversation, with its sudden tears, its fitful moments of enthusiasm. They appeared more significantly in sporadic movements of antagonism towards his home. These were to be expected. In spite of its charms, life at Melbourne House had an ugly side. Its hard animalism, its rapacious worldliness, were bound to jar on a person of sensibility. Nor in that plain-spoken age were they concealed. “Your mother is a whore,” shouted a Cambridge friend to George Lamb in the heat of an undergraduate quarrel. George knocked him down; but he cannot have failed to know that there was truth in the insult. William must have learned this truth early too. And though in theory he did not set much value on chastity, yet such a discovery about his own mother is generally upsetting to a sensitive boy; especially if, like William, he is temperamentally susceptible to the charm of innocence. Again—and here he had his brothers with him—he was irritated by the violence of Lady Melbourne’s ambition for her children: loudly they protested that they wished she would sometimes let their careers alone. Still less did William like the hardness of her mockery; with the candour of his family he told her so. “Everybody has foibles from which no quarantine can purify them,” he writes to her. “No resource remains but to make up your mind to put up with them as to Lewis’ way of laughing people out of them—which by the way you are sometimes a little inclined to adopt—it only confirms them—and makes the person ridiculed hate you into the bargain.” The tone of this reproof is good-natured enough. And indeed none of these sources of irritation counted for much in themselves. But they accumulated in William to create a secret uneasiness which is the most striking evidence of his inner maladjustment. His prevailing state of mind when he first grew up was unusual for a man of his age. Except in politics he was all for caution, inactivity and putting up with things. Though happy, he was not hopeful. Beneath the smooth surface of his equanimity, had sown themselves the seeds of a precocious disillusionment.
His first acquaintance with the world encouraged their growth. Whig society was an entertaining place: but it did not foster sentimental illusions. Even Devonshire House life had its seamy side; at Carlton House and in the demi-monde, the seamy side was uppermost. William entered them with some shreds of the ingenuous idealism of youth still hanging round him. He soon lost them; and he felt it. Once seizing a pen he poured forth his feelings in some verses to a friend.
A year has pass’d—a year of grief and joy—
Since first we threw aside the name of boy,
That name which in some future hour of gloom,
We shall with sighs regret we can’t resume.
Unknown this life, unknown Fate’s numerous shares
We launched into this world, and all it cares;
Those cares whose pangs, before a year was past,
I felt and feel, they will not be the last.
But then we hailed fair freedom’s brightening morn,
And threw aside the yoke we long had borne;
Exulted in the raptures thought can give,
And said alone, we then began to live;
With wanton fancy, painted pleasure’s charms,
Wine’s liberal powers, and beauty’s folding arms,
Expected joys would spring beneath our feet,
And never thought of griefs we were to meet.
Ah! Soon, too soon is all the truth displayed,
Too soon appears this scene of light and shade!
We find that those who every transport know,
In full proportion taste of every woe;
That every moment new misfortune rears;
That, somewhere, every hour’s an hour of tears.
The work of wretchedness is never done,
And misery’s sigh extends with every sun.
Well is it if, when dawning manhood smiled
We did not quite forget the simple child;
If, when we lost that name, we did not part
From some more glowing virtue of the heart;
From kind benevolence, from faithful truth,
The generous candour of believing youth,
From that soft spirit which men weakness call,
That lists to every tale, and trusts them all.
To the warm fire of these how poor and dead
Are all the cold endowments of the head.
Such moods seldom got the upper hand in him. And no one who met him seems to have noticed them. But they had their effect; his uneasiness persisted, was confirmed.
Indeed he had cause to be uneasy. Education, though it had muffled their clash, had done nothing to reconcile the opposing tendencies in his nature. One half of him still went out to the ideal, the romantic; the other told him that, in actual fact, self-interest and material satisfactions were the controlling motive forces in the world. As he grew older the struggle was further complicated by the fact that his personal and his ideal sympathies became engaged against each other. The people he was fondest of, all took the anti-ideal side. Yet he continued to respond to the call of his imagination as strongly as before. He was in an impasse.
It did not worry him very much. Life was pleasant, he was adaptable. Moreover, gradually and insensibly, he had evolved a mode of thought and action, by which he could evade the more distressing implications of his situation. He did not suppress his ideal instincts; there was an obstinate integrity in his disposition which made him incapable of denying anything he genuinely felt. But still less did he throw over his realism, to follow the call of his heart. He would have thought it silly, for one thing: his reason told him that his family’s point of view was right. Besides, to quarrel with it would have entailed a row; and he hated rows. No more now than as an Eton boy did he see the sense of standing up to be knocked to pieces. As at Eton, therefore, he compromised; adopted a neutral, detached position, which enabled him to enjoy the world he lived in, while avoiding those of its activities which most violently outraged his natural feelings. He refused to be ambitious, to join in the sordid scuffle for place and power; he conducted his own personal relationships by a rigid standard of delicacy and honour; and he always said what he thought, regardless of public opinion. On the other hand he taught himself to tolerate other people’s opinions; he lived the life that was expected of him; and he concentrated his heart and interests chiefly on those pleasures which his home did provide. Social life, public affairs, occupied a growing share of his attention: while his emotions attached themselves primarily to his personal affections. In them, indeed, both sides of his nature did, in some sort, find fulfilment. Love for a living individual was both real and romantic. It became the strongest motive power in his life. For the rest, though he indulged his taste for philosophizing, he was doubtful if it had any value. He was a sceptic in thought, in practice a hedonist. Shelving deeper problems, he enjoyed the passing moment wholeheartedly, and took his own character as little seriously as he could.
Such an attitude worked very well for the time being. It was easy to be a successful hedonist in the Whig society of 1800, if one was as popular and as cheerful as William. His faculty for self-adaptation worked as well as it had at school: he continued to be happy. All the same he paid a heavy price for his happiness. His condition of mind was not a healthy one. Resting as it did on an unresolved discord, its basic foundation was insecure. This insecurity was increased by the bias given to his outlook by upbringing. In spite of all her wisdom and all her affection, it was a pity that Lady Melbourne was his mother. His view of life, if it was to be a stable affair, must be built, in part at least, on his ideal sentiments. Lady Melbourne’s opinions, and still more her example, tended to make him distrust these. In her smooth efficient way she had managed to discredit his best feelings in his own eyes. And even if he was unaware of the cause, it made him feel uneasy all the time.
Nor was the philosophy he had adopted to meet the difficulties of his situation, good for him. It is unnatural to be a materialist, when one is twenty-three years old and throbbing with idealistic feelings. And the efforts William was forced to make to maintain himself in his scepticism, against the pull of his nature, produced a sort of frustration in his character. He grew far too self-preservative, for one thing. Insecurely perched in his little patch of tranquil neutrality, he became dominated by the desire to preserve it from invasion. His hatred of trouble grew stronger and stronger, till he would make practically any sacrifice to avoid an unpleasant scene, to put off a difficult decision. It modified even his attitude to those personal relationships by which he set such store. Though he was unfailingly considerate and unselfish in little things, he never dreamt of letting his feeling for someone he loved divert him from the course of life he had marked out for himself: still less would he take the responsibility of guiding their lives. An enlightened policy of live and let live was his method of running a relationship.
But beyond this, his upbringing had a more formidable, a more disastrous effect upon him. It crippled the development of his most valuable faculties. These were intellectual. Nature had meant him for that rare phenomenon, a philosophical observer of mankind. His detachment and his curiosity, his honesty and his perceptiveness, his sense of reality and his power of generalization, all these mingled together to make his mind of the same type, if not of the same high quality, as that of Montaigne or Sir Thomas Browne: the mind of the botanist in the tangled jungle of men and their thoughts, exploring, observing, classifying. But to be a thinker, one must believe in the value of disinterested thought. William’s education had destroyed his belief in this, along with all other absolute beliefs; and in so doing, removed the motive force necessary to set his creative energy working. The spark that should have kindled his fire was unlit: with the result that he never felt moved to make the effort needed to discipline his intellectual processes, to organize his sporadic reflections into a coherent system of thought. He had studied a great many subjects, but none thoroughly; his ideas were original, but they were fragmentary, scattered, unmatured. This lack of system meant further that he never overhauled his mind to set its contents in order in the light of a considered standard of value. So that the precious and the worthless jostled each other in its confused recesses: side by side with fresh and vivid thoughts lurked contradictions, commonplaces, and relics of the conventional prejudices of his rank and station. Even his scepticism was not consistent; though he doubted the value of virtue, he never doubted the value of being a gentleman. Like so many aristocratic persons he was an amateur.
His amateurishness was increased by his hedonism. For it led him to pursue his thought only in so far as the process was pleasant. He shirked intellectual drudgery. Besides, the life he lived was all too full of distracting delights. If he felt bored reading and cogitating, there was always a party for him to go to, where he could be perfectly happy, without having to make an effort. Such temptations were particularly hard to resist for a man brought up in the easy-going disorderly atmosphere of Melbourne House; where no one was ever forced to be methodical or conscientious, and where there was always something entertaining going on. If virtue was hard to acquire there, pleasure came all too easily. Merely to look on kept one contented.
Indeed that was the danger. At twenty-one William was already an onlooker; an active-minded, lively onlooker, ready to respond to every thrill, every joke in the drama: but standing a little aloof, without any compelling desire to take part himself. He had made his peace with the world, and on favourable terms: but none the less the world had, in this first round of the fight, defeated him. Endowed by birth with one of the most distinguished minds of his generation, there was a risk that he might end as nothing more than another charming ineffective Whig man of fashion.
A risk but not a certainty: William’s character had taken shape but it was not yet set into its final mould. And the rebellious elements within it still surged, seeking an outlet. At moments, as we have seen, they burst out in his talk: his Foxite idealism still sounded, a discordant trumpet note, in the minor harmony of his scepticism: even his intellectual arrogance was the sign of a spirit not yet resigned to accept life just as he found it. A change of circumstance, the pressure of a new influence, and there was a chance he might yet, in some later engagement, turn the tables on the world; that his creative energy, gathering its forces together, might break through the inhibitions induced by upbringing, and gush forth to fulfilment. There was still a chance.