One of the greatest pleasures of my life – and it was accorded me at Limpsfield – comes back to me with the remembrance of sunshine, open doors and windows, climbing roses – and Prince Kropotkin. Mild, blond, spectacled, gentle-spoken, the great scientist inspired me with singular affection. We wrangled by the hour together on the steps of the troglodytic cottage, the Princess being always watchfully near at hand. I cannot imagine about what we can have wrangled. It was rabbits, I think. Kropotkin immensely admired the Rabbit. It was for him the symbol of perdurability – and mass production. It stood out against Selection. Defenceless and adapted for nothing in particular it had outlived the pterodactyl, the Hyrcanian Tiger and the Lion of Numidia. The coneys, in short, were a feeble people yet had their homes in the everlasting rocks.
I don’t know what I had to say against that. I obviously found something or the arguments could not have taken place. What I did say must have had some sense or he would not have returned to argue with me. He did that very often. It was perhaps because he was never allowed quite to finish an argument. His heart was weak: suddenly the Princess would descend upon him when he had just thought out something really crushing but before he had had time to formulate it. She would drape his plaid about him, he would be led off, spitting fiery sentences at me over his shoulder.
I knew nothing in those days about Science. I know nothing now and it seems probable that I shall remain in a similar state of ignorance till I die. I have always entertained the most vivid distrust for the Scientific Mind. All the scientists I have known have seemed to me to be extraordinarily untrustworthy. I was once, at a public dinner in London, set next to Professor Metchnikoff. He was at that time one of the most eminent scientists in the world. I was set next to him because I was the only guest who could speak French. He was mild and gentle, his voice and accent resembled those of his compatriot, Kropotkin. His speciality was the great bowel. All the ills of life, all illnesses, poverties and distress were to be cured and life itself infinitely prolonged by proper attention to the great bowel. It was the Rabbit of Kropotkin. You were to eat nothing but lettuce and milk. At any rate you were to eat nothing that you would possibly want to eat.
On this occasion the beaming savant was reckless. He pointed to his plate and said:
‘Tiens: je vais faire la noce’ – ‘I am going on the spree.’
His plate contained a steamed sole. Save for blotting-paper there is nothing so without taste.
Having eaten it he began to talk. He talked of the fowls of the air. As with Kropotkin the Coney of the Rocks so for Metchnikoff was the Bird of Heaven. Either because they have no great bowel or because having it they take great care of it, birds, according to Metchnikoff, attain unheard of ages. Ravens, he said, lived to be a thousand, vultures are practically immortal. And as for peacocks … He was in ecstasies over the white peacocks he had just seen at Warwick Castle. Lady Warwick said they had been given to her by Disraeli who had them through his grandfather who had them from Hamburg where they had already attained the age of two hundred…
I suggested to my smiling and triumphant neighbour that Disraeli was one of the most romantic liars of his generation and Lady Warwick one of the most romantic … oh! figures of the court of Edward VII. But these facts conveyed nothing to the Professor. In his subsequent volume on the great bowel the white peacocks of Warwick occupied prominent positions.
When I was a child I had a Barbary ring-dove called Jack. For a dove he was very combative. If you put your finger in his cage he would peck it. That is rare with doves.
He was fourteen when my grandmother gave him to me. She bred them and he was her favourite male bird, so she knew his age. I had him till I in turn was fourteen and he twenty-two. I gave him then to my nurse. At her house in Walthamstow he lived several years more. Then he laid an egg and shortly afterwards died. He must have been nearly thirty.
When he laid the egg, he having been an indomitable male, my mother told me his story. He had first died at the age of seven – which is the average age of ring-doves. My mother, knowing that my grandmother would be grieved at the loss had replaced him without telling her mother. She had twice done the same thing for me. My nurse being very old her daughter had once done as much for her. So altogether it had taken five Jacks, the last at least being a lady, to reach the unprecedented age of thirty. A good deal of science is like that – loving kindness supported by credulity. So too is religion, perhaps. Kropotkin desired the good of humanity so he had his transfigured Rabbit – Metchnikoff desired to multiply the sum of human good health, hence his belief in the White Peacocks.
My old nurse Atterbury was married to a descendant of the great Atterbury of Rochester; her daughter to one of the great Racine’s. Thus even in the lower part of the house I lived among resounding names whilst the great of those days – at least in the arts – thundered and declaimed upstairs.
M. Racine, the cook’s husband, had been a member of the Commune in 1870. He was a striking, very tall man, with an immense hooked nose that leaned to one side and blank, black, flashing eyes. I used to listen to his declamations against MacMahon and Gambetta with a great deal of edification. He must have been the first politician of the extreme Left that I ever listened to but about the same time I must have had my first lessons in French literature from a M. Andrieux fils. He was another Communard. He comes back to me as the most elegant man I ever knew. His little moustaches were most comically waxed and he had the enviable gift of being able to make two cigarettes at once. The crook to the right of M. Racine’s nose I always put down to the Versaillaise troops, figuring that they had done it with an immense paper clip. Thus I early developed a hatred for tyrants and the love for lost causes and exiles that still, I hope, distinguish me. Poland, Alsace Lorraine, Ireland and even the Jews exiled from their own country – those were the names of romance of my childhood. They so remain for me.
My nurse, Mrs Atterbury, had one singularity – she had come in contact with more murders and deaths by violence than any person I ever met – at any rate until 1914. In consequence, I imagine, my childhood was haunted by imaginary horrors and was most miserable. I can still see the shadows of wolves if I lie awake in bed with a fire in the room. And indeed I had the fixed belief for years that except for myself the world was peopled with devils. I used to peep through the cracks of doors to see the people within in their natural forms.
Mrs Atterbury had been in the great railway accident near Doncaster where innumerable persons were burned to death; she had seen seven people run over and killed and her milder conversations abounded in details of deaths by drowning. I don’t think she was present at the sinking of the Princess Alice but she talked about it as if she had been. Her normal conversations ran:
‘When I lived with meyuncle Power in the Minories time of the Crimea Wower, meyuncle let ’is top front to a master saddler. N wen wower broke out the master saddler e worked niteanday, niteanday fer sevin weeks without stop er stay. N e took is saddles to the Wower Orfis n drawed his pay. All in gowlden sovrins in a Gledstun beg. N wen e got ome e cut is froat on the top front landin n the blood n the gowld run down the staircase together like the awtificial cascades in Battersea Pawk.’… ‘The blood n the gowld!’ she would repeat and catch my wrist in her skinny fingers.
She was a witness – or an almost witness – of one of the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel. She certainly came on the body of one of the victims and claimed to have seen a man vanish into the fog. I never actually heard the details of that. My mother, worried by the advent of a questioning police sergeant and the hysterics of the household below stairs forbade the old lady to tell us children about it. But her impressive and mysterious absence in her best black bonnet and jet beaded cloak, and the whispers of the household made me fully aware that she was giving evidence at the Inkwedge. For long afterwards heaven knew what horrors were not concealed for me in the pools of shadow beneath the lamp-posts. In solitary streets your footsteps echoing and a smudge of fog in the gaslight!
The last time I saw the old lady she was sitting – as she did day in day out for years – in the window of a parlour that occupied the apex of a corner lot in an outer suburb. She could look right up and down two long streets.
She greeted me with great vivacity. The day before there had been a tremendous thunderstorm. The streets up which she looked had been almost obscured by falling water. She said to me:
‘I calls out to Lizzie … Good gracious me! That man! “’E’s struck dead!” … N’e was!’ she added triumphantly.
I fancy the physical gloom of London adds to the heaviness of my memory of those days. A city whose streets are illuminated only by the flicker of rare street lamps seems almost darker than one not lit at all. And the corners of rooms are always filled with shadows when the sole illuminant is a dim oil-lamp or a bluish gas flame. And in London it was always winter. I remember at any rate no spring.
Above the darkness brooded the Hard Times. I am talking now of the early ’nineties. It is difficult to think how people lived then. In cold, in darkness, lacking sufficient clothes or sufficient food. With the aid of gin perhaps: or beer when you could cadge a pint. Charles Booth in his Life and Labour of the Poor in London states that ninety per cent of the population of London in those days depended for its menus plaisirs – its glimpses of light, of pleasure, its beanfeasts, its pints at the pubs – on windfalls. A working man got the price of a pint of beer for dexterously holding a lady’s skirt off the wheel as she stepped out of a carriage. He would get as much for hailing a cab on a wet night. A charwoman got an old dress given her and sold it in a rag and bone shop for the price of a quartern of gin. Cooks had their perquisites: their ‘perks.’ Old women with ‘puffity pockets’ beneath their skirts slunk up and down area railings. When they went up the pockets would contain pounds of dripping: mutton fat: half plum cakes: remains of joints of beef. With the price of them the cook would get a new hat and some tobacco for her father in the workhouse. You lived in slums in Seven Dials, Whitechapel, Notting Dale. You burned the stairrails and banisters, the door jambs, the window frames for fuel. The rest of the world was no better. In Paris half the population was insufficiently fed; on sunny days the most horrible, half nude creatures sunned themselves on the benches of the Champs Elysees. In Berlin the greater part of the population never thought of tasting meat. In St. Petersburg the condition of the poor would not bear thinking of. When you did witness it, you went mad or divested yourself of all your goods. Kropotkin had done that and was only one of scores of princes and great landowners. ‘The poor,’ the middle class householder said, ‘are always with us. These are the words of Jesus Christ.’ So he put on several mufflers, buried his purse in an inner pocket and buttoned up his overcoat to the chin the better to avoid the temptation to give a starving woman a ha’penny. I remember taking the young daughter of my father’s most intimate friend, who was Queen Victoria’s Master of Music, on the River Blythe in a canoe. I talked to her about the conditions of the poor. Next day her mother Lady Cusins said to me:
‘Fordie, you are a dear boy. Sir George and I like you very much. But I must ask you not to talk to dear Beatrice … about Things!’ Punch itself was once almost suppressed. It printed a drawing of Charles Read’s showing two miserable women of the ‘Unfortunate Class’ soaked by rain and shivering under one of the Adelphi Arches. One of them says to the other: ‘Dearie… Ow long ’ave you been gay!’ Gay of course signified ‘unfortunate’. The consternation in Victorian London was terrific. Punch had spoken about Things. It never has again.
The natural corollary of these pressures was … Anarchism, Fabianism, Dynamitings, Nihilism. I saw a good deal of the inner workings of these.
I never took any stock in politics. But political movements have always interested me. I have only once voted. It is one of my most passionate convictions that no one individual can be sufficiently intelligent to be entrusted with the fortune or life of any other individual. Far less can he be morally capable of influencing to the extent merely of a single vote the destinies of millions of his fellows. I at any rate never could feel myself so entitled. I don’t believe a creative artist can have any intellect: he is an observer and a recorder. He may have passions but he must mistrust them.
My own predilections have always been toward the Right. I like Pomp, Banners, Divine Rights, unreasonable ceremonies and ceremoniousness. It seems to me that when the world was a matter of small communities each under an arbitrary but responsible head then the world was at its best. If your community did not prosper you decapitated your chief. Till then he was possessed of Divine Rights. Presumably you cannot better the Feudal System.
So I was always a sentimental Tory. But inasmuch as the Tories stood in the way of Home Rule for Ireland I never voted or wrote for that Party. The Liberals of the ’nineties on the other hand were mostly great employers of labour. Their aim was to have always fringes of pauperised and parasitic working people so that wages might be kept low. It was perhaps an unconscious aim. My Tory view was that every workman should first be assured of four hundred a year. Let the employer of labour assure that before he started his factory – or clear out. So, though the Liberals supported Irish Home Rule I could not support them.
The Literary Man in England is usually predestined to the Left. Ranking socially with the Governess and the Butler – a little above it if he prospers, a little below if he is poor – he cannot, qua writer, be a Gentleman. In consequence he tries to achieve Importance outside his Art. The Tory Party was always the Stupid Party. And proud of it! In the ’nineties it let Henley starve and cold shouldered Mallock. The Left on the other hand forever stretches out its arms toward Intellect. In consequence English Intelligentsia are almost invariably of the Left – Liberals, Fabians, Communists, Nonconformists or worse. The Liberals once offered me myself a constituency… Clackmannan and Kinross. A scattered and bleak district to work in politically.
It has from my earliest days been my fate to be regarded as a brand to be snatched from the burning by the Left. From my earliest days in darkest London! I never quite knew why. I suppose it was because as a boy I was of a family influential in the Arts and Letters. At any rate whether it was the Rossettis or the Garnetts of the Left or straight Labour, Fabian or Morris-Socialist agitators I was seldom between the ages of twenty or thirty without someone putting Left pressure upon me. I was for ever being shouldered off to meetings of Hammersmith Socialists at William Morris’ house, to meetings of Marxists at the Avelings, of Anarchists in Hyde Park, of Parliamentary Labour leaders at the Holborn Restaurant or to those of pro-Boer agitators in Piccadilly Circus. In that way I saw some pretty tidy fights. I saw the Anarchists break up a Morris-Socialist meeting at Kelmscott House, the Morris-Socialists break up an Anarchist assembly in Hyde Park and a tremendous set-to between Morris-Socialists and Fabians in a North Kent suburb – the Crays, I think, or Eltham. In addition, being profoundly impressed by the uselessness to England of the British Empire and with the savage nature of the Dopper Boers and wishing solely that South Africa might be returned to its real owners, the natives, and Kruger and Mr Chamberlain hung on the same gallows, I was once chased for three-quarters of a mile along New Oxford Street by a howling mob of patriots. That was during the South African War. On the other hand I once saw Mr George Bernard Shaw brought to a clean stop in the middle of a Socialist Speech. Few people can have seen the like.
My cousins, the young Rossettis did that.
They were Anarchists. Today they are almost infinitely respectable. But when the hot blood roared in the young ’nineties what were young Intelligentsia to do? The young Philistine joined the Skeleton Army and brought bladders of ink or flour with which to disfigure young women of the Salvationists. The Salvation Army was then young and marked out for persecution. I remember Mr Edward Garnett, then too, young and gallant. He constituted an anti-Skeleton Army and purchasing an enormous cudgel went down to protect the Salvationist lasses at Brighton. But if you did not do that and were young and hot-blooded and militant, Anarchism was your logical occupation.
The young Rossettis then were Anarchists. They fostered the Red Revolution with their pocket moneys, they harangued meetings with childish voices, they ran a printing press and an Anarchist journal called The Torch, in the basement of William Rossetti’s house – which belonged to his wife, my aunt Lucy. The Torch Press printed two literary curiosities at least. A pamphlet by Mr George Bernard Shaw called Why I am an Anarchist, and my own first poem.
In our families as children we were trained to be geniuses under the powerful shadow of pre-Raphaelism. I still remember the painfulness of the process and the conviction that whilst my young cousins undoubtedly were geniuses I at least was a Philistine. They wrote Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen. I read penny dreadfuls in the coal cellar to avoid my father’s eyes. And one of the acutest agonies of my childhood, after I was past the age of fearing the shadows at night was being pressed into acting in those dramas. The Rossetti’s large back drawing-room in Endsleigh Gardens was converted into a stage…
It is astonishing how memories come back. When I write ‘Endsleigh Gardens’ suddenly the name ‘Borschitzky’ comes up before me. That is because I used to have violin lessons from the queer, tragic Borschitzky whose dismal adventure caused Euston Square to be rechristened. He came home late at night and found his landlady murdered in the kitchen. Being nearly blind he fell over the body, got himself covered with blood and as a foreigner and a musician was at once arrested by the intelligent police. He was, of course, acquitted; but the trial caused so much sensation as the ‘Euston Square murder’, that the respectable inhabitants petitioned to have the name of the square changed and it became Endsleigh Gardens. (Do you know how the inhabitants of Rugeley tried to get the name of their city changed? An atrocious series of murders were there committed by a man called Palmer, the reports of the Rugeley murders shaking all England. The inhabitants sent a deputation to the Home Secretary – Lord John Russell. Lord John listened to them with attention and then suggested critically that they might call Rugeley after the Opposition Minister – Palmerston. They didn’t.)
Poor Borschitzky was a small, bald man with an immense nose, who wore his greyish hair brushed stiffly forward into peaks, and Gladstone collars that came forward into peaks equally stiff. He was usually dressed in an immensely long frock coat that nearly hid his tiny legs and enormous feet. He spoke the most extravagantly pidgin English I have ever imagined and told the longest and most extraordinary stories.
His stories went like this:
‘Zair voss a Gris-chun mit a Chew. E sez to im:
‘“You uckly Chew I haf ad a mos orible tream. It voss a mos orible tream. I tream I co to dhe Chewish Evven an it voss a mos orible place. Ze spiddons voss all filzy an ze dables coffered viz creese and dher voss no sand on de floor and de praziers voss dhick wiz rust. O it voss a mos orible place an it voss fooll fooll fooll of orible uckly Chews spiddin on ze floor and shmoking; shmoking filthy filthy paipes.”
‘“Dad vos vairy curious,” sez ze Chew. “I ollso haf a tream. I tream I co to dze Gris-chun Evven. O, and it voss a mos loffely place. De spiddoons voss of prass zat shone laike colld and dhe sand on der floor laike silber. Ond de daples voss viter ass a snotrift ond de praziers voss silber ond de dobacco poxes oll retty do be smoaked; O it voss a mos loffly place. Loffly; loffly! ontly … zer vos nowun in it!”’
Towards the end of his life great troubles fell on poor Borschitzky. His mainstay had for years been the preparatory school to which I was sent. All his other pupils fell away; no orchestra would any longer employ him. Nor play his compositions. Then his old friends the owners of the school died. They had supported him for years in spite of his peculiarities. The new owners of the school dismissed him. Then he had nothing and was perhaps seventy-two. He packed up his never played compositions in several bundles and took them to the British Museum Library. Dr Garnett told him kindly that the Museum only accepted the compositions of the dead. He went to the Post-office at the corner of Endsleigh Garden, mailed the parcel to the Museum and then went back to his room. He tidied it very thoroughly and destroyed a number of papers. Then he went out, and by the railings of the Square before his windows he cut his throat. If he had done it indoors it would have caused his landlady a great deal of trouble and have made a horrid mess for her to clean up.
But still when in Continental Cathedrals I hear the boom of the serpent and the sharp tap of the cantor as he starts the choir in its plain-song I see the form of poor old Borschitzky with his bow held over his beloved fiddle and the school choir with its mouths all open before him. He taps magisterially three times with his bow, his side-locks stick forward, his coat tails hanging down to his enormous boots. ‘Van! Doo! Dree … Pom-Pom,’ he shouts, and off we all go on his rendering of the words that accompany the Ninth Symphony. God send him an old leather cushion stuffed with straw for his hard chair in his Chewish Evven… and send to all old, worn out artists to be as considerate in their final distress.
Those were grim enough times for artists – the ’eighties and early ’nineties. I don’t know that they are any better now. There was a blind poet called Philip Bourke Marston. He was not a very striking poet, but because he was blind he occupied a position of some note amongst the minor pre-Raphaelite group. He was bearded like an elder statesman of those days and, with his down-glancing eyes, was of noble appearance. Members of the group used to take it in turns to read to him in his gloomy room in the Euston Road. One day another poet of much greater reputation came in. He threw a fit of delirium tremens and imagined himself a Bengal tiger; he fell upon poor Marston and mauled him rather severely, the blind man being unable to defend himself at all. William Sharpe came in and found them struggling on the floor. He pulled off the dipsomaniac who immediately burst a blood vessel, his blood pouring all over both Marston and Fiona Macleod. Sharpe ran around to the nearby hospital to fetch a doctor. The physician in charge immediately cried out that Sharpe must be arrested for murder. He was drunk. In the meantime, the dipsomaniac bled to death and Marston nearly went out of his mind… Yes, grim times in that city of dreadful night!
I don’t know if you know how many material comforts were lacking in the civilisation of those days. I was told by one of the frequent hostesses of Mr Gladstone that that statesman and his wife always took to bed with them a hot water bottle filled with beef tea. They drank the fluid in the night. At six in the morning Mr Gladstone had a grilled chicken leg and an egg beaten up in sherry brought to his bedside. At eight he ate a great breakfast.
But all the statesmen I have known were hearty feeders. I remember being privileged to wait on a Lord Chancellor at lunch at his Club. A young relative of mine to whom I acted as guardian had just become a Ward of Court and my financial adviser had strongly recommended against investments in Consols which stood then at 113. His Lordship disposed of the affairs of his wards at any odd moments outside the Law Courts.
The meal that he consumed was unthinkable, considering that it was lunch. He began with a tumbler of sherry and half of the upper side of an enormous turbot au gratin. (Brillat Savarin says that the perfect lunch consists of a small slice of turbot au gratin, a glass of sherry and a slice of thin bread and butter.) Then he had two immense beefsteaks, the greater part of an apple-pie, at least a quarter of a pound of Stilton and some grilled herring-roes on toast. With the turbot after the sherry, he drank a bottle of hock, with the steak a bottle of Burgundy, with the cheese and savoury two dock glasses of port and he topped it all with a small glass of very good wine. His conversation was of a singular joviality on the side of salaciousness.
Immediately afterwards he delivered in the House of Lords a judgement in a peerage case – of extraordinary acumen, clearness of language and memory of details. And he was in his place in the Lords till far into the night, a full dress sitting. I don’t know what he had for dinner.
I have always thought that these extraordinary assimilative powers of statesmen were necessitated by the great fatigue incident on their calling. A man like a Prime Minister or a Chancellor of the Exchequer must burn up in the forced draughts of his career at least twice as much fuel as anyone leading a retired or a contemplative life. At any rate they gorge – and live to the ages of Methuselahs.
It is probably that, too, that makes them so extraordinarily touchy, and ready to accuse their opponents of drinking. At any rate all the Prime Ministers and most of the Members of the Cabinet who occupied seats in my time, were automatically accused by the Opposition of drinking. On the face of it that would be impossible. You cannot drink habitually to intoxication and attend to innumerable details in an atmosphere of lunacy and at the same time live to great old age – any more than you can write good prose for long if you are habitually drunk.
Political acrimonies of the ’nineties were astonishing in England. They resembled those of the United States today – or was it yesterday? In New York during a late Presidential election I was told by a lady for whose veracity I would vouch before the Recording Angel that she was invited to a meeting of one great Party. It was a private ladies’ meeting in Grand Concourse, N.Y.C., say. The principal speaker alleged that, by oath, the Knights of Columbus were obliged to disembowel every Protestant woman they should meet who was with child. One of the Presidential Candidates was a Roman Catholic. No one at the meeting uttered a word of doubt. My informant herself had no doubts. She asked me naively as being an R.C. whether the allegation was not true. In the event the Roman Catholic candidate was not elected.
Similar but less extensive mendacities distinguished the Gladstonian era of politics. I remember going to a tea party at the house of the lady who afterwards told me of Mr and Mrs Gladstone’s beef tea. Mrs Gladstone came in with the tapes of her bodice hanging down on her bustle. No one dared inform her of it. The incident created an extraordinary sensation in London and was widely used as an argument against Home Rule by the Tories. The argument used was this: The Grand Old Man spent so much money in houses of ill fame that, firstly his wife could not afford a proper lady’s maid and secondly his behaviour drove Mrs Gladstone mad, so that she ran about with her clothing in disarray. Actually Mrs Gladstone was provided with a perfectly adequate and devoted staff of servants. But as old age came on she disliked standing still whilst her maid adjusted the armour of proof, the whalebones, the hooks and eyes, bustles and jet caparisons that finished the lady’s – and the charwoman’s – uniform of that day. So, whenever she could escape from her maid’s hands she would.
The legends that the Tories invented as to Mr Gladstone’s incontinence were extraordinary – and they died hard. It is only a few years since a scabrous memoir writer revived some of them and was suppressed. As a matter of fact, both the Grand Old Man and his wife interested themselves in reclaiming the ‘fallen’ amongst females – a Victorian pursuit that, if it was as odious as most Victorian moral activities, might still be said to leave its practitioners on the side of the angels.
And indeed I have always regarded with extreme suspicion allegations of let us say – unconventionalities – against political Front Benchers. The Cabinet Ministers I have known were usually followed by detectives – for their own good. And they had a healthy fear of blackmail.
In any case, opposing Front Ranks in England balance things out. Great General staffs of armies entrenched against each other in the late war, considered it merely good manners not to shell each other’s Headquarters. Similarly, Ministers seldom put in motion machinery for the personal discredit of opponents of equal rank. They allow their party organisations to settle with each other what eccentricity shall balance against what unusualness. A Tory leader, being alleged to be the father of the children of several peers, was given an unopposed seat in a Northern constituency. Against that, the Tories promised not to oppose an Irish leader who had occasioned considerable private scandal by leaving his wife rather cynically. When a Liberal Minister, having an exaggerated appreciation of my writing, offered to put me up for a Scotch seat, I pointed out that I was a Roman Catholic and an author. He said, ‘Oh, that is all right. I arranged that the Tories shall put up against you a Jew with a practically criminal record in the Stock Exchange. That will give you quite a sporting chance.’ He, that is to say, wanted my pen for the support of his party, the other side wanted the Jewish gentleman’s questionably earned money for their party chest.
That, of course, was in later days; politics in England had become a more tranquil and cynical affair of jobbery between ins and outs. A young man of a little ability and inclination for discipline might be certain, after several years of docile voting for his party, of a Junior Lordship of the Treasury if his party remained in, or a comfortable consulate general in a Scandinavian Kingdom or a South American Republic if they fell. But in the early ’nineties all life was bitter. The political pendulum was about to swing violently towards the right. The artistic activities symbolised by the physical force schools of Henley or Mr Rudyard Kipling were to find, in the world, their counterparts in outrages … wars, rumours of wars, pogroms, repressions.
If the Ins and the Outs of the Front Benchers reviled each other and even fought on the floor of the House of Commons, the extreme Left was not slow to learn from its betters. The Extreme Left of that day is the Governing Class of the moment of writing not only in England but over vast surfaces of the globe. The wheels of Parliament formerly nearly stopped when Mr Keir Hardie appeared on the floor of the House in a cloth cap. He was the forerunner of Labour in Power. The Left nearly burst itself with rage, when Lord Salisbury cynically called Mr Dadabhi Naraoji, Liberal Member for Holborn, a ‘black-man’. Today, Mr Naraoji’s compatriots have fairly mastered the British Raj. It has been a curious process, and one has perhaps been privileged to have witnessed during one lifetime so tremendous a world revolution. I would rather be twenty again than have that privilege.