A funny little incident, told me in the small hours when Joe came home, described the dire discomfiture of one of his greatest admirers when, having invited him to supper that he might silence “a conceited young ass” by his superior wit, the “conceited young ass” so fancied himself as to monopolize the whole conversation: this fiasco, though not to his own glorification, caused Joe infinite delight; but the disgusted host was only consoled after he had arranged a duel for my husband with Robert Marshall, the playwright, a recognised wit—the condition being that neither should think before speaking: I consider that here an unfair advantage was taken—any one who was a friend of Joe’s knowing full well that this was just the whip of which he loved the lash. Be it added that this tilt between the two knights cemented their friendship.
A host of these incidents took place in his well-loved Garrick Club, of which—by the testimony of many friends—he was the heart and soul and some add the good genius. I believe there were quarrels not a few that he averted or headed by his tact and kindly humour—quarrels that might sometimes have led to sorrowful decisions by the Club Committee to which he belonged. He told me one day of a humorous end to an earnest expostulation he had held with poor Harry Kemble—greatly beloved in spite of his known weakness: “Every word you say is true, my dear Joe,” the actor had replied with the tears streaming down his great cheeks—“but what if I like it?”
It is good to remember that that colossal figure—of which our daughter, seeing it on the stage when she was a child, asked tremulously, “Is it a human being?”—remained to the end an honoured institution of the Club.
Of Joe’s tactful capacity as a peacemaker I was a witness at the home of my mother’s family—the beautiful Gothic Abbey of Bisham near Marlow. We were staying with my cousin, George Vansittart, who was then the owner. He was the kindest of men, but had a peppery and ill-controlled temper, and nothing so inflamed it as the growing habit with trippers on the Thames of landing upon his grounds. His gardeners and keepers were sternly bidden to warn off these rash people, and he himself, if walking or shooting in Bisham woods—quite a mile from the Abbey—would angrily bid them begone.
One day he and Joe were sitting in his ground-floor library facing the river, when he espied a boat containing a lady and a man making across stream towards the big trees shading his lawns. He jumped up—his face flushed, and watched the man rise, a powerful figure, ship his sculls and push into shore. “By——, the insolent brute! Under my very nose!” shrieked the incensed squire. And, seizing a heavy stick he strode out of the French window—Joe following somewhat alarmed.
My cousin took no pains to soften the language with which he addressed “the insolent brute” before he was half-way across the lawn, and Joe hastened as he saw the big man step defiantly out of the boat while the woman wept and implored him unavailingly to return. Joe caught my cousin by the arm—he was getting on in years—for as he drew near he saw that the intruder was an actor—of no great refinement—known in the profession for a swaggering bully.
“There’s a lady in the boat, Mr. Vansittart,” said my husband. Instantly my cousin stopped, and the man, recognising Joe, greeted him surlily and presently turned back to his companion now fainting on the bank. Joe followed him, and George Vansittart, returning to the house, called out to his butler, who was hastening to the scene: “Take out some brandy and water for the lady and see she needs nothing.” Joe brought back a message of thanks from the poor thing, and was far too anxious lest the outbreak should affect my cousin’s health to mind his remark that he was to be congratulated upon his acquaintance.
Recurring to that appreciation of him by the young in his last years, which is one of the sweetest tributes to Joe’s memory, many alert and boyish faces rise up before me; eager over some animated discussion in which the give-and-take was always even between the older man and the younger, or alight with laughter at his quaint wit and merry censure of some foible of the day; for though he could laugh at its foibles he was never out of heart with the world, which was always to him a good world, even when he prophesied that, through some crucible, the crazes of the last twenty years would have to pass for elimination. “They have got to have this epidemic,” he would say of Cubist painter and eccentric poet, “but they’ll get over it, and meanwhile the good old world will go on quietly as usual and young folk will fall in love and want poets to sing for them and so the best things must come to the top in the end.”
Apart from this sort of, as he called it, “half-baked” thought, he was always ready to weigh and consider every new aspect of life; and if no passing mode could deceive him or put him out of heart, either with his life-long heroes or with his own methods of expression; yet to the last hour he was always keen—not only for fresh work himself, but to see the work of the world develop. In the words of Mr. Stopford Brooke, quoted in the Life by Prof. L. P. Jacks, he would have said: “Whether in this world or another we will pursue, we will overtake, we will divide the spoil.”
And so, whether he were hanging over the garden gate of our holiday home gathering information from the labourers who passed along the road, or discussing ethical problems with his sons and their friends, he was always “pursuing”—and the young were always at home with him, for he never wanted to lead only to express his opinion and listen to their reply.