Escape, and Other Essays

by Arthur Christopher Benson

Take the case of Arthur Hallam, the inspirer of "In Memoriam." I remember hearing Mr. Gladstone say, with kindled eye and emphatic gesture, that Arthur Hallam was the most perfect being physically, morally, and intellectually that he had ever seen or hoped to see. He said, I remember, with a smile: "The story of Milnes Gaskell's friendship with Hallam was curious. You must know that people fell in love very easily in those days; there was a Miss E— of whom Hallam was enamoured, and Milnes Gaskell abandoned his own addresses to her in favour of Hallam, in order to gain his friendship."

Yet the portrait of Hallam which hangs in the provost's house at Eton represents a rosy, solid, rather heavy-featured young man, with a flushed face,—Mr. Gladstone said that this was caused by overwork,—who looks more like a young country bumpkin on the opera-bouffe stage than an intellectual archangel.

Odder still, the letters, poems, and remains of Hallam throw no light on the hypnotic effect he produced; they are turgid, elaborate, and wholly uninteresting; nor does he seem to have been entirely amiable. Lord Dudley told Francis Hare that he had dined with Henry Hallam, the historian, who was Arthur Hallam's father, in the company of the son, in Italy, adding, "It did my heart good to sit by and hear how the son snubbed the father, remembering how often the father had unmercifully snubbed me."

There is a hint of beauty in the dark eyes and the down-dropped curve of the mobile lip in the portrait, and one need not quote "In Memoriam" to prove how utterly the charm of Hallam subjugated the Tennyson circle. Wit, swiftness of insight, beauty, lovableness— all seem to have been there; and it remains that Arthur Hallam was worshipped and adored by his contemporaries with a fierce jealousy of devotion. Nothing but the presence of an overmastering charm can explain this conspiracy of praise; and perhaps there is no better proof of it than that his friends could detect genius in letters and poems which seem alike destitute of promise and performance.

There is another figure of earlier date who seems to have had the same magnetic gift in an even more pre-eminent degree. There is a portrait by Lawrence of Lord Melbourne that certainly gives a hint, and more than a hint, of the extraordinary charm which enveloped him; the thick, wavy hair, the fine nose, the full, but firmly moulded, lips, are attractive enough. But the large, dark eyes under strongly marked eyebrows, which are at once pathetic, passionate, ironical, and mournful, evoke a singular emotion. Every gift that men hold to be advantageous was showered upon Melbourne. He was well born, wealthy, able; he was full of humour, quick to grasp a subject, an omnivorous reader and student, a famous sportsman. He won the devotion of both men and women. His marriage with the lovely and brilliant Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose heart was broken and mind shattered by her hopeless passion for Byron, showed how he could win hearts. There is no figure of all that period of whom one would rather possess a personal memoir. Yet despite all his fame and political prestige, he was an unhappy, dissatisfied man, who tasted every experience and joy of life, and found that there was nothing in it.

The dicta of his that are preserved vibrate between cynicism, shrewdness, wisdom, and tenderness. "Stop a bit," he said, as the cabinet went downstairs after a dinner to discuss the corn laws. "Is it to lower the price of bread or isn't it? It doesn't much matter which, but we must all say the same thing." Yet, after all, it is the letters and diaries of Queen Victoria that reveal the true secret of Melbourne's charm. His relation to his girl- sovereign is one of the most beautiful things in latter-day history. Melbourne loved her half paternally, half chivalrously, while it is evident that the Queen's affection for her gallant and attractive premier was of a quality which escaped her own perception. He humoured her, advised her, watched over her; in return, she idolised him, noted down his smallest sayings, permitted him to behave and talk just as he would. She lovingly records his little ways and fancies—how he fell asleep after dinner, how he always took two apples, and hid one in his lap while he ate the other.

"I asked him if he meant to cat it. He thought not, and said, 'But I like to have the power of doing so.' I observed, hadn't he just as well the power of doing so when the apples were in the dish on the table? He laughed and said, 'Not the FULL power.'"

Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy. He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, "You see, those women bothered him so." And when he was superseded by Peel, he combated the Queen's dislike of her new premier, and did his best to put Peel in a favourable light. When Peel made his first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, "For God's sake, go and talk to the Queen!" When I was privileged to work through all Melbourne's letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up to the end.

Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,—he had not the purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,—but I know of no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated by the aroma of charm. Everything that he did and said had some distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same before, and said it heavily and solemnly.

Not that charm need be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps most beautiful when there is something of the child about it, something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness. Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself so interesting to others, and perhaps rather over-shadowed by the responsibility of it. He was romantically affectionate, and the tears came very easily at the call of emotion. Such incidents as that when Newman said good-bye to his bare room at Littlemore, and kissed the door-posts and the bed in a passion of grief, show what his intensity of feeling might be.