To return to Mr. Chamberlain. Though already twice a widower he was still regarded politically as a young man, and I remember the American Minister Mr. Phelps assuring me that he had watched in the House of Commons Mr. Gladstone snub Chamberlain in a way that he was convinced had a good deal to do with his breach with the Liberal party. I doubt that being more than a very secondary cause, but I perfectly recall the acrimonious tone in which Mr. Chamberlain early in our acquaintance commented on the way in which politicians were treated “because they were young.” Anyhow, Mr. Chamberlain not only asserted himself as worthy of all consideration politically, but he rapidly discarded socially his stern views of those whom he had formerly stigmatised as “lilies of the field.” The late Sir Cecil Spring Rice once told me that he and Mr. Chamberlain had been thrown together a good deal on some occasion in America, and the latter had confided to him that he had really believed that the so-called “upper classes” were, taken as a whole, the idle, selfish, self-indulgent, and generally pernicious people whom he had denounced, but that when he came to know them he realised that they were a very different set of individuals. I have always held that Mr. Chamberlain was an honest man, and that when people accused him of changing his coat his changes were the result of conviction. He once said to me that he had invariably held that the people ought to have what they really wanted, and that more than once he had discovered that he was mistaken in what he had previously imagined to be their desires, and that then he was willing to follow their lead. “For instance,” he said, “I thought the country wanted Secular Education and therefore advocated it, but experience showed me that this was not the case and I therefore ceased to support it.” Of course this principle may be pushed too far. A statesman ought to have some convictions from which he cannot and will not depart, but it would be absurd to say that a man entering political life is bound to have a cut-and-dried programme which nothing will make him modify. Moreover Mr. Chamberlain had grown up in a narrow commercial circle, and larger knowledge of men and manners was bound to widen his views. On the first occasion that he stayed with us at Osterley in June 1887 and June 1888 his daughter Miss Beatrice Chamberlain came with him. I see by our old Visitors’ Book that we had some very good Conservatives to meet them—in 1888 Lady Lathom and her daughter Maud, George Curzon, Lord and Lady Kintore, Sir John Stirling Maxwell, and my husband’s cousin, Prince Louis Esterhazy. I have been told that more than one person first saw Mr. Chamberlain rowing on the Lake at Osterley in a tall hat and with a pipe in his mouth! I rather think that it was at a garden party. In 1888 just after the death of the Emperor Frederick almost everyone appeared in mourning, which somebody said made it look like a funeral wake tempered with strawberries. Poor Beatrice Chamberlain, however, appeared in a sort of plaid gown which made her very unhappy. She confided to Lady Lathom that she had just returned from France and had not known that people were wearing mourning—moreover she belonged to some society in Birmingham (a very sensible one) which agreed not to wear mourning except for quite the nearest relatives. She was afraid we might think that her clothes were due to her Radical principles, which we certainly did not. She became a very talented and distinguished woman, and her death, a few years ago, was a loss to many good causes. I was much touched by a letter which she wrote me after my husband died in 1915 in which she said that he and I had been kind to her “particularly in the long-ago days when I, not so very young, but so very raw, was keeping house for papa and came with him into this strange, unknown, and uncharted world of London.” We had done little enough, and it was very nice of her to preserve such a recollection for over a quarter of a century.
Next year when Mr. Chamberlain stayed with us he had married the charming Miss Endicott, now Mrs. Carnegie, but I shall have more to say of them both later on.
DEPARTURE FOR INDIA
I must now record some recollections of the first of our three visits to India.
The idea of such a journey arose from my seeing Mr. Robert Bourke in a hansom as I was driving late in the season of 1886. He waved to me and I stopped to hear what he had to say. “I want to talk to you and Jersey,” said he. “Very well,” I said; “come down to Osterley and you will find us both at such a time.” It was accordingly arranged, and he told us that Lord Salisbury had offered him the Government of Madras. He was somewhat upset, as he had been Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs when Lord Salisbury was Secretary of State for that Department, and when the latter became Prime Minister Mr. Bourke thought that he ought to have had higher promotion, and regarded this offer rather as exile. However, on talking it all over he began to paint the gubernatorial glories in more roseate hues, and my husband and I both recommended him to accept, as we neither of us thought in our hearts that he was likely to attain Cabinet rank in England. Then he said, “If I go, will you come out and stay with me?” It was a new but attractive project, and we gave a provisional promise which we fulfilled in the autumn of 1888. My parents undertook to keep an eye on the younger children and to have them at Stoneleigh for part of our absence—it was arranged that Villiers should join us when his Christmas holidays began, and the Eton authorities consented that he should miss the following term as it was thought that India would be equally educational. We accordingly took our passages on the P. and O. Arcadia, which left Marseilles on Friday, October 26th. My brother Dudley and Mr. Charles Buller sailed in the same ship, which was a new one and had improvements then reckoned very novel. For instance, it had electric light, which had not yet been installed in all the P. and O. fleet. There were about 240 first-class passengers—some entertaining ones among them, including Sir Samuel and Lady Baker, Captain Hext, who was Director of Indian Marine, and Mr. and Mrs. Gerard Leigh. In the second saloon was the theosophist Colonel Olcott—an odd mixture of philanthropy and humbug—but discussions with him often served to pass the time. One was not allowed to ask a second-saloon passenger for meals, but we had permission for him to come and talk to us, and also to give two theosophical lectures in the first-class saloon. I shall have more to say of him at Madras—but the inner meaning of theosophy is so often discussed that I insert here the way in which he presented it as I noted in my journal after one of his lectures given when we were nearing Port Said:
“Colonel Olcott gave a lecture on the Theosophical Society of which he is President. The Society has its headquarters in Madras” (N.B.—really at Adyar near Madras) “and has three chief objects—Universal Brotherhood, Study of ancient oriental texts, Investigation of hidden psychical forces. It admits members of any religion, but requires universal toleration. Practically its own tenets are Buddhist, that being rather a philosophy than a religion. It professes, however, to assist its members to the better comprehension of the esoteric or underlying significations of their respective religions.”
Colonel Olcott himself was a Buddhist, and moreover laid claim to certain powers of healing, which I should imagine, in so far as they were effectual, were a kind of faith healing; he went beyond M. Coué, as he declared that he had healed a blind man! Mrs. Gerard Leigh gravely asked him one day whether he could give her something to protect her against spooks, as she often had to stay in a house which she believed to be haunted. “Give me something you are accustomed to wear,” he said, and she handed him a ring. He stared at it, and said, “If you could see—you would see two rays” (blue rays I think he said) “going from my eyes into this ring.” “What will it do?” she asked. “Well,” was the answer, “it will be like a hand laid on your head to protect you.” If she remembered it next time a spook was about, I feel sure that it was most effectual. “Your ring,” he said to one of us, “came out of a jeweller’s shop—mine came out of a rose,” and told us a pleasing legend of how his sister held a rose and Madame Blavatsky conjured a ring out of it.
COL. OLCOTT AND PROF. MAX MULLER
He had very exalted philanthropic views, and long afterwards, when he was in England, Professor Max Müller told me that he had said to him, “Colonel Olcott, with all your fine ideas for doing good how can you lend yourself to that nonsense of broken tea-cups and so on?” “And,” continued Max Müller, “he looked down through his funny blue spectacles and answered, ‘All religions must be manured’—which surely gave away the whole show.”
Colonel Olcott was extremely anxious to enlist me as a member of the Theosophical Society, assuring me that he only wanted my signature to a document which he would keep privately, “not for publication.” What good it would do him in that case is not very apparent, but the net was spread in vain in the sight of the bird as far as I was concerned. Years afterwards he reappeared at Sydney and renewed his appeal in the following pathetic—but still unsuccessful—verses: