Henniker-Heaton, on the other hand, will be remembered not for his biographical dictionary of Australians, which was the precursor of Who’s Who, but for his achievement in politics—a postal reform as far reaching as that of Rowland Hill, the father of the post-office. I prophesied his success in print nearly thirty years ago. He is a shining example of what a man who has a great ideal can do by singleness of vision; nothing could shake him from his ideal of a universal penny post; ridicule was poured on it; the big battalions were brought up against it; but he pursued it doggedly. He showed infinite patience, infinite good-nature, infinite tact. He brought his personal influence to bear on politicians of both sides. He went to conferences all over the world; he entertained delegates from all parts of the world; he collected and classified every species of statistic; he accumulated irresistible facts until he had a penny postage, not universal, because it does not bridge the twenty miles between Kent and France,[[8]] but universal for the possessions of the Anglo-Saxon nations, for the United States came into the agreement as well as the Empire. Nor did his activities stop at the post-office; for he has achieved reforms of almost equal magnitude in telegraphic charges. Now he is taking a well-deserved rest, and I cannot help thinking that he would take it very usefully if he had a flat in Berlin, and saw the Kaiser every day. A monarch of the force and intelligence of the Kaiser could not help seeing the irresistibleness of the argument that a letter ought to be taken from London to Hamburg and Berlin for the same price as it is taken to the heart of British Borneo, and if he once happened to notice it, he would brush away the cobwebs which impede it.
[8]. Now happily soon to be accomplished.
To Alfred Austin I was never attracted, except by his enthusiasm for gardens and Italy. He was made Laureate because he was a leader writer, not because he was a poet, and possessed neither the ability nor the affability for the post. Had he gone on writing about blackthorn and blackbirds, he would have left a greater name as a poet, and would not have been made the victim of the famous story which is told of a Scottish law lord, who, meeting him at a country house, said, “Well, Mr. Austin, are you still writing ‘pomes’?”
“One must do something to keep the wolf from the door,” replied the poet, with official modesty.
“And is that what you use those ‘pomes’ for?” asked the man of law, giving one visions of a small man with a big moustache belabouring a wolf on the door-step with a roll of manuscript.
I know of only one more malicious story, which relates to the bestowal of a bishopric. While it was in the balance, Lord Salisbury was suffering from one of his fits of insomnia, and, as his custom was, sent for an M.P. son, whose speeches were the only thing which could make him sleep. His son bothered him all night to bestow the see—it was the premier bishopric—on its present holder. At last Lord Salisbury lost patience. “Oh! give it to him, and leave me. I prefer insomnia.”
It was à propos of insomnia that Lord Salisbury made his finest retort in the House of Lords. A new Liberal peer, to whom the leader was particularly acid, because, having been a whip in the House of Commons, he was rather conscious of his importance, was, in spite of the fact that his income arose chiefly from a brewery, advocating Local Option, because he said that the number of public-houses was a temptation to drink. “Of course,” said Lord Salisbury, “I do not enjoy the same opportunities as the noble Lord does for knowing the effect of the number of public-houses upon the amount which is drunk, but I don’t see his line of argument, because, though I live in a house with forty bedrooms, I never feel the slightest inclination to sleep.”
The Irish Party, too, came in for his acid wit. Who has forgotten his comment on the member of the Irish Party who libelled him, and went to America, when he lost the action, to escape paying the costs? Lord Salisbury only shrugged his shoulders, and said that escaping was the forte of the Irish, adding, “Some prefer the fire-escape, and some the water-escape.”
Harold Frederic owed some of his vogue as a novelist in this country to Mr. Gladstone, who had an immense enthusiasm for his great novel, In the Valley. Frederic, a big burly man, with a burly moustache, was the ablest American journalist in London, till the advent of Isaac Nelson Ford for the Tribune, and Harry Chamberlain for the Sun and the Laffan Agency. Frederic represented the New York Times. He was a man coarse in his speech, and rather coarse in his fibre, and full of prejudices, but he had the gift of political prophecy, and, like Balaam, his utterances were dictated by the voice within him, and not by what he had come to say. His letters to his paper were splendid journalism. He used often to come to Addison Mansions, because he lived just round the corner in the old house on Brook Green. He might have been with us now, if he had not been a Christian Scientist. He was an enormous consumer of alcohol, though I never knew him the worse for liquor, and when he was taken with his last illness, the professor of Christian Science, who was called in by a woman who had great influence over him, was not able to insist upon banishing spirits as a regular practitioner would have done. The result was that he took stimulants (which were worse than poison to him) whenever he felt bad, and ruined his chance of recovery.
Rider Haggard I have spoken of elsewhere.