Essentially a man of action, finding little solace in literature or art, his amusements were of the more frivolous kind. He was fond of racing, boxing, theatres, and billiards, and had a passion for cards that sometimes made him indifferent in what company he played. On one occasion this habit exposed him to a cutting retort. A young Guardsman staying at the same hotel had been asked to make one of a hand at whist. But Russell, whose partner he was, soon found that the soldier was very drunk indeed. He bore for a while the erratic play, but at last threw down his hand, exclaiming, “This is not whist; it is tomfoolery.” The Guardsman, quite unabashed, told him to “keep his hair on.” Any kind of familiarity was intolerable to Russell, and this insolence at once threw him into a towering rage. “Do you know who I am, sir?” he demanded, with that savage glare that had frightened so many reluctant witnesses. But the soldier faced him as coolly as he would have done a battery. “Know you! Of course I do. But remember, my man, you’re not in your silly old police court now.” This was precisely the kind of answer which left Russell helpless. For, though his tastes were a little ordinary and his manner rather rough, he was incapable of the verbal coarseness which is in some cases the only rational alternative to silence. Anything savouring of brutality or looseness was intolerable to him, and it is said that nobody ever dared twice to tell a doubtful story in his presence. He contributed little to the jollity of the Bar mess on circuit, and in ordinary society was inclined to silence, though he could occasionally tell well enough a story of the kind he liked.
Mr. Balfour is credited with saying once that if he and Lord Randolph Churchill had gone to the Bar they must have made forty thousand a year instead of the twenty thousand or so which then represented the high-watermark of forensic success. Few would go so far as to make such a claim. But most people must sometimes have wondered, in watching the great barrister in an unfamiliar environment, how much of his eminence is due to sheer intellect. Certainly very few high reputations in the Courts are increased in politics, and those barristers who do succeed in the House of Commons are generally rather lightly regarded in the Law Courts. Lord Russell was an example of the great lawyer who is also a great personality but is hardly a man of great general elevation. His mind, though vigorous and acute, was essentially narrow; the sap of his intellect was directed almost exclusively to things immediate and practical. On all general questions he lagged behind the opinion of his time. Thus, though he early took a keen interest in Irish politics, and in his later years seldom spoke on anything but Home Rule, his conversion to that cause did not ante-date Mr. Gladstone’s. He had always held that, if Home Rule was necessary, it must come gradually through extensions of local government, but he did not regard it as necessary. Yet he had no difficulty in following Mr. Gladstone when the split came. The truth was that, considered from a worldly point of view, he was mainly a professional man, with professional ambitions and professional thoughts, and politics were to him, rather more than to most lawyers, a means of rounding off his career as an advocate. At the same time, he had no small share of the temperament that made so many of his family embrace a religious life. Money and position were realities; so was religion; other things were less real. It is a temperament puzzling to people in Protestant countries, who understand neither the griping materialism of the Papist peasant nor the scarcely less materialistic mysticism of the Papist peasant’s brother who happens to be a saint. But it is a temperament very Irish, and Russell, though his frigidity made him most unlike the “typical” Irishman of our conceptions, was an Irishman to the core.
Lord Russell’s contemporary and rival, Sir Richard Webster, who succeeded him as Lord Chief Justice under the title of Lord Alverstone, was in every way his opposite. Russell had personality and a touch of genius; Webster was wholly destitute of atmosphere. Russell often carried judge and jury with him by sheer momentum; with Webster it was dogged that did it. Russell, if not excessively Irish on the surface, was, for good or ill, wholly un-English in any part of him; Webster was a most authentic specimen of the Englishman in his least exciting aspect. He was the kind of man who has always been a source of splendid strength to this country—the man who can ever be depended on to do good, honest, sterling work, and is never under suspicion of dangerous brilliance. Whether the task be trying a murderer, or ruling an Eastern province, or running a civil service department, or writing a column for Punch, it is to men like Webster that our confidence is mainly given, and we are never really easy unless they are in a majority. Webster happened to go in for law, his family circumstances tending that way. But when Lord Salisbury suddenly brought him into politics, making him a law officer before he had a seat in the House of Commons, he at once attained the same sort of success in Parliament that he had achieved at the Bar. If he had gone from Trinity College, Cambridge, to Trichinopoly, it would have been the same. Such men as Webster never fail, even as comic singers. Webster sang a very excellent comic song, and would often do so in congenial company, even after he had reached the Bench. And he ran a capital mile race, was great over hurdles, played a good game of cricket, cycled much when the bicycle was out of fashion, and to the end of his life read the sporting papers with at least as much interest as the Law Times.
In a word, there was much health in him, and quite as much ability as he wanted for his purpose. The one thing he lacked was a touch of distinction. That horrible word “level-headed” was not inapplicable to him. If Webster was never, in any circumstances, below a certain standard, he paid the penalty of never rising above it. Nobody ever said, nobody ever did, fewer notable things. He had some very big jobs as an advocate: he led for the Crown before the Parnell Commission; he prosecuted Jabez Balfour, the Liberator swindler; he prosecuted the authors of the Jameson Raid; he served as junior to Russell in the Behring Sea arbitration; and he was leading counsel for this country in the Venezuela arbitration. The praise showered on him for his conduct of these great international cases was undoubtedly deserved. But the quality of the praise is worth notice. “The care and preciseness with which he prepared the cases,” says an authority, “bore traces of tremendous labour. Unlike the American lawyers, who dealt principally in general propositions, Webster advanced no point that could not be legally supported and defended.” Webster was, in fact, an almost perfect specimen of the matter-of-fact British lawyer who, having a complete contempt for first principles, and a vast reverence for precedent and punctilio, is “greatly trusted and respected by solicitors.” He was helped by a ponderously earnest and almost prayerful manner, which suggested that a certain moral obliquity, and an element not quite English, you know, resided with the side opposed to him.
If Sir Richard Webster had been just a little more “English,” a good deal less able, and far less learned, he might have made another Mr. Justice Grantham. There was just the sort of resemblance between the two men that obtains between a first-rate portrait and a very wild and wicked caricature. Both were intensely Conservative, intensely respectable, intensely unimaginative, intensely moral and well-meaning. But Mr. Justice Grantham, like necessity, knew no law, while Lord Alverstone knew a great deal; and Lord Alverstone had the judicial temperament in full measure, while Mr. Justice Grantham could not, without severe mental discomfort, listen to more than one side of a case. His ordinary course was to take a glance at both litigants; that was generally sufficient, but if both seemed equally objectionable he might be impelled to take sides according as he liked or disliked counsel. Taking a side was quite necessary to him. I remember one case in which he suffered, for quite a little time, the agonies of choice. The issue lay between an Englishman who had become some sort of heathen and a naturally black and heathen man. As an intensely religious English gentleman Sir William Grantham was bound to disapprove very strongly of anybody who threw away the advantages of having been born a “happy English child.” But at least equally he did not like colour. For about a quarter of an hour his bosom was torn by conflicting feelings; then he made up his mind that the calls of blood were paramount, and for the rest of the hearing went strongly against the hapless dark-skinned litigant. Judicially Sir William Grantham was simply the Great Reversible. Personally he was an extraordinarily good-hearted man, and those who had least respect for his judicial qualities were among his warmest friends. There was not a dry eye in the Law Courts when it became known that he had been called before the highest of all tribunals.
A very different type of lawyer was Sir Francis Jeune, the famous President of the Divorce Court. A handsome, bearded man, with features of a slightly Semitic cast, and courtly manners not quite English—he was born in Jersey, though little of his life had been spent there—he was, both professionally and socially, one of the best-known figures of the Nineties. His wife, the widow of a Peer’s younger son, was a great entertainer, and her fondness for everything either “smart” or intellectual was a considerable factor in breaking down the barriers which still existed between “the classes” and mere talent or mere money. Judges seldom make much figure in society; and in the Nineties there still clung to them as a class much of that Bohemian character which derived from the days when Circuit duty implied a lengthy banishment from London and a rough bachelor life in the Assize towns. Mr. Justice Hawkins, later Lord Brampton, was not perhaps quite typical of his brethren, and the exaggerated untidiness of Lord Justice Vaughan Williams was exceptional. But not less exceptional was the combination of scholarliness and mondaine aplomb of Sir Francis Jeune. As a divorce judge he had a perfect style; it could hardly have been beaten by the bedside manner of a Royal physician. It was a delight to hear him interpreting the degree of affection implied in a wife’s reference to her husband as “my dear little black piggie.” No man was more apt in discussing the psychology of sex. In one case he showed, by a wealth of refined analysis and historical allusion, how while it was quite possible for a man to be in love with two women at the same time, and leave each in the belief that she was the sole mistress of his heart, no woman was capable of such liberality or such dissimulation. He was a great advocate of temporary separation as a possible cure for ills matrimonial; “absence,” he held, “often made the heart grow wiser.” A rigid moralist might have ventured the criticism that the delightful man-of-the-world way in which Sir Francis dealt with suits and suitors was prejudicial to the interests of marriage; a divorce as managed by him seemed so entirely ordinary and innocent an affair. But, suave as he was, he could be strong on occasion, and he once committed a Duchess to prison with the most perfect and relentless good breeding. Ordinarily he shunned the rôle of judicial humorist; Mr. Justice Darling was then a very young judge, and the older jesters were of the coarser genre. But occasionally a good thing came out accidentally. Thus it was once pointed out that he had joined in prayers at the Archbishops’ Court, whose competence was impugned in the case then being argued. “Yes,” said Sir Francis, “but I prayed without prejudice.”
The name of Lord Coleridge has a very far-away sound; yet, though he was born in 1820 and called in 1847, he was still a great figure in the early Nineties. It was a majestic sight to see him rise sweepingly from the Bench at the close of a sitting. He was six feet three in height, erect and sturdy, though not corpulent, and this tall column of manhood was crowned by an appropriately noble capital; his head was large and finely shaped, and his features, while strong and significant, were suffused with a benignancy of expression which might be occasionally misleading. For he could say very nasty things in his gentle and delicately modulated voice—a voice the beauty of which Sir Charles Russell had never known surpassed. As a cross-examiner he had shown deadly power in his days of advocacy. The smashing of the Tichborne pretender had been one of his great forensic feats; during the larger part of the cross-examination his drift was not generally appreciated, but when he sat down the fraud was completely unmasked, and at the subsequent trial for perjury it was found that Coleridge had, in the words of a commentator, “stopped all the earths.” He died in the spring of 1894, after over twenty years in the great post of Lord Chief Justice. He was undoubtedly a very great judge, but, being on a large scale all round, his faults were not exactly small. His temper was despotic, his language could be bitter, he had many dislikes, and was at once subtle and indiscreet. A fondness for society, going with a disposition to fall foul of many units in society, naturally led to many collisions, and he was as constant in his feuds as in his friendships. Even in his old age he could, if the matter were of sufficient importance, rouse himself to great mental efforts. But those who saw him presiding over his Court in the early Nineties were chiefly conscious of dignified somnolence, and the alertness and vitality of his successor, Russell, seemed almost indecent after the repose that had reigned so long.
Lord Coleridge was one of those lawyers who retain their political prejudices in unmitigated form after translation to the Bench; he was to the last as dogmatic a Liberal as Grantham was a Conservative. Thus in 1892 he wrote to a correspondent, “I am out of politics, of course, but I would go far and do much to destroy the Unionists. To them and them alone is due coercion and all the train of evils and the denial of obvious and safe improvements in England and Scotland. I have no feeling against the Tories; there must be such people in every old-established and aristocratic country, and they at least are honest and act steadily on principle. But a Unionist who pretends to be and calls himself a Liberal, and who for seven long years has voted for everything reactionary and entirely opposed to his creed—I have no patience with these men.” We hear much now about the degradation of the Press. Lord Coleridge thought the solemn London papers of the early Nineties, though “rather better educated” than the American, “to the full as vile,” and “with a swagger and insufferable pretence and self-assertion” from which American journalism was free. Moreover, the “Court and aristocracy degrade the independence and corrupt the manners of the vast numbers who are brought within their influence.” It can be well understood that a man holding such opinions, and expressing them with such vigour, was only popular among those who thought with him. For the rest, Lord Coleridge was fond of good pictures, good music, good living, and good stories. He was not himself the hero of many anecdotes, but one may serve. He was sitting in Court with Mr. Justice Groves one day when a slip of paper was handed up to the Bench conveying the news of a most unexpected judicial appointment. Groves exclaimed, “Well, I am damned.” “My learned brother,” said Coleridge, “I do not indulge in profane language myself, but if you would repeat that word it would really relieve my mind.”
No survey of the legal landscape of the Nineties would be complete without some reference to that most individual figure, Sir Frank Lockwood. Of middle-class Yorkshire birth, Lockwood inherited from his father a facility in caricature and from his mother a keen sense of humour. He was meant for the Church, and sent to Cambridge with orders in view. But his lively nature rebelled against this decorous career, and after he had taken his degree and spent a little time in tutoring he decided to go to the Bar. His first case was a formal appearance to give consent on the part of a certain corporation; the fee was three guineas for the brief and one guinea for consultation. A rather testy judge remarked on the unnecessarily large number of counsel appearing. “You, sir,” he demanded, turning to Lockwood, “what are you here for?” “Three and one, m’lud; merely three and one,” was the soft answer, which did not turn away judicial wrath, but did attract professional attention to the young barrister.
Lockwood is a singular and almost unique example of a barrister making a very creditable success by abandoning himself frankly to the very side of his temperament which would seem least likely to help him in so grave a profession. He throve on a studied light-heartedness. His parts were not specially quick; he had a fundamental common-sense, but little more, and if he had taken himself quite seriously it is likely the legal world would have taken him quite lightly. But it was not easy for judges or witnesses or jurymen to resist the fascination of his cheery presence and genial humour. His jokes were always cracked with a shrewd eye to business, and many of them would not have sounded very amusing outside a court of justice. But they were above the ordinary level of forensic humour, and there came to be a recognised “Lockwood brief.” The character of a jester was also useful as leading to a wide journalistic renown. “Lockwood’s latest” went the rounds as merrily as the sparkling witticisms of the facetious lodger of Mrs. Todgers. The paragraphists were delighted to narrate how Lockwood, seeing a Scottish host sign for himself and his wife in the traditional Highland way, “Cluny and Mrs. McPherson,” himself wrote, “26, Lennox Gardens, S.W., and Mrs. Lockwood.” With equal glee they told how Mr. Lockwood went to a chapel where his Nonconformist friend, Mr. Samuel Danks Waddy, Q.C., was advertised to give a brief, bright, and brotherly address, and how Waddy turned the tables on him by solemnly giving out that “Brother Lockwood would now lead in prayer.”