CHAPTER I
THE NINETIES
The late Mr. Justin McCarthy’s vivid Portraits of the Sixties, the late Mr. George Russell’s admirable volume dealing with the men and women of the Seventies, and Mr. Horace Hutchinson’s more recent Portraits of the Eighties form together an invaluable biographical guide to a period second in interest to none in modern history. It is the business of a less distinguished pen to attempt to give some account of leading figures during the last years of the century and of the reign of Queen Victoria.
The task is one to be approached with equal interest and trepidation. With interest, because what men thought and did in the Nineties—still more what they neglected to do and forgot to think—is still powerful to-day; what we are and suffer was in the main decided for us a quarter of a century ago. With trepidation, because the time is distant enough for the reader to demand something more than a mere essay in instantaneous photography, with its mad foreshortenings and irrelevant emphasis; while it is also near enough for errors to be exposed by competent witnesses—people who were behind the scenes at the performance, while the writer was only one of the gallery.
It requires no great courage to attempt an “appreciation” of anybody, from Homer to Addison, who has long been dead. For if one knows very little about such people, there is really very little to be known—little, that is, to tell us the very men they were. The great figures of the past are either phantoms or statues, things of mist or things of stone, without form or with nothing but form. Of a phantom there can be any view; of a statue there can be essentially but one; the only possible diversity is attained by throwing coloured lights on it, as they do on stage groups. Thus, when literary men say that the time has not yet arrived for a “final estimate” of this person or that, they do not mean that a true estimate may be formed hereafter. All they mean is that any present estimate is liable to effective contradiction. When effective contradiction becomes by the nature of things impossible, we have not necessarily attained truth, but we have achieved what is called “historical perspective.”
“Drastic measures,” said the schoolboy in Vice Versa, “is Latin for a whopping.” “Historical perspective” means immunity from being “whopped” for an unlucky guess. The learned professor to whom the mind of his own butler is probably a dark mystery discourses confidently about the secret motives of Tiglath Pilezer or Oliver Cromwell, not because he knows, but because he knows nobody else knows. An anti-authoritarian like Mr. Wells will traverse the said professor’s view (if he happens not to like it) with equal decision and for the same reason. Everybody may declare that the professor is right and Mr. Wells wrong. Nobody can prove it.
The case is different when a letter to The Times, stating an indisputable but hitherto unpublished fact, may make nonsense of the most ingenious deductions, or when (as in the case of Lord Beaconsfield) light is suddenly thrown on a quite unsuspected corner of some great man’s character. The writer is not foolish enough to pretend to “finality,” and will not be greatly perturbed if he is accused of doing less or more than justice to individuals. In some sense the ancients were right in holding that the real purpose of biography was less truth than edification. For the “verdict of history” is a futility when considered in relation to the individual arraigned before its bar; when we can be sure of doing perfect justice in the simplest police case we may begin to talk about the infallibility of a tribunal of pedants. The chief usefulness of such a verdict is that of a sign-post to the living; and for such purpose the rough method of the ancients, who put a halo round one man’s head and hung another in chains by the roadside, was perhaps more effective than the modern way of submitting all to the same sort of post-mortem examination. Carry analysis to the length of an autopsy, and hero and scoundrel look very much alike.
The writer’s view, it may be repeated, is rather that of the gallery than the green-room. It is least of all that of any individual player’s tea-party. The gallery has its defects. Attention is diverted by the crackers of nuts and suckers of oranges. The actors appear quaintly foreshortened, and throw puzzling shadows. The finer by-play sometimes passes unnoticed, or its meaning is not rightly apprehended. There is a tendency, perhaps, to think the man who mouths his part the best actor. But on the whole the gallery knows a good play when it sees it, and is more than any other part of the house free from the more cranky prepossessions of the moment. It has no pose. It has little faddism. It has neither the servility nor the malice of the deadhead. It has paid honest money, and wants honest money’s worth, is unaffectedly pleased when it gets it, and frankly angry if it doesn’t. It may be too generous when it claps, and a trifle unjust when it hisses. But it is honest in both moods.
If the writer may sometimes avail himself of the privileges of the gallery to deal frankly with the eminent, he has certainly no bias against the Nineties. He recalls them as, on the whole, a golden age. The sun shone brighter in those days. The east wind was less bitter. The women were certainly prettier and (perhaps) more modest; the steaks were juicier; the landladies were a kindlier race. There was a zest and flavour in life lacking to-day. Youth was emancipated from the harsher kind of parental control, and had not yet found a stern step-father in the State. The world was all before it where to choose, and the future was veiled in a rose-coloured mist. If some well-meaning elder suggested that one might (by working really hard) end by being Attorney-General, or even editor of The Times, one said the right thing aloud, but inwardly murmured, “Ambition should be made of jollier stuff.” Those were, in short, the days when for men now middle-aged everything was possible, except failure and death: unthinkable things notoriously invented by old fogies to depress the spirits of immortal youth.