“Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay” was the personal note of the period. “Soldiers of the Queen”—
“When we say that England’s master,
Remember who have made her so”—
represented the national gesture of the time: a time of boundless confidence sustained on a basis in one sense horribly insecure and in another firm as adamant. For, while the shakiness of the material foundation of England’s “mastery” was soon to be exposed, the man of the Nineties was to be otherwise justified in his careless faith. In “reeking tube and iron shard” we were found but second-rate; it was the qualities the Nineties rather went out of their way to deride that pulled us through the evil days that followed that singular time. The English character might seem a little vulgarised just then, a little disfigured by superficial cynicism, but it still had its fellow to seek. And it was just the young rowdy of that day, and not the elder who rebuked him, who saved the period in the good opinion of its successors. The older men of the Nineties had more than a touch of Polonius; they were excellent in counsel, but of “most weak hams.” But if it was the autumn of the old excellences, it was the springtide of other things, and the Nineties will always have a claim on the reverence of Englishmen as the breeding and growing time of men as brave as any of our blood.
CHAPTER II
THE EARL OF ROSEBERY
“I would give you a piece of plate if you could get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.”
So wrote Mr. William Cory, one of the masters at Eton in the Sixties, concerning a favourite pupil, Lord Dalmeny, later to be widely famed as Earl of Rosebery and Prime Minister of England. Mr. Cory seems to have belonged to a rather rare class of men, and a perhaps still rarer class of schoolmasters: those who really like boys and enjoy themselves in very young society. Others besides Bacon have deemed it a not quite wholesome taste; at any rate there is always a danger attaching to it—one may develop into a hero-worshipper of a rather pitiable kind. Worse still, one may get accustomed to the most sickly kind of incense. When Paul is in his proper position at the feet of Gamaliel it is good for Paul, but less certainly good for Gamaliel. When Gamaliel sits at the feet of Paul it is good for neither. So when the excellent Cory talks with reverent enthusiasm about the talented youth of the upper classes a normal man is conscious of a certain impatience. Young Dalmeny seems to have overpowered him. He is “surely the wisest boy that ever lived.” His Latin verses are not as other boys’. He writes “flowing, simple, dignified Latin,” “enjoys the old poetry as much as the modern,” and is (at fifteen or a little more) “a strong but wise admirer of both Napoleons.” “I am doing all I can,” says Mr. Cory, “to make him a scholar; anyhow, he will be an orator, and, if not a poet, such a man as poets delight in.”
All this is most reminiscent of the schoolboys of Thackeray, with their prize-poem inspirations, their Jacobite or Jacobin enthusiasms, and their quaint affectations of profundity. But Mr. Cory, with all his affectionate partiality for the young Scottish aristocrat, is still sagacious. He puts his finger unerringly on the weak spot. The mature Lord Rosebery, of course, did not get what the young Lord Dalmeny wanted. He just missed the palm, and he got a great deal of the dust. But the desire to have the best of all worlds, the love of facile success, the resentment of pain, trouble, and ingratitude, no doubt explain his strange and splendid but rather maimed career. Mr. Gladstone described him, while he was still young, as “the man of the future.” Judges scarcely less competent than Mr. Gladstone used Mr. Gladstone’s words when he had advanced well into later middle life.