Collections and Recollections

by George William Erskine Russell

In all these cases the courtesy of the intention was manifest; but sometimes it is less easy to discover. Not long ago Sir Henry Trying most kindly went down to one of our great Public Schools to give some Shakespearean recitations. Talking over the arrangements with the Head Master, who was not a man of felicities and facilities, he said, "Each piece will take about an hour; and there must be fifteen minutes' interval between the two." "Oh! certainly," replied the Head Master; "you couldn't expect the boys to stand two hours of it without a break." The newly appointed rector of one of the chief parishes in London was entertained at dinner by a prominent member of the congregation. Conversation turned on the use of stimulants as an aid to intellectual and physical effort, and Mr. Gladstone's historic egg-flip was cited. "Well, for my own part," said the divine, "I am quite independent of that kind of help. The only occasion in my life when I used anything of the sort was when I was in for my tripos at Cambridge, and then, by the doctor's order, I took a strong dose of strychnine, in order to clear the brain." The hostess, in a tone of the deepest interest, inquired, "How soon did the effect pass off?" and the rector, a man of academical distinction, who had done his level best in his inaugural sermons on the previous Sunday, didn't half like the question.

Not long ago I was dining with one of the City Companies. On my right was another guest—a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers. We had a long and genial conversation on topics relevant to Smithfield, when, in the midst of it, I was suddenly called on to return thanks for the visitors. The chairman, in proposing the toast, was good enough to speak of my belongings and myself in flattering terms, to which I hope that I suitably responded. When I resumed my seat my butcher friend exclaimed, with the most obvious sincerity, "I declare, sir, I'm quite ashamed of myself. To think that I have been sitting alongside of a gentleman all the evening, and never found it out!"

The doorkeepers and attendants at the House of Commons are all old servants, who generally have lived in great families, and have obtained their places through influential recommendations. One of these fine old men encountered, on the opening day of a new Parliament, a young sprig of a great family who had just been for the first time elected to the House of Commons, and thus accosted him, with tears in his eyes: "I am glad indeed, sir, to see you here; and when I think that I helped to put your noble grandfather and grandmother both into their coffins, it makes me feel quite at home with you." Never, surely, was a political career more impressively auspicated.

These Verbal Infelicities are by no means confined to social intercourse. Lord Cross, when the House laughed at his memorable speech in favour of Spiritual Peers, exclaimed in solemn remonstrance, "I hear a smile." When the Bishop of Southwell, preaching in the London Mission of 1885, began his sermon by saying, "I feel a feeling which I feel you all feel," it is only fair to assume that he said something which he would rather have expressed differently. Quite lately I heard an Irish rhetorician exclaim, "If the Liberal Party is to maintain its position, it must move forward." A clerical orator, fresh from a signal triumph at a Diocesan Conference, informed me, together with some hundreds of other hearers, that when his resolution was put "quite a shower of hands went up;" and at a missionary meeting I once heard that impressive personage, "the Deputation from the Parent Society," involve himself very delightfully in extemporaneous imagery. He had been explaining that here in England we hear so much of the rival systems and operations of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society that we are often led to regard them as hostile institutions; whereas if, as he himself had done, his hearers would go out to the mission-field and observe the working of the societies at close quarters, they would find them to be in essential unison. "Even so," he exclaimed; "as I walked in the beautiful park which adjoins your town to-day, I noticed what appeared at a distance to be one gigantic tree. It was only when I got close to it and sat down under its branches that I perceived that what I had thought was one tree was really two trees—as completely distinct in origin, growth, and nature as if they had stood a hundred miles apart." No one in the audience (besides myself) noticed the infelicity of the illustration; nor do I think that the worthy "Deputation," if he had perceived it, would have had the presence of mind to act as a famous preacher did in like circumstances, and, throwing up his hands, exclaim, "Oh, blessed contrast!"

But it does not always require verbal infelicity to produce a "Thing one would rather have expressed differently." The mere misplacement of a comma will do it. A distinguished graduate of Oxford determined to enter the Nonconformist ministry, and, quite unnecessarily, published a manifesto setting forth his reasons and his intentions. In his enumeration of the various methods by which he was going to mark his aloofness from the sacerdotalism of the Established Church, he wrote; "I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish me from my fellow-Christians." Need I say that all the picture-shops of the University promptly displayed a fancy portrait of the newly fledged minister clad in what Artemus Ward called "the scandalous style of the Greek slave," and bearing the unkind inscription—"The Rev. X.Y.Z. distinguishing himself from his fellow-Christians"? If a comma too much brought ruin into Mr. Z.'s allocution, a comma too little was the undoing of a well-remembered advertisement. "A PIANO for sale by a lady about to leave England in an oak case with carved legs."

An imperfect sympathy with the prepossessions of one's environment may often lead the unwary talker to give a totally erroneous impression of his meaning. Thus the Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford once brought an Indian army chaplain to dine at the high table of Oriel, and in the common room after dinner the Fellows courteously turned the conversation to the subject of life and work in India, on which the chaplain held forth with fluency and zest. When he had made an end of speaking, the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who was not only a very learned scholar but also a very devout clergyman, leaned forward and said, "I am a little hard of hearing, sir, but from what I could gather I rejoice to infer that you consider the position of an army chaplain in India a hopeful field." "Hopeful field indeed," replied the chaplain; "I should rather think so! You begin at £400 a year."

A too transparent honesty which reveals each transient emotion through the medium of suddenly chosen words is not without its perils. None that heard it could ever forget Norman Macleod's story of the Presbyterian minister who, when he noticed champagne-glasses on the dinner-table, began his grace, "Bountiful Jehovah!" but, when he saw only claret-glasses, subsided into, "We are not worthy of the least of Thy mercies." I deny the right of Bishop Wilberforce in narrating this story in his diary to stigmatize this good man as "gluttonous." He was simply honest, and his honesty led him into one of those "Things one would rather have expressed differently." But, however expressed, the meaning would have been the same, and equally sound.

Absence of mind, of course, conversationally slays its thousands, though perhaps more by the way of "Things one would rather have left unsaid" than by "Things one would rather have expressed differently." The late Archbishop Trench, a man of singularly vague and dreamy habits, resigned the See of Dublin on account of advancing years, and settled in London. He once went back to pay a visit to his successor, Lord Plunket. Finding himself back again in his old palace, sitting at his old dinner-table, and gazing across it at his old wife, he lapsed in memory to the days when he was master of the house, and gently remarked to Mrs. Trench, "I am afraid, my love, that we must put this cook down among our failures." Delight of Lord and Lady Plunket!

Medical men are sometimes led by carelessness of phrase into giving their patients shocks. The country doctor who, combining in his morning's round a visit to the Squire and another to the Vicar, said that he was trying to kill two birds with one stone, would probably have expressed himself differently if he had premeditated his remark; and a London physician who found his patient busy composing a book of Recollections, and asked, "Why have you put it off so long?" uttered a "Thing one would rather have left unsaid." The "donniest" of Oxford dons in an unexampled fit of good nature once undertook to discharge the duties of the chaplain of Oxford Jail during the Long Vacation. Unluckily it so fell out that he had to perform the terrible office of preparing a criminal for execution, and it was felt that he said a "Thing one would rather have expressed differently," when, at the close of his final interview, he left the condemned cell, observing, "Well, at eight o'clock to-morrow morning, then."

The path of those who inhabit Courts is thickly beset with pitfalls. There are so many things that must be left unsaid, and so many more that must be expressed differently. Who does not know the "Copper Horse" at Windsor—that equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk to which (and back again) the local flyman always offers to drive the tourist? Queen Victoria was entertaining a great man, who, in the afternoon, walked from the Castle to Cumberland Lodge. At dinner her Majesty, full, as always, of gracious solicitude for the comfort of her guests, said, "I hope you were not tired by your long walk?" "Oh, not at all, thank you, ma'am. I got a lift back as far as the Copper Horse." "As far as what?" inquired her Majesty, in palpable astonishment. "Oh, the Copper Horse, at the end of the Long Walk!" "That's not a copper horse. That's my grandfather!"