Tortor pararet;” etc.[294]
Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.
It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from the ergoteur. There's all the difference between the ergoteur and the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.
Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it, ancora impara, “still learning.”
At dinner he showed in full force.
Table-Talk
Heroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.
Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure that penseur, as in libre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]
Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father, Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.
J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in the Quarterly.