The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

by John St. Loe Strachey

the first woman coming from Mycenae Will pine to pour the poison in her ear.

I have set down, I believe correctly, what I heard Browning tell, but I am bound to add that it does not quite correspond with the facts given in the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen in the life of Landor mentions the quarrel and the kind intervention of the Brownings, but does not make the incident nearly so tragic. Very probably indignation made Browning emphasise the bad side of the story. Also he was telling of something which had taken place thirty years before. Finally, it is thirty-five years since I heard the conversation here recorded and indignation has also, no doubt, played its part in deepening the colours of my narration. But, though for these reasons I do not suggest that the details I have given are of biographical importance, I feel absolutely certain on two essential points: (1) Browning unquestionably compared the scene he witnessed to Lear and compared it in the most striking and poignant way. (2) The words put into the mouth of Miss Landor are not any invention or addition of mine. They made a profound impression upon me and I am sure they are the actual words I heard Browning use. He spoke them with passion and dramatic intent, and they still ring in my ears. My memory for many things is as treacherous as that of most people, but when a certain degree of dramatic intensity is reached the record on the tablets of my mind is almost always correct and remains unchanged.

Before I leave the subject of my wife's family and friends and of the warm-hearted kindness with which they received me, I ought to say something about my father-in-law, Mr. Simpson. Though he had not his wife's charm of manner and delight in all the amenities of life and of social intercourse on its best side, he was to me a very attractive man, as well as one of very great ability. Through his shyness he made all but his intimates regard him as dull. There was in truth no dullness about him. His mind was one of great acuteness within its own very special limits. Either by nature or training, I can hardly tell which, he was exactly fitted to be what he was, that is, first a Second Wrangler at Cambridge, then a Conveyancer, and Standing Counsel to the Post Office. Though he never took silk, he was in the most exact sense a counsel learned in the law, and received the singular honour of being made a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn, although he was not a Queen's Counsel. His special gift in the study and practice of the law was his skilful draftsmanship whether in wills, conveyances, or clauses in Acts of Parliament. His vast knowledge and his judgment as to what was the proper interpretation of the Statutes, of the rules of Equity, of the principles of the Common Law, and of the practice of the Courts, was unrivalled.

Mr. Simpson was, in private life, one of the most honourable and high- minded men that I have ever known. Most honourable men are content to be careful of other people's rights and conscious of their own duties in big things, but do not bother themselves to ask whether they have done exactly right in little things. Mr. Simpson was as particular in the minutiae of conduct as he was in great affairs. Take, for example, the way in which he regarded the duty of silence in regard to any knowledge of clients' private affairs which he had derived in the course of his professional work. He never yielded to the temptation to gossip, even about cases which were thirty or forty years old, cases which it might have been argued had become historical. This care extended not only to his own cases, but to matters which he had heard discussed in his chambers in Lincoln's Inn or in those of his brother barristers.

You could not move him by saying that everybody was dead in the case concerned, or that it would be to the credit of particular people to tell what really happened and what were the true causes and motives of the action. Nothing of this kind would affect him. He gave for his silence reasons similar to those which Dr. Lushington gave when, on his death-bed as a very old man, his family asked him to leave for historical purposes a record of the truth about Byron's quarrel with his wife. Dr. Lushington replied that even if he could do so without a breach of faith with any living person, he would not. He had a higher duty, and that was to help men and women to feel that they could unburden themselves fully to their professional advisers, and that there was no risk of those advisers in the future constituting themselves the judges of whether this or that thing should become known to the world at large.

What the client wants is the seal of the confessional. If he cannot have that, he will often refuse to speak the whole truth. But this may mean not only personal injury to those who would speak out if they could feel sure of secrecy, but might inflict injury on others, and indeed on the community as a whole. There is, I feel, no rational denial of this point of view. At any rate, this was the principle which Mr. Simpson carried out in the most meticulous way. He would only talk about the law in the abstract or upon points made in open court. He would not even go so far as to say, "I drew up that marriage settlement, or made that will, or advised this or that man to take action."

He carried his reticence beyond even professional knowledge. For example, he regarded what was said in a club smoking-room as said under the seal of secrecy, and nothing would induce him to repeat what he had heard. Strangely enough, he was a member of the Garrick Club, and I remember him once mentioning that Thackeray used to hold forth in the smoking-room to all present. Naturally I thought that he would be willing to describe some of these talks, for they had obviously made a great impression on him. He, however, was adamant in this matter. When people talked in club-rooms, he argued, they ought to have the feeling that it was like talking in their own house and to their own family. For him Clubs were "tiled" houses.

I think, myself, that he went too far here; but certainly he was erring on the right side. At the present moment the habit of certain lawyers, doctors, and businessmen, to discuss the private affairs of their clients and customers in public is much too common. No doubt most of them are careful to use a good deal of camouflage and to tell their stories as "A" "B" cases, without mentioning names. But that is not always successful. Chance and the impishness of coincidence will very often enable one to discover the most carefully camouflaged secret. I remember, as a young man, coming across an instance of this kind which very much struck me. It happened that the barrister in whose chambers I was a pupil said, very properly, to me on the first day that he supposed I understood that whatever I saw in papers in chambers must be regarded as strictly confidential. It might, he said, happen that I should see things of a highly confidential nature about someone whom I knew in Society; and he went on to tell a story of how, when he was young, two young barristers or students came across a set of papers in which two young ladies, sisters, who happened to be acquaintances of these young men, were mentioned as having a reversionary interest in a very large sum of money with only one old life between it and them. Though apparently only daughters of a struggling professional man, they would soon, it appeared, be great heiresses. The result was two proposals and two marriages! Whether they lived happily ever afterwards is not stated, but they lived, at any rate, "wealthily."

I did not condemn the principle as unsportsmanlike but I remember thinking that there must be a million chances against a barrister ever seeing papers relating to someone he knows. Yet, within two or three days, I was told to help in drafting a marriage settlement which dealt with people at whose house I was going to dance on the very night in question. To my surprise I found that my host and hostess were very rich people. Though I lived for nearly two years in Mr. Simpson's house, and for the next fourteen years, that is, till his death, I saw him constantly, I neither exchanged a bitter word with him, nor felt the slightest indignation or annoyance at anything he did or said. He was at heart one of the kindliest as well as one of the shyest and apparently most austere of men. Mathematics and law may have dried up his intellect, but they never dried up his heart.

Though he was a man of fine intellect, and had a great and deep knowledge of many subjects, I think I never saw a man who was so absolutely devoid of any interest in poetry or Belles-Lettres. I believe indeed that he was quite without any understanding of what poetry meant. If I had been told that he was the Wrangler who said that he could not see "what Paradise Lost proved," I should not have been the least surprised. And yet the style of his writing was often remarkable for its perfect clarity and perfect avoidance of anything in the shape of ambiguity. He could say what he wanted to say in the fewest number of words and in a way in which the most ingenious person could not twist into meaning something which they were not intended to mean. He was indeed a super-draftsman. But that is a gift which every man of letters who is worthy of his salt ought to salute with reverence.