One episode of these foreign experiences deserves a separate notice. In 1832 Milnes spent some months in Greece with his friend Mr Christopher Wordsworth, a scholar whose Athens and Attica has long been a classical text-book. But Milnes was more powerfully attracted by the sight of Grecian independence than by the relics of her ancient glory. The volume which he published on his return, called Memorials of a Tour in some parts of Greece, chiefly Poetical (his first independent literary venture, it may be remarked), contains but scanty references to antiquity. He was keenly interested in the efforts of Greece to obtain a settled government of her own, and through all the drawbacks and discomforts which, as a traveller, he had to endure from the Greeks, he firmly adhered to the cause of freedom. He even advocated the immediate restoration of the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon. But Milnes had a mind which was singularly free from prejudice, and even in those early days he had learnt to consider both sides of every question, and to keep his sympathies controlled by his judgment. He probably approached Greece with the enthusiasm for a liberated nation which had so deeply stirred even the most indifferent in England; but he left it ‘with an affection for the Turkish character which he never entirely lost, and which enabled him in very different days, then far distant, to understand the political exigencies of the East better than many politicians of more pretentious character and fame.’
We have dwelt on Milnes’s early years at some length, because their history throws considerable light on his subsequent career, and accounts for most of the difficulties that he experienced when he made his first entrance into London society. ‘Conceive the man,’ said Carlyle: ‘a most bland-smiling, semi-quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianised little man, who has long olive-blonde hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society!’ If the rough Scotch moralist was not in an unusually bad humour when he wrote these words, it is not to be wondered at that Milnes was regarded for a time as a dangerous person, ‘anxious to introduce foreign ways and fashions into the conservative fields of English life.’ But this dislike of him was very transient, and in less than a year after his return to England he had ‘made a conquest of the social world.’ That he was still looked upon as an oddity seems certain, and even his intimate friend Charles Buller could exclaim: ‘I often think how puzzled your Maker must be to account for your conduct;’ but people soon became willing to accept him on his own terms for the sake of his wit and brilliancy, and, we may add, of his kind heart. Some nicknames that survived long after their application had lost its point, are worth remembering as illustrations of what was once thought of him; perhaps still more for the sake of the letter which Sydney Smith wrote on being accused, quite groundlessly, of having invented them.
‘Dear Milnes,—Never lose your good temper, which is one of your best qualities, and which has carried you hitherto safely through your startling eccentricities. If you turn cross and touchy, you are a lost man. No man can combine the defects of opposite characters. The names of “Cool of the evening,” “London Assurance,” and “In-I-go Jones,” are, I give you my word, not mine. They are of no sort of importance; they are safety-valves, and if you could by paying sixpence get rid of them, you had better keep your money. You do me but justice in acknowledging that I have spoken much good of you. I have laughed at you for those follies which I have told you of to your face; but nobody has more readily and more earnestly asserted that you are a very agreeable, clever man, with a very good heart, unimpeachable in all the relations of life, and that you amply deserve to be retained in the place to which you had too hastily elevated yourself by manners unknown to our cold and phlegmatic people. I thank you for what you say of my good-humour. Lord Dudley, when I took leave of him, said to me: “You have been laughing at me for the last seven years, and you never said anything that I wished unsaid.” This pleased me.
‘Ever yours,
‘Sydney Smith[[86]].’
When we read that Milnes ‘made a conquest of society,’ it must not be supposed that he was a mere pleasure-seeker. On the contrary, as Mr Reid says in another place, ‘he had too great a reverence for what was good and pure and true, too consuming a desire to hold his own with the best intellects of his time, and, above all, too deep a sympathy with the suffering and the wronged to allow him to fall a victim to these temptations.’ From the first, then, he ‘sought to combine the world of pleasure and the world of intellect.’ A list of his friends would contain the names of the best-known men of the day, but, at the same time, men who had but little in common: Carlyle, Sterling, Maurice, Spedding, Thackeray, Tennyson, Landor, Hallam, Rogers, Macaulay, Sydney Smith. ‘He became an intimate member of circles differing so widely from each other as those of Lansdowne House, Holland House, Gore House, and the Sterling Club’; and as a host he was notorious for mingling together the most discordant social elements. Disraeli sketched him in Tancred under a disguise so thin that nobody could fail to penetrate it:
‘Mr Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr Vavasour’s breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or merit—one might almost add, your character—you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced. He prided himself on figuring as the social medium by which rival reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust’ (vol. i. p. 337).
When some one asked if a celebrated murderer had been hanged, the reply he got was: ‘I hope so, or Richard will have him at his breakfast-table next Thursday;’ and Thirlwall, when his friend was on the brink of marriage, thus alludes to past felicity:
‘It is very likely, nay certain, that you will still collect agreeable people about your wife’s breakfast-table; but can I ever sit down there without the certainty that I shall meet with none but respectable persons? It may be an odd thing for a Bishop to lament, but I cannot help it’ (vol. i. p. 448).
After all it seems probable that Milnes himself, and not the lion of the hour, was the chief attraction at those parties. He delighted in the best sort of conversation—that which he called ‘the rapid counterplay and vivid exercise of combined intelligences,’ and he did his best to revive the practice of that almost forgotten art—l’art de causer. As Mr Reid says: