Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere

by John Willis Clark

‘His brilliancy and talents in tongue or pen—whether political, social, or literary—were inspired chiefly by good-will towards man; but he had the same voice and manners for the dirty brat as he had for a duchess, the same desire to give pleasure and good. Once, at Redhill, where we were with a party, and the chiefs were explaining to us the system in the court-yard, a mean, stunted, villainous-looking little fellow crept across the yard (quite out of order, and by himself), and stole a dirty paw into Mr Milnes’s hand. Not a word passed; the boy stayed quite quiet and quite contented if he could but touch his benefactor who had placed him there. He was evidently not only his benefactor, but his friend’ (vol. ii. p. 7).

Milnes had been called a Liberal-Conservative during the first ten years of his parliamentary life. He now became a Conservative-Liberal; but the transposition of the adjective made little, if any, change in his political conduct. He was as insubordinate in the latter position as he had been in the former. He took Lord Palmerston as his leader and chosen friend; but he did not always side with him. In the debates on the Conspiracy Bill, after the attempt of Orsini to assassinate Napoleon III., Milnes spoke and voted against his chief; and on the measure for abolishing the East India Company he was equally indifferent to the claims of party. As time went on, he drifted out of party politics altogether; and both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which he entered in 1863, it was to measures of a private character, or to measures of social reform, that he gave his attention. He advocated help to Lady Franklin in her expedition to clear up the mystery of her husband’s fate; he was in favour of female suffrage; of the abolition of public executions; and he led the agitation for legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. At the same time he cordially supported the Liberal party on all great occasions. Speaking of the abortive Reform Bill of 1866, Mr Reid remarks:

‘Houghton held strongly to the Liberal side throughout the movement, and again afforded proof of the fact that his elevation to the House of Lords had strengthened, rather than weakened, his faith in the people and in popular institutions. Early in April he presided at one of the great popular meetings in favour of Reform. The scene of the meeting was the Cloth Hall at Leeds—a spot famous in the political history of the West Riding—and Lord Houghton’s speech was as advanced in tone as the most thoroughgoing Reformer could have wished it to be. He was, indeed, one of the very few peers who took an open and pronounced part in the agitation of the year’ (vol. ii. p. 151).

This is only one instance, out of many that could be adduced. It would be interesting to know what he would have thought of some of the later developments of his party. It is almost needless to say that he never regarded Lord Beaconsfield as a serious politician. On the eve of his return from Berlin in 1878, he writes: ‘I hope to be in my place on Thursday, to see the reception of the Great Adventurer. Whether from knowing him so well, or from the sarcastic temperament of old age, the whole thing looks to me like a comedy, with as much relation to serious politics as Punch to real life.’ At the same time he had not been a thoroughgoing supporter of Mr Gladstone’s agitation against the Turks, and he had warned that statesman so far back as 1871, that ‘a demon, not of demagoguism, but of demophilism, is tempting you sorely.’

Advancing years and disappointed hopes caused no abatement in his interest in foreign affairs. The events of 1848 had been specially interesting to him; and at the close of that year he produced what Mr Reid well describes as ‘a striking and instructive’ pamphlet, entitled A Letter to the Marquis of Lansdowne. The author reviews the events of the year, and supports the thesis that ‘the Liberals of the Continent had not proved themselves unworthy of the sympathy of England.’ We have no room for an analysis of this masterly work, but we cannot refrain from quoting one remarkable passage in which he foreshadows French intervention in Italy. After describing measures by which Austria intended to make the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom a second Poland, he proceeds:

‘And France, whatever be her adventures in government, will not easily have so dulled her imagination or quelled her enthusiasm as to be unmoved by appeals to the deeds of Marengo and Lodi, and to suffer an expiring nation at her very door to cry in vain for help and protection, not against the restraints of an orderly authority, but against fierce invaders intent upon her absolute destruction’ (vol. i. p. 413).

This pamphlet made a great sensation. In England it was received, for the most part, with dislike and apprehension. Carlyle was almost alone in praising it. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘it is the greatest thing he has yet done; earnest and grave, written in a large, tolerant, kind-hearted spirit, and, as far as I can see, saying all that is to be said on that matter.’ But the strongest proof of the power of the pamphlet is the fact that the Austrians stopped the writer on the Hungarian frontier when travelling with his wife in 1851, as a person who could not breathe that revolutionary atmosphere without danger to the empire. In his later years foreign travel became almost a necessity to Lord Houghton; and as he had then fewer ties to bind him to England, his absences were more frequent and more prolonged. He travelled in France, no longer as an envoy without credentials, but for his private information, or to be the guest of Guizot and De Tocqueville; he became the friend of the accomplished Queen of Holland; he represented the Geographical Society at the opening of the Suez Canal; he made a triumphal progress through the United States; and only three years before his death he went again to Egypt and Greece.

Throughout his life Milnes approached public events with a singular sobriety of judgment. He was never led away by popular clamour, but formed his opinions, on principle, after mature deliberation. It is almost needless to add that he generally found himself on the unpopular side. When England went mad over the Crimean war, Milnes wrote calmly: ‘For my own part I like neither of the combatants, though I prefer a feeble and superannuated despotism as less noxious to mankind than one young and vigorous, and assisted by the appliances of modern intelligence.’ During the American civil war, he ‘broke away from his own class, and ranged himself on the side of the friends of the North, with an earnestness not inferior to that of Mr Bright and Mr Forster.’ Mr Reid tell us that this conduct won for Milnes that popularity with the masses, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire, which all his previous efforts had failed to obtain, and that he found himself, to his great surprise, one of the popular idols. In 1870, again, he was on the unpopular side: ‘I am Prussian to the backbone,’ he wrote, ‘which is a pure homage to principle, as they are the least agreeable people in the world.’

We have been at pains to set forth Milnes’s political acts and convictions in some detail, because he has been frequently represented as a gay farceur, who took up politics as a pastime. It is not, however, as a politician that he will be remembered, but as a man of letters. In his younger days he achieved distinction as a writer of verse, and Landor hailed him as ‘the greatest poet now living in England.’ This judgment may nowadays provoke a smile; but, though it is not to be expected that his poems will recover their former popularity, they hardly deserve to have fallen into complete neglect. As Mr Reid says:

‘A great singer he may not have been; a sweet singer with a charm of his own he undoubtedly was; nor did his charm consist alone in the melody of which he was a master. In many of his poems real poetic thought is linked with musical words; whilst in everything that he wrote, whether in verse or in prose, one may discern the brightest characteristics of the man himself: the catholicity of his spirit; the tenderness of his sympathy with weakness, suffering, mortal frailty in all its forms; the ardour of his faith in something that should break down the artificial barriers by which classes are divided, and bring into the lives of all a measure of that light and happiness which he relished so highly for himself’ (vol. ii. p. 438).