For his prose works, or at least for some of them, we predict a very different fate. We do not like even to think of an age that will refuse to admire the charming style, the real dramatic power, the exquisite tact, and the fine taste which distinguish his Life of Keats, and his Monographs, to which we have already alluded. Other essays, probably of equal merit, lie scattered in Reviews and Magazines. We hope that before long we may see the best of these collected together. Such a series, which would cover a period of nearly sixty years, would form a most important chapter in the history of English literature.
Besides his reputation as a writer, Milnes occupied an unique position towards the world of letters, which it is not quite easy to define. It is not enough to say that he was a Mæcenas, though he knew and entertained the whole literary community both in London and at Fryston—a house which, as Thackeray said, ‘combined all the graces of the château and the tavern’; or that he was always ready to lend a helping hand to those in distress, though he spent a fortune in generously and delicately assisting others. His peculiar characteristics were a rare gift in detecting merit, and an untiring energy in bringing it out, and setting it in a position where it could bloom and flourish and be recognized by other people. In effecting this he spared no pains, and shrank from no annoyance. Often, indeed, he must have risked his own popularity by his importunity for favours to be conferred on others. Mr Reid describes at length the amusing scene between him and Sir Robert Peel, when he solicited and obtained pensions for Tennyson and Sheridan Knowles, of neither of whom the Minister had ever heard; and to Milnes must also be allowed the credit of having been the first, or nearly the first, to bring into prominent recognition the merits of Mr John Forster. He possessed, too, in a very high degree, the gift of sympathy, and, as a consequence, of influence. ‘Ever since I knew you,’ said his friend Macarthy, ‘you have been the chief person in my life; a friend and brother and confessor—the end and aim of all my actions and hopes’; and Robert Browning, in a long and most interesting letter, written to ask Milnes to use his interest to get him appointed secretary to the minister whom England, as he then believed, ‘must send before the year ends to this fine fellow, Pio Nono[[87]],’ admits that his own interest in Italy was due in the first instance to Milnes’s influence. ‘One gets excited,’ he says, ‘at least here on the spot, by this tiptoe strained expectation of poor dear Italy, and yet, if I had not known you, I believe I should have looked on with other bystanders.’ We have said that he was charitable; but to say this is to give an imperfect idea of the efforts he would make for literary men in difficulties. When Hood was in distress he found that he ‘preferred to receive assistance in the shape of gratuitous literary work for his magazine rather than in money.’ Milnes not only contributed himself, but ‘canvassed right and left among his friends for contributions.’ Nor was his help confined to the person whose work he valued. ‘The interest and friendship which the genius had aroused,’ says Mr Reid, ‘was extended to his or her friends and connexions. Many a widow and many an orphan had occasion to be thankful that the husband or father had during his lifetime excited the admiration of Milnes. Years after the death of Charlotte Brontë we find him trying to smooth the path of her father, and to secure preferment in the Church for her husband.’ This is only one instance out of many that might be adduced. Again, he seemed to regard his critical faculty as a trust for the benefit of others, and was never more congenially employed than in drawing attention to some young poet who had no influential friends. In proof of this we will only refer our readers to the touching story of poor David Gray, whom he nursed with almost feminine tenderness, and whose poem, The Luggie, he edited; and to his early recognition of the genius of Mr Swinburne, to whose merits he drew attention by an article in the Edinburgh Review. In close connexion with this kind help to men of whom he knew little or nothing may be mentioned his interest in the Newspaper Press Fund. The formation of such a fund was strenuously resisted, we are told, by the most influential members of the Press; but Milnes, from the first, brought the whole weight of his social influence to its support, and contributed, more than any other man, to its permanent and successful establishment.
Nor should his kindness to young men be forgotten. He may have sought their society in the first instance from the pleasure he took in all that was bright, and entertaining, and unaffected; but, as we have already tried to point out, his motives were commonly underlaid by some serious purpose which it was not always easy to discover. We do not maintain that he was specially successful in drawing young men out, for his own talk was often scrappy, anecdotical, and difficult to follow; still less do we mean that he tried to influence them in any particular direction by improving conversation, or the enunciation of any special opinions in politics or literature. But he certainly made his juniors feel sure of his sympathy and his good-will.
Of Milnes’s religious opinions it is difficult to give any positive account. His family had been Unitarian; at college he became an Evangelical; soon afterwards he fell under the influence of Irving, whom he proclaimed to be ‘the apostle of the age.’ Then, during his residence in Italy, as we have already mentioned, he chose Dr Wiseman for his intimate friend, and the higher Roman Catholic clergy had hopes of his conversion. ‘Mezzofanti,’ wrote one of his friends in 1832, ‘is full of hopes that you will return to the bosom of her whom Carlyle calls “the slain mother”.’ But, during this same period, while passing through what he calls ‘the twilight of his mind,’ he was the friend of Sterling and Maurice and Thirlwall, under whose influence he was hardly likely to submit to an infallible Church. He himself said that he was prevented from joining the Church of Rome by the uprising of a Catholic school in the Church of England. To this movement, as we have seen, he was deeply attached, and both spoke and wrote in its defence. In one of his commonplace books he called himself a Puseyite sceptic; sometimes he said he was a crypto-Catholic, and to the last he never entirely shook off the impressions of his youth. But Mr Reid is probably right in describing him as ‘a tolerant, liberal-minded man, apt to look at religion from many different points of view.’ We are not aware that he ever took part in any directly religious movement, or ever declared his allegiance to the Church of England except as a political organization. Partly from a love of paradox, partly from a habit of looking round a question rather than directly at it, he would have had something to say in defence of almost any system of religion, while his unfeigned charity would induce him to adopt that which recognized most fully the claims of suffering humanity.
Lord Houghton died at Vichy, August 11, 1885. He had been in failing health for some time, but the end was sudden and unexpected. Only a few hours before it came he had been entertaining a mixed company at the table d’hôte by the brilliancy and variety of his conversation. It might almost be said that he died, as he had lived, in society.
We have tried to eliminate what we believe to have been the real Milnes from a cloud of misrepresentations and erroneous judgments—for both of which, it must be remembered, he was himself directly responsible. We leave to our readers the task of passing sentence on a singularly amiable, if eccentric, personality. Some opinions expressed by those who understood him and valued him will appropriately close this article. When he was young his friends recognized in him what Dr Johnson would have called the potentiality of greatness, though they doubted whether he would have sufficient steadiness of purpose to achieve it. ‘Your gay and airy mind,’ wrote Tennyson in 1833, ‘must have caught as many colours from the landscape you moved through as a flying soap-bubble—a comparison truly somewhat irreverent, yet I meant it not as such.’ ‘I think you are near something very glorious,’ said Stafford O’Brien, ‘but you will never reach it.’ Mr Aubrey de Vere decided that ‘he had not much solid ambition. The highlands of life were not what interested him much; its mountains cast their shadows too far and drew down too many clouds.’ But, if Milnes’s well-wishers were compelled to abandon their hopes of any great distinction for their friend, they recognized, with one accord, his charity and his sincerity. If they did not admire him, they loved him. ‘You are on the whole a good man,’ said Carlyle, ‘though with terrible perversities.’ Forster declared that he himself had ‘many friends who would be kind to him in distress, but only one who would be equally kind to him in disgrace.’ A distinguished German said of him, ‘Is it possible that an Englishman can be so loveable?’ and Mr Sumner described him as ‘a member of Parliament, a poet and a man of fashion, a Tory who does not forget the people, and a man of fashion with sensibilities, love of virtue and merit among the simple, the poor, and the lowly.’ Lastly, let us cite his own whimsical character of himself, which, though expressed in the language of paradox, is probably, in the main, nearer to the truth than one drawn by any critic could be:
‘He was a man of no common imaginative perceptions, who never gave his full conviction to anything but the closest reasoning; of acute sensibilities, who always distrusted the affections; of ideal aspirations and sensual habits; of the most cheerful manners and of the gloomiest philosophy. He hoped little and believed little, but he rarely despaired, and never valued unbelief, except as leading to some larger truth and purer conviction’ (vol. ii. p. 491).
EDWARD HENRY PALMER[[88]].
A dramatist who undertakes to write a play which is to be almost devoid of incident, and to depend for interest on the development of an eccentric character, with only a single strong situation, even though that situation be one of surpassing power, is considered by those learned in such matters to be almost courting failure. Such a work is therefore rarely attempted, and is still more rarely successful. Yet this is what Mr Besant has had to do in writing the Life of Edward Henry Palmer; and we are glad to be able to say at once that he has discharged a delicate and difficult task in a most admirable fashion. For in truth he had a very unpromising subject to deal with. It is always difficult to interest the general public in the sayings and doings of a man of letters, even when he has occupied a prominent position, and thrown himself with ardour into some burning question of the day, political or social. Palmer, however, was not such a man at all. He did ‘break his birth’s invidious bar,’ but alas! it was never given to him, until the end was close at hand, ‘to grasp the skirts of happy chance,’ or to rise into a position where he could be seen by the world. It is melancholy now to speculate on what might have been had he returned in safety from the perilous enterprise in which he met his death, for it is hardly likely that the Government would have failed to secure, by some permanent appointment, the services of a man who had proved, in so signal a manner, his capacity for dealing with Orientals. As it was, however, with the exception of the journeys to the Sinaitic Peninsula and the Holy Land, he lived a quiet student-life; not wholly retired, for he was no book-worm, and enjoyed, after a peculiar fashion of his own, the society of his fellow-men; but still a life which did not really bring him beyond the narrow circle of the few intimate friends who knew him thoroughly, and were proportionately devoted to him. He took no part in any movement; he was not ‘earnest’ or ‘intense.’ He did not read new books, or any of the ‘thoughtful’ magazines; nor had he any particular desire to alter the framework of society. The world was a good world so far as he was concerned; and men were strange and interesting creatures whom it was a pleasure to study, as a naturalist studies a new species; why alter it or them? The interest which attaches to such a life depends wholly on the way in which the central character is presented to the public. That Mr Besant should have succeeded where others would have failed need not surprise us. The qualities which have made him a delightful novelist are brought to bear upon this prose In Memoriam, with the additional incentives of warm friendship and passionate regret. It is clear that he realized all the difficulties of his task from the outset; and he has treated his materials accordingly, leading the reader forward with consummate art, chapter by chapter, to the final catastrophe, which is described with the picturesqueness of a romance, and the solemn earnestness of a tragedy. Such a book is almost above criticism. A mourner by an open grave, pronouncing the funeral oration of his murdered friend, has a prescriptive right to apportion praise and blame in what measure he thinks fit; and we should be the last to intrude upon his sacred sorrow with harsh and inconsiderate criticism. But we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw attention to one point. It has been Mr Besant’s object to show the difficulties of all kinds against which his hero had to contend—ill-health, heavy sorrows, debt—and how he came triumphant through them all, thanks to his indomitable pluck and energy; and further, as though no element of interest should be wanting, he has represented him as smarting under a sense of unmerited wrong done to him by his University, which ‘went out of the way to insult and neglect’ him. This is no mere fancy of Mr Besant’s; we know from other sources that Palmer himself thought he had not been treated at Cambridge as he ought to have been, and that he was glad to get away from it. We shall do our best to show that this was a misconception on his part, and we regret that his biographer should have given such prominence to it. But, though Mr Besant may have been zealous overmuch on this particular point, his book is none the less fascinating, and we venture to predict that it will live, as a permanent record of a very remarkable man. We are sensible that much of its charm will disappear in the short sketch which we are about to give, but if our remarks have the effect of sending our readers to the original, we shall not have written in vain.
Edward Henry Palmer was born in Green Street, Cambridge, 7 August, 1840. His father died when he was an infant, and his mother did not long survive her husband. Her place was supplied to some extent by an aunt, then unmarried, who took the orphan child to her own home and educated him. She was evidently a person who combined great kindness with great good sense. Palmer, we read, ‘owed everything to her,’ and ‘never spoke of her in after years without the greatest tenderness and emotion.’ Of his real mother we do not find any record; but the father, who kept a small private school, was ‘a man of considerable acquirements, with a strong taste for art.’ We do not know whether any of Palmer’s peculiar talents had ever been observed in the father, or whether he can be said to have inherited anything from his family except a tendency to asthma and bronchial disease. From this, of which the father died before he was thirty, the son suffered all his life. He grew out of it to a certain extent, but it was always there, a watchful enemy, ready to start forth and fasten upon its victim.