Just as in the art of writing, and in fact in all arts, the best style is that where there is no style, or rather where we no longer notice the style, so appropriate and so inevitable, so easy the thing said, sung, or done is made to appear, so in diplomacy the most delightful diplomats were those about whom there was no diplomatic style, nothing which made you think of diplomacy. Michael Herbert was one of these, and so pre-eminently was Count Benckendorff. When he was Ambassador in London he took root easily in English life, and made friends instantly and without effort in many different worlds, so his personality and his services are well known to Englishmen. I doubt, however, whether they know how great the services were which he rendered at times both to our country as well as to his own.
All through the war, till a few days before his death, he was giving his whole heart and soul to his work, and every nerve of his being was strained to the utmost. The war killed him as certainly as if he had fought in the trenches. He was astonishingly far-sighted and clear-sighted. In 1903 he told me there would be a revolution in Russia directly there was a war. At the time of the Agadir crisis, he told me that the future of Europe entirely depended on the policy of the German Government: on whether the German Emperor and his Government decided or not to embark on a Louis XIV. policy of ambition and aggression, and try to make Germany the only European power.
When the Emperor of Russia issued the manifesto of 17th October, and the Russians were bedecking their cities with flags, because they thought they had received a constitution, he made it excruciatingly clear that it was nothing of the kind; and he predicted no less clearly what would be the results of so ambiguous an act, and so dangerously elastic a charter.
His public career belongs to history. I had the privilege of knowing him as a private person and of finding in him the kindest and the wisest of friends.
I think his most striking quality was his keenness. The way he would throw himself into the discussion, the topic, or the occupation of the moment, whether it was a book, a play, a picture, a piece of music, a political question, a wolf-hunt, a speech, a problem, even an acrostic to be guessed, or the dredging of a pond.
Whenever I wrote anything new he always made me read it aloud to him, and he was in himself an extraordinarily exhilarating and encouraging public.
He was all for one’s doing more and more, for finding out what one could not do and then doing it.
He once tried to persuade me to go into Parliament. When I objected that I had no power of dealing with political questions, and no understanding of many affairs that a member of Parliament is supposed to understand, he said: “Rubbish! You could do all that part, just as you wrote a parody of Anatole France; people would think you knew.”
He hated pessimism. He hated the Oriental, passive view of life, especially if it was preached by Occidentals. The looking forward to a Nirvana and a closed door. He hated everything negative. Suicide to him was the one unpardonable sin. He hated affectation, especially cosmopolitan affectation, what he used to call “le faux esprit Parisien.” “Je préfère,” he used to say, “le bon sens anglais.” He was extremely argumentative and would put his whole soul into an argument on the most trivial point; and he was as unblushingly unscrupulous as Dr. Johnson in his use of the weapons of contradiction, although, unlike Dr. Johnson, however heated the argument, he was never rude, even for a second; he didn’t know how to be rude. He spoke the most beautiful natural French, the French of a more elegant epoch than ours, with a slightly classical tinge in it. He spoke it not only as well as a Frenchman, but better; that is to say, he spoke without any frills or unnecessary ornament, either of phrase or accent, with complete ease and naturalness.
He spoke English just as naturally. I remember on one occasion, shortly after he arrived in London, his being taken for an Englishman throughout a whole dinner-party by his host. But he used to say that this was sheer bluff and that his command of the language was limited. His beautiful manners, and the perfection of his courtesy came from the same absence of style I have already alluded to. He was natural and unaffected with everyone, because he was chez soi partout; and his distinction, one felt, was based on a native integrity, a fundamental horror of anything common, or mean, or unkind, the incapacity of striking a wrong note in word or deed: the impossibility of hurting anyone’s feelings. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, writing in a provincial newspaper in Russia, about one of the many European crises that threatened Europe before the outbreak of the Great War, said: “We should have been dragged into a war, had we not had at the time, as our Ambassador in London, the first gentleman in Europe.” That is, I think, his best and most fitting epitaph.