The Ambassador, Sir Edmund Monson, was academic with a large swaying presence and an inexhaustible supply of polished periods. A fine scholar and a master of precise and well-expressed English and an undiminishing store of vivid reminiscence; in the matter of penmanship he was passion’s slave. Possibly my opinion is biased from having had to write out so many of his dispatches on a typewriter, and so often some of them twice, owing to the mistakes. Typewriting, it is well known, is an art in which improvement is rarely achieved by the amateur; one reaches a certain degree of speed and inaccuracy, and after that, no amount of practice makes one any better. If there were too many mistakes in a dispatch it would have to be written out again. There never seemed to be any reason why Sir Edmund’s dispatches should ever end, and they were just as remarkable for quantity as for length. He was exceedingly kind and always amiable, to talk to or rather to listen to; he was the same in his dispatches; one had the sensation of coasting pleasantly downhill on a bicycle that had no break, and save for an accident was not likely to stop.
Michael Herbert, the Councillor, was a complete contrast to Sir Edmund in many ways. With him one felt not only the presence of a brake, but of steel-like grasp on that brake—a steel-like grasp concealed by the suavest of gloves and a high, refined courtesy and the appearance of a cavalier strayed by mistake into the modern world. Never was there an appearance more deceptive in some ways; in so far, that is to say, as it seemed to indicate apathy or indifference or lack of fibre. He had a will of iron and a fearless and instant readiness to shoulder any responsibility, however grave or perplexing. He was a man of action, and an ideal diplomat. At one of his posts they called him “the butcher.” At that time the men who enjoyed the highest reputation in the Diplomatic Service, and who seemed to be the most promising, were perhaps Charles Eliot, Cecil Spring-Rice, and Arthur Hardinge; and in every one of these cases the promise was fulfilled; but as a diplomat, I think anyone would agree, that Herbert excelled them all and easily, although the others might be in one case more intellectual or more brilliant, in another more erudite. Herbert had a steely strength of purpose, a quick eye, and the power of making up his mind at once, as well as a shrewd understanding of the world and especially of the foreign world, and a quiet far-sightedness. Moreover, he had the charm that arises from natural and native distinction, and a subtle flavour which came from his being intensely English, and at the same time a citizen of the world, without any admixture of artificial cosmopolitanism. He would have been at home in any period of English history; whether at the Black Prince’s Court at Bordeaux, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at Kenilworth, at Whitehall, or at the Congress of Vienna.
Had he dressed himself up in the shimmering and sombre satins and the waving plumes of the Vandyk period they would have seemed to be his natural, his everyday clothes.
I could imagine him putting his inflexible determination, expressed in thin, metallic tones of deferential and courteous deprecation, lit up by gleams of a sharp and shy humour, against the perhaps equally obstinate, but unfortunately less wise and less constant, wishes of Charles I. I can imagine him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet appreciation to the jokes of Falstaff, at the first performance of Henry IV.; or signing, without a flicker of hesitation, a dispatch to Drake or Raleigh that would mean war with Spain; or shutting his snuff-box with a sharp snap, as he saw through some subtle wile of Talleyrand; or listening, civil but quite unabashed, to a storm of invective from Napoleon.
One day someone in the Chancery remarked on the peculiarly nauseous odour of the food that is given to foxhounds. “I like it,” he said. “I used to eat it as a child.”
I have always thought the most crucial test to which a new piece of verse or a modern picture can be put is to imagine what effect the verse would produce in an anthology of another epoch or the picture in a gallery of old masters. Herbert as a personality and as a diplomatist could have stood any test of this kind, and placed next to any of the old masters or the old masterpieces, in character and statesmanship, without suffering from the comparison; indeed, so far from suffering any eclipse, his personality would only have emerged more signally and more distinctly, with the melancholy suavity of its form and the unyielding resilience of its substance.
In April 1899, the second centenary of the death of Racine was celebrated in Paris by a performance of Racine’s Bérénice at the Théâtre français. This performance was one of the landmarks in my literary adventures. Bartet played Bérénice, and I do not suppose that Racine’s verse can ever have been more sensitively rendered and more delicately differentiated. Between the acts, M. Du Lau, a fine connoisseur of life and art, took me behind the scenes and introduced me to Bartet. They talked of the play. Around us hovered an admiring crowd, and whispered homages were flung to the artist, like flowers. It was like a scene in a Henry James novel, a page from the Tragic Muse. They agreed that Racine’s loveliest verses were in this play: “Des vers si nuancés,” as Du Lau said. Bartet wore a lilac cloak over white draperies, and a high ivory diadem, and when we said good-bye Du Lau kissed her hand and said: “Bon soir, charmante Bérénice.”
If anyone is inclined to think Racine is a tedious author they cannot do better than read Bérénice. It is the model of what a tragedy should be. The drama is simple and arises naturally and inevitably from the facts of the case, which are all contained in one sentence of Suetonius: “Titus Reginam Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.” That is to say, Titus loved Bérénice and, it was believed, had promised her marriage. He sent her away from Rome, against his own will as well as against hers, as soon as he came to the throne.
It is the eternal conflict between public duty and personal inclination.
“With all my will, but much against my heart,