The first installment of visitors, with their attendant musicians, having departed, their places were presently taken by a distinguished Hungarian diplomat, Count —— and his wife. When I say of the count, who spoke English perfectly, that one could not distinguish him from a highly placed English gentleman, I am paying him, no doubt, an insular, but I mean it to be a sincere, compliment.
But the Princess had still another guest in reserve, on whose qualities, so I judged from her tones, she set even a higher store. This was a Hungarian lady, young, well born, and married, but unfortunately neglected by her husband, although she was extremely beautiful. As my mind was much engaged with the thoughts of old castles, and also with the composition of my own little work on Cyprus, I paid no great attention to what the Princess said in praise of this guest whose advent was now approaching. But when the lady arrived I felt that the praise was justified. As she and her husband are by this time beyond the reach both of praise and blame, I may say of her without fear of impertinence that she was a model of innocent beauty, that her conversation was as charming as her expression, and her dresses as charming as her conversation. I am myself not much addicted to cards, but when she proposed in the evenings to teach me the Hungarian game of Tarok I should not have been human had I failed to become her pupil. But I was never long in her company without being conscious of a feeling that she was a woman who, through no fault of her own, had already had a history, or was certain to have one some day. This feeling did not mislead me. A year later it was justified. I learned, by accident, that her history had been short, forlorn, and fatal. Its hidden actualities, reconstructed by my own imagination, I afterward combined in my novel A Human Document.
CHAPTER XIII
TWO WORKS ON SOCIAL POLITICS
The Second Lord Lytton at Knebworth—"Ouida"—Conservative Torpor as to Social Politics—Two Books: Labor and the Popular Welfare and Aristocracy and Evolution—Letters from Herbert Spencer
My visit to Cyprus one year, and my visit to Hungary the next, were both of them retreats from the life of political and even philosophical thought. They were frank acts of truancy in the regions of pure romance; where life, individual and social, is a spectacle to be enjoyed, not a problem of which thinkers compete in devising an explanation. But on returning from Hungary to England the practical affairs of the moment met me again halfway, at Vienna, where for a day or two I broke my journey. My acquaintances at Vienna were few, but they included Sir Augustus and Lady Paget at the Embassy, whom I had last seen at midnight on the deck of the Dover packet when I was bound for the shores of Cyprus more than a year before. Ambassadors, if they know their business, are necessarily preoccupied with the present, and when lunching or dining with Sir Augustus it was not possible to forget it. It was all the more impossible because on these occasions there was another diplomat present, also an old acquaintance—Sir Henry Drummond Wolf, who happened to be then on his way home from Persia, and who was voluble on questions of international, and especially of English, politics. So far, however, as my own mood was concerned, this dissipation of romance by realities was a more or less gradual process. Even when I was again in England my inclinations to the life romantic—to what Virgil (I think) calls the "amor ulterioris ripæ"—survived for many months the new recall of my mind to the philosophies of prosaic action.
As an illustration of this fact I remember a weekend visit which I paid that summer to Robert, the second Lord Lytton, at Knebworth. The occasion was marked by the coappearance of things romantic and practical in more ways than one. On the day of my arrival one of the first topics discussed was "Ouida," who at that time was in England, and had been staying at Knebworth only the week before. "Ouida's" view of life was nothing if not romantic. Lytton, during the previous spring, had been spending some weeks in Florence. He was quite alone; and "Ouida," who, apart from her affectations, was a very remarkable woman, had had no difficulty in securing his frequent company at her villa, where she fed him at an incredible price with precociously ripe strawberries. On her memory of these tender proceedings she had built up a belief that his nature had been emptied of everything except one great passion for herself, and she had actually come to Knebworth convinced that a single word from her would tear him from the bosom of his family and make him hers alone. The magic word was said. The expected results had, however, failed to follow—perhaps because the word, or words, had not been very happily chosen. They had been these: "Why don't you leave this bourgeois man-and-wife milieu behind you and prove in some Sicilian palace what life may really mean for people like you and I?"
On the occasion of the same visit another meeting between romance and reality was this: Knebworth was originally a dignified but plain structure, built (I should say at a guess) in the time of Charles II; but, as is well known, the first Lord Lytton (the novelist), inspired by the taste of his time, and aided by inexhaustible stucco, metamorphosed it into the semblance of a pinnacled castle or abbey, the old dining room reappearing in the form of a baronial hall. One evening after dinner I, my host, and a certain Admiral B—— happened to be in the hall alone. While the admiral was reading a letter, my host drew me aside and gave me an amusing description of the rise of the admiral's family. His grandfather, having accumulated a substantial fortune as a solicitor, discovered a ruin—a small tower in France—the name of which was identical with his own. This ruin he bought, and declared that it was the cradle from which his own family sprang. He then, having bought an estate in an English county, proceeded to build a Norman castle in ruins, and adjoining this he built a turreted Tudor mansion. Here was a family pedigree translated into terms of stone. The builder crowned his work by the adoption of feudal manners, to which his domestics had so to adapt their own that when a neighbor, who called on him, asked if Mr. B—— was at home, the reply of the footman was, "The right honorable gentleman is taking a walk on the barbican." My host, having finished his story, was for a moment called away. He had no sooner gone than the admiral, coming up to me, jerked his thumb in the direction of the surrounding panels, and said, confidentially, "The whole of this was put up by that man's father."
But in a much more memorable way romance conquered reality one night in the drawing-room. The ladies of the party had disappeared; and by way of doing something Lytton, two other men, and myself became somehow grouped round a card table with our minds made up for whist. At first we put down our cards with promptitude and a semblance of attention, but someone before long made some observation which, though interesting, was wholly irrelevant to the game. The three others put down their cards to listen, and had, when they took them up again, some difficulty in remembering who was to play next. Presently one of them quoted a line of poetry. It was from Coleridge's "Kublai Khan." Somebody else suggested a mild doubt as to whether that poem had, as the author contended, really been composed in a dream. The game once more proceeded, but our host's eyes had already begun to wander, and at last he frankly threw his own cards on the table. Everybody else followed him. Cards were things forgotten. Their place was taken by poetry. Single lines were cited which the authors had dreamed undoubtedly. The most remarkable was dreamed by a brother of Tennyson, after a day spent in examining a bundle of ancient manuscripts. The line—it was Latin—was as follows:
"Immemorabilium per fulva crepuscula palpans"—that is to say, "fumbling among the tawny twilights of immemorables." Lord Lytton looked as if he were in a dream himself. Presently he spoke as though his mind were coming back from a distance. "I," he said, "dreamed a poem in India. It has never been written down, but I still can remember every line of it. Listen." The poem, which was full of vague Oriental imagery, was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author's voice, naturally low and musical, acquired new tones as he recited it, giving to it the qualities of an incantation; and round us, as though fashioned out of shadows, was the large, dimly lighted drawing-room, which the old novelist had incrusted with impossible heraldries, culminating in escutcheons of pre-Christian Welsh kings.