CHAPTER XPARIS

“We would not die in that man’s companyWho fears his fellowship to die with us,”

“We would not die in that man’s company

Who fears his fellowship to die with us,”

as the most satisfying lines in the language. And I would punctuate the long discussions by playing over and over again at the pianoforte a German students’ song:

“Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein Collegium,”

and sometimes translate Heine’s songs to Belloc.

Best of all were the long summer afternoons and evenings on the river, when the punt drifted in tangled backwaters, and improvised bathes and unexpected dives took place, and a hazy film of inconsequent conversation and idle argument was spun by the half-sleeping inmates of the wandering, lazy punt.

During the Easter holidays I went back to Hildesheim for the last time as a pupil. Sometimes when I was supposed to be working, Frau Timme would find me engaged in a literary pursuit, and she would say: “Ach, Herr Baring, lassen Sie diese Schriftstellerei und machen Sie Ihr Examen” (“Leave all that writing business and pass your examination”).

Before saying a final good-bye to Hildesheim, I will try to sum up what chiefly struck me in the five years during which I visited Germany constantly. Nearly all the Germans I met, with few exceptions, belonged to the bourgeois, the professional class, theintelligentsia; and they used to speak their mind on politics in general and on English politics in particular with frankness and freedom.

I believe that during all this period our relations with Germanywere supposed to be good. Lord Salisbury was directing the foreign policy of England, and his object was to maintain the balance of power in Europe: friendly relations with both Germany and France, without entangling England in any foreign complications.

The English then, as Bismarck said, were bad Europeans. It would have perhaps been better for England if it had been possible for them to continue to be so.

But the Germans I saw never thought that the relations between the two countries were satisfactory, and they laid the whole blame on England. I never once met a German who said it would be a good thing for Germany and England to be friends, with the exception of Professor Ihne. But I constantly met Germans who said Germany might be friends with England but England made it impossible. England, they said, was the spoil-sport of Germany. I was at Hildesheim when the cession of Heligoland to Germany was announced. “England,” said the Germans, “ist sehr schlau” (“The English are very sly”). They thought they had made a bad bargain.

So even, when they had gained an advantage, it escaped their notice; and they always thought they had been cheated and bamboozled. What opened my eyes more clearly still was the instruction given to the schoolboys; the history lessons during which no opportunity was ever lost of belittling England, and above all the history books, theWeltgeschichten(World-histories), which the boys used to read for pleasure.

In these histories of the world, the part that England played in mundane affairs was made to appear either insignificant, baleful, or mean. England was hardly mentioned during the earlier periods of history. There was hardly anything about the England of the Tudors, or the Stuarts, but England’s rôle in the Napoleonic Wars, in which England was the ally of Germany, was made to appear that of a dishonest broker, a clever monkey making the foolish cats pull the chestnuts out of the fire. The whole of England’s success was attributed to money and money-making. “Sie haben,” the Timmes used constantly to say, “den grossen Geldbeutel” (“You have the large purse”). It was not only the Timmes who used to rub this in, in season and out of season, but casual strangers one met in the train or drinking beer at a restaurant.

My impression was that Germans of this class detested England as a nation, in a manner which Englishmen did not suspect.

“Die Engländer sind nicht mutig aber prahlen können Sie” (“The English are not brave, but they know how to boast”), a boy once said to me.

They constantly used to lay down the law about English matters and conditions of life in England which they knew nothing of at all. In England, they used to say, people do such and such a thing. The English have no this or no that. Above all, “Kein Bier,” and when I said there was such a thing as beer in England, they used to answer: “Ach, das Pale-Ale, aber kein Bierkomment,” which was indeed true.

During the time I spent in Hildesheim you could have heard every single grievance that was used as propaganda in neutral countries during the European War, and when I was in Italy during the war, Italians expressed opinions to me which were obviously German in inspiration and were echoes of what I used to hear in Hildesheim.

I never met a German who had been to England, but they always had the most clearly defined and positive views of every branch of English life. When I was at school at Hildesheim, the book the boys used to read to teach them English was a book about social conditions and domestic life in England, described by a German who, I suppose, had been to England. He had a singular gift for misunderstanding the simplest and most ordinary occurrences and phenomena of English life and the English character.

I suppose it would be true to say that the English did not know the Germans any better than the Germans knew them. English statesmen, with one exception, certainly knew little of Germany, but there is this difference. The English admitted their ignorance, their indifference, and passed on. They never theorised about the Germans, nor dogmatised. They never said: “There is no cheese in Germany,” or: “The Germans cannot play football.” They did not know whether they did or not, and cared still less.

During the Boer War, the German Press voiced with virulence all that the middle class in Germany had thought for years, and we were astonished at this explosion of violence; but in reality this was no new phenomenon; it was the naturalexpression of feelings that had existed for long and which now found a favourable outlet.

Of course, in the upper classes, things, for all I know, may have been quite different. I know that there were influential Germans who always wished for good relations between the two countries, but even there they were in a minority.

I left Germany grateful for many things, extremely fond of many of the people I had known, but convinced that there was not the slightest chance of popular opinion in Germany ever being favourable towards England, as the feeling the Germans harboured was one of envy—the envy a clever person feels for someone he knows to be more stupid than himself yet to be far more successful, and who succeeds without apparent effort, where he has laboriously tried and failed.

Bismarck used to say there was not a German who would not be proud to be taken for an Englishman, and when Germans felt this to be true it only made them the more angry.

Years later I heard foreign diplomatists who knew Germany well sometimes say that the English alarm and suspicion of German hatred of England was baseless, and that the idea that Germany was always brooding on a possible war with England was unfounded.

When asked how they accounted for the evidence which daily seemed to point to the contrary, they would say they knew some German politicians intimately who desired nothing so much as good relations with England. This was no doubt true, but in speaking like this, these impartial foreigners were thinking of certain highly cultured, liberal-minded aristocrats. They did not know the German bourgeoisie. Indeed they often said, when someone alluded to the violence of German newspapers: “That’s the Professors.”

It was the Professors. But it was the Professors who wrote the history books, who taught the children and the schoolboys, lectured to the students, and trained the minds of the future politicians and soldiers of Germany.

During my last sojourn at Hildesheim I went to stay with Erich Wippern, who was learning forestry in the Harz Mountains. He lived in a little wooden house in the forest. The house was furnished entirely with antlers, and from morning till night, he associated with trees and was taught all about them by an old forester.

I never went back to Hildesheim again for any time, although I used sometimes to stay a night there on my way to or from Russia. The last time I heard of the Timmes was just before the outbreak of war, when I received a letter from Kurt Timme, whom I had known twenty-two years before as a little boy, telling me his father was dead, and inviting me to attend his own wedding. Kurt was an officer, now a lieutenant. I sent him a wedding present. Two weeks later we were at war with Germany.

At the end of the summer term, Bron, Kershaw, and myself gave a dinner-party at the Mitre, to which forty guests were invited. Slap’s band officiated. The banquet took place in a room upstairs. This was the menu:

JUNE 16, 1897.Melon, Two Soups, Salmon, Whitebait, Sweetbread,Bits of Chicken, Lamb, Potatoes, Asparagus,Duck, Peas, Salad, Jelly, Ice, Strawberries,Round Things.

JUNE 16, 1897.

Melon, Two Soups, Salmon, Whitebait, Sweetbread,Bits of Chicken, Lamb, Potatoes, Asparagus,Duck, Peas, Salad, Jelly, Ice, Strawberries,Round Things.

The caterers of the dinner were loth to print such a menu.

They hankered for phrases such asPurée à la bonne femme, andPoulets printaniers, but I overruled them. Very soon, during dinner, the musical instruments were smashed to bits, and towards the end of the meal there was a fine ice-throwing competition. After dinner the guests adjourned to Balliol Quadrangle.

It was Jubilee year—the second Jubilee. Preparations were being made in London for the procession and for other festivities, and the atmosphere was charged with triumph and prosperity. For the third time in my life I saw Queen Victoria drive through the streets of London. I saw the procession from Montagu House in Whitehall. This was the most imposing of all the pageants, and the most striking thing about it was perhaps the crowd.

There was a great deal of talk about the Fancy Dress Ball at Devonshire House. I had a complicated costume for it, but none of my family went to it as our Uncle Johnny died just before it came off. We went to see some of the people in their clothes at Lord Cowper’s house in St. James’s Square, where I remember a tall and blindingly beautiful Hebe, a dazzlingCharlotte Corday, in grey and vermilion, a lady who looked as if she had stepped out of an Italian picture, with a long, faded Venetian red train and a silver hat tapering into a point, and another who had stepped from an old English frame, a pale figure in faded draperies and exquisite lace, with a cluster of historic and curiously set jewels in her hair, and arms and shoulders like those of a sculpture of the finest Greek period.

Later on in the summer, my father, who had not been well for some time, died, and we said good-bye to 37 Charles Street, and to Membland after the funeral was over, for ever.

I went to a crammer’s at Bournemouth and spent the whole of the winter in London being intensively crammed, and all through the Christmas holidays. In the spring there was a further examination.

This time I qualified in all subjects, and I was given half-marks in arithmetic. The gift of these half-marks must have been a favour, as, comparing my answers with those of other candidates, after the examination, I found that my answers in no way coincided with theirs.

Years later I met a M. Roche, who had been the French examiner. He told me that I was not going to be let through; (as I suspected, I had not passed in arithmetic), but that he had gone to the Board of Examiners and had told them the French essay I had written might have been written by a Frenchman. When the result of the examination was announced I was not in the first three, but when the first vacancy occurred later, I was given it, and on 20th June 1898 I received a letter from the Civil Service Commission saying that, owing to an additional vacancy having been reported, I had been placed in the position of a successful candidate, and asking me to furnish evidence of my age.

I was able to do this, and was admitted into the Foreign Office and placed in the African Department.

I enjoyed my first summer at the Foreign Office before the newness of the work and surroundings wore off. The African Department was interesting. It has since been taken over by the Colonial Office. Officials from West Africa would drift in and tell us interesting things, and there was in the Department a senior clerk whose devotion to office work was such that his leave, on the rare occasions he took it, used to consist in his coming down to the office at elevenin the morning instead of at ten. At the end of the summer I was moved up into the Commercial Department, which was a haven of rest in the Foreign Office, as no registering had to be done there, and no putting away of papers; and the junior clerks used to write drafts on commercial matters—tenders and automatic couplings. In the other departments they had to serve a fifteen-year apprenticeship before being allowed to write a draft.

Suddenly, in that autumn, the whole life of the Office was made exciting by the Fashoda crisis. We were actually on the brink of a European war. The question which used to be discussed from morning till night in the Office was: “Will Lord Salisbury climb down?” The Office thought we always climbed down; that Lord Salisbury was the King of Climbers-down. But Lord Salisbury had no intention of climbing down this time, and did not do so. I remember my Uncle Cromer saying one day, when someone attacked what he called Lord Salisbury’s vacillating and weak policy: “Lord Salisbury knows his Europe; he has an eye on what is going on in all the countries and on our interests all over the world, and not only on one small part of the world.” During this crisis, the tension between France and England was extreme; it was made worse by the inflammatory speeches that irresponsible members of Parliament made all over England at the time. I believe they shared the Foreign Office view that Lord Salisbury would climb down at the end, and were trying to burn his boats for him; but they need not have troubled, and their speeches did far more harm than good. They had no effect on the policy of the Foreign Office, which was clearly settled in Lord Salisbury’s mind; all they did was to exasperate the French, and to make matters more difficult for the Government. This was the first experience of what seems to me to recur whenever England is in difficulties. Directly a crisis arises in which England is involved, dozens of irresponsible people, and sometimes even responsible people, set about to make matters far more difficult than they need be. This was especially true during the European War. I never saw Lord Salisbury in person during the time I spent in the Foreign Office, except at a garden-party at Hatfield, where I was one of several hundreds whom he shook hands with. But I had often the opportunity of reading his minutes, and sometimes his reports,written in his own handwriting, of conversations he had held with Foreign Ambassadors. These were always amusing and caustic, and his comments were wise and far sighted.

The internal arrangements and organisation of the Office were in the hands of Lord Sanderson. Many of the clerks lived in terror of him. He was extremely kind to me, although he always told me I should never be a good clerk and would do better to stick to diplomacy. Even on the printed forms we used to fill up, enclosing communications, which we called P.L.’s, and which he used to sign himself, in person, every evening, a clerk standing beside him with a slip of blotting-paper, his minute eye for detail used constantly to discern a slight inaccuracy, either in the mode of address or the terminology. He would then take a scraper and scratch it out and amend it. The signing of all these forms must have used a great deal of his time, and I believe the custom has now been abolished.

In those days all dispatches were kept folded in the Office, an immensely inconvenient practice. All the other public offices kept them flat, but when it was suggested that the Foreign Office papers should be kept flat, there was a storm of opposition. They had been kept folded for a hundred years; the change was unthinkable. Someone suggested a compromise: that they should be half-folded and kept curved, but this was abandoned. Ultimately, I believe, they were allowed to be kept flat.

Later on, the whole work of the Foreign Office was reformed, and the clerks no longer have to spend half the day in doing manual clerical work. In my time it was most exhausting, except in the Commercial Department, which was a haven of gentlemanlike ease. Telegrams had often to be ciphered and deciphered by the clerk, but not often in the Commercial Department. But on one Saturday afternoon I remember having to send off two telegrams, one to Sweden and one to Constantinople, and I sent the Swedish telegram to Constantinople and the Turkish telegram to Sweden, and nothing could be done to remedy the mistake till Monday, as nobody noticed it till it was too late, and the clerks went away on Saturday afternoon. Sending off the bags was always a moment of fuss, anxiety, and strain. Someone nearly always out of excitement used to drop the sealing-wax on the hand of the clerk who was holding the bag, and sometimes the bagused to be sent to the wrong place. One day both Lord Sanderson and Sir Frank Bertie came into one of the departments to make sure the bag should go to the right place. The excess of cooks had a fatal result on the broth, and the bag, which was destined for some not remote spot, was sent to Guatemala by mistake, whence it could not be retrieved for several months.

After Christmas that year I stayed with the Cornishes at the Cloisters at Eton, and we acted a play calledSylvie and Bruno, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s book. The Cornish children and the Ritchies took part in it. I played the part of the Other Professor, and one act was taken up by his giving a lecture. The play was successful, and Donald Tovey wrote some music for it and accompanied the singers at the pianoforte.

In January I was appointed attache to the Embassy at Paris, and I began my career as a diplomat.

I had rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the Chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir Edmund Monson; the Councillor, Michael Herbert; the head of the Chancery, Reggie Lister. Both of these had rooms to themselves where they worked. The other secretaries worked in the Chancery.

In the morning, the bag used to arrive from the Foreign Office. It used to be fetched from Calais every night, and twice a week a King’s Messenger would bring it. The business of the day began by the bag being opened, and the contents were entered in a register and then sent to the Ambassador. The dispatches were then sent back to the Chancery in red boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put away in a cupboard. Later on in the day, a box used to come down from the Ambassador with draft dispatches, which were written out by us on typewriters, if we could, or with a pen.

Work at the Embassy meant writing out dispatches on a typewriter, registering dispatches and putting them away, or ciphering and deciphering telegrams. That was the important part of the work. It was for that one had to hang about in case it might happen, and it was liable to happen at any moment of the day, or the night.

Besides this, there was a perpetual stream of minor occurrences which came into the day’s work. People of all nationalities used to call at the Embassy and have to be interviewed by someone. A lady would arrive and say she would like to paint a miniature of Queen Victoria; a soldier would arrive from India who thought he had been bitten by a mad dog, and ask to see Pasteur; a man would call who was the only legitimateKing of France, HenryV., with his title and dynasty printed on his visiting card, and ask for the intervention of the British Government; or someone would come to say that he had found the real solution of the Irish problem, or the Eastern question; or a way of introducing conscription into England without incurring any expense and without English people being aware of it. Besides this, British subjects of every kind would come and ask for facilities to see Museums, to write books, to learn how to cure snake bites, to paddle in canoes on the Oise or the Loire, to take their pet dogs back to England without muzzles (this was always refused), or to take a book from the Bibliothèque Nationale, or a missal from some remote Museum. All these people had to be interviewed and their requests, if reasonable, had to be forwarded to the French Government, for which there were special stereotyped formulæ. Drafts had to be written for notes to the French Government, and there was a large correspondence with the various Consulates.

In the morning, the head of the Chancery used to interview the Ambassador and report to the Chancery on the state of his temper; sometimes he would go and see a French Minister and come back laden with news and gossip; various secretaries, the naval and military attachés, or the King’s Messenger, would stroll into the Chancery, and discuss the latest news, and sometimes other visitors from England would waste our time.

The Ambassador never appeared in person in the Chancery, and his displeasure with the staff, when it was incurred, used to be conveyed to them in memoranda, written in red ink, which were sent to them in a red leather dispatch box.

Sir Edmund Monson had the pen of a ready dispatch-writer, and he would write very long and beautifully expressed dispatches.

We used to have luncheon generally at the same restaurant, and be free in the afternoons, although we had to come back towards tea-time to see if there was anything to do and often remain in the Chancery till nearly eight o’clock; one resident clerk had to live in the house in case there were telegrams at night. If there was a lot of telegraphing, the work would be heavy.

The Chancery hours were always gay. One day one of thethird secretaries and myself had an argument, and I threw the contents of the inkpot at him. He threw the contents of another inkpot back at me. The interchange of ink then became intensive, and went as far as red ink. All the inkpots of the Chancery were emptied, and the other secretaries ducked their heads while the grenades of ink whizzed past their heads. The fight went on till all the ink in the Chancery was used up. My sitting-room was then drawn on, and the fight went on down the Chancery stairs, into the street, and I had a final shot from my sitting-room window, the ink pouring down the walls.

We were drenched with ink, red and black, but still more so was the Chancery carpet, the staircase, and the walls of the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré. Reggie Lister was told what had happened, and said: “Really, those boys are too tiresome.”

We were alarmed at the state of the carpet, a handsome red densely thick pile. We bought some chemicals from the chemist and tried to wash it out, spending hours in the effort after dinner. The only result was that the corrosive acids burnt the carpet away, which made the damage much worse.

The next morning Herbert arrived at the Embassy and noticed that the Chancery staircase was splashed with black stains. He asked the reason and was told. We were sent for. In quiet, acid, biting tones he told us we were nothing better than dirty little schoolboys, and we went away with our tails between our legs. But all that was nothing; Reggie’s plaintive remonstration and Herbert’s biting censure left us calm; what we were really frightened of was the Ambassador—would he find it out?

The next three days were days of dark apprehension, overclouded with the shadow of a possible ink-row; especially as the stain caused by the acids on the Chancery carpet had turned it grey and white, and left a dreadful cavity in the middle of the stain. We ordered a new carpet and prayed that the Ambassador might not be led by an evil mischance to visit the Chancery. He did not, and the episode passed off unnoticed by him.

Our relations with France at this time were not of the best. The Fashoda incident was just over; the Boer War was goingon, which the French said was: “Une guerre d’affaires”; a speech had been made recently by Sir E. Monson at the banquet of the Chamber of Commerce which had made a great sensation. The majority of the French Cabinet were in favour of asking that the British Government be asked to recall Sir E. Monson, but M. Delcassé was strongly opposed to this as he feared war. In spite of all this, the French were friendly to us personally. I was elected to the “Cercle de l’Union” and seconded by General Galliffet.

The French were absorbed in the Dreyfus case. Nothing else was discussed from morning till night. Wherever one went one heard echoes of this discussion, and in whatever circle or group you heard the problem discussed the disputants were generally divided in a proportion of five to three; three believing in the innocence of Dreyfus, and five believing in his guilt.

One night I dined with Edouard Rod and Brewster. The burning topic engrossed us to such an extent, we discussed it so long and so keenly that I still remember the only other subjects we mentioned; they stood out, isolated and rare, like oases in the vast Dreyfus desert. I remember Rod saying he didn’t care for Verlaine’s poetry, because it wasn’tbanalenough. Brewster and I quoted some lines; but Rod thought them all too subtle and not direct enough. Finally I quoted:

“Triste, triste était mon âme,A cause, à cause d’une femme.”

“Triste, triste était mon âme,

A cause, à cause d’une femme.”

This he passed.

We discussed plays for a brief moment. Rod said he liked bad plays played by good actors—for instance, Duse inLa Dame aux Camélias; Brewster said he liked good plays done by bad actors—Musset played by refined amateurs; I said I liked good plays acted by good actors. Then we talked of Dreyfus once more, and Rod said plaintively: “De quoi est-ce-qu’on parlera lorsque l’affaire sera finie?”

I made acquaintance of Anatole France and attended some of his Sunday morning levées at the Villa Said in the Bois de Boulogne.

When I first went there, I never heard any topic exceptL’affairementioned, and indeed the only people present at these meetings were fanatical partisans of Dreyfus who did notwish to talk of anything else. In other houses I met equally fanatical believers in Dreyfus’ guilt. While one was sitting at a quiet tea, an excited academician would rush in and say: “Savez-vous ce qu’ils ont fait? Savez-vous ce qu’ils osent dire?” I find this entry in my notebook dated 5th July 1899, from Boswell:

“Talking of a court-martial that was sitting upon a very momentous public occasion, he (Dr. Johnson) expressed much doubt of an enlightened decision; and said that perhaps there was not a member of it who in the whole course of his life had ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities.”

On the other hand, I remember someone saying at the time that although the decisions of court-martials were nearly always wrong, technically, in their form, they were nearly always right in substance.

Most English people whom I saw during this period believed in Dreyfus’ innocence, but not all. Among the fervent believers in his guilt was Arthur Strong, then librarian in the House of Lords.

I had made Arthur Strong’s acquaintance at Edmund Gosse’s house, and he was from that moment kind to me. In appearance he was like pictures of Erasmus (not that I have ever seen one!)—the perfect incarnation of a scholar. He knew and understood everything, but forgave little. And the smoke from the flame of his learning and his intellect sometimes got into people’s eyes. I frequently saw him in London, and once he came to see me in Paris. I remember his looking at the bookshelf and the pictures on my walls, photographs of pictures by Giorgione and Titian.

He approved of Dyce’s Shakespeare; Dyce’s, he said, was a good edition. He disapproved of Stevenson; Stevenson, he said, had fancy but no imagination. Giorgione, he said, was to Titian what Marcello was to Gluck. Talking of the Dreyfus case, he said if English people would only understand that the Dreyfusards are the same as pro-Boers in England they would talk differently. He said the French were supreme critics of verse. They were like the Persians, they stood no nonsense about poetry. To them it was either good or bad verse. He used to say that there had never been since Johnson’sLives of the Poetsa critical review of English literature asbig and as broad. We might find fault with some of Dr. Johnson’s judgments, but there had been nothing to replace it.

He admired Byron as much as my father did, and in the same way. He thought him a towering genius. Shelley likewise, but not Wordsworth. Wordsworth, he said, was like Taine and Wagner. They were all three just on the wrong lines, each one of them on a tremendous scale, but wrong nevertheless.

We used to have fierce arguments about Wagner. Wagner’s work, he used to say, was not dramatic but scenic. He invented a vastly effective situation but left it at that; neither the action nor the music moved on. He thought Mozart was infinitely more dramatic. He said that Wagner could not write a melody, and that if he did, with the exception of the Preislied in theMeistersinger, it was commonplace and vulgar. The “Leit-Motivs” were not complete melodies.

I was at that time a fervent Wagnerite, and used to contest his points hotly. Curiously enough, six years later, his ideas on Wagner found an echo in a letter which I received from Vernon Lee, after she had been to Bayreuth. This is what she wrote:

“About Bayreuth. Although I expected little enjoyment, I have been miserably disappointed. It is so much less out of the common than I expected. Just a theatre like any other, save for the light being turned out entirely instead of half-cock only, and the only beautiful things an opera ever offers to the eye, namely the fiddles, great and small, and the enchanting kettle-drums, being stuffed out of sight. Themise en scèneis more grotesquely bad than almost any other opera get-up. What is insufferable to me is the atrocious way in which Wagner takes himself seriously: the self-complacent (if I may coin an absurd expression)auto-religionimplied in his hateful unbridled long-windedness and reiteration; the element of degenerate priesthood in it all, like English people contemplating their hat linings in Church, their prudery about the name of God… Surely all great art of every sort has a certain coyness which makes it give itself always less than wanted: look at Mozart, he will give you a whole act of varying dramatic expression (think of the first act ofDon Giovanni) of deepest, briefest pathos and swift humour, a dozen perfect songs or concerted pieces, in the time it takes for that oldposeur, Amfortas, to squirm over his Grail, or Kundry to break the ice with Parsifal.EvenTristan, so incomparably finer than Wagner’s other things, is indecent through its dragging out of situations, its bellowing out of confessions which the natural human being dreads to profane by showing or expressing. With all this goes what to me is the chief psychological explanation of Wagner (and of his hypnotic power over some persons), hisextreme slowness of vital tempo. Listening to him is like finding oneself in a planet where the Time’s unit is bigger than ours: one is on the stretch, devitalised as by the contemplation of a slug. Do you know who has the same peculiarity? D’Annunzio. And it is this which makes his literature, like Wagner’s music, so undramatic, so sensual, so inhuman, turn everything into a process of gloating. I had the good fortune (like Nietzsche) of hearingCarmenjust after theRing. The humanity of it, and the modesty also, are due very much to the incomparable briskness of the rhythm and phrasing; the mind is made to work quickly, the life of the hearer to brace itself to action.”

I think Arthur Strong would have agreed with every word of this.

I had not been at Paris long before one evening after dinner the telephone bell rang; I went to answer it and was told that President Faure was dead. The staff of the Embassy walked in the funeral procession to Notre Dame, in uniform. It was a radiant day. The mourning decorations—a veil of crape flung negligently across the façade of the Chamber of Deputies—the banners, the wreaths, the draperies, were a fine example of the French discretion and artistic instinct in decoration. On the balcony of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Bernhardt was sitting wrapped in furs; with us were the Corps Diplomatique, some officials from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one a composer of dance tunes,Sourires d’Avril, etc., once celebrated all over Europe, now more forgotten than the songs of Nineveh or Tyre. We laughed, we chattered, we ate chocolate, we enjoyed the sunshine and the exercise, we gave no thought to the man in the gorgeous coffin who had taken so much trouble to ape and observe the forms of majesty, and who had been rewarded with such merciless ridicule.

During the first fortnight I spent in the Diplomatic Service there was a plethora of funerals which we had to attend; one at the Greek Church; one at the Madeleine. Attending funerals, and going to the station to meet royalties were both important factors in Diplomatic life. Indeed, at a small postone seemed to spend half one’s life at the railway station. Some of the secretaries were keen race-goers, and when, as sometimes happened, they were not allowed to go because of possible work, and they would point out that there was not likely to be any work to do, Reggie Lister used wisely to remark that we were not paid for the amount of work we did, but for hanging about in case there should be any work. In spite of this, he used generally to arrange things in such a manner that anyone who wanted to go to the races could go.

Reggie Lister was an artist in life and the organisation of life. He built his arrangements and those of others with a light scaffolding that could be taken down at a moment’s notice and rearranged if necessary in a different manner to suit a change of circumstance. He was radiantly sensible. He had a horror of the trashy and the affected, and his gaiety was buoyant, boyish, and infectious. If he was really amused himself, his face used to crinkle and his body shake like a jelly, “comme un gros bébé,” as a Frenchman once said. His intuition was like second-sight and his tact always at work but never obtrusive, like the works of a delicate watch. I never saw anyone either before or after who could make such a difference to his surroundings and to the company he was with. He made everything effervesce. You could not say how he did it. It was not because of any exceptional brilliance or any unusual wit, or arresting ideas; but over and over again I have seen him do what people more brilliant than himself could not do to save their lives, that is, transfigure a dull company and change a grey atmosphere into a golden one. It was not only that he could never bore anyone himself, but that nobody was ever bored when he was there. You laughed with him, not at him. He took his enjoyment with him wherever he went and he made others share it.

His taste was fastidious, but catholic, and above all things sensible. He was acutely appreciative of external things: a walk down theChamps Elyséeson a fine spring morning; good cooking; dancing and skating, and he danced like mad; he was never tired of telling one of his summer travels in Greece; his first disappointment and his subsequent delight in Constantinople—and nobody in the world could tell such things as well. It was difficult to be more intelligent; but his intelligence (and after a minute’s conversationwith him you could not but be aware of its acuteness), his love and knowledge of artistic things, his shrewdness, his humour, and rollicking fun, although taken all together, are still not enough to account for the fascination that his personality exercised over so many different people—over, I believe, almost anyone he pleased, if he took the trouble. If his diplomatic duties called for trouble of this kind, there was none he would not take; if only his own private social life was concerned he sometimes permitted himself the luxury of indifference; but he never indulged in “le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire”; although the company of celebrities tried him almost beyond endurance, leaving a peevish aftermath for his friends to put up with.

One instance is better than pages of explanation and analysis.

One day Reggie Lister and myself each received a letter from a friend in England asking us to be civil to a young French couple who were newly married, and were just setting up house in Paris. Reggie left cards on them, and they asked us both to luncheon.

We found them in a small but extremely clean apartment on the other side of the river, and as we went into the drawing-room it seemed to be crowded with relations in black—mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and aunts. All of them in deep mourning. It reminded me of the opening scene of a one-act play, which used to be popular many years ago, calledLa joie fait peur. In that play, the curtain rises on a bereaved family who are all of them steeped in inspissated gloom.

We went into the little dining-room and sat down to a shiny mahogany table. An old servant tottered and pottered about the room with a bunch of keys and a bottle of wine covered with cobwebs. A rather grim mother-in-law sat at the head of the table. The young, newly married couple were shy. There was an atmosphere of stern, rigid propriety and inflexible tradition over the whole proceeding. Formal phrases were bandied, and all the time the mother-in-law, the aunts, and the sisters-in-law, all of them dressed in crape with neat white frills, never ceased to throw on the bashful young couple the full searchlight of their critical observation. But we had not been at the table many minutes before Reggie had captivated the company, and at the end of five minutes theywere all screaming with laughter and talking at the top of their voices. They were not laughing at him. They were laughing with him.

This is just what Reggie Lister could do, and what I have never seen anybody else succeed in doing, to that extent and in such difficult circumstances. He had something which made you, whoever was in the room, wish to listen to him, and made you wish him to listen to you. He had also the gift of making the witty wittier, the singer, the talker, the musician, the reciter, do better than his best, of drawing out the best of other people by his instantly responsive appreciation.

The French of all classes appreciated and loved him, and when he died they felt as if an essential part of Paris had been taken away, and a part that nothing could replace. To be with him at the same Embassy, as I was for a year and a half, was an education in all that makes life worth living. But what was life to me was, I am afraid, sometimes death to him, as I tried him at times highly.

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 thepresence 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 CharlesI.I can imagine him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet appreciation to the jokes of Falstaff, at the first performance ofHenry 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 throughsome 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’sBéréniceat 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 theTragic 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 readBérénice. 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. Hesent 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.

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