| CHAPTER VIII
| -1 | |
| DIPLOMACY (1861)
| 0 | |
| HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his
Minister to England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone
back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced
many centuries before: Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a
brief day; the Common Law prolonged its shadowy existence for a
week. The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished in
April, 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a
lawless world, to begin a new life without education at all. They
asked few questions, but if they had asked millions they would
have got no answers. No one could help. Looking back on this
moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could only
shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one
of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be
spared from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again
without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew
himself about to be in his new role, he was less ridiculous than
his betters. He was at least no public official, like the
thousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded
their jealousies and intrigues on the President. He was not a
vulture of carrion -- patronage. He knew that his father's
appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal
friendship; he did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed
it, or the reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit;
but he could have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for
them, the strongest and most decisive being that, in his opinion,
Mr. Adams had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his
chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard
to find a fit appointment in the list of possible candidates,
except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well as this
experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of
fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than
Senator Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee,
was likely to give him. In the family history, its members had
taken many a dangerous risk, but never before had they taken one
so desperate.
| 1 | |
| The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one,
except perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary
of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the
Executive appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had
applied for the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally
known as Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the
post, or of helping the Minister. The Assistant Secretary was
inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially
useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps
he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too much of
Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.
| 2 | |
| The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path
by giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote
letters, it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one,
at that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people.
The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except
in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst
and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams
into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be
beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had
time to watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House
in the April evenings and march southward, quietly enough, with
the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few
signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence
before being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the
furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of
fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as
the solitary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old
Cunard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for
Liverpool. This time the pitcher of education had gone to the
fountain once too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man
had got to meet a hostile world without defence -- or arms.
| 3 | |
| The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May
1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have
enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with
one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was
alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams
the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in
London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters of
introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra
burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate person in the
party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never
dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy
was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered how
his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter,
1778, on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old
son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of
adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered
how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with himself, a
baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar
Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John
Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought it natural
that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also,
with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that
he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend on
Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams
had no friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he
asked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his
father and grandfather had done before him, without a murmur.
This was a lofty view, and for him answered his objects, but it
bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the young man
realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal. He modestly
thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer, and judged
his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time
America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order. Her
representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in
1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private
secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the
Court and Parliament of Great Britain.
| 4 | |
| One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If
they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they
stood with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him
quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same
ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of
Cassius M. Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's
education profited less than the private secretary's, Cassius
Clay as a teacher having no equal though possibly some rivals. No
young man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from
such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious
that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the
Government; fewest of all among those who were in it. At home,
for the most part, young men went to the war, grumbled and died;
in England they might grumble or not; no one listened.
| 5 | |
| Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He
never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his
tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence --
of talking without meaning -- is never effaced. He had to begin
it at once. He was already an adept when the party landed at
Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a
family of early Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena
of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord
Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar Palmerston laugh at
figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance
in the Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the
ceremony.
| 6 | |
| Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the
affair of history and their errors concern historians. The errors
of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a
large part of his education. He thought on May 12 that he was
going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest
profession. For a hundred years the chief effort of his family
had aimed at bringing the Government of England into intelligent
cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His father
was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief
apparent obstacle to good understanding. As for the private
secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively
English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England. He
supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery
family, to be welcome everywhere in the British Islands.
| 7 | |
| On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of
a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of
Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn -- the sooner the
better -- that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May,
1861, no one in England -- literally no one -- doubted that
Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all
were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated
Palmerston who, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the
severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently
held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared.
Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the rebel
emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency
before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of
the British Government in advance. The recognition of
independence would then become an understood policy; a matter of
time and occasion.
| 8 | |
| Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension -- a
sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow.
Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The
chances were great that the whole family would turn round and go
home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves
of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long
leisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation
had his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be
-- unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for
his -- trifling though it were -- was proved by his unreflecting
confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that his
father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a
subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over
several generations, he could not certainly point out another who
could have stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this
long day, and tedious journey to London, without once thinking of
the possibility that his father might make a mistake. Whatever
the Minister thought, and certainly his thought was not less
active than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His
manner was the same as ever; his mind and temper were as
perfectly balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve twitched.
| 9 | |
| The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden
could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the
private secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his
father as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus
into Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst
of a London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he
preferred to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the
waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for breakfast, rather than ask a
question or express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously,
was too appalling to face. Had he known it better, he would only
have thought it worse.
| 10 | |
| Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond
retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of
circumstances, a newcomer in London society needs years to
establish a position, and Minister Adams had not a week or an
hour to spare, while his son had not even a remote chance of
beginning. Politically the prospect looked even worse, and for
Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but for the
Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he
stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one
of the luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he
escaped. The blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed
over him. Lord John Russell had acted -- had probably intended to
act -- kindly by him in forestalling his arrival. The blow must
have fallen within three months, and would then have broken him
down. The British Ministers were a little in doubt still -- a
little ashamed of themselves -- and certain to wait the longer
for their next step in proportion to the haste of their first.
| 11 | |
| This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor.
The father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's
was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles
Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as
enemies; the only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred
and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling
with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street; and
the British Government, well used to a liberal unpopularity
abroad, even when officially rude liked to be personally civil.
All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a
corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing
in especial to complain of; his position was good while it
lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had
no such compensations. Brought over in order to help his father,
he could conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was
clear that his father had got to help him. To him, the Legation
was social ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known.
Entire solitude in the great society of London was doubly
desperate because his duties as private secretary required him to
know everybody and go with his father and mother everywhere they
needed escort. He had no friend, or even enemy, to tell him to be
patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have broken out
with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools as
well as of sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do
it at once, for his father would never so much need help again.
In fact he never gave his father the smallest help, unless it
were as a footman, clerk, or a companion for the younger
children.
| 12 | |
| He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common
in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most
secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but
useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son
could go only as an invited guest, the most instructive
conversation he ever heard among the young men of his own age who
hung about the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel
chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, mon cher!" No
one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also
slow to assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If
the American Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian
Ambassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be
in trouble to-morrow. It would all come in the day's work. There
was nothing professional in worry. Empires were always tumbling
to pieces and diplomats were always picking them up.
| 13 | |
| This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff.
His social education was more barren still, and more trying to
his vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him
writhe with torture. He never forgot the first two or three
social functions he attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in Stratton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure
of a window and hoped that no one noticed him; another was a
garden-party given by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of
Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister and Mrs.
Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till every one
else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to
playing leap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next
thirty years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who,
singularly enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another
nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager
of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and
forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled
nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador
for partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the
world turned to ashes.
| 14 | |
| When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his
solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the
Times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for
Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this
is history and can be read by public schools if they choose; but
the curious and unexpected happened to the Legation, for the
effect of Bull Run on them was almost strengthening. They no
longer felt doubt. For the next year they went on only from week
to week, ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more
than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to see them
go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.
| 15 | |
| So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or
finished in the character of private secretary; and as about to
begin, without further experiment, a final education in the ranks
of the Army of the Potomac where he would find most of his
friends enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this
idea uppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn,
and began the winter. Any winter in London is a severe trial;
one's first winter is the most trying; but the month of December,
1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a
glutton of gloom.
| 16 | |
| One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the
absence of the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit,
Reuter's telegram announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell
from a British mail-steamer was brought to the office. All three
secretaries, public and private were there -- nervous as wild
beasts under the long strain on their endurance -- and all three,
though they knew it to be not merely their order of departure --
not merely diplomatic rupture -- but a declaration of war --
broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end.
They saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for
its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.
| 17 | |
| They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it,
is told in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster
who was one of the Fryston party. The moment was for him the
crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries it was
merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they
were a military outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned
position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort
sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog was
never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Londoner
lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source of
comfort denied to them -- he should not be private secretary
long.
| 18 | |
| He was mistaken -- of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same
mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing
but one of many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round
hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal to
him which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these,
and to him the most important, was to put an end forever to the
idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an independent and free
citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he had kept up his
relations with the American press. He had written pretty
frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with
the two or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News,
the Star, the weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them
news and views that should have a certain common character, and
prevent clash. He had even gone down to Manchester to study the
cotton famine, and wrote a long account of his visit which his
brother Charles had published in the Boston Courier.
Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and instantly came
back upon him in the most crushing shape possible -- that of a
long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did
not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the
Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he
instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe
Parkes, one of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who had
haunted London since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times
office, to tell them all they did not know about Henry Adams,
rushed to the Legation to tell Adams all he did not want to know
about the Times. For a moment Adams thought his "usefulness" at
an end in other respects than in the press, but a day or two more
taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had
not even a club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the
Times article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and the
world had other persons -- such as President Lincoln, Secretary
Seward, and Commodore Wilkes -- for constant and favorite objects
of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful
again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education
at least had reached the point of seeing its own proportions.
"Surtout point de zele!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession for
a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among
Trent Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters and
meddled with no more newspapers, but he was still young, and felt
unkindly towards the editor of the London Times.
| 19 | |
| Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the
Trent Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to
its surprise, still in place. Although the private secretary saw
in this delay -- which he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense
-- no reason for changing his opinion about the views of the
British Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his
table, and go on copying papers, filing letters, and reading
newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the
brutality of Mr. Seward -- or vice versa. The heavy months
dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without improving
his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to
the end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for
it. During this tedious winter and for many months afterwards,
the only gleams of sunshine were on the days he passed at
Walton-on-Thames as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at
Mount Felix.
| 20 | |
| His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers,
although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were
strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be
kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper
Grosvenor Street were certainly the best in London; but none
offered a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first
time, the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis
was one of the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself
as closely as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy,
and he had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to
understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most
required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis,
a dozen years older than himself, could have good-naturedly
trained a school of such, without an effort, and with infinite
advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was
in this social polar winter, the single source of warmth and
light.
| 21 | |
| Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such
pressure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates
made common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was
merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the
younger members of the household, it was not quite so with the
Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they
gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with American
sources, British society had begun with violent social prejudice
against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except
Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three
generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind,
and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, the
fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself that this
new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary
suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to
do with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally
the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had
Lincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average
Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly
quiet manner and the unassailable social position of Minister
Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore him, since
they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the example.
Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politically he
was negligible; he was there to be put aside. London and Paris
imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln and his
hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams
would vanish with the rest.
| 22 | |
| This situation made Minister Adams an exception among
diplomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated
as members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility
of total extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe,
for a year at least, regarded the Washington Government as dead,
and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better
received than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by
little, in private, society took the habit of accepting him, not
so much as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition, or
an eminent counsel retained for a foreign Government. He was to
be received and considered; to be cordially treated as, by birth
and manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of
getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible
advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language,
birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in
order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr.
Adams apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society
few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double
personality and corresponding double weight.
| 23 | |
| The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of
the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes
and William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes
and Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be
supported. They saw what the private secretary in May had
overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the American
Minister made a mistake, and, since his strength was theirs, they
lost no time in expressing to all the world their estimate of the
Minister's character. Between them the Minister was almost safe.
| 24 | |
| One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences
of different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London,
possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for
in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a
large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes.
Every bore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the
"cool of the evening"; and of course he himself affected social
eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one
who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of
men -- of a great many men. A word from him went far. An
invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost
Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad,
and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he
had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which
were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made
speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too
high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men
who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and
had the ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social
position of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house
in Upper Brook Street to which most clever people were
exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no
one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous
to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader,
a strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a
collector of books, but above all he was a man of the world by
profession, and loved the contacts -- perhaps the collisions --
of society. Not even Henry Brougham dared do the things he did,
yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes was the good-nature of London;
the Gargantuan type of its refinement and coarseness; the most
universal figure of May Fair.
| 25 | |
| Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or
Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E.
Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever
to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite
the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or
political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or
variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the
singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and
Lancashiremen seem to hold dear -- the exterior roughness assumed
to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature.
Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker
ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and
emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a
daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace
of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union
cause and made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was
sure to do, partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery
convictions, and partly because it gave him a practical opening
in the House. As a new member, he needed a field.
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| Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership,
and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for
work. With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England
began to take heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his
true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action, and even the
private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam of
encouragement as he saw the ring begin to clear for these burly
Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely to be as brutal
as ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not exactly
light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters in
England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle
even Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
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| In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed
as enemies of order, -- anarchists, -- and anarchists they were
if hatred of the so-called established orders made them so. About
them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly the
side of the Union against Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers
to London society, they were at home in the American Legation,
delightful dinner-company, talking always with reckless freedom.
Cobden was the milder and more persuasive; Bright was the more
dangerous to approach; but the private secretary delighted in
both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them talk the same
language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the House.
| 28 | |
| With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a
little ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it
might, and disposed to wait before moving again. Little by
little, friends gathered about the Legation who were no
fair-weather companions. The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall,
Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an annoying and troublesome
enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the most valuable
friends the Minister found, both politically and socially, and
the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private secretary
shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and never
forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's
claret which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he
insisted that it was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on
by assenting to his point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent
pleasure in dispute, and in that respect the Duke would perhaps
have done better; but the secretary had to admit that though at
other periods of life he was sufficiently and even amply snubbed
by Englishmen, he could never recall a single occasion during
this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.
| 29 | |
| Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either
men or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for
Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made
Devonshire House almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent
Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of
Alderley whose house was one of the most frequented in London.
Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was always a friend. Yet the
regular course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir
Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which young
Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped
them. Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came
into close alliance. By the time society began to reopen its
doors after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private
secretary occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no
more effort of any kind, but silently waited the end. Whatever
might be the advantages of social relations to his father and
mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and society was
futile. He meant to go home.
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