The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 6
A year has pass’d—a year of grief and joy—
Since first we threw aside the name of boy,
That name which in some future hour of gloom,
We shall with sighs regret we can’t resume.
Unknown this life, unknown Fate’s numerous shares
We launched into this world, and all it cares;
Those cares whose pangs, before a year was past,
I felt and feel, they will not be the last.
But then we hailed fair freedom’s brightening morn,
And threw aside the yoke we long had borne;
Exulted in the raptures thought can give,
And said alone, we then began to live;
With wanton fancy, painted pleasure’s charms,
Wine’s liberal powers, and beauty’s folding arms,
Expected joys would spring beneath our feet,
And never thought of griefs we were to meet.
Ah! Soon, too soon is all the truth displayed,
Too soon appears this scene of light and shade!
We find that those who every transport know,
In full proportion taste of every woe;
That every moment new misfortune rears;
That, somewhere, every hour’s an hour of tears.
The work of wretchedness is never done,
And misery’s sigh extends with every sun.
Well is it if, when dawning manhood smiled
We did not quite forget the simple child;
If, when we lost that name, we did not part
From some more glowing virtue of the heart;
From kind benevolence, from faithful truth,
The generous candour of believing youth,
From that soft spirit which men weakness call,
That lists to every tale, and trusts them all.
To the warm fire of these how poor and dead
Are all the cold endowments of the head.
Such moods seldom got the upper hand in him. And no one who met him seems to have noticed them. But they had their effect; his uneasiness persisted, was confirmed.
Indeed he had cause to be uneasy. Education, though it had muffled their clash, had done nothing to reconcile the opposing tendencies in his nature. One half of him still went out to the ideal, the romantic; the other told him that, in actual fact, self-interest and material satisfactions were the controlling motive forces in the world. As he grew older the struggle was further complicated by the fact that his personal and his ideal sympathies became engaged against each other. The people he was fondest of, all took the anti-ideal side. Yet he continued to respond to the call of his imagination as strongly as before. He was in an impasse.
It did not worry him very much. Life was pleasant, he was adaptable. Moreover, gradually and insensibly, he had evolved a mode of thought and action, by which he could evade the more distressing implications of his situation. He did not suppress his ideal instincts; there was an obstinate integrity in his disposition which made him incapable of denying anything he genuinely felt. But still less did he throw over his realism, to follow the call of his heart. He would have thought it silly, for one thing: his reason told him that his family’s point of view was right. Besides, to quarrel with it would have entailed a row; and he hated rows. No more now than as an Eton boy did he see the sense of standing up to be knocked to pieces. As at Eton, therefore, he compromised; adopted a neutral, detached position, which enabled him to enjoy the world he lived in, while avoiding those of its activities which most violently outraged his natural feelings. He refused to be ambitious, to join in the sordid scuffle for place and power; he conducted his own personal relationships by a rigid standard of delicacy and honour; and he always said what he thought, regardless of public opinion. On the other hand he taught himself to tolerate other people’s opinions; he lived the life that was expected of him; and he concentrated his heart and interests chiefly on those pleasures which his home did provide. Social life, public affairs, occupied a growing share of his attention: while his emotions attached themselves primarily to his personal affections. In them, indeed, both sides of his nature did, in some sort, find fulfilment. Love for a living individual was both real and romantic. It became the strongest motive power in his life. For the rest, though he indulged his taste for philosophizing, he was doubtful if it had any value. He was a sceptic in thought, in practice a hedonist. Shelving deeper problems, he enjoyed the passing moment wholeheartedly, and took his own character as little seriously as he could.
Such an attitude worked very well for the time being. It was easy to be a successful hedonist in the Whig society of 1800, if one was as popular and as cheerful as William. His faculty for self-adaptation worked as well as it had at school: he continued to be happy. All the same he paid a heavy price for his happiness. His condition of mind was not a healthy one. Resting as it did on an unresolved discord, its basic foundation was insecure. This insecurity was increased by the bias given to his outlook by upbringing. In spite of all her wisdom and all her affection, it was a pity that Lady Melbourne was his mother. His view of life, if it was to be a stable affair, must be built, in part at least, on his ideal sentiments. Lady Melbourne’s opinions, and still more her example, tended to make him distrust these. In her smooth efficient way she had managed to discredit his best feelings in his own eyes. And even if he was unaware of the cause, it made him feel uneasy all the time.
Nor was the philosophy he had adopted to meet the difficulties of his situation, good for him. It is unnatural to be a materialist, when one is twenty-three years old and throbbing with idealistic feelings. And the efforts William was forced to make to maintain himself in his scepticism, against the pull of his nature, produced a sort of frustration in his character. He grew far too self-preservative, for one thing. Insecurely perched in his little patch of tranquil neutrality, he became dominated by the desire to preserve it from invasion. His hatred of trouble grew stronger and stronger, till he would make practically any sacrifice to avoid an unpleasant scene, to put off a difficult decision. It modified even his attitude to those personal relationships by which he set such store. Though he was unfailingly considerate and unselfish in little things, he never dreamt of letting his feeling for someone he loved divert him from the course of life he had marked out for himself: still less would he take the responsibility of guiding their lives. An enlightened policy of live and let live was his method of running a relationship.
But beyond this, his upbringing had a more formidable, a more disastrous effect upon him. It crippled the development of his most valuable faculties. These were intellectual. Nature had meant him for that rare phenomenon, a philosophical observer of mankind. His detachment and his curiosity, his honesty and his perceptiveness, his sense of reality and his power of generalization, all these mingled together to make his mind of the same type, if not of the same high quality, as that of Montaigne or Sir Thomas Browne: the mind of the botanist in the tangled jungle of men and their thoughts, exploring, observing, classifying. But to be a thinker, one must believe in the value of disinterested thought. William’s education had destroyed his belief in this, along with all other absolute beliefs; and in so doing, removed the motive force necessary to set his creative energy working. The spark that should have kindled his fire was unlit: with the result that he never felt moved to make the effort needed to discipline his intellectual processes, to organize his sporadic reflections into a coherent system of thought. He had studied a great many subjects, but none thoroughly; his ideas were original, but they were fragmentary, scattered, unmatured. This lack of system meant further that he never overhauled his mind to set its contents in order in the light of a considered standard of value. So that the precious and the worthless jostled each other in its confused recesses: side by side with fresh and vivid thoughts lurked contradictions, commonplaces, and relics of the conventional pre
judices of his rank and station. Even his scepticism was not consistent; though he doubted the value of virtue, he never doubted the value of being a gentleman. Like so many aristocratic persons he was an amateur.
His amateurishness was increased by his hedonism. For it led him to pursue his thought only in so far as the process was pleasant. He shirked intellectual drudgery. Besides, the life he lived was all too full of distracting delights. If he felt bored reading and cogitating, there was always a party for him to go to, where he could be perfectly happy, without having to make an effort. Such temptations were particularly hard to resist for a man brought up in the easy-going disorderly atmosphere of Melbourne House; where no one was ever forced to be methodical or conscientious, and where there was always something entertaining going on. If virtue was hard to acquire there, pleasure came all too easily. Merely to look on kept one contented.
Indeed that was the danger. At twenty-one William was already an onlooker; an active-minded, lively onlooker, ready to respond to every thrill, every joke in the drama: but standing a little aloof, without any compelling desire to take part himself. He had made his peace with the world, and on favourable terms: but none the less the world had, in this first round of the fight, defeated him. Endowed by birth with one of the most distinguished minds of his generation, there was a risk that he might end as nothing more than another charming ineffective Whig man of fashion.
A risk but not a certainty: William’s character had taken shape but it was not yet set into its final mould. And the rebellious elements within it still surged, seeking an outlet. At moments, as we have seen, they burst out in his talk: his Foxite idealism still sounded, a discordant trumpet note, in the minor harmony of his scepticism: even his intellectual arrogance was the sign of a spirit not yet resigned to accept life just as he found it. A change of circumstance, the pressure of a new influence, and there was a chance he might yet, in some later engagement, turn the tables on the world; that his creative energy, gathering its forces together, might break through the inhibitions induced by upbringing, and gush forth to fulfilment. There was still a chance.
Part II
Chapter Three
Love
For a year or two his career marked time. There was a little uncertainty at first as to what profession he should adopt. He had been destined for the Bar; but now Lady Melbourne suddenly suggested he should become a clergyman. It was a curious idea, considering that he doubted Christian doctrines and disapproved of Christian morals. But the Whig aristocracy did not regard faith as an essential qualification for holy orders. To them the church was primarily a good profession for younger sons. William’s scholarly tastes and relatively discreet private character seemed to make him especially fitted for it; with any reasonable luck he should be a bishop before he died. However, he did not show any enthusiasm for the proposal; and Lord Egremont was flat against it. Turning therefore to the secular world, Lady Melbourne sat down and wrote to the Prince of Wales asking him for a job for William in connection with the Office of the Stannaries. The Prince replied with a refusal, in which the fulsome effusiveness of his language was only equalled by the obvious strength of his determination to do nothing at all. In the end it was settled that, after all, William should become a lawyer. He was quite willing. Going on circuit was a new experience; he found himself, as usual, pleasantly popular with his fellow barristers; it gave him a thrill of delighted pride to be offered his first brief. Still, law did not rouse his interest sufficiently to divert him from his chosen career of leisure and pleasure. He continued to write verses and prologues to private theatricals; he went to Carlton House and Roehampton more than ever; and he often found time to go down to the country for “a bath of quiet,” reading and day-dreaming. In any case, after a few years, an event took place that made his indolence of little account. In January, 1805, Peniston Lamb died of consumption. For the moment all was forgotten in sorrow. On so devoted a family the blow fell with extraordinary force; Lady Melbourne herself was so overcome by emotion as even to forget her usual worldly preoccupations. Openly disregarding public opinion she had invited Peniston’s mistress, the pretty Mrs. Dick Musters, to stay at Melbourne House that she might soothe his last moments; when he died Lady Melbourne was desolated. For William the event was momentous. His prospects were entirely reversed; he was now the heir to a peerage and a large fortune. It was not in reality anything to be thankful for. He was now, even more inextricably than before, entangled in the web of that worldly life which, since he was a child, had hampered him in following the best course for his talents. As a younger son there was no practical reason—if he had ever felt the inclination—why he should not break away from conventional existence and devote himself to that life of thought and writing in which he could most fully have expressed himself. But future peers in that day were not free. They were integral and active parts of the great machine of aristocratic government and social life; to them, almost as much as to a royal prince, was allotted a ready-made role, function, responsibilities. For them, to take up a life of contemplation was to act in opposition to the whole pressure and tradition of the society of which they were members. It was made all the more difficult by the fact that the position imposed on them was such an attractive one. With some of the duties of royalty they had all its pleasures and privileges. They walked through life envied by men and courted by women, recognized and acclaimed monarchs of a magnificent realm. Certainly William seems to have felt no qualm on accepting his new position. No more at this juncture than in earlier days, did he show the slightest conscious realization that the life to which he was called diverted him from his true bent. He took it for granted, for instance, that like other eldest sons, he must now go into the House of Commons. The only problem that worried him was what seat he should stand for. Should it be Leominster or Hertford? He went down to Hertford and delighted his supporters with an excellent speech. But for some reason he preferred Leominster. In January, 1806, he was elected member. But before this he had taken a more irrevocable step. He had married.
Ever since 1802 he had wanted to. In that year Caroline Ponsonby, now a grown-up young lady of seventeen, was launched on the world. She had matured into all and more than all that William could have hoped for. Indeed she was the most dynamic personality that had appeared in London society for a generation. Outwardly she had hardly changed since he first met her. Slight, agile, and ethereal, with a wide-eyed wilful little face, and curly short hair, she still looked a child; like something less substantial even,—“the Sprite,” people called her, “the Fairy Queen, Ariel.” Her fresh lisping voice, too, trained though it was to linger cooingly on the syllables in the approved Devonshire House manner, was a child’s voice; “Lady Caroline,” said an irritated rival, “baas like a little sheep.” Nor did her exterior belie what lay within. As much as at fourteen she still loved to gallop bareback, to dress up in trousers, to lose herself in day-dreams; when the fit took her she screamed and tore her clothes in ungovernable rage. No one could have been less like the conventional idea of a young lady. On fire for the dramatic, the picturesque, the ideal, openly at war with the tame and the trivial, at every turn she flouted convention; would rush into the street dressed anyhow, spoke her mind with enfant terrible candour, plunged straight into the subjects which interested her, regardless of the formalities of polite conversation. As for orthodox feminine employments, gossip, embroidery, they filled her with ineffable contempt. More normal girls like her cousin Harriet Cavendish, not unnaturally resented this. In fact, many people thought her tiresome; even her friends admitted she was difficult. Yet they forgave her everything. The Fairy Queen cast a spell, which, for those on whom it worked, was not to be resisted. It came partly from the sheer spontaneous intensity of her temperament. In each changing mood, her gusts of irresponsible gaiety, the trembling sensibility which responded like a violin string to poetry, music, eloquence, she seemed more alive than other people; and heightened their sense of life by her pr
esence. She was very clever too, in a fitful, darting way. Too impatient to follow a logical process, and generally in the clouds, she could yet on occasion pierce to the heart of a subject with a lightning insight that dazzled her hearers. And she expressed herself with a direct vividness of phrase which made her every word memorable. But beyond all this, beyond her gifts and her vitality, there was in her a touch of something stranger and more precious—was it genius?—a creative individuality, whimsical, extravagant, enchanting, which scrawled its signature in a thousand fanciful flourishes on everything she said or did. Sometimes it blossomed forth in an Elizabethan fantasy of humour, “my most sanative elixir of julep, my most precious cordial confection,” so she begins a letter to a cousin thanking him for a medical prescription; the same quality flitted in zig-zag butterfly flights across her most sombre confessions of melancholy. “I am like a vestal who thought of other concerns than the poor flame she hoped Heaven would keep burning. Do not condemn me to be burnt alive; wait a little, I shall return to dust without any unusual assistance”: or “I go off . . . and you will probably see among the dead in some newspaper—died on her voyage, Lady Caroline Lamb, of the disease called death; her time being come and she being a predestinarian”: she cannot recommend a governess without it breaking out; “Miss X. is sensible, handsome, young, good, unsophisticated, independent, true, ladylike, above any deceit or meanness, romantic, very punctual about money; but she has a cold and a cough and is in love. I cannot help it, can you?” This spirit thrusts its irrepressible head into the very datings of her letters: “Brocket Hall, heaven knows what day,” thus she heads a formal congratulation to a prospective sister-in-law she has not yet met. Here we come to the secret of her peculiar spell. Lady Melbourne might be more brilliant, the Duchess of Devonshire more winning, Lady Bessborough more intimately lovable; but where in them is to be found this bewitching unexpectedness, this elusive gleam lit at the very torch of will-o’-the-wisp?