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 legitimate[182] King of France, Henry V., 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 formul?. 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 the[183] third 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 going[184] on, 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’t banal enough. Brewster and I quoted some lines; but Rod thought them all too subtle and not direct enough. Finally I quoted:
“Triste, triste était mon ame,
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 in La 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 except L’affaire mentioned, and indeed the only people present at these meetings were fanatical partisans of Dreyfus who did not[185] wish 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’s Lives of the Poets a critical review of English literature as[186] big 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 the Meistersinger, 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. The mise en scène is 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-religion implied 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 of Don Giovanni) of deepest, briefest pathos and swift humour, a dozen perfect songs or concerted pieces, in the time it takes for that old poseur, Amfortas, to squirm over his Grail, or Kundry to break the ice with Parsifal.[187] Even Tristan, 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), his extreme 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 hearing Carmen just after the Ring. 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 fa?ade 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 Théatre 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 post[188] one 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 the Champs Elysées on 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 conversation[189] with 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, called La 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 they[190] were 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 the[191] presence of a brake, but of steel-like grasp on that brake—a steel-like grasp concealed by the suavest of gloves and a high, refined courtesy and the appearance of a cavalier strayed by mistake into the modern world. Never was there an appearance more deceptive in some ways; in so far, that is to say, as it seemed to indicate apathy or indifference or lack of fibre. He had a will of iron and a fearless and instant readiness to shoulder any responsibility, however grave or perplexing. He was a man of action, and an ideal diplomat. At one of his posts they called him “the butcher.” At that time the men who enjoyed the highest reputation in the Diplomatic Service, and who seemed to be the most promising, were perhaps Charles Eliot, Cecil Spring-Rice, and Arthur Hardinge; and in every one of these cases the promise was fulfilled; but as a diplomat, I think anyone would agree, that Herbert excelled them all and easily, although the others might be in one case more intellectual or more brilliant, in another more erudite. Herbert had a steely strength of purpose, a quick eye, and the power of making up his mind at once, as well as a shrewd understanding of the world and especially of the foreign world, and a quiet far-sightedness. Moreover, he had the charm that arises from natural and native distinction, and a subtle flavour which came from his being intensely English, and at the same time a citizen of the world, without any admixture of artificial cosmopolitanism. He would have been at home in any period of English history; whether at the Black Prince’s Court at Bordeaux, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at Kenilworth, at Whitehall, or at the Congress of Vienna.
Had he dressed himself up in the shimmering and sombre satins and the waving plumes of the Vandyk period they would have seemed to be his natural, his everyday clothes.
I could imagine him putting his inflexible determination, expressed in thin, metallic tones of deferential and courteous deprecation, lit up by gleams of a sharp and shy humour, against the perhaps equally obstinate, but unfortunately less wise and less constant, wishes of Charles I. I can imagine him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet appreciation to the jokes of Falstaff, at the first performance of Henry IV.; or signing, without a flicker of hesitation, a dispatch to Drake or Raleigh that would mean war with Spain; or shutting his snuff-box with a sharp snap, as he saw through[192] some subtle wile of Talleyrand; or listening, civil but quite unabashed, to a storm of invective from Napoleon.
One day someone in the Chancery remarked on the peculiarly nauseous odour of the food that is given to foxhounds. “I like it,” he said. “I used to eat it as a child.”
I have always thought the most crucial test to which a new piece of verse or a modern picture can be put is to imagine what effect the verse would produce in an anthology of another epoch or the picture in a gallery of old masters. Herbert as a personality and as a diplomatist could have stood any test of this kind, and placed next to any of the old masters or the old masterpieces, in character and statesmanship, without suffering from the comparison; indeed, so far from suffering any eclipse, his personality would only have emerged more signally and more distinctly, with the melancholy suavity of its form and the unyielding resilience of its substance.
In April 1899, the second centenary of the death of Racine was celebrated in Paris by a performance of Racine’s Bérénice at the Théatre fran?ais. This performance was one of the landmarks in my literary adventures. Bartet played Bérénice, and I do not suppose that Racine’s verse can ever have been more sensitively rendered and more delicately differentiated. Between the acts, M. Du Lau, a fine connoisseur of life and art, took me behind the scenes and introduced me to Bartet. They talked of the play. Around us hovered an admiring crowd, and whispered homages were flung to the artist, like flowers. It was like a scene in a Henry James novel, a page from the Tragic Muse. They agreed that Racine’s loveliest verses were in this play: “Des vers si nuancés,” as Du Lau said. Bartet wore a lilac cloak over white draperies, and a high ivory diadem, and when we said good-bye Du Lau kissed her hand and said: “Bon soir, charmante Bérénice.”
If anyone is inclined to think Racine is a tedious author they cannot do better than read Bérénice. It is the model of what a tragedy should be. The drama is simple and arises naturally and inevitably from the facts of the case, which are all contained in one sentence of Suetonius: “Titus Reginam Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.” That is to say, Titus loved Bérénice and, it was believed, had promised her marriage. He[193] sent her away from Rome, against his own will as well as against hers, as soon as he came to the throne.
It is the eternal conflict between public duty and personal inclination.
“With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part,
My very dear,
Our solace is the sad road lies so clear;
Go thou to East,
I West.”
Coventry Patmore’s Ode sums up the whole tragedy. The sentiments the characters express are what any characters would have said in such a situation now or a thousand years ago, and would be just as appropriate and true if the protagonists of the drama belonged to Belgravia or to the Mile End Road. The verse is exquisite.
Antiochus, who loved Bérénice in vain, says to her as he leaves her:
“Que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,
Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
The tragedy is full of musical lines, sad and suggestive and softly reverberating, with muted endings such as:
“Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui?
Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,
Lieux charmants, où mon c?ur vous avait adorée,”
and some of the most poignant words of farewell ever uttered:
“Pour jamais! Ah Seigneur! songez-vous en vous-même
Combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?
Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.”
The Prince of Wales passed through Paris and stayed there a night that winter and dined at the Embassy, and we had to wear special coats and be careful they had the right number of buttons on them.
I got to know a good many French people, and some of those who had been famous in the days of the Second Empire: Madame de Galliffet and Madame de Pourtalès. Madame de Pourtalès had grey hair, but time, which had taken away much from her[194] and stamped her with his pitiless seal, had not taken, and was destined never to take, away the undefinable authority that alone great beauty possesses, and never loses, nor her radiant smile, which would suddenly make her look young.
Once at a party at Paris many years after this, at the Jaucourts’ house, I again saw Madame de Pourtalès. It was not long before she died. Her hair was, or seemed to be, quite white, and that evening the room was rather dim and lit from the ceiling; her face was powdered and she appeared quite transfigured; the whiteness of her hair and the effect of the light made her face look quite young. You were conscious only of dazzling shoulders, a peerless skin, soft shining eyes, and a magical smile. She put out everyone else in a room. She looked like the photographs of herself taken when she was a young woman. One saw what she must have been, and everybody who was there agreed that here was an instance of the undefinable, undying persistence of great beauty that just when you think it is dead, suddenly blooms afresh and gives you a glimpse of its own past.
Reggie Lister told me that he had once asked Madame de Pourtalès what was the greatest compliment that had ever been paid her. She said it was this. Once in summer she had been going out to dinner in Paris. It was rather late in the summer, and a breathless evening, she was sitting in her open carriage, dressed for dinner, waiting for someone in the clear dayligh............