I know you are more clement than vile men, Who of their broken debtors, take a third, A sixth, a tenth, letting them thrive again On their abatement: that's not my desire…
"What would Shakespeare have said to Chamberlain's Bankruptcy Act, which is the law of England today and for many a year to come? You now take everything from the broken debtor and do not then discharge him, but keep his failure hung over him for years in order to force him to the prison, which the beggared seldom escape. In this we are infinitely viler than Shakespeare's 'vile men.' Shakespeare not a social reformer! If your laws were conceived in the spirit of his maturity, the millennium would be realized. I always put him with Jesus as a thinker." Mallock laughed as at an enormity and I didn't pursue the theme. I had given them pause, which was enough.
We adjourned to the drawing-room for coffee, which was excellent, as the whole meal had been. Beckett ate with the keenest enjoyment, but in strict moderation, and all of us cultivated a similar control. While drinking the coffee Dowden said he hoped I'd write on Shakespeare. "You've certainly given me food for thought," he added courteously.
"And me too," cried Mallock.
When they went away, Beckett kept me and for the life of me I could not understand why, till he suddenly blurted out, "Tant pis if you think worse of me, but I think I owe it to you to tell you the truth. I was talking to Mallock the other day about you, praising your extraordinary scholarship and knowledge of Shakespeare and your genius. He said that genius was difficult to measure, but knowledge was easy; why not let him test your knowledge of Shakespeare; and so I arranged this dinner. If you had come to grief I'd have said nothing, but you came through so brilliantly that I think you ought to know. I hope you're not angry with me?"
"No, no," I replied. "How could I be?"
"I want to be friends," rejoined Beckett warmly. "I want you to regard me as a friend and as a sign of it I wish you'd call me Ernest and let me call you Frank."
"That's dear of you," I responded, and gave him my hand. From that day on Ernest Beckett was a true friend of mine and my affection for him grew till he passed-alas! all too soon, into the eternal silence.
One word more on the freedom of speech used in good society in London in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. It was not so outspoken as the best French or German society, but its rule was very much like the rule of the best Italian or Spanish society: anything was permitted if it was sufficiently funny or witty. In the Prince of Wales' set in especial, it was possible to tell the most risque story, provided always that it was really humorous. And the Pink 'Un, or chief sporting paper of the day, edited by John Corlett and printed on pink paper once a week, certainly set a broad example. One instance will prove this. Just before I returned to London the Baroness Burdett Coutts, a great favorite of the Prince and the Queen for her goodness of heart and many benefactions, though well over sixty years of age, married young Mr. Bartlett, an American, a good-looking man of six or seven and twenty, and five feet ten in height. Prince Edward, it was said, was asked by the Queen to remonstrate with the old lady. But she met him by saying that she could not make her dear boy unhappy. "He is head over ears in love with me, you know," she said. The Prince could only smile and perhaps repeat the British saying under his breath: "No fool like an old fool."
The week after the marriage Corlett published the announcement in the Pink 'Un, and underneath in large letters, this:
AN ARITHMETICAL PROBLEM:
How many times does twenty-seven go into sixty-eight and what is there over?
Perhaps nothing except the famous naughty blunder in The Times some years later ever caused such widespread merriment.
The tone of English society is the tone of a well-bred man of the world, whereas the tone of American society is the tone of a Puritan grocer.
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CHAPTER XIV
In my early days in London one event moved me profoundly, the death and burial of Charles Reade. Somehow or other he had got the name of being bad tempered and quarrelsome and his lovable and great qualities were almost forgotten. Indeed, were it not for the fact that a prominent journalist, George Augustus Sala, took up the cudgels for his private character and wrote of him as kind-hearted as well as noble-minded, judgment against him would have gone by default. Of course, like all the younger ones, I measured him wholly as a writer and accepted at once every word of Sala's eulogy and went far beyond it. Unlike most Englishmen, I regarded Reade as a far greater writer than Dickens, and indeed had no hesitation in putting The Cloister and the Hearth side by side with Vanity Fair in my admiration, and perhaps a little higher in my love. Again and again I talked of Reade's masterpiece as the greatest English novel, though the spirit of opposition may have added a tinge of challenge to my passionate superlative.
The announcement of his death reminded me that I might have known him, had I wished. Rossetti's passing some two years before, my regret was keen and lasting. But I went to his burial and from it learned how careless, or rather how chanceful, is England's sympathy with her great men. True, that Easter Tuesday was a vile day: it rained and the air was raw. He was to be buried too at Willesden, miles away from the centre, but there was not a great crowd even at Shepherd's Bush, whence the funeral procession started.
A more dismal burial would be hard to imagine. And so I resented even Sala's praise of It is never too late to mend as a "magnificent work," and his comparison of Hawes, the governor of the gaol, and Eden the chaplain, as "distinctly original and dramatic characters," with the Faust and Mephistopheles and the Gretchen of Goethe. Such over praise seemed as impertinent-odious as his talking of two Charles Reades: "One a very pugnacious and vituperative old gentleman, always shaking his fist in somebody's face and not infrequently hitting somebody over the head," and "the other Charles Reade I knew and revered as a valiant, upright and withal a charitable and compassionate Christian man, inexhaustible in his pity for suffering, implacable only in his hatred of things shameful and cruel and mean. He was throughout his life a militant man; but his soldiering is over now; there he rests in a peaceful tomb by the side of the Friend whom he loved so long and so deeply."
Only three months before, Tennyson had been made a peer amid universal eulogy; yet here was as great a man put away forever without pomp or circumstance; the ordinary English reader thought more of Maud or The May Queen than The Cloister and the Hearth; still what did it matter? I for one walked through the rain and slush while the gallant Denys, with his "the Devil is dead", went with me and Gerard and Catherine and the rest of the glorious and ever-living company; and perchance one man's understanding and admiring, passionate love is more than most of us get in this earthly pilgrimage. Surely it is well with dear Charles Reade: I saw his coffin lowered into the grave, but I find it hard to forgive myself. I ought to have seen and known him in order at least to have thanked him for his deathless gift to humanity and the many hours of pure delight I had had with his brave heart and noble spirit.
But now I must say a word or two of other occurrences that throw a certain light on English character and conditions. An American actress, Mary Anderson, took London by storm. It was said that Lord Lytton bought a row of the stalls night after night and filled the seats with chosen guests; his admiration surprised everyone who knew him, because he was regarded as an avowed admirer of the ephebos, rather than of woman's beauty; but he certainly fell for "our Mary," as some tried to nickname her. This was the Lord Lytton, who in The New Timon sneered at Tennyson: