CHAPTER XIII

GREAT MEN OF THE DAY

Every artist is his own masterpiece.—BURSTALL.

In beginning this chapter, I very nearly fell into the old mistake of saying “I suppose young people don’t read Dickens nowadays.” It is curious how generation after generation of us seniors fall into that trap. Miss Linthorpe said it to me once, when I was in the schoolroom, upon which I offered to submit to a Dickens examination, and passed it with flying colours. I said it myself to Francis one day, when he was lying on the floor with a book, and he held up the book, which was _Martin Chuzzlewit_. So I will make no apology this time for talking of Mrs. Leo Hunter as if she were a character familiar to my readers. She was a real old lady, who lived at Ipswich (I think) and had some phenomenal number of children, and wrote verses quite as bad as the “Dying Frog.” But indeed she was not one woman, she was every woman—every woman who has sufficient station in the world to be able to choose her own company. We all want to collect lions—none the less since we ourselves began to be Managing Directresses, and Q.C.’s, and Members of Parliament. So I am not ashamed of having hunted the lions in my day; and I have kept them for a separate chapter—just a few of them, who will be worth exhibiting, because everybody still remembers their names, and yet my younger readers never saw or only saw them at a distance.

I suppose it would be generally agreed that the greatest man of the period (I am speaking of the period round about 1960) was Lord Chief Justice Poltwhistle. He dated from the old days of the English Bar, before women could plead (“barbarous days, Lady Porstock”) or sit on juries. In his young days, he said, it was still customary for lawyers to demand their fees, even when they lost the case; and he could quote instances in which men had risen to great fame at the Bar without ever winning a single important case. “We took it all in a more sporting spirit then,” he would say, in his quaint old way. “You might win a moral victory as a pleader, although you failed to get a verdict owing to the intrinsic badness of your cause. But of course at that time counsel weren’t required to take any oath as to what they thought of the rights and wrongs of the case, and it was not contrary to etiquette to defend a man although you were morally certain he was guilty. Even the moral theologians allowed that; and you must understand, Lady Porstock, that a moral theologian has a conscience just one point less elastic than a lawyer’s. I recollect when the Act was passed in ’42 an old company-promoter called Blofeld sitting next to O’Leary, who was a prominent K.C. in those days, and saying, ‘Well, the next time I get into the Courts it seems as if I’d have to find either a knave or a fool to defend me.’ ‘And you’ll have your pick of the Bar,’ says O’Leary. Wonderful smart chap he was, O’Leary. ‘It isn’t fair on us Catholics,’ he’d say to me (there weren’t very many of us practising in those days), ‘for the Protestants all think we’re such liars, when I’ve defended a man it’s all I can do to prevent him getting up and pleading Guilty.’ In those days, too, you could accept any brief you liked, and accepted the party that offered the biggest retaining fee, instead of having to wait your turn. It nearly broke O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill went through. I remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t defend the old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel because he can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the best counsel the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich people who can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a wonderful smart chap, O’Leary.” And so the old gentleman would wander on, charming us with anecdotes of the bad old times that, just because they are so distant, still win our rebellious sympathies.

Another of our guests was Mrs. Justice Partridge, who was one of the first of my sex to take the silk, and actually the first, I believe, to attain the Bench. She used to tell the story of one of the first cases she had to try. The offence was criminal wife-beating, and everybody was expecting her, as a woman, to be particularly severe over it. The accused, an Irishman, was equal to the occasion, and explained that he was “just taychin’ her her place in the house, the same as you would _your_ old man, yer Honour.”

Talking of Irishmen reminds me of another distinguished visitor of ours, Daniel Geraghty, the Prime Minister of Ireland at that time. I remember asking him why it was that Ireland, since her liberation in the twenties, had never done much that was memorable in the way of literature, having produced so much till then. “It’s a simple thing,” he said, “it’s just that we Irishmen have no imagination. We’re hard, business folk by nature. When you English had it all your own way, you always liked to believe, and always wanted us to believe, that we were just dreamy sort of fellows, only fit to dream in a pig-sty or a garret, the way we’d starve contented. It’s always the way with you conquering races, you admire your subjects for the qualities that won’t be dangerous to you. _Excudent alii_—it’s the same all the world over.” I have never made up my mind whether he was right, but it certainly looks as if he was justified.

At another time, we entertained Fothergill—the younger Fothergill, of course, not the one who wrote _Fifteen Years in a Fijian Larder_. He came to us when he had just had the distinction of discovering the last race that was left to be discovered—the Ibquo’s in South America. He said they were a fascinating people, very simple in their character and very primitive in their habits. They knew nothing of flying, of electricity, or even of steam, and they used petrol only as an intoxicant. When they had to travel a long distance, or to pull heavy weights, they would take one of their tame mustangs and fasten it to a wheeled cart, and then drive it along with a whip, pulling the cart behind it. Their cooking was done over a fire, usually of coal; and their sacrificial meals were always cooked in vessels of iron, not aluminium, because it would be “bad magic.” They believed in a good Spirit which ruled the world, and in a bad Spirit which only had power to hurt them if they did wrong. They had great respect for old age, and generally chose some of the older men of the tribe to be their counsellors; if a child disobeyed its parents, it was punished. They also regarded their women with great veneration, and you would often see a man getting up from his place by the fire to make room for a woman who had none. When there was a marriage, the bride was solemnly escorted by her friends to the house of her future husband, where she was henceforward to live. The men worked in the fields; the women stayed at home and cooked for them, and also looked after the children, of whom there were often as many as eight or nine in one family. I seldom remember spending such an interesting evening.

It was not at my own house but at Lady Leek’s that I used to meet the literary men of the period. I did not care for having them at Greylands, or even at Chiswick, because they were liable to wear such odd clothes, and to talk so very loud, and to bring the strangest people in with them, quite uninvited. But they were very interesting people to meet, there is no doubt. The trouble about their writings was that they spent almost all their time writing about one another; sometimes in appreciation, sometimes in criticism. Occasionally one of them would break away from the tradition by writing about the men of a previous generation—there was Bernard Sykes, for example, who wrote a book that was very much talked about at the time, in which he tried to show that Lord Kitchener was a bad general, and that Herbert Wells was not really religious. But mostly they stuck to their own generation and criticized each other’s works about each other. The novelists could not do this exactly, but even in the novels the heroes were always novelists and the heroines female novelists, and they all settled down in Chelsea and lived unhappily ever after. Novels were very long in those days, running to three, or four, or even five volumes. Archie Lock used to say that he always took Debrett with him when he went on a journey, because it was the only book you could still get in one volume. “And very creditable to them,” he added, “considering the pressure on their space.” Of course the old “adventure stories” had not quite died out, but they were dying out rapidly—the Tarzan Syndicate, for example, decided to confine itself to films about this time. Publishing was already so expensive that all books except technical ones had to be produced by subscription. So the only novels one had were very long and very literary. It was only Jenkins’ invention in the seventies that made them cheap again.

I once met Henricourt and heard from him the story of his early struggles. He was a Civil Servant on £600 a year when he wrote his first masterpiece, _The Kleptomaniac_. It was one of the most realistic books of the century, and critics said that