The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  Yet each impression was a true one. The outward paradox mirrored accurately the paradox within. His new mildness of demeanour, for example, was no pretence. As with age he grew more independent of other people’s opinions, native fastidiousness began to modify family custom. The Lamb robustness remained, but refined into a charming brusquerie. Experience, too, had softened him. It is the proof of his essential fineness of disposition, that he profited by suffering. The difficulties of his private, the disappointments of his public life, so far from hardening him, had taught him to be tolerant in practice as well as in theory. Further, the unsatisfactory spectacle of his own career disposed him to look kindly on the shortcomings of others. Profoundly unegotistic, he judged the rest of the world as he would judge himself.

  But he was not at one with himself. On the contrary, maturity had only intensified the discord within him. His intellectual judgment was more cynically realistic than ever. All he had seen of the world confirmed him in his view that it was ruled mainly by folly, vanity, and selfishness. This is the burden of almost every observation on human nature in his notebook:

  “Your friends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own, without thinking that you should follow theirs. Thus, in fact, they all think themselves wiser than you, whatever they may say.”

  “It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.”

  “Persons in general are sufficiently ready to set themselves off by communicating their knowledge, but they are not so willing to communicate their ignorance. They are apt, both in writing and conversation, to stop when they come to the precise difficulty of the subject, which they are unable to get over, with such common phrases as ‘it were easy to push these considerations much further’, or ‘with the rest you are perfectly well acquainted’.”

  “When a man is determined by his own inclination either to act or not to act in a particular manner, he invariably sets about devising an argument by which he may justify himself to himself for the line he is about to pursue.”

  “If you make an estimate of your expenses for the coming year, and upon that estimate you find that they exactly amount to or fall little short of your income, you may be sure that you are an embarrassed, if not a ruined man.”

  “Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.”

  “You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.”

  And when someone quoted to him an old observation of his own to the effect that man could only learn by experience, “No, no,” he returned sadly, “nobody learns anything by experience; everybody does the same thing over and over again.”

  This last reflects, indirectly, as much on himself as on others. It was the measure of his detachment, that he never excepted himself from his condemnation of human beings in general. His contempt was not arrogant. This makes it more amiable; but it shows how thoroughly disillusioned he was. As for the ideal motives by which people professed to be actuated, he thought them the most fantastic illusions of all; smoke screens raised by men in order to hide from themselves the fact of their own selfishness. If, by any rare chance, idealists were sincere, it could only be because they were too stupid to understand the nature of things. “A doctrinaire,” he used to say, “is a fool but an honest man.” Or again “Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle.”

  Yet his heart continued to rebel against the conclusions of his reason. His sensibility was as tremblingly keen as in youth. He did not believe in human virtue: but he recognized goodness when he saw it; and he loved it. Even if public life was in fact a shoddy, self-seeking affair, how heart-stirring a pageant did it contrive to present! A moving tale still brought the tears to William’s eyes, an heroic deed still fired him to a glow of generous admiration. The grace of girlhood, the sweetness of friendship, the charm of garden solitude, vain and ephemeral though they might be, set him throbbing with exquisite and poignant emotions. And now and again his spirit was touched by sublimer visitations. Suddenly there would sweep over him a mysterious sense of some august and unearthly power behind the show of things, governing human destiny. “I consider,” he once broke out, unexpectedly and with emotion, to an embarrassed Cabinet meeting, “that England has been under the special protection of Divine Providence at certain periods of her history; the Spanish Armada, for instance, and the retirement of the French squadron from Bantry Bay.” And on another occasion, “I do not approve,” he said, “of the condemnation in Fénelon, of those whom he is pleased to call mystics—to which persuasion I belong.” Indeed these curious spiritual intimations of his were in the nature of direct mystical experience. They did not lead him to adopt a thoroughgoing mystical philosophy; for they came too seldom and too fleetingly for him to feel justified in founding an intellectual structure on them. Besides, he could find no logical ground for believing in their truth. But he was too sincere not to recognize their convincing reality as long as they lasted. And though they did not displace his rationalism, they undermined its security. Uneasily he hung suspended between two opinions.

  No wonder he was paradoxical! What was life but a bundle of contradictions? No wonder he was ironical; faced by the pre-posterous incongruity of experience, the only thing a reasonable person could do was to shrug his shoulders and smile. His duality of vision appears in his attitude to every sort of subject. No one appreciated better the achievements of culture: but he did not believe they had ever seriously influenced mankind. “Raphael was employed to decorate the Vatican,” he said, “not because he was a great painter but because his uncle was architect to the Pope.” In politics he united a mystical patriotism and a disinterested wish to do the best for his country, to a scornful disbelief in the sacredness of any human institution, the good sense of any political ideal. Again, though his heart was so abnormally tender that he could hardly hear a tale of suffering without tears, humanitarian schemes raised in him a violent antagonism. “I am not a subscribing sort of fellow,” he would reply breezily to earnest persons asking him to contribute to a philanthropic cause. Educational reformers, factory reformers—the only result of their efforts, he alleged, would be to worry the poor. As for the anti-slavery fanatics, he thought them perfectly futile. “I say, Archbishop,” he once remarked to Archbishop Whately, “what do you think I would have done about this slavery business if I had my own way? I would have done nothing at all. I would have left it all alone. It is all a pack of nonsense. There always have been slaves in most civilized countries, the Greeks, the Romans. However, they would have their own way and we have abolished slavery. But it is all great folly.” It was their confidence in their own ability to do good that put him off humanitarians so much. Little did they realize humanity’s gigantic propensity to error. “Try to do no good,” he asserted trenchantly, “and then you won’t get into any scrapes.”

  But it was in his attitude to religion that his duality of mind appeared most significantly. Many people thought he was an atheist. Certainly he talked flippantly about the most holy topics; he seldom went to church himself, and he did not like other people going often; “No, my Lord,” he replied to the disconcerted Archbishop of York, who had invited him to attend the evening service, “once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.” And he had a horror of pious emotionalism—“Things are coming to a pretty pass,” he exclaimed, after listening to an evangelical sermon on th
e consequences of sin, “when religion is allowed to invade private life.” Roman Catholicism, in his view, was insufficiently calm, and he recommended the Church of England on the ground it was the “least meddlesome.” Yet the subject of religion exercised over him a strange compelling fascination. For hours he would sit studying the controversies of the early fathers; every new theological work found its way to his shelves, its margins scrawled with his notes. No doubt this was partly due to historical interest. Religion, he once said, had played so prominent a role in human history, that every educated man should investigate it. Perhaps he also found an ironical amusement in contemplating the extraordinary figments of fancy with which, according to his ideas, human beings had seen fit still further to confuse their already perplexed lives. But there was, all the same, a serious side to his religious preoccupations. The imaginative element in him cried out against a purely rationalistic interpretation of the universe. And the mystical strain, stirring always in the hinterland of his consciousness, set him wondering if there was not something in religion after all. Certainly there were things in his experience inexplicable by rationalist theory. If he searched the records of religion long enough, might he not discover an explanation of them—might he not even find grounds for that faith for which, in spite of himself, his spirit yearned? Anyway there was no harm in trying. In a world where all was obscure, the speculations of the theologians had as good a chance of being true as anything else.

  For this was the final result of his cogitations; a scepticism more complete, because more considered, even than that of his youth. When the evidence of heart and head, of reason and imagination, contradicted each other at every turn, he could put no certain trust in his judgment. And the opinions of others, so far as he had studied them, provided no more satisfactory solution to the riddle. How could one trust the judgment of beings, the essential condition of whose nature it was to be limited and biased and ignorant? “Neither man nor woman,” he noted, “can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools. This is the first step towards becoming either estimable or agreeable; and until it be taken there is no hope. The sooner the discovery is made the better, as there is more time and power for taking advantage of it. Sometimes the great truth is found out too late to apply to it any effectual remedy. Sometimes it is never found at all; and these form the desperate and inveterate causes of folly, self-conceit and impertinence.”

  No, life was an insoluble conundrum; and all that a sensible man could do was to try and get through it with as little unpleasantness to himself, and everyone else, as possible; in private to be considerate and detached, in public to do what little he could to guide the world down its uncharted course with the minimum of friction. This generally involved doing very little. It certainly meant refusing to risk an immediate disturbance for the sake of a problematical future good. As for ultimate truth, the nearest an honest man could hope to get to that, was to be vigilantly faithful to the conclusions of his own reason and experience; not to let his candid impressions be distorted by convention or cowardice or the deceptions of his own vanity. Probably, these personal conclusions were as far from the truth as everything else. But they were the only things of which he had first-hand evidence. Anyway only good could come of speaking one’s mind, even if it did shock people. “It is a good thing to surprise,” he once said. By shaking others out of their complacency one might make them realize how ill-founded human convictions are.

  He reaped the reward of his courage. William got closer to truth, pierced far deeper into the significance of things, than the majority of his hustling contemporaries. All the same his creed was not an inspiriting one. And there was a strong undercurrent of melancholy in him. “To those who think,” he was fond of quoting, “life is a comedy, to those who feel, a tragedy.” William was far too sensitive not to feel its tragic implications more often than was comfortable for him. Fits of depression overtook him, in which he sat silent and remote, overwhelmed by a sense of the barren fleetingness of existence; and even his brightest moods were shot through by grey streaks of disillusionment. Yet he was not so unhappy as might have been expected. For one thing he was no longer at open war with himself. Though the discordant elements in him were as discordant as ever, he had given up trying to reconcile them. He had imposed an armistice on his inner struggle, he had come to terms with his difficulties. Besides, happiness is an affair of temperament rather than opinions. And William’s temperament was all salt and sunshine. The depression of 1816 was too alien from his spirit to last long; when the immediate cloud passed, willy-nilly he began to respond to life again; by the time he was forty-six he had recovered nearly all his youthful capacity for enjoyment. The world might be a futile place; but how odd it was, how fascinating, how endlessly full of interest! By now he had acquired the skill of a life-long hedonist in extracting every drop of pleasure from life that it had to offer. “Lord Melbourne looked as if he enjoyed himself,” said a surprised observer who had watched him beaming at some tedious city banquet. “There is nothing Lord Melbourne does not enjoy,” was the reply. Along with his pleasure in life went a pleasure in his fellow creatures. Most cynics have a fundamental antipathy to their kind; not so William. “The worst of the present day,” he once said to a friend, “is that men hate one another so damnably. For my part I love them all!” This was a slight exaggeration. Arrogant people irritated him profoundly, and pretentious ones still more. “There now, that fellow has been trying for half-an-hour to make me believe he knows a great deal of what he knows nothing,” he commented after listening to a literary man holding forth at his table, “we won’t have him again.” But though he did not love everybody, he liked most and hated none. Himself normal in his tastes, he felt at home with the normal run of humanity; sympathized with their aspirations, shared their pleasures, understood their weaknesses. Perhaps human beings were not very dignified; but then, he did not feel dignified himself. Besides, their absurdities and inconsistencies only made them the more entertaining. And if he liked men as a whole, certain individuals among them he loved. Experience had only confirmed the strength of his personal affections. For Emily, for Fred, for his closest friends, he felt an ardent unselfish love that overrode all his deliberately cultivated detachment. Unquenchable beacons of comfort and joy they shone out, radiating a little circle of light in the huge darkness of the universe, warming the shivering heart. Indeed the very paradox of his nature made him a happy man on the whole. A cynic who loved mankind, a sceptic who found life thoroughly worth living, he contrived to face the worthlessness of things, cheerfully enough.

  Only there was a chink in the armour of his serenity. It depended too much on keeping in the sun. Since he relied for happiness on the passing joys of pleasure and affection, he must manage his life so that these were always at his disposal. A threat to the amenity of his mode of existence was deeply disturbing to him. As we have seen he was terrified of revolution. And in private life too, he avoided the disagreeable as much as he could. He had a horror of seeing a corpse, for instance. Even in books, he refused to read anything that dealt with the grim or the sordid. Crabbe, he said, degraded everything he touched; and in later years he put aside Oliver Twist after one glance. “It is all among workhouses and pickpockets and coffin-makers,” he said, “I do not like those things: I wish to avoid them. I do not like them in reality and therefore I do not like to see them represented.”

  Indeed there was a flaw in his philosophy, a radical defect, implicit in this shrinking from the unpleasant. The happiness that is an expression only of an instinctive mood has no certainty of continuance; William’s serenity rested on no reasoned foundation, but only on a precariously-adjusted equilibrium. For the present his sanguine temperament was strong enough to provide a counter-weight to the melancholy of his scepticism. But supposing his mood changed, supposing that, stricken by sorrow or by the failure of vitality, he lost his faculty of enjoyment—at once he would be flung into that slough of despond to
which his intellectual convictions might logically seem to consign him. Only as long as he kept his balance was he safe; and in a world of chance and catastrophe, at any moment it might begin to waver.

  The truth was that William’s mature character, like his youthful, was a compromise. In a sense he had made far more of a success of it than most people. For he was that rare phenomenon, a genuinely independent personality. From the turmoil of warring influences which, from cradle to middle age, had fought for possession of him, he had emerged dominated by none, his every opinion the honest conclusion of his own experience; his every utterance and habit, down to the way he ate, and folded his letters, the unqualified expression of his own individuality. But, though he was enslaved to nothing else, he was not master of himself. Strong enough to reject any faith that his own reason did not think convincing, he had not the strength to form a faith of his own. His spiritual security was at the mercy of circumstances.