In these words we hear the accents of the wise, amused Melbourne who had won the heart of the young Queen. Indeed, his decline was gradual. Now and again the mists part to disclose a glimpse of the old Melbourne; with Mrs. Norton at a performance of a play of Ben Jonson, for instance—“That it should be dull I had expected,” he was heard exclaiming during the interval, “but that it should be so damned dull I had not conceived!” or talking to a Maid of Honour when dining with the Queen, “This dish is damned bad. On ordinary occasions I should try to leave out the adjuration; but on this occasion it is not worth while—it is so damned bad!”
These flashes, however, were few and far between. Old acquaintances who met him after 1842 were for the most part shocked at the change in him. White-headed, dim-eyed, with stiff gait and dragging leg, he showed no trace of that exuberant social vitality which had once been his distinguishing characteristic. Greville watched him at a house party at Broadlands sitting hour by hour grave, stern and silent, with an expression “as of a perpetual consciousness of his glory obscured” written on his face, then breaking for a moment into a feeble echo of his old style of conversation, then relapsing once more into silence: in the middle of a dinner at Lord Cottesmore’s through which he had sat neither speaking nor, apparently, taking in what was said to him, he suddenly arose and hobbled out of the room. The effort needed for conversation was more than he could manage.
Politically the same process of decline showed itself. Up to the time of his stroke it was not noticeably apparent. Melbourne, though he cannot be said to have exerted himself once he had resigned, continued to play an influential part in the counsels of the Whig Party. He was against the Whigs going in for aggressive opposition, partly out of his own innate conservatism, and still more because he did not want to rouse the Queen’s anti-Tory feeling against her new Government. Both at informal meetings of the party leaders and in letters to John Russell he preached the wisdom of doing nothing in particular, with his old incisive vigour. “As we haven’t a majority,” he said, “we may be allowed to think a little what is best for the country and the world.” On the rare occasions, too, that he summed up the energy to speak in the House of Lords, he could still be at his old independent-minded best. One speech in particular, during a Corn Law debate in February, 1842, was memorable. “Though I am ready to consider any measure for the alleviation of distress,” he said, “I can never hold that the cause can be prevented by changes in the constitution or by changing the persons who administer public affairs. I am opposed to this, for if the existence of national distress is looked on as a reason for organic change in the constitution or in the individuals who compose the Government, there is an end of all stability in public affairs. In every state of the country, I fear it will not be difficult to make out such a case of poverty and suffering as may support an argument for great and immediate alterations. We have lived lately in a time of great change and many strong measures. It is supposed that these measures have produced disappointment, that Catholic emancipation has not ended in the tranquillity that was expected from it, that the Reform Bill has not improved the condition of people at large; and that those who recommended these measures do not enjoy with the country the same popularity that they formerly did. How this may be I know not. But I do know that, if there is disappointment, it does not arise from the vicious principle or the ill-working of those measures themselves, but from the wild, unfounded, exaggerated expectations of their effects which were indulged in and anticipated. A man does not know himself, nor is he a safe judge of his own conduct. But I believe myself never to have contributed to the raising of these wild and illusory hopes.” In these words Melbourne states more fully and forcibly than anywhere else the reasons determining his ambiguous attitude to that great general reforming movement which had been the dominating feature of political history throughout his active career as a statesman. They may stand, indeed, for his political apologia.
For his political swan-song too. He made no important speech during the following months; and after his stroke he could not. He rose from his bed changed politically as much as socially. He still wrote to his colleagues about affairs and occasionally attended their meetings. But the letters, traced painfully out by his semi-paralysed hand, were illegible and rambling. And he sat through the meetings, for the most part, slumped in his chair in a dazed apathy, unable it seemed to take in what was going on round him. Growingly he lost grip, lived in the past, seemed incapable of grasping what was happening in the world.
The change in him could not fail to make its impression on his colleagues. They were too fond of him not to listen deferentially and courteously whenever he spoke; but naturally they paid less and less attention to his opinions. The world in general noticed this; and followed their lead. Gone were the days of Melbourne’s dressing-room levées with queues of people following one another up the stairs to ask him favours and regale him with gossip while he shaved. Whole afternoons passed now without a knock resounding on the front door of South Street. Melbourne minded. Well acquainted with Vanity Fair though he was, he was too incurably sensitive not to be hurt when he was brought thus face to face with the selfish fickleness of its natives. Besides, he needed company to keep up his flagging spirits. An old friend found him one afternoon alone and gloomy in his library. “I am glad,” he exclaimed “you have come. I have sat here watching that timepiece and heard it strike four times without seeing the face of a human being; and, had it struck the fifth, I feel I could not have borne it!” More unreasonably, he felt wounded and surprised that his colleagues consulted him less than they had. For it was one of the most distressing symptoms of his decline that he failed to realize it. At the time of his resignation he was well aware that he was not likely to be up to taking office again. Not so after his stroke. Early in 1844 it looked as if the Tories might be about to fall. One evening Melbourne was dining at the Palmerstons’: “I was kept up half the night,” he announced to the embarrassment of the company, “thinking, suppose that I was sent for to Windsor, what advice should I give the Queen: and it kept me long awake!”
As a matter of fact, by this time there was no question of his being fit for active work of any kind. Living in London at all was getting too much for him: during the next two years he spent more and more time down at Brocket. There, day after day, he would sit, an unopened book on his knee, gazing out of the window or at the fire, sunk in an apathetic melancholy. No wonder! In the quiet of the country he was forced inescapably to contemplate his true situation, to face the fact that he was now old and infirm and on the shelf, with nothing to look forward to except death. He would be heard mournfully murmuring over to himself some lines from Samson Agonistes:
“So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat. Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself.
My race of glory run, and race of shame.
And I shall shortly be with those that rest.”
His friends and relations did what they could to cheer him up. Lord and Lady Beauvale hovered round; Lady Palmerston drove over from Panshanger; Mrs. Norton wrote regularly; now and again a visitor from the outside world—an old friend like Lady Holland or one of Mrs. Norton’s clever young men—came down to spend a night. Melbourne could still respond to these efforts to entertain him. He sat up till well after his ordinary bedtime talking and listening to the visitors; and he dismayed innocent, Victorian Lady Beauvale by the way he chuckled over the spicier passages in Mrs. Norton’s letters. But these wafts of a brighter mood evaporated with the occasion that stirred them; all too soon he was plunged back into melancholy once more.
For in him the sadness ordinarily attendant on old age was reinforced by peculiar reasons for suffering. Amid much that was dimming and fading one memory remained painfully fresh; the memory of the Queen. People noticed that his eyes filled with tears every time her name was mentioned: if he was unwell, it could even prod
uce a sort of hysterical outburst. He missed her more than ever, when there was so little to distract his mind from his sense of her loss. For he had lost her finally and completely now. After 1841 the relationship was a dead one. Melbourne made pathetic efforts to keep it going. He was always writing to her; gentle, gossipy letters, lit up from time to time by a faint glint of his old characteristic self. Let her not buy objects merely for their historical interest, he urges—“What is the value of Cardinal Wolsey’s cap? A Cardinal’s cap is no great wonder!”—or he counsels her about the education of the child Prince—“Be not over-solicitous about education . . . it may mould and direct the character but it rarely alters it.” Alas, his letters did not evoke the response he yearned for. He would wait for the arrival of the post trembling with hope. More often than not it brought him nothing. The Queen did not write as frequently as he did. In his weakened state he could not restrain himself from gently upbraiding her for her neglect; he had begun to think Her Majesty’s silence rather long, he told her wistfully. The Queen apologized. But she wrote no more often than before. Melbourne had to accustom himself to hearing from her only occasionally; and though these occasions were now easily the happiest moments of his life, yet the letters themselves were not what they once had been. No longer did she write to pour out her feelings, but filled up the page as best she might with mild family news and conventional words of sympathy and encouragement. “The change from progress to decadence is a very hard and disagreeable trial,” he replies to her apologetically, “Lord Melbourne has been reading Cicero on old age, a very pretty treatise, but he does not find much consolation in it. It is certainly, as Your Majesty says, wrong to repine at everything, still it is difficult not to do so.” Once or twice his longing for her betrays itself in a brief, understated, poignant phrase. “Lord Melbourne cannot say otherwise but that he continually misses and regrets the time when he had daily confidential communication with Your Majesty.”
Their rare meetings did nothing to soothe him; short, stiff interchanges in company, utterly unlike the leisurely intercourse of the past. There is a distressing account of a visit to Chatsworth in the winter of 1843. Melbourne had arrived as excited as a child at the prospect of seeing the Queen again. And then she never saw him alone or talked to him for more than a few minutes; even at dinner she soon turned to the other side. Oblivious of the people round him, the old man sat, his face working with the unconcealed anguish of his disappointment. The Queen’s conduct on this occasion seems to have been due to gaucherie, not lack of heart. She was flustered to see how he had changed and frightened of tiring him. Indeed, considering the limitations of her character and situation, she treated Melbourne after his fall as well as anyone could reasonably expect. She never forgot that she owed him a great deal, and sought conscientiously to discharge her debt: wrote to him when she had time, sent him presents, invited him for an occasional visit; and when she heard he was embarrassed for money, she lent him a considerable sum to tide him over his difficulties. All the same, it must be admitted that she was not the sort of woman who knew best how to soften the hard pang of parting. Her egotism and her honesty alike forbade it. She could not put herself in his place nor enter imaginatively into his feelings; and it had never been possible for her to pretend to a sentiment she did not feel. For Melbourne she now felt very little. Though the Queen could love intensely, she was only capable of loving one person at a time. The Prince had now completely replaced Melbourne in her affections; so much so that she somehow felt she had been disloyal in ever having been so fond of Melbourne at all. “Reading this again,” she notes in 1842, after looking back at some entry of two years before in her diary, “I cannot forbear remarking what an artificial sort of happiness mine was then, and what a blessing it is I have now in my beloved Husband real and solid happiness, which no Politics, no worldly reverses can change; it could not have lasted long, as it was then, for after all, kind and excellent as Lord M. is, and kind as he was to (me), it was but in Society that I had amusement, and I was only living on that superficial resource, which I then fancied was happiness! Thank God! for me and others, this is changed, and I know what REAL happiness is.”
She never stopped to think what was real happiness to Melbourne. But, as a matter of fact, even if she had, it would have made little difference to him. Not the Queen, but the nature of human existence, was responsible for his sorrow. For what he minded was the fact of separation, and this was inevitable. An old man at the end of his life’s journey, and a young girl just setting out on hers, what bond could hold them together?—especially when the girl happened to be Queen of England and newly married to a man of her own age whom she passionately loved. For a short time their ways had crossed. Now, with hopeless, regretful eyes, he watched her figure grow small and disappear over the horizon.
The trouble was that she had grown to be the only thing that made life worth living to him. Here we come to the crucial, central, incurable cause of his melancholy, a cause that finds its origin far back in the dim beginnings of his history. For all that it had been so packed and brilliant, Melbourne’s had been an unfulfilled life. He was born with a strong, subtle intelligence, always restlessly searching to discover some ultimate truth and significance in human existence. But his search had been frustrated by the congenital, fundamental division in his nature. Never had he been able to reconcile the sceptical realism of his judgment with those ideal aspirations, which alone commanded the enthusiasm of his heart. Indeed he had long ago given up trying to do so; and, resigning himself to accept the fact that he would never be sure of the ultimate value of anything, he had surrendered himself in a spirit of cheerful ironical detachment, to such immediate satisfactions as life offered to him; to the pleasures of society and the interest and excitement of great affairs. So long as he was vigorous and zestful, this policy had worked well enough. Now it did not do so any more. He had neither the spirit to enjoy society nor the strength to take part in public affairs. This would not have mattered so much if he had not been solitary, for, along with his intellect, nature had endowed him with an intensely affectionate heart that might have enabled him to forget his own troubles in the interests and happiness of others whom he loved. But, once youth is past, such a heart can only find complete and continuing fulfilment in family life, in the close stable relationship that a man has with wife and children. Here Melbourne had been cruelly treated by fate. Born to be a husband and father, he found himself, through no fault of his own, when near on seventy, a childless widower; well liked by many, but needed by none.
In face of this situation, all his age-old, carefully constructed defences crumbled. What good was a hedonistic philosophy, however intelligently conceived, when the power to enjoy was failing. What strength could he find in his detachment? Detachment can only strengthen the spirit if it is a positive detachment founded on a sense of some timeless and absolute reality, immune from the accident of mortal existence; whereas Melbourne’s was negative, sustained by nothing firmer than an instinctive response to the call of the passing hour. Against the injurious onset of time, age and death, the human soul is fortified by two things only, faith and love. Melbourne had no one who depended on his love, nor had he ever been able to find ground on which to build a sure faith. During these last years he met the Archbishop of Canterbury who spoke to him of the help given by prayer. “Yes?” queried Melbourne, “but who is one to pray to and what is one to pray for?” After many changes of fortune the life-long battle between his sanguine temperament and his questioning destructive intellect had ended in his temperament’s decisive defeat. At last he was forced to feel, as well as to think, that life was a vain and empty dream. A grey sense of the insubstantiality and fleetingness of things human possessed his spirit. “The fire is out,” he muttered to himself as he sat gazing before him at vacancy. “The fire is out.”
The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 44