He revisited the places where his youth had been passed in London. He could not have done so before because all the happiness in his life had been behind him, but “now I can affront the past without fear.” He saw the house at Camberwell where he was born, the house in Canonbury Square where he had been to school, the houses in Highbury Place, Hampstead and Highgate where he had lived. He went to the British Museum, the South Kensington collection, the National Gallery, the Dulwich Gallery, Kew Gardens, the City, University College School, all of which he had known well in earlier days. But as he had not cared to awaken his memories, he had kept away from these places: “Now it is altogether different.” The past thirteen years, though to the world he had been successful, now appeared to him like a bad dream. He had made money, his public life had prospered, his family life had been peaceful, all his tastes, affections, ambitions were gratified; “and yet in spite of all this I have been so lonely, there has never been a time when I would not have accepted a sentence of death as a relief....You have made life once more a glorious and a hopeful thing.” No one, not even his closest friends like John Morley and Charles Dilke, could have guessed from his self-assured manner and steely exterior that he was capable of feeling lonely or of being stirred to such emotions as he revealed to Mary, which would have evoked much skeptical laughter from his political opponents.
Early in November ‘88 he started for the United States, explaining his absence from the autumn session of Parliament to his friend the editor of the Birmingham Daily Post: “When this letter is brought to you I hope I may be half-way across the Atlantic to carry out a second and private treaty which I negotiated when last in America and which fortunately does not require the ratification of the Senate”; and he went on to speak of “this new light that has come into my life.” His passage was booked under another name, and he managed to make the journey without recognition. He left the vessel by a ladder, a dangerous proceeding as the boat was moving, the steps were swaying, and he might easily have dropped into the water or been crushed between pier and steamship. He made straight for Washington, and was married to Mary Endicott in St. John’s Church, President Cleveland and most of the Cabinet being present. They went to Paris, the Riviera and San Remo, reaching Highbury in time for Christmas and undergoing a big civic festival in January ‘89.
London society approved the match, one of its leaders Lady Dorothy Nevill praising the latest American immigrant: “No one ever had a more perfect wife than he....She is the most charming woman imaginable.” Queen Victoria entered in her journal: “Mrs. Chamberlain is very pretty and young-looking, and is very ladylike with a nice frank open manner.” Chamberlain’s eldest son and daughter, Austen and Beatrice, were of Mary’s age; while of the children of his second marriage, Neville was nearly twenty, Ida, Hilda and Ethel would soon be out of their teens. But the coming of Mary created a much happier home, and long afterwards one of Joseph’s children wrote: “She unlocked his heart, and we were able to enter in as never before.” Chamberlain himself declared: “She brought my children nearer to me.”
His private life was more secretive than that of most people. No one knew anything of the tranquil happiness, due entirely to Mary, that he experienced at home. Gossip-writers could not glean a scrap of information about his doings anywhere but in the political field, and they had to fall back on his love of orchids. He was known affectionately to his fellow citizens of Birmingham as “our Joe,” and to the less admiring portion of the electorate as “Brummagem Joe.” With Mary at his side he developed a passion for his garden at Highbury, varying the beds, extending the greenhouses, adding shrubberies, making the pool more picturesque. The peace he could not find among men he discovered among flowers. When in London, he and Mary were often to be seen in the Botanical Gardens, Regent’s Park, or in the gardens at Kew, where to his concern the Temperate House had remained unfinished for thirty years.
In 1890 Chamberlain lost much of his money when the Argentine securities collapsed, but cut his expenses and wrote a political play which was read to the actor-manager Beerbohm Tree, who made the wise comment, “Sure of reputation in one sphere, why should Chamberlain risk failure in another?” and turned it down. A few years later Chamberlain saw Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband, thinking the dialogue clever but the plot false. “I wonder that Wilde did not know better than to make the black spot such an especially mean and contemptible thing as selling a political secret,” he said. Perhaps he considered that to justify such a situation a politician should at least have a war on his conscience.
Tree’s rejection of Chamberlain’s play did not affect their friendship, and to celebrate the politician’s sixtieth birthday the actor-manager and his wife went to stay at Highbury. They drove from the Birmingham station in their host’s carriage, which was recognized by the people in a marketplace and lustily cheered. Anxious that the populace should not think their hero ungracious, Tree bowed right and left and doffed his hat, but having no monocle could not do full justice to the occasion. After dinner they discussed John Bright, and Chamberlain read one of his speeches, imitating his manner. “He was a very young man for sixty,” noted Tree, “for he could not help running like a boy when a cow got loose from a paddock.” Needless to add that Tree had to see the orchid house.
At a later meeting an incident occurred which Tree recalled. He was lunching in Chamberlain’s house in Prince’s Gate, London, and after the ladies had left the table the men smoked and gossiped about politics. Many well-known politicians, including John Morley, were there, and Tree was the only layman present. “The conversation turned upon the affairs of the world, and after some warm argument Colonel John Haye, who was then American ambassador, said: ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, do remember that in international politics there is such a thing as morality.’ There was a momentary silence, then everybody round the table roared with laughter.”{17} According to Tree, in Chamberlain’s opinion it was good for a man’s character always to do what he had decided to do; for instance, if he had made up his mind to take a walk and it began to rain, Chamberlain would nevertheless take a walk. Perhaps this remark impressed Tree more than it would have done had he known that Chamberlain seldom took a walk if he could help it.
Whatever “our Joe” did was right in the eyes of the Birmingham people, and when, after all his radical reforms and his republican views on the House of Lords, the Conservatives returned to power and he accepted the Colonial Secretaryship under Lord Salisbury’s leadership, his constituents were prouder of him than ever before.
At first he did not wish to take office, but his wife encouraged him and under her influence his attitude quickly changed from gloomy uncertainty to radiant confidence. He never appeared or felt gay when she was away from home, and two passages in his letters to her during February 1895, when she was looking after her parents in Cannes, tell us all we need to know:
I can never be too grateful to you for all the happiness you have brought to me and to mine. I often think that you have completed my life.
And now having unburdened myself a little [concerning his financial losses] I will only add that all my troubles are as nothing in comparison with the happiness you have brought me.
March came and she was still with her people on the Riviera. “I do not mind telling you that I should like to have you back again,” he wrote, “and I think that the time has fully come when ‘this correspondence shall now cease’ as they say in the newspapers.” That spring there was an outbreak of a relatively new illness called influenza. “The doctors seem to know no more about it than they did at first and certainly to be no nearer a cure,” he told her, adding that “the daffodils and some of the azaleas are good, also some white rhododendrons. There is not a large show of orchids but some new and very pretty ones.”
The atmosphere in the home changed completely when she returned after an absence. The years seemed to drop from him, and she was like a much-loved sister instead of a stepmother to his sons and daughters. She was considere
d by everyone thoroughly feminine, having a good intelligence and no fads. Chamberlain once said that he preferred Parnellites to petticoats in Parliament, but his domestic life was governed unconsciously by his wife, who smoothed his social relationships with the nobility at whose houses he now had to dine and who were frequently his guests. They seldom dined alone, his position enforcing their attendance at innumerable receptions or the presence of others at their table. He seemed younger than ever, though his industry was indefatigable and his indulgences unregarded. In his early sixties his doctor warned him that if he continued to drink champagne with his dinner he would scarcely survive another ten years. He asked how much longer he would live if he gave it up. Another five years at least, said the doctor. Then he would be satisfied with ten years plus the champagne, said Chamberlain, who also chain-smoked long black cigars, sat up till the early hours of the morning, and ate and drank what he liked. He was hospitable but not clubbable and enjoyed nothing so much as tea with his wife among the roses in what he called “the Italian climate of Birmingham.”
After changing his political allegiance he lost his early friends and acquired no new ones, but his wife more than made up for the loss. He still saw John Morley occasionally but they never talked politics. His old leader Gladstone had been both hated and loved. Chamberlain aroused much hatred but no love among his political associates, and as he appeared harsh and cynical to the world scarcely a soul was aware that he pined for friendship and affection. Before his third marriage he had acted on the principle that “work is the only anodyne” for sorrow, and he kept his feelings sternly under control. But the softness in his nature was wholly released by Mary, and the only time he ever displayed emotion in public was when he spoke of the happiness she had brought him. He was on affectionate terms with his children, and in later years was proud of Austen’s Parliamentary success and Neville’s business acumen. He said that his younger son was cleverer than the elder, but that Neville was not interested in politics: “If he was, I would back him to be Prime Minister.” Austen seemed more anxious to be a gentleman than a statesman, an ambition not shared by his father, who would have been amazed by Neville’s naïveté in treating Hitler as a gentleman.
Chamberlain’s period as Secretary for the Colonics was sufficiently exciting. It included the Jameson Raid of 1895, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, and the Boer War of 1899-1902.
The tremendous imperial preparations for the Diamond Jubilee kept Chamberlain tied to his desk for many weeks, and his wife saw little of him; but when all the ceremonial functions were over on Jubilee Day, June 19th, Joe and Mary went for a walk through the city, past St. Paul’s on which searchlights were playing, and as far as the Bank of England, returning along the river to Piccadilly, a distance of five miles which for him might have been fifty. “I think Joe has had as much of it as is good for anyone,” said Mary at the conclusion of these junketings.
But the great Victorian Age was destined to end in the disaster of the South African War. The responsibility for this was shared equally by President Paul Kruger and Joseph Chamberlain, though at the time each was made to carry the total blame by his opponents. We are mainly concerned with the private man and our record must be confined to a moment when the negotiations leading to the war had reached a crisis. At the end of August 1899 Mary and Joe walked all round their garden at Highbury after the rest of the household had gone to bed. The moonlight, the dark shadows of the shrubs and trees, the queer lighting effect on the flowers “gave it a new charm and we both wondered why we did not do it oftener.”
Chamberlain’s mind was never at rest. Whenever he left a man or a meeting he was thinking of what he had to do in the next few hours. With him mental activity took the place of bodily exercise. He was the type of man who could not leave things as they were. Yet with his manifold activities, enough to exhaust the energy of others and leave them limp, he needed the constant encouragement and consolation of his wife; and when, after the death of her father, Mary went abroad with her mother in September 1900, the man who was then conducting a war wrote to her: “It is only a few hours since I said goodbye but already it seems a long time.”
His first grandchild appeared in 1901, and a year later Joe was caught on all fours with the baby on his back. The next year was notable for the termination of the Boer War and the coronation of Edward VII, but it was not lucky for Chamberlain, who had a nasty accident in July. He was driving in a hansom cab when the horse shied, slipped and fell, the occupant’s head coming into violent contact with the glass window. Blood poured down from a cut and he was nearly stunned. At Charing Cross Hospital inspection showed that the glass pane had penetrated to the bone and slightly indented the skull which was bruised at a very thin spot. Three stitches were necessary without an anesthetic, and he lost a pint of blood. Mary dashed to the hospital and found him smoking one of his black cigars. On the next day, his birthday, he sat up and read letters and telegrams. Although at the time he did not appear to have suffered from concussion, he was never quite the same man afterwards, his mind losing some of its quickness.
When A. J. Balfour took Salisbury’s place as Prime Minister, Chamberlain visited South Africa with his wife and soon afterwards resigned his post as Colonial Secretary in order to devote his energies to a campaign for Tariff Reform.
On July 8th, 1906, his seventieth birthday was celebrated in Birmingham with general rejoicing, much banqueting, and a great deal of speechmaking. The next day he made an oration on the reform he had been so eagerly pressing on the electorate for three years, ending with the words:
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toil shall see.
Two days later, on July 11th, he suffered a severe stroke from which he never recovered. His mental faculty remained operative as a general rule, but there were periods of aphasia, and physically he was an invalid.
In 1910 Margot Asquith called to see him at Prince’s Gate, receiving a warm welcome from Mary. He was sitting erect in an armchair near the tea table, and Margot noticed that his mind was still vigilant though his speech was indistinct. The present writer once saw him at the Kensington Gardens teahouse on a summer day. He was sitting bolt upright, wearing a top hat and greatcoat with astrakhan collar, a monocle in his eye, an orchid in his buttonhole. Though he appeared to be looking fixedly at the passers-by, he gave the impression of a seated statue. He who had been the vital hero of one’s boyhood had become a lifeless mask.
He lingered on for eight years, dying at Highbury on July 2, 1914. Mary, still lovely, married again, this time a canon in the Church of England. Perhaps her gentle patient nature was more at rest in the cloisters of a cathedral than in the precincts of Parliament.
CHAPTER 9—Oscar Wilde Discourses
In the same year that Joseph Chamberlain met Mary Endicott a famous wit commented on the Pilgrim Daughters. The eighteen-eighties saw the first considerable arrival of American girls with their mothers in search of titles. It was estimated in 1909 that more than five hundred American women had married titled foreigners and that some 220 million dollars had gone with them to Europe. The great majority of these alliances took place in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries, and the mart was not recognizably open for trade until the nineties. It is therefore interesting to have the reflections of the most acute social critic of his age at the commencement of a movement that was to bring fresh color into the English scene.
Oscar Wilde had spent the whole of 1882 in America and had seen the inhabitants of the United States with an observant eye. He liked the girls, calling them “pretty and charming—little oases of pretty unreasonableness in a vast desert of practical common sense.” Apparently they liked him, because he landed at New York with two secretaries, one for autographs, the other for locks of hair, and he declared that “within six months the first had died of writer’s cramp, the second was completely bald.” Asked whether he thought European or American women t
he more beautiful, he replied that he would answer that question in mid-ocean, out of sight of both continents. Back in England he summed the situation up: “American women are charming, but American men—alas!”
Soon after his visit the eruption commenced and London society was dotted with American mothers and daughters. Early in 1887 he announced that “a terrible danger is hanging over the Americans in London. Their future and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success of Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter.” The first of these was Colonel William F. Cody, who had made a reputation as scout and guide during the Civil War and had spent some ten years fighting Indians. While the Kansas Pacific Railway was being constructed he supplied the workmen’s rations by killing nearly five thousand buffaloes within eighteen months, earning the nickname of “Buffalo Bill.” He then founded a great Wild West show, with which he toured Great Britain and the continent of Europe, making a fortune. Wilde was convinced that his show would be successful because:
...the English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilisation. When they sight Sandy Hook they look to their rifles and ammunition; and, after dining once at Delmonico’s, start off for Colorado or California, for Montana or the Yellow Stone Park. Rocky Mountains charm them more than riotous millionaires; they have been known to prefer buffaloes to Boston. Why should they not? The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their “Hub,” as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustle and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. Better the far west with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity! This is what Buffalo Bill is going to bring to London.
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