Chapter XI: Epilogue

“Silence in Court! what’s this unseemly rumpus?
Attention to the parting words of Bumpus.
Tired of disguise, of borrowed rank and station,
Thus in a trice I work my transformation.
His wig and nose removed, the beak appears
A simple officer of Volunteers,
Who to himself restored, and sick of mumming,
Begs leave to thank you each and all for coming,
Spite of cross roads, dark lanes, tenacious clay,
And benches not too soft, to hear our play.
Next, to those friends my warmest thanks are due
Who give their aid to-night, but chief to you
Who for my sake, and only for to-day,
O’ercome your natural shyness of display.
Now comes the hardest portion of my task,
A most momentous question ’tis to ask.
I pause for your reply with bated breath—
I humbly hope you’ve not been bored to death?
Thanks for the signal which success assures;
Welcome to all, but most to amateurs.
Thanks, gentle friends, your welcome cheers proclaim
We have not altogether missed our aim.
Not ours your hearts to thrill, your tears to move,
With Hamlet’s madness, Desdemona’s love.
We dare not bid in high heroic strain
Wolsey or Richelieu rise and breathe again.
We walk in humbler paths, and cannot hope
(To quote the spirit-stirring verse of Pope)
‘To wake the soul with tender strokes of Art,
To raise the genius and to mend the heart;
To make mankind in conscious virtue bold,
Live o’er each scene and be what they behold.’
No—with deep reverence for these nobler views,
We seek not to instruct you, but amuse;
To make you wiser, better, we don’t claim—
To make you laugh, our only end and aim.
And as the test of everything, men say,
Is just this simple question—does it pay?
Well, then (I speak for self and comrades present),
This acting pays us well; we find it pleasant.
If at the same time it amuses you,
We reap a double gain vouchsafed to few,
To please ourselves and please our neighbours too.
Besides, to-night in more material sense,
It pays us well in shillings, pounds, and pence.
Your dollars flush our regimental till,
But in more sterling coin we’re richer still:
Yes, doubly, trebly, rich in your goodwill.
And so farewell! but stop, before we part,
We’ll sing one song and sing it from the heart.
Just one song more: you guess the song I mean:
Our brave time-honoured hymn, ‘God save the Queen.’”

He continued also to act as mentor to his younger brothers, two of whom went in due course to Cambridge, and, to his great delight, pulled in their college racing boat (Trinity Hall), which was then at the head of the river. He often visited them at Cambridge, and, whenever he could manage it, would spend some part of the vacation with them, joining them in all their amusements, and helping them in their studies. You may judge of the sort of terms they were on, by this extract from a letter to his mother in August 1856:—

“We shall be very happy to join you in Scotland. I want to
know whether _good_ fishing tackle is procurable at Stirling,
or in the neighbourhood of Callender. At Edinbro’ and Glasgow
I know it can be obtained, and much cheaper than in London.
Perhaps Harry can inform me, if he is not too much occupied in
discovering the value of χ, which I believe is the great object
of mathematics (I speak it not profanely). Tell Harry and
Arthur I expect to find them both without breeches.

‘Those swelling calves were never meant
To shun the public eye,’

as Dr. Watts remarks, or would have remarked if he had written
on the subject.”

Such occupations as these, with magistrate’s work, and field sports taken in moderation, served to fill up his time, and would have satisfied most men situated as he was. But he could never in all these years get the notion quite out of his head (though it wore off later) that he was not doing his fair share of work in the world, and was a useless kind of personage, for whom no one was much the better but his wife and children, and whom nobody but they would miss. This feeling showed itself in his immense respect for those who were working in regular professions, and in the most conscientious scrupulousness about taking up their time. Often he has come to my chambers, and, after hurrying through some piece of family business, has insisted on going away directly, though I might not have seen him for a month, and was eager to talk on fifty subjects. The sight of open papers was enough for him; and he had not practised long enough to get the familiarity which breeds contempt, and to know how gladly the busiest lawyer puts aside an Abstract, or Interrogatories in Chancery, for the chance of a pleasant half-hour’s gossip.

I think, however, that I can show you clearly enough, in a very few words, what his real work in the world was during these years, and how perfectly unconscious he was that he was doing it faithfully. In 1857, your grandfather had a dangerous attack of illness, from which he never recovered. George was with him and nursed him during the crisis. As soon as he was well enough to use a pen, he wrote as follows to Lady Salusbury:—

“Amongst other things it occurs to me how much I have had to
thank God for through life, and how my family have always drawn
together in the way I wished them. And here I should be doing
injustice to George, if I did not in my own mind trace much
of this happy result to his quiet and imperceptible influence
as an elder brother, in many ways of which my wife and I were
not exactly cognizant at the time. Perhaps I am thinking
more about him just now as he was in his natural place as my
right-hand man when I was taken unwell; and when I say truly,
that neither his mother or I ever had even an unkind word or
disrespectful look from him since he was born, and that his
constant study through life, as far as we are concerned, has
been to spare us rather than give us trouble, and throw his
own personal interests over much more than we chose to allow
him, it is especially for the purpose of giving dear A—— (her
adopted daughter) a precedent to quote with her own lips in
the training of her own boys which I know will be particularly
acceptable to herself. It is the last theme on which he would
like to expatiate, but that such was my deliberate and true
opinion, will be, I doubt not, one of these days, a source of
satisfaction to them both, and to the children.”

Your grandfather died shortly afterwards, and a year later George wrote to his mother:—

“I feel that we have great cause for gratitude and rejoicing
_as a family_; I mean for the way in which we hang together,
and the utter absence of any subject of discord or disagreement
between any of our members. I think we may well be happy, even
while thinking of what happened this time last year, as I have
done very frequently of late.”

He would have been impatient, almost angry, if anyone had told him that the “hanging together,” at which he rejoiced, was mainly his own doing.

In the village, too, he was beginning to find occupation of the most useful kind. Thus he opened a village reading-room for the labourers, which was furnished with books and papers, and lighted and warmed, every evening from seven to nine. “Hitherto it is a great success,” he writes in 1868: “we have fifty members who subscribe 2_d._ a week, and we give them a cup of coffee and a biscuit for 1_d._ Some of them drink five or six cups a night. Whether coffee will continue to beat beer I don’t know, but at present it keeps them from the public-house, and saves their wages for their wives. Some of them are very fond of reading, and the rest play draughts and dominoes.” Then there were frequent “laundry entertainments,”—penny readings, or theatrical performances in the big laundry,—of which his sister writes: “The boys and Mr. Phillips and I used to make the music, but the great hits of the evening were always George’s. He used to recite ‘The One-horse Chay,’ or some Ingoldsby Legend, or ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley,’ or sing a comic song, and the people liked his performances better than anything. Like all very reserved people, he acted wonderfully well, and always knew how every part should be done, so he used to coach us all when a play was being got up. But he would never criticise unless asked: he always thought that people knew as well as he did how to do their parts, but they did not. He was always so droll on these occasions. When a performance was proposed by the boys, he used to say it was too much trouble, and that he wanted to be left quiet. But they always got their way, and when it was inevitable he would learn his entire part while we others were mastering a page. I was always whip, because I could not stand doing anything by halves, and used to drive everyone mercilessly till the scenes began to go smoothly. He would sometimes rehearse his part almost under his breath, gabbling it off with the book in his hand, and then I would remonstrate, and he would go through it splendidly, as well as on the day of performance.”

But the reform which he had most at heart he never lived to carry out. The industry of straw-plaiting, which prevails in the neighbourhood, while it enables the women and girls to earn high wages, makes them bad housewives, all their cooking and cleaning being neglected, while they run in and out of neighbours’ houses, gossiping and plaiting. In the hope of curing this evil he looked forward to fitting up a large barn in the village as a sort of general meeting-place. Here, when he had made the roof air-tight, and laid down a good floor, there was to be a stove for cooking and baking, and appliances for instruction in other household work. Under his wife and sister there were to be “cooking classes, sewing classes, and singing classes; and, in the evenings, entertainments for the poor people, a piano and night classes, sometimes theatricals, and often concerts, and when the boys wanted to dance they were to have their dances there. He used to think that constant meetings in the barn would humanize us all, and be a very pleasant thing for making rich and poor meet on equal terms.” It is perhaps vain to dwell upon such things, but I cannot help hoping that some day those of you who have the opportunity of realizing such plans may remember to what purposes the big barn was once destined. Of one other part of his village work, his Sunday evening classes for the big boys, I shall have to speak presently.

But you must not suppose from anything in this chapter that he ever lost his interest in politics, or public affairs. He was always a keen politician, retaining, however, all his early beliefs. “You have all got far beyond me,” he writes to his sister; “and my dear mother turning Radical in her old age is delightful.” Perhaps the most ardent politician amongst us all is the best witness to call on this subject. “I don’t think anything was more remarkable about George than his politics. He, who was so good an old Tory in many ways, showed that he believed in a universal principle and duty underlying all the political opinions about the best means of carrying out reforms. I think it is very rare, when people are discussing politics, to find this constant recognition of something beyond party nostrums. But (as in his father) I have always detected it in George; and, when I have got very hot whilst propounding Radicalism against all the rest here, have always found sympathy from him at the bottom; and I have always felt at last how much more truly liberal he was at heart than we Radicals, because we are always wanting to force on our opinions our own way, whilst in him I always recognized a divine sort of justice and patience, which used to make me feel very conceited, and wanting in faith. He was born with aristocratic instincts, being by nature intensely sensitive and refined, with a loathing of anything blatant and in bad taste, and with an intense love of justice; and the unwise, violent, foolish way in which many men like —— expound their doctrines disgusted him beyond measure, though he would always recognize the real truth that lay at the bottom of Radicalism.”

But he shall speak for himself on one great event, which you are all old enough to remember, the late war between France and Germany. Almost the first incident of the war—the despatch of the then Emperor, speaking of the Prince Imperial’s “baptism of fire”—roused his indignation so strongly that it found vent in the following lines:—

By! baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a hunting,
Bath of human blood to win,
To float his baby Bunting in.
By, baby Bunting.

What means this hunting?
Listen! baby Bunting—
Wounds—that you may sleep at ease,
Death—that you may reign in peace.
Sweet baby Bunting.

Yes, baby Bunting!
Jolly fun is hunting!
Jacques in front shall bleed and toil,
You in safety gorge the spoil.
Sweet baby Bunting.

Mount! baby Bunting,
Ride to Daddy’s hunting!
On its quiet cocky-horse,
Two miles in the rear, of course.
Precious baby Bunting.

Ah, baby Bunting!
Oftentimes a hunting,
Eager riders get a spill—
Let us hope your Daddy will.
Poor little Bunting.

Perpend, my small friend,
After all this hunting,
When the train at last moves on
Daddy’s gingerbread “salon”
May get a shunting.

Poor baby Bunting!
Curse on such a hunting!
Woe to him who bloods a child
For ambitious visions wild,
Poor baby Bunting!

“_October 6th, 1870._—I am, I think, rapidly changing sides about this horrid war. You know I was a tremendous Prussian at the outset, but (although the French deserve all they get) I really can’t stand the bombardment of Paris; besides, Bismarck is repulsive.”

“OFFLEY, _1871_.

“I think that the high and mighty tone assumed by Herr Gustave
Solling (German superhuman excellence, Handel, Beethoven,
Minnesingers, &c.) the worst possible vehicle for the defence
of the German terms of peace. When a man talks ‘buncombe,’ it
shows that he has an uneasy feeling that his case is a weak
one. The cynical line is the right one for the Germans; why not
say, in the words of Wordsworth,—

‘And why? Because the good old rule
Sufficeth them; the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.’

But pray don’t say this to our cousin, and thank her for her
translation. You know what I think about the matter; I would
have gone to war with the French to stop the war; and I would
have gone to war with the Germans to stop the peace. There’s an
Irish view of it, from a sincere war-hater.”

The person who knew him best once wrote of your grandfather’s politics: “Men of all parties speak of him as belonging to their clique. This proves to me, if I had required the proof to strengthen the conviction, that there is a point on the plain of politics at which the moderate Tory, the sensible Whig, and the right-minded Radical, in other words all true patriots, meet; like the vanishing point in a picture to which all true and correct lines tend. And thus it is with him: he has reached that point, and there he foregathers with all of all parties, who, throwing aside party prejudice, act and think for the good of their fellow-creatures.”

The description, I cannot but think, applied equally well to my brother, though he continued nominally a Tory to the end, and, as you will all recollect, lived as quiet, methodical a country life as if he had no interests in the world beyond crops, field sports, and petty sessions. But that it must have required a considerable effort on his part to do this comes out in much of his most intimate correspondence. For instance, only a month or two before his death he writes to his sister:—“Thanks, many, for your letter, and Mrs. S——’s. Hers is delightful, and I so fully understand her feeling. I always feel uncomfortable in point-device places, where the footman is always brushing your hat, and will insist upon putting out your clothes, and turning your socks ready to put on, and, if you say half a word, will even put them on for you. How I hate being ‘valeted!’ I should like to black my own boots, like Mr. ——, but then he is (or was) a master of foxhounds, and, being of course on that account a king of men, can do as he pleases, in spite of Mrs. Grundy. I am also a gypsey (is that rightly spelt? That word, and some others, are stumbling-blocks to me; I am afraid all my spelling is an affair of memory), a Bohemian at heart. I sometimes feel an almost irresistible desire to doff my breeches and paint myself blue. I should also like (I would limit myself to one month per annum) to go with a carpet-bag to the nearest station, and to rough it in all sorts of outlandish places—but then A—— can’t rough it, and there are the brats, and lots of other impediments. The very act of wandering anywhere delights me. I think we spoil half the enjoyment of life by being too particular; how terrible dinner-parties are becoming! But enough of my sermon. In spite of my secret longings I shall continue to do as my neighbours, and it would be wicked in my case to be discontented. They threatened to nominate me Chairman of the Board of Guardians here, but finding that the Vice-chairman was standing (and thinking him better qualified), I declined any contest, and was not put up. I am sorry for it, for the office, although troublesome, is capable of being made useful, and I think I should have liked it in time;” and then comes a sentence which may serve to explain to some of you your feelings towards him—“I cannot forgive —— for putting ——” (one of his nephews) “on a bolting horse. If you do mount a boy, you ought to give him the cleverest and quietest horse in your stable, and no sportsman would do otherwise.”

There is one more trait in his character which I must not omit here, as I wish to give you as perfect a knowledge of him as I have myself. I have already told you how very scrupulous he was with regard to money matters. He had, indeed, a horror of debt which made him morbidly sensitive on the subject; and he recognized the fact, and treated himself for it as he would have done for a fit of bile, or any other physical disorder. On more than one occasion, when some unlooked for expenditure seemed likely to bring on a more than usually severe attack, he cured himself by some piece of unwonted extravagance, such as buying a diamond ornament for his wife, or making a handsome present to some poor relation. The remedy answered perfectly in his case; but I am bound to add that it is one which I cannot recommend as a specific without the warning, that, before using it, you-must satisfy yourselves, as he always did, that there were no reasonable grounds for uneasiness.

But if he sometimes worried himself about money, he kept his anxiety to himself, and was constantly doing the most liberal acts in the most thoughtful manner. Of the many instances I could give of this, I select one, which an old friend has communicated to me with permission to mention it. I give it in his own words:—“There is one little incident connected with his personal relations to me which I shall always remember with feelings of gratitude and pleasure. When the Suez Canal was opened I had an offer of a free passage out and home in a P. and O. steamer, and I was rather exercised in my mind by not feeling it prudent to accept, as I knew that living in Egypt for a fortnight at that time would be very expensive, and I knew that I could not afford it. I happened to be writing to him about that time, and mentioned this in my letter. By return of post he sent me a cheque for £50, begging me to accept it as a loan, to be paid when I had as much to spare, or never if I preferred it. I did not take advantage of his generous kindness, and I declare I almost regret now that I did not, as I believe I should have given him sincere pleasure in so doing.”