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whose genius has performed so much in which men of all political parties find delight.-I remain, &c., J. RUSSELL.

✅ No man ever took more pains that the pensions which the Crown is enabled to bestow should be conferred on desert. A writer in Blackwood has recently mentioned that, when Lord John heard that Mrs. Somerville was in pecuniary difficulty, he contrived to increase by 100 the pension which Sir Robert Peel had conferred on her. In his first year of office he secured a pension of £200 a year for Dr. Chalmers's widow; he gave a pension of £300 to Father Mathew; of £200 to Mr. Leigh Hunt, telling him that 'the severe treatment he formerly received in times of unjust persecution of liberal writers enhanced the satisfaction' with which he made the announcement; he conferred a pension of £100 on the children of Mr. Hood; in the following year he conferred pensions on Mr. Adams the astronomer, on Mr. Sheridan Knowles, on Mr. Carleton the author of 'Irish Stories,' and on Professor M'Cullagh's sister; while in his last year of office he conferred a pension on Professor Wilson, he procured a grant for Mr. Hind, and he gave a pension to Mrs. Jameson. These are a few instances of the use which he made of the Pension List. Of the many applications which were made to him in connection with it, perhaps it is permissible to give a sample, which is too good a specimen of its author's skill to be buried for ever under the heavy mass of a Prime Minister's correspondence.2

DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, Wednesday evening, December 18, 1850. MY DEAR LORD,—Allow me to thank you for your ready and kind reply to my note, and to put you in possession of the exact state of Mr. P's case. ...

1 Years afterwards he used his influence successfully with Mr. Gladstone to obtain pensions for the Misses Somerville.

2 The candidates for pensions are, I presume, found in tolerably close array among the papers of Prime Ministers. It is more interesting to add that, among Lord J. Russell's papers, I have found a letter from Mr. Hallam, written after his son's death, resigning the pension for which he had no longer any need.

For some few years past he has been living in a fifth storey in a house in the Rue Neuve Luxembourg in Paris (on the proceeds of an amateur theatrical performance for his benefit, of which I undertook the management and stewardship, and which I have dispensed to him half yearly); and such is the nervous affection, of his hands particularly, that, when I have seen him there, trembling and staggering over a small wood fire, it has been a marvel to me, knowing him to live quite alone, how he ever got into or out of his clothes. To the best of my belief, he has no relation whomsoever. He must either have starved or gone to the workhouse (and I have little doubt that he would have done the former) but for the funds I have doled out to him, which were exhausted before you generously assisted him from the Queen's Bounty. He has no resource of any kind—of that I am perfectly sure. In the sunny time of the day he puts a melancholy little hat on one side of his head, and, with a little stick under his arm, goes hitching himself about the boulevards; but for any power he has of earning a livelihood he might as well be dead. For three years I have been in the constant expectation of receiving a letter from the portress of the house to say that his ashes and those of his wood fire, both of a very shrunken description, had been found lying together on the hearth. But he has lived on; and for a few hours every day has so concealed his real condition out of doors that many French authors and actors (who treat him with deference as an English man of letters) would stand amazed to know what I now tell you. I have endeavoured to put him before you precisely as he is, and neither to exaggerate his claims nor to invest him with any interest that does not attach to him. He has lived in Paris, to make the least of his poverty and the most of his means. Mr. Justice Talfourd, Mr. Hardwick, the police magistrate, Mr. Forster, the editor of the Examiner, and I, are (I think) his only English friends. We all know him, just as I have described him.

I do not think he would hold a small pension very long. I need not add that he sorely needs it—and I do not doubt that the public are well acquainted with his name and works.

With every apology I can offer for troubling you at this length, I am, my dear Lord, your very faithful and obedient servant, CHARLES DICKENS.

THE LORD JOHN RUSSELL.

Mr. Dickens had not long to wait.

DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, December 24, 1850.

MY DEAR LORD,-I have conveyed to Mr. P. by to-night's post the joyful intelligence of her Majesty's gracious approval of your generous suggestion in his favour; and I do not doubt that he will endeavour to express to you (over that brighter fire) some of the happiness he owes to you. .—I am, my dear Lord, your faithful and obliged servant, CHARLES DICKENS.

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While, however, Lord John was duly sensible of the claims of authors, some of whom were personally unknown to himself, he never forgot the poet who had been the friend of his youth and of his age; and who, more than twenty years before, had declared that the only place he desired of him was that little corner of his friend's honest heart, which he believed to be his, and which Lord John knew that he valued.

Lord John saw Mr. Moore for the last time in December 1849. That evening the poet had a fit,

from the effects of which he never recovered. The light of his intellect grew still more dim; his memory failed still more: ... on the 26th of February 1852 (the day after Lord John resigned office), he expired calmly and without pain at Sloperton Cottage.1

When his will-written nearly a quarter of a century before -was opened, it was found that he had

confided to my valued friend Lord John Russell (having obtained his kind promise to undertake the service for me) the task of looking over whatever papers, letters, or journals I may leave behind me, for the purpose of forming from them some kind of publication, whether in the shape of memoirs or otherwise, which may afford the means of making some provision for my wife and family.

The promise had been given when Lord John was comparatively young, and when he had never known the fatigues. of office. It was redeemed when the author was growing old, and when he was wearied with the incessant labours which

1 This extract, and the following extracts, are taken from the introduction to Mr. Moore's Memoirs,

must fall to the lot of any man who fills the first place in this country for half a dozen consecutive years.

Yet Lord John never hesitated. He ran down to Bowood in the middle of April to talk the matter over with Mrs. Moore. He found that

Mr. Longman, anxious to comply with the wishes of Mr. Moore, at once offered for Mr. Moore's papers, on condition of my undertaking to be the editor, such a sum as, with the small pension allowed by the Crown, would enable Mrs. Moore to enjoy for the remainder of her life the moderate income which had latterly been the extent and limit of the yearly family expense.

And he at once addressed himself to the new task.

He used such despatch that the four first volumes appeared in 1853, the two succeeding volumes in 1854, the two concluding in 1856. The years in which they were thus being prepared for the press were, in a political sense, the most unhappy of Lord John's life; they were not free from heavy private sorrow. Yet it may be reasonably hoped that he was occasionally sustained by the reflection that, while he was incurring the obloquy of his old allies and the attacks of his opponents, he was himself silently working for the relief of his early friend's widow. And in this sense the motto which he placed on the title-page-Spirat adhuc amor-has a double significance; for while Lord John, no doubt, thought it appli cable to the translator of Anacreon and the author of the 'Melodies,' in another sense it may be equally applied to the editor, who, for the love he bore his old friend, voluntarily undertook, when weary with political toil, the drudgery of selecting and publishing a mass of manuscript.

This circumstance, moreover, exempts, or rather ought to have exempted, the book from ordinary criticism. It is easy, no doubt, to show that Lord John in his preface affords many proofs that he regarded his friend's poetry with the favour with which it was originally received, rather than with the discriminating criticism which has been since applied to it; and it is equally easy to complain that the publication of Mr.

Moore's journal has not tended to raise the poet's reputation. But it is a fair reply to the first charge that, if Lord John to some extent exaggerated the charm of Mr. Moore's verses, later critics have hardly done adequate justice to the generous sentiments which everywhere pervade them; and, in the next place, if Mr. Moore in his journals attached too much importance to the social recreations which so frequently diverted him from graver pursuits, and laid too little stress on the happy hours which he passed at his own fireside, the fault is Mr. Moore's and not Lord John's.1

The labour of editing a vast mass of manuscript is not light. But it was perhaps characteristic of Lord John that, while he was undertaking the heavy task of supervising the publication of Mr. Moore's remains, he was simultaneously preparing Mr. Fox's correspondence for publication. These letters, which formed the basis of the life which was subsequently published, and which must not be confounded with that work, had come into Lord John's possession after Lady Holland's death in 1845. Lord John seems to have commenced the task of selecting those which were to be made public in the winter of 1851-2. He was actively engaged on the work in the following summer; and its four volumes were published at variou sintervals from 1853 to 1857.

More real interest attaches to Lord John's literary work in the summer of 1852 than to his Parliamentary labours in the first six months of that year. The Parliamentary session of 1852 was memorable for the weakness of the Government and the disorganisation of the Opposition; it was marked by only. one great legislative achievement—the passage of the Militia Bill and Lord John made what most people thought the mistake of opposing this measure. His opposition at any rate revealed the internal differences of the Whigs, since he failed to carry with him his closest political friends; 2 and the defeat 1 The publication of Mr. Moore's diaries led to somewhat angry remonstrances on the part of Lord Londonderry and Mr. Croker, who were aggrieved by certain passages in the journals. But I have not thought it necessary to refer to the controversies to which these memoirs gave rise.

2

2 Of the seven members of the Russell Cabinet in the House of Commons,

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