MR. S1VIALLEY'S LETTERS.*
WE have only one fault to find with Mr. Smalley's London Letters. They are so full of good things, that half-way through the reader is apt to suffer from mental indigestion, and so fail to properly enjoy the remainder of the feast. But after all, that is the fault of the reader, not of the able correspondent of the New York Tribune, and may easily he corrected by a process of judicious dipping. The best test of success or failure in the machinery of literature is appropriateness ; and judged by this standard, the book before us must be pronounced .an excellent piece of workmanship. A competent critic asked 'to describe the style and manner of the ideal London. Letter, would declare that it should be the printed talk of a brilliant, well-informed man of the world. The reader ought to feel as if an agreeable acquaintance in a club smoking-room or across * London Letters, and Some Others. By George W. Smalley. In 2 vole. London s Macmillan and co. a dinner-table were telling him all the news of the town, describing the distinguished men of the day, or explaining those esoteric workings of society or the Constitution which are not visible to the world in general. But to lay down this canon is to summarise Mr. Smalley's style. Just as good after-dinner talk is always easy, never " tall," never pompour, never affected, and equally distant from theatrical cynicism and over-strenuousness of purpose, so the author of London Letters contrives to keep free from every sort of exaggeration. There is a point where good. talk becomes too good, and hardens into literary forms. Those who attempt to write con- versationally, yet with force and brilliancy, usually end by imitating conversation after it has passed this point, and so give to their work the effect they least desire, that of the stilted preachments of the brilliant bore. Mr. Smalley has the clever cook's knack of getting his omelette off the fire when it is thoroughly well done, and yet just before it has begun to set hard. His letters are always pleasant reading, and yet always give the impression that they are written by a man who likes what he is talking about, and is not " working up" a study of the man or thing he describes.
Among the best things in the two thick volumes before us are the " Personalities," or portraits of distinguished English- men. These word-pictures are no exception to the rule of style which, as we have noted above, Mr. Smalley has set him- self. They have nothing of the formality or of the parade of the analytic method which distinguishes the " characters" of memoirists like Greville. They are " touch-and-go " sketches, and impressions such as a clever man may throw off at will when asked on a sudden what sort of -a person was Mr. Bright, or is the Master of Balliol. They make no sort of claim to be final estimates ; but judged by their own standard, they are inimitable. The letter. on Mr. Bright has been so repeatedly quoted already, that we must refrain from extracting it, excellent as it is. We prefer to quote the truly admirable portrait of Mr. Hayward. Those who knew the great diner-out personally will recognise the delicacy and truth of the drawing :—
" Not a few, I suspect, of those who road the headline of this letter will ask, Who wad Mr. Hayward ?' The question is one I have hoard from Americans in London when they were told they were to meet him at dinner. It is one no Londoner would have put, nor any foreigner on his second visit here. Mr. Hayward's fame and position are the most striking example that can be quoted of the extreme narrowness of purely social renown. Who in London was known so well P Out of London no one was known so little, though an exception may be made in favour of Paris where his acquaintance was very largo. Nor was his celebrity of to-day. For a generation he has had no rival. For two genera- tions he has been a figure. He was the contemporary of Sydney Smith, of Sam Rogers, of Macaulay, and held his own with the best of them. And he died only last Saturday. Nobody who ever met him will forget him ; but I suppose among those who know him not his memory may be only transient. Abraham Hay- ward was born in 1802. Ho never had what is called in this country a start in life. He wont to no public school and to neither University. He began life in a solicitor's office; thence, by a not very usual transition, he made his way to the Bar, to which, how- ever, ho was not called till he was nearly thirty years old. He made no effort for practice, though he edited a law journal and was ultimately made a Q.C. He had neither fortune nor family. One of his grandparents was a Jew, and thence he got his first name Abraham; by no means then a pasSport to society. Ho translated Faust into English prose, and it is still the best transla- tion for those who wish to learn the exact meaning of the original. He wrote for the Morning Chronicle. From an early period he was a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh, and the Quarterly Review, and his essays have been republished. But none nor all of these incidents in his personal history gives the least clue either to the origin of his social career or • to his extraordinary ascendency in the world amid which he lived. Nor do I know, nor can I find anybody who does know, how Hayward got his first stop in the life he led so brilliantly. I always meant to ask him and he would have told without hesitation. But it is too late.
What made Hayward famous beyond all other things was his genius for society. Genius is not too strong a word, A man who without any help but his own aptitudes and force of character makes his way into that jealously guarded company, and makes himself in the end a power there, can only be described by using words of wide range and rare application. It is to be remembered that he became famous in one of the most brilliant periods of English society. He had many competitors besides those I have named, the late Bernal Osborne, for example. He mot on equal terms all the ablest men in public life. He was asked to almost ovary great house in town and country ; asked not once or twice, but continually asked all his life long. He was the intimate friend and trusted advisor of great ladies as well as dis- tinguished men. lie became long since a sort of arbiter in the fashionable world. His influence and authority reached almost everywhere. If the mistress of a palace in Mayfair wanted to weed her visiting list, it was Hayward whom she consulted. If she wanted to form a visiting list, ho again would be her adviser. Nor does that mean merely ladies of doubtful claim to social position. I knew of a case not many years ago where ho was called in, the lady in question being of high rank, spotless reputation, with a good house, a popular husband, and plenty of money. She was, with all that, new to London, felt that she needed a pilot, and Hayward was the pilot she chose. If you could get at the secret of Hayward's power it would be worth knowing. But the truth is, there was no secret. The free- masonry of society is a very complete organisation. The moment a man is known to ono of the brotherhood as a desirable acquaint- ance, he quickly becomes known to a wide circle. The beginning of Hayward's success must date from his first introductions— however they came about. Here was a new talker, a man who could enliven a dinner-table, and ho was welcome accordingly. His supremacy and authority came later. He took immense pains. Ho amassed facts. He knew everything about everybody. His memory was marvellous in its tenacity. Later in life, people who did not like him used to say he was asked everywhere because he was feared everywhere. No doubt he was feared. A man who knew enough to shatter, or at least to shako, half the reputations in the room might well be feared. But that is only an incident— by no means the foundation or essential support of his position."
The quotation shows how perfectly well Mr. Smalley under- stands London society. There are still many intelligent people, English and American, who imagine that it is an affair of blue blood, and that no one can enter it unless he is born in a certain rank of life. Nothing could be a greater mistake. Ever since London society began to get itself organised, somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century, distinc- tion, not birth, has usually been its basis. It is true that family and rank have always been held to afford printd-facie evidence of distinction, but never to the exclusion of other
qualities. In England, exceptional wealth and exceptional ability have always consistently been regarded as passports to the fashionable world, There is an old story that the com- mittee of Almack's once refused admittance to one of the greatest of the English Duchesses, on the ground that, " though a woman of rank, she was not a woman of fashion." The decision was doubtless in accordance with precedent, and represents the true spirit of Society, which is never exclusive
in the foolish sense. It does not, as on the Continent, insist upon quarterings, but on distinction for something or other, joined with the ability to understand its requirements. Mr. Smalley shows elsewhere than in the letter on Hayward, how well he has grasped this fact. This undercurrent of real knowledge of London life is, indeed, apparent throughout his writings. Especially is it to be noted in the series of essays devoted to English talk and talkers. What could be better than the following description of the only kind of talk now
tolerated in society A-
" The autocrat who held sway over the company and forced them to listen has disappeared. Perhaps it is the democratic tendency of the age which has driven him out of the field, or out of the drawing-room ; at any rate ho is gone and nobody wants him hack. You may tell a story but you must, in Hayward's phrase, cut it to the bone. The ornamental elaboration, the tricking out your tale with showy tags—purpureis pannis—the leisurely prolongation of the narrative once practised, can bo practised no more. If you do not cut it short you will be cut into, and before you are half-way through, another man will have begun and finished his, and your. audience will have gone over to the enemy. Worse still, . if you persist you may for once have your way. But it will be for once only. Your host makes the appalling discovery that you are impossible and he asks you not again,—neither he nor any of the company. No reputation is so universal as that of the bore ; no other criminal is so shunned by his fellow-men. It is this rapidity, this lightness of touch, which makes it so difficult for the provincial or the foreigner to seize the note of modern society in London. Seldom does either succeed at once. Of the provincial I will say nothing ; be shall be left un- sung, But the transient visitor has painful experiences at times because ho insists on bringing with him to London tho manners and customs which ho has found avail in his native land. Women make few mistakes ; their preternatural quickness of perception, their instantaneous insight into the real ,condition of things per- fectly new to them, their intuitions, are so many extra senses and safeguards. It is the male foreigner whose tact cannot always be depended on to carry him safely over the social roofs and shoals which surround him in the sea he has never navigated before. He comes, let us say, from Central Africa ; the Congo is his home. He is a cultivated, an accomplished man ; but not quite what is here understood by a man of the world. Ho belongs in fact to that same past generation which had so heavy a hand, or such a genius for getting to the bottom of a subject, and sometimes staying there. He is asked to an evening party. Ho goes correctly attired, and bent on conquest. He is not content with the silent bow or the word or two of commonplace greeting to his hostess which hero are thought sufficient. He comes to a dead halt at the top of the staircase ; sets forth in elegant language his pleasure at seeing her his pleasure at being asked, the pleasure he expects from seeing so many pleasant people, his pleasure at having quite unexpectedly found the English so civil to the tribes of Central
Africa. Long before he has finished, the pressure of guests arriving behind him has carried him on into the middle of the drawing-room, and the compliment which he began to his hostess is completed in the ear of a stranger."
Did space allow, we Would gladly quote some of Mr. Smalley's excellent criticisms of the inner working of the English Constitution, for here, as well as in regard to society, he shows the very pulse of the machine. These, however, we must leave our readers to pick out for themselves from among the thousand good things the books contain. Before we part from London Letters, there is one other point on which we must dwell,—the excellent tone as regards the relations. between England and America maintained throughout. Not a word is said which could help to separate the two branches- of the Anglo-Saxon race, but very many that may make Englishmen and Americans understand each other better, and enable them to realise their brotherhood. It is specially pleasant to find that Mr. Smalley realises that English men and women never think of Americans as foreigners, and seldom, except by a slip of the tongue, use that word in speak- ing of them. That we are not, and never can be, foreigners- to each other, who wants better proof than Mr. Smalley's own book P No foreigner could possibly have written it, had he- lived in England double the time spent by the correspondent of the Tribune on this side of the Atlantic.
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