MRS. FORD AND CHARLES AUSTIN. [TO THE EDITOR OF TEE
"SPECTATOR."' SIR,—It was from the letter in your issue of March 19th that I first heard that my kind friend, Mrs. Ford of Pencarrow, had died at the venerable age of ninety-three. I was not surprised to learn that she had been a diligent and, so to say, pencil-in-hand student of the Spectator. Charles Austin— that great advocate who is now remembered only as the initiator of Macaulay into Liberalism—had told me that in her youth she was an esprit fort ; but she herself stated that she afterwards became an enlightened Anglican, or, as she expressed it, a follower of Arthur Stanley. She was the widow of the Ford who wrote the once famous handbook to Spain. Also she was the sister of Sir William Molesworth who edited Hobbes, and was ranked by my father among "the infidels of the House of Commons, who are actually in favour of opening places of entertainment on the Sabbath day," and who—" Would you believe it ? "—were supported in that un-Evangelical proposal by my saintly uncle Lord Mount Temple (Cowper-Temple). It was natural that (to adapt Shakespeare), "being so brothered and so husbanded," she was a mine of intellectual gossip. A clever lady once spoke of her to me as a "fashionometer." But this unkind criticism did not do her justice, and might perhaps be turned into a compliment.
Greg once maintained the paradox that not one man in a thousand can afford to keep a conscience; and Jowett in his essay on casuistry gave the advice: "Do as others do in a Christian country." Stripped of exaggeration, such warnings mean that if we rise too much above the moral traditions of our day, there is a risk of our losing some of that precious teaching of experience which those traditions hold in solution. The conventional groove in which most good men, and nearly all good women, are toiling, if it bars the way to originality, is a safeguard against unwholesome eccentricity. And thus, if Mrs. Ford's friends must acknowledge that originality was not her forte, they may insist that its shadow, eccentricity, was not her foible. Also, if she took her tone from the society in which she moved, that society, I repeat, was the
wisest and the best. Indeed, a lady who knew her well was clearly recalling a playful mot of hers when she wrote to me: " Mrs. Ford was fond of lions, as Sir Roderick Murchison used to `roar' at her parties." So that on the whole she was not so much a fashionometer as what may be termed a philosophometer. An illustration may make my meaning clear. When in 1875 I was writing my reminiscences of Charles Austin (since reprinted in " Safe Studies ") I obtained some interesting facts about him from Mrs. Ford ; and her information was all the more valuable because it was indirectly confirmed by Lord Belper, Lord Houghton, and Mill. I once asked Charles Austin why, having written articles for the Westminster Review, he had not republished them. "I have not," he answered with a smile, " that intense love for my literary offspring that you have for yours." This answer did not seem quite serious, and I afterwards asked Mrs. Ford what she made of it. "He did not give you his real reason," she replied (in effect). " We all know how great he was at the Parliamentary Bar, and 1 know how unrivalled he was as a. converser in his prime; but as soon as ever he took up his pen all his vigour went out of him." I have no doubt that the facts were as she gave them, but they are curious. He was anything but a coward. Accustomed to large audiences, he knew that his speeches would appear in print. How was it, then, that the fact of writing for publication had on him intellectually an effect so sudden and devitalising as somehow to recall the effect which the burning of Atalanta's brand had physically on Meleager P My only reply is to refer my readers to the account of Fox's deficiency as an author given by Macaulay when marking the contrast between him and Sir James Mackintosh. But his explanation hardly clears away the difficulty. It is easy to guess how Mackintosh, though so great as an author, may have failed as an orator; but it is hard to understand how it came about that such orators as Fox, Austin, and, let me add, Gladstone were so far less successful as authors.
It was at a Brighton hotel in 1869 that I saw most of Mrs. Ford. She had a horror of English tables crhOte ; but she was taking care of her mother and, with filial devotion, submitted to the infliction of those gregarious gatherings for which the old lady had a liking extraordinary in one who had been born and bred in the conventional epoch. Being extremely deaf and a little matriarchal (mente lo.bante), Lady Molesworth gave me some discomfort, and must have given her daughter much more, by asking me at the public table in a loud voice whether I was acquainted with this or that Duchess or other great personage. An incident reported to me on one such occasion may amuse your readers, and I will therefore (to paraphrase Homer) "voluntarily, yet not willingly," quote it, with an anecdotical appendage, from " Old and Odd Memories " :- " One of the most singular of my links with the past is Lady Molesworth (the mother of the politician), whom I met at Brighton in 1869, and who was then hard upon ninety. She told me that she had gone into a shop adjoining the Pavilion, and had astonished the shopman by saying : This used to be part of the Pavilion. The last time I was here was seventy years ago, when I came to a ball given by the Prince Regent.' The garrulous old lady's experience reminds me of an odd incident connected with the same place. My wife's grandmother, Lady Ely, who was lady- in-waiting to Queen Adelaide, was in attendance at Brighton when a Court ball was given at the Pavilion. As the accommodation was indifferent, she asked some of her friends to leave their cloaks in her bedroom. When, at the end of the ball, the ladies returned to claim their possessions, they were startled by a loud snore coming from behind the curtains of the four-poster. The fact was that the aged and infirm Lord Ely, never dreaming that his privacy would be invaded, had gone to rest betimes."
ifoatirskl, Boscombe.
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