A Victorian—with a Difference
Sir Edmund Hornby : An Autobiography. (Constable. 18s.) SIR Ennvign HORNBY was a Victorian in the spirit as well as the letter, though he did not belong to the Victorian type whose reputation for unusual goodness the modern satirist delights to destroy. He was not gilt with the same brush and cannot be set to glitter upon the same shelf with Mr. Strachey's heroes. Their little pretences were as foreign to his crude nature as their great aspirations. He was an unregenerate Englishman, certainly not of the salt of the English earth, but of the stuff for whose salvation the salt is required. This autobiography of his recently came before the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice with the result that it lacks one five-hundredth part of its original whole, i.e., less than a page.
It is strange that in character he should have belonged so entirely to this country for his mother was an Italian and, though he came on the other side of old- Yorkshire stock, who in his grandfather's time manufactured for themselves a fortune, he never went• either to private or public school. Brought up at home, in London, and educated by tutors until fourteen or fifteen, he was then sent to Germany to learn languages. His proficiency was extraordinary and had been cultivated to the exclusion of all else.. Two languages he knew as it were by nature, two he learned with little difficulty, and when in his seventeenth year he became secretary to his uncle, the English Minister plenipotentiary in Lisbon, it took him little while to be fluent in Portuguese. A precocious boy, " a puffed-up young bull frog " he calls him- self, but a bull frog with a great deal of energy, he found his secretarial duties very light. He had little to do but dance attendance upon a charming and delicate aunt, make a superficial study of the youth of Lisbon, fall in love, ride and get what sport he could. " I think I deserve some credit," he writes, " for not turning out an unmitigated blackguard." Of diplomatic life, he goes on, " I naturally saw a great deal.
It seemed to me to consist of an ingenuous and well-developed system of lying. What was promised one day was forgotten in a most unblushing manner the next. Remonstrance was listened to with a smile. Intrigue that a child could discover and be ashamed of, was looked on as evidence of talent. No one seemed serious but everybody amused." With the exception of his aunt he despised his whole entourage, the young men were " without manhood and had never had a boyhood," and with the over-suspicion of inexperience he doubted the virtue of the young women.
In shooting, in seeing the country, and talking to the country people he found his pleasantest hours. He made friends with the rural clergy, who in out-of-the-way places showed him a ready hospitality. They were with exceptions uneducated men but good company. Under all their " religious jargon " (he has a perfect horror of any religious profession) he found them " kind and charitable to the poor and needy, simple in their exhortations to godliness and not over harsh to sinners." He draws an idyllic picture of the life of the only student that he met among them. He lived in the ruins of a deserted priory at the end of a lovely valley " kept a mule, three or four goats, and a lot of fowls, and here with about £20 a year he assured me he wanted for nothing. He had a few fields of Indian corn, some melon beds by the stream, an orchard of oranges, lemons and olives. I never met a man more contented with his lot, his only dread being promotion." He took no money for the bed and board of his young guest, but was pleased with little presents consisting usually of " castor oil, sweet spirits of nitre and quinine, of which I used to send him supplies and now and then an illustrated work on natural history."
The death of the aunt brought these lazy, pleasant days to an end. Hornby went back to London and began to study law. Being called to the Bar he married early and lived quietly for a few years outside London, meeting intimately some interesting people of whom his descriptions are unlike the received portraits. Mrs. Carlyle, struck him, for instance, as " a downtrodden woman," Carlyle as an eminently dis- agreeable and bullying sort of man, " a loud barker but a feeble biter." General Gordon he thought obstinate, undis- ciplined, unreliable from carelessness, and a little ridiculous.
Before long, however, he got work which took him not only out of London but out of Western Europe. He was sent as Commissioner of the Turkish Loan to Constantinople and two years later was made. Judge of the Supreme Court. Soon we find him living in patriarchal style in a great house on the Bosphorus, surrounded by servants of many nations. The government of these dependants gave him great pleasure. A complete autocrat, he was just and—up to a point—beneficent. He regarded Orientals as dark men of brown or yellow variety, more cunning, more civilized, and less trustworthy than negroes, whose cruelty and deceit it was the Englishman's duty to mitigate, and shame. " I absolutely refuse," we read, " to discuss the question of the inferiority or superiority of races. Nothing can or will alter the fact that the white man will and must use the black man for perhaps centuries to come not as an equal but as an inferior, just as the rich and cultured man uses and regards the poor and ignorant man." It is, he goes on, for the Law and its officers to prevent this use being abused. He does not care whether a man of inferior race is called a slave or not, provided his rights as a human being are regarded. Such rights are not natural " but ought to be admitted, and such admissions mean equality before the Law—not citizenship and -not necessarily any voice in government. " The only, goVernment worthy of respect or 'obedience is that of the cultured and the strong. -A minister whO governs to please the people is to my mind. a traitor to his country." All idealists— and there were many in his daY—Hornby summed up under two headings " Exeter Hall " and " Manchester Party." All missionaries from Jesuits to Quakers, and all professed humanitarians belonged to the first Category. • His view was that if a man had a religion, sincerity and indeed decency required that he should be silent about it. With Mohamme- dans he had more sympathy than Christians, because according to his view their sexual immorality was more open, and their ideal no higher than they could easily reach ; to do 'him justice he hated insincerity.
• It is possible to be a man of absolute integrity without being at all high-minded. The sort of singleness of purpose father than of mind or principle; which distinguished the herO of this most readable book, gave him an insight into characters far above his own. He gives delightful character sketches of the men he worked with in Turkey, and later On when 'promoted to be Judge of the Supreme Court at Shanghai, perhaps the most attractive is that of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe " the subliineit figure among the British Ambassadors of an heroic age."
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