Sir Frederick Leighton, the eminent English artist, and at one time president of the Royal Academy, was one of the most charming men of his time. His reminiscences were delightful and told with rare dramatic effect. I remember a vivid description which he gave me of the wedding of one of the British royalties with a German princess. Sir Frederick was one of the large and distinguished delegation which accompanied the prince.
The principality of the bride's father had been shorn of territory, power, and revenue during the centuries. Nevertheless, at the time of the wedding he maintained a ministry, the same as in the Middle Ages, and a miniature army. Palaces, built centuries before, housed the Cabinet.
The minister of foreign affairs came to Sir Frederick and unbosomed himself of his troubles. He said: "According to the usual procedure I ought to give a ball in honor of the union of our house with the royal family of England. My palace is large enough, but my salary is only eight hundred a year, and the expense would eat up the whole of it."
Sir Frederick said: "Your Excellency can overcome the difficulty in an original way. The state band can furnish the music, and that will cost nothing. When the time comes for the banquet, usher the guests with due ceremony to a repast of beer and pretzels."
The minister followed the instructions. The whole party appreciated the situation, and the minister was accredited with the most brilliant and successful ball the old capital had known for a century.
For several years one of the most interesting men in Europe was the Duke d'Aumale, son of Louis Philippe. He was a statesman and a soldier of ability and a social factor of the first rank. He alone of the French royalty was relieved from the decree of perpetual banishment and permitted to return to France and enjoy his estates. In recognition of this he gave his famous chateau and property at Chantilly to the French Academy. The gift was valued at ten millions of dollars. In the chateau at Chantilly is a wonderful collection of works of art.
I remember at one dinner, where the duke was the guest of honor, those present, including the host, were mostly new creations in the British peerage. After the conversation had continued for some time upon the fact that a majority of the House of Lords had been raised to the peerage during the reign of Queen Victoria, those present began to try and prove that on account of their ancient lineage they were exempt from the rule of parvenu peers. The duke was very tolerant with this discussion and, as always, the soul of politeness.
The host said: "Your Royal Highness, could you oblige us with a sketch of your ancestry?"
"Oh, certainly," answered the duke; "it is very brief. My family, the Philippes, are descendants from AEneas of Troy, and AEneas was the son of Venus." The mushrooms seemed smaller than even the garden variety.
The duke was talking to me at one time very interestingly about the visit of his father to America. At the time of the French Revolution his father had to flee for his life and came to the United States. He was entertained at Mount Vernon by Washington. He told me that after his father became King of France, he would often hesitate, or refuse to do something or write something which his ministers desired. The king's answer always was: "When I visited that greatest man of all the world, General Washington, at his home, I asked him at one time: 'General, is it not possible that in your long and wonderful career as a soldier and statesman that you have made mistakes?' The general answered: 'I have never done anything which I cared to recall or said anything which I would not repeat,' and the king would say: 'I cannot do that or sign that, because if I do I cannot say for myself what General Washington said of himself.'"
The duke asked me to spend a week-end with him at Chantilly, and it is one of the regrets of my life that I was unable to accept.
I happened to be in London on two successive Sundays. On the first I went to Westminster Abbey to hear Canon Farrar preach. The sermon was worthy of its wonderful setting. Westminster Abbey is one of the most inspiring edifices in the world. The orator has to reach a high plane to be worthy of its pulpit. I have heard many dull discourses there because the surroundings refuse to harmonize with mediocrity. The sermon of Canon Farrar was classic. It could easily have taken a place among the gems of English literature. It seemed to me to meet whatever criticism the eminent dead, buried in that old mausoleum, might have of these modern utterances. I left the Abbey spiritually and mentally elated.
The next Sunday I went to hear Charles Spurgeon. It was a wonderful contrast. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle was a very plain structure of immense proportions but with admirable acoustics. There was none of the historic enshrining the church, which is the glory of Westminster Abbey, no church vestments or ceremonials.
Mr. Spurgeon, a plain, stocky-looking man, came out on the platform dressed in an ordinary garb of black coat, vest, and trousers. It was a vast audience of what might be called middle-class people. Mr. Spurgeon's sermon was a plain, direct, and exceedingly forcible appeal to their judgment and emotions. There was no attempt at rhetoric, but hard, hammerlike blows. As he rose in his indignation and denunciation of some current evils, and illustrated his argument with the Old Testament examples of the punishment of sinners, the audience became greatly excited. One of the officers of the church, in whose pew I sat, groaned aloud and gripped his hands so that the nails left their mark. Others around him were in the same frame of mind and spirit.
I saw there and then that the men who fought with Cromwell and won the battle of Naseby had in modern England plenty of descendants. They had changed only in outward deference to modern usages and conditions. If there had been occasion, Mr. Spurgeon could have led them for any sacrifice to what they believed to be right. I felt the power of that suppressed feeling--I would not say fanaticism, but intense conscientiousness--which occasionally in elections greatly surprises English politicians.
Canon Farrar's sermon easily takes its place among the selected of the library. Spurgeon's address was straight from the shoulder, blow for blow, for the needs of the hour.
One of the incidents of the generous hospitality which I enjoyed every year in London was a dinner at the Athenaeum Club given to me by one of the members of the government at that time. He was a gentleman of high rank and political importance. There were twenty-six at the dinner, and it was a representative gathering.
At the conclusion our host made a very cordial speech on more intimate relations between the United States and Great Britain, and then in a complimentary phrase introduced me, saying: "I hope you will speak freely and without limit."
I was encouraged by a most sympathetic audience and had a good time during my effort. No one else was called upon. My host was complimentary and said: "Your speech was so satisfactory that I thought best not to have any more."
Some time afterwards he said to me: "Many of my friends had heard of you but never heard you, so I made up my mind to give them the opportunity, and what was really a purely social affair for every other guest, I turned into an international occasion just to draw you out. However, the fraud, if it was a fraud, was an eminent success."
No one in England did more for Americans than Sir Henry Lucy. Every American knew all about him, because of his reputation, and particularly because he was the author of that most interesting column in Punch called the "Essence of Parliament."
At his luncheons he gathered eminent men in public life and in the literary and journalistic activities of Great Britain. These luncheons were most informal, and under the hospitable genius of Lucy the guests became on intimate terms. There was no table in London where so many racy stories and sometimes valuable historical reminiscences could be heard.
To be a guest at one of Sir Lucy's luncheons was for an American to meet on familiar terms with distinguished men whom he knew all about and was most anxious to see and hear.
At a large dinner I had a pleasant encounter with Sir Henry. In order to meet another engagement, he tried to slip quietly out while I was speaking. I caught sight of his retreating figure and called loudly the refrain of the familiar song, "Linger longer, Lucy." The shout of the crowd brought Sir Henry back, and the other entertainment lost a guest.
In several of my visits to London I went to see not only places of interest but also houses and streets made famous in English literature. In one of my many trips to St. Paul's Cathedral I was looking at the tomb of the Duke of Wellington in the crypt and also at the modest tomb of Cruikshank, the artist, near by.
The superintendent asked me who I was and many questions about America, and then said: "Many Americans come here, but the most remarkable of them all was Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll. He was very inquisitive and wanted to know all about Wellington's tomb. I told him that the duke's body was first put in a wooden coffin, and this was incased in steel; that this had made for it a position in a stone weighing twenty tons and over that was a huge stone weighing forty tons. He gave me a slap on the back which sent me flying quite a distance and exclaimed: 'Old man, you have got him safe. If he ever escapes cable at my expense to Robert G. Ingersoll, Peoria, Illinois, U. S. A.'"
I had an opportunity to know that the war by Germany against France and England was a surprise to both countries. While in London during part of June, 1914, I met Cabinet ministers and members of Parliament, and their whole thought and anxiety were concentrated on the threatened revolution in Ireland.
The Cabinet had asked the king to intervene and he had called representatives of all parties to meet him at Buckingham Palace. After many consultations he declared settlement or compromise were impossible. The situation was so critical that it absorbed the attention of the government, the press, and the public.
About the first of July I was in Paris and found the French worried about their finances and the increase in their military expenses which were reaching threatening figures. The syndicate of French bankers were seriously alarmed. There was no suspicion of German purpose and preparations for attack.
While in Geneva a few weeks afterwards I became alarmed by letters from relatives in Germany who were socially intimate with people holding very important positions in the government and the army, and their apprehensions from what their German friends told them and what they saw led to their joining us in Switzerland.
One day the Swiss refused to take foreign money or to make exchange for Swiss, or to cash letters of credit or bank checks. I immediately concluded that the Swiss bankers knew of or suspected Germany's hostile intentions, and with only two hours, and two families with their trunks to pack, we managed to reach and secure accommodations on the regular train for Paris. There was nothing unusual either at the railrstation or in the city.
One of the amusing incidents which are my life-preservers occurred at the station. Two elderly English spinsters were excitedly discussing the currency trouble. One of them smoothed out a bank of England note and said to her sister: "There, Sarah, is a bank of England note which has been good as gold all over the world since Christ came to earth, and these Swiss pigs won't take it."
I told this incident afterwards to a banker in London. He said they were very ignorant women, there were no bank of England notes at that time.
German hostility developed so rapidly that our train was the last which left Switzerland for France for nearly two months. We were due in Paris at ten o'clock in the evening, but did not arrive until the next morning because of the mobilization of French recruits.
The excitement in Paris was intense. A French statesman said to me: "We are doing our best to avoid war. Our troops are kept ten kilometres from the frontier, but the Germans have crossed and seized strategic points. They will hear nothing and accept nothing and are determined to crush us if they can."
From all ranks of the people was heard: "We will fight to the last man, but we are outnumbered and will be destroyed unless England helps. Will England help? Will England help?" I have been through several crises but never witnessed nor felt such a reaction to ecstatic joy as occurred when Great Britain joined France.
The restrictions on leaving Paris required time, patience, and all the resources of our Embassy to get us out of France. The helpfulness, resourcefulness, and untiring efforts of our Ambassador, Myron T. Herrick, won the gratitude of all Americans whom the war had interned on the continent and who must get home.
There was a remarkable change in England. When we left in July there was almost hysteria over the threatening civil war. In October the people were calm though involved in the greatest war in their history. They did not minimize the magnitude of the struggle, or the sacrifices it would require. There was a characteristic grim determination to see the crisis through, regardless of cost. Cabinet ministers whom I met thought the war would last three years.
The constant appeal to me, as to other Americans, was, "When will you join us? If we fail it is your turn next. It is autocracy and militarism against civilization, liberty, and representative government for the whole world."
We had a perilous and anxious voyage home and found few grasping the situation or working to be prepared for the inevitable, except Theodore Roosevelt and General Wood.
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