In the end these considerations triumphed; good sense generally did with Melbourne. The proposals for modifying the Bill came from a group of moderate Tory peers—the Waverers, they were nicknamed. These wanted the recall of Parliament put off in order to give time for their plans to be thoroughly considered. Melbourne was against this: a delay would rouse public suspicion. Riots and rick burning would begin again, and he would have to put them down. Besides, though he sympathized with the Waverers’ intentions, he did not think their policy likely to do any good. Rather would it lead to the break up of the Government, he told Palmerston, and to a general exacerbation of feeling. The Ministers’ chief aim should be to keep things together until people had a chance to cool down. Besides, it would be letting down Lord Grey to assist in breaking up his Government. As often before in Melbourne’s history, he felt strongly about personal obligations because he was so uncertain about any others.
Doubtfully, reluctantly, resignedly he reverted to his old acceptance of reform. The complex contradiction of his sentiments on the subject showed in his demeanour. The tone of his talk became even more bewildering than usual to simple-minded persons. By turns flippant and pessimistic, frank and enigmatic he seemed wholely detached from the Government of which he was a member. Of course reform was folly, he would say. Yet, when anyone suggested resisting it, he would burst out laughing, rub his hands and turn the subject. One observer was especially mystified by him. Charles Greville, the Clerk of the Council, had constituted himself an unofficial intermediary between the Waverers and the Ministers. He was always buttonholing Melbourne, in the Park, in South Street, at the Home Office, in order to extract from him some statement of his views. Greville was ingratiating, persistent and conceited—“The most conceited man I ever met,” said Disraeli, “though I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton”—the very type Melbourne most enjoyed teasing. Sometimes he set out to shock Greville by openly mocking the whole idea of reform, sometimes he tantalized his curiosity with half confidences about his colleagues, sometimes he lounged back “in his lazy, listening, silent humour, disposed to hear everything and to say very little.” Never though, did he quite commit himself. Greville found these interviews extremely unsatisfactory. What a pity it was, he reflected, that at this important moment in English history, one of His Majesty’s chief Ministers should be no better than a frivolous cynic; and a dissipated spendthrift into the bargain. Leaving South Street one morning he noticed with a pleasurable sense of moral disapproval, a Jew waiting in the hall and a valet de chambre sweeping away a bonnet and shawl.
With the new year events began to move towards their culmination. It became obvious that the Whigs would not get the Bill through without at any rate pledging themselves to make peers. Were they prepared to do this? Many hated the idea, Melbourne most of all. What a dangerous precedent would it provide for forcing all sorts of other odious reforms through Parliament in the future! For a moment he was moved from his attitude of detached resignation; and protested so strongly that in January it was thought he might resign. In the end, however, common sense and loyalty once more prevailed. When the final crisis came in May, Melbourne in Cabinet voted for demanding from the King the power to make peers. But up to the last he was in a queer uncertain mood. Greville met him in April at a ball at the French Embassy. Melbourne suddenly said to him, “I don’t believe there is a strong feeling in the country for the measure . . . might it not be thrown out?” “Do your colleagues agree?” asked the astonished Greville. “No,” said Melbourne. Greville said that he ought to persuade them. “What difficulty can they have in swallowing the rest?” replied Melbourne, “After they have given up the rotten boroughs . . . I don’t see how the Government is to be carried on without them. Some means may be found; a remedy may possibly present itself but I am not aware of any.” No doubt he was still teasing Greville by a display of cynicism. But he was also giving voice to his secret convictions. When it came, the glorious triumph of the reform cause left Melbourne noticeably unexhilarated. Reluctantly he had supported it as the only means of pacifying popular discontent. Now he began to wonder if it would produce the desired effect. After all they had been led to hope, the people would certainly be disappointed by the results of reform; with the consequence that they would get more angrily discontented than ever. One day soon after the Bill had passed, he met Attwood. “If the people don’t get their belly-full after this,” Attwood said, “I shall be torn in pieces.” “And so much the better, you deserve it,” retorted Melbourne with unwonted bitterness. Moreover, even if by a stroke of luck, the people did stay quiet, the new Parliament would not. Gloomily Melbourne envisaged the prospect of a House of Commons full of earnest, strenuous middle-class persons insatiably clamouring for more and more reforms; and with the power to get them. One thing he was sure of: they were not easily going to persuade him to help them again. “There is no knowing to what one may be led by circumstance,” he wrote to his brother Fred, “but at present I am determined to make my stand here and not to advance any further.”
However, it was not in him to give way to depression. Perhaps things were not as bad as he feared; anyway it was never any use worrying. Ruefully and philosophically he shrugged his shoulders at the future and went off to dine at Holland House.
Chapter Eleven
Mrs. Norton
For luckily he had other resources to fall back upon, when affairs looked melancholy. He was able to take things philosophically because he was detached; and he was detached partly because politics were never to him the be all and the end all of existence. Though he had thrown himself with such surprising energy into his work, his character was not so far changed as to make him forgo his old enjoyments. He still read enormously. At the height of the disturbances of 1831 he contrived to find time to study the subject of the Druids and to explore the obscurer bypaths of Elizabethan dramatic literature—Heywood’s Apology for Actors and Rumbold’s Collection of Stage Plays.
He re-read old favourites, too, notably As You Like It. “It is the prettiest play in the world,” he once said. Moreover he liked it because he seems to have felt an affinity with the character of the melancholy Jacques. Into his commonplace book he copied Jacques’ remark after hearing Touchstone talk of Ovid,
“Oh knowledge ill inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched house!”
“A man,” comments Melbourne, “may be master of the ancient and modern languages, and yet his mind and his manners shall not be in the least degree softened or harmonized by discipline and by force and beauty of example. The elegance, grace and feeling which he is continually contemplating, cannot mix with his thoughts or insinuate itself into their expression: but he remains as coarse, as rude and as awkward, and often more so than the illiterate and the ill-instructed.”
Such a passage illustrates typically Melbourne’s attitude to literature. Books appealed to him primarily not for their learning or as a source of artistic pleasure but for the light they threw on experience. Always he relates what he reads to what he himself has observed. For—and here he is unlike most men of affairs—he never lost his interest and his curiosity as to life in general. His mind did not grow so tired and pre-occupied as to stop him questioning and reflecting. Seated in Cabinet, gossiping at a dinner party, he continued to notice and draw his characteristic conclusions. When he was back in his library at South Street he pulled out his commonplace book and jotted these conclusions down. They were varied, according to what aspect of life had stimulated them. Sometimes they arose from his political experience.
“People complain of the instability of human affairs, but in fact the state of man, if fixed and certain, would not be endured.”
Sometimes they are the results of his classical reading.
“Greek and Latin literature is thought so good because so much of it is lost.”
Social life was for him a great stimulus to reflection.
“A well-looking man should dress hims
elf more carefully because his appearance attracts attention to his attire, and if the latter sits ill or be ungraceful it points out and strengthens the contrast: whereas an ill-looking fellow and an ill-made suit appear both of a piece.”
“Wit of all things suffers most by time.”
“Nothing hurts the character or degrades the understanding so much as suffering wit and humour to dominate and hold the first place in discussion . . . the ludicrous is an admirable auxiliary but it should not be depended upon as a principle.”
“Labour is so necessary to the health and vigour of the body, and consequently of the mind, that those who by their wealth are exempted from it as a means of subsistence are yet compelled to seek it as a diversion.”
“Persons who are foolish enough to do that which requires admonition are rarely wise enough to refrain from the practice for which they are admonished.”
His own character was another favourite object of his curious contemplations. He viewed it with an impartial detachment.
“I am very good-tempered if I have my own way; and that is not saying little for myself. For many are just as ill-tempered when their wishes are complied with as when they are thwarted.”
Such modified self-approval, however, as is implied in this saying is rare. The melancholy and sceptical view which Melbourne took of human life in general extended to himself; all the more as with advancing years he grew aware of the incurable nature of his own weaknesses and of the failure of his youthful hopes.
“Misfortunes are often accidents, yet the calamities inflicted on us by the hand of God are very few in proportion to those which come from our own errors.”
“The advantages of youth are those which we prize least and employ most when we possess them: and regret most when we lose them. There is no man who, at an advanced period of his life were he able to choose, would not at once ask for the restoration of the strength and health of his early years.”
“In youth we are anxious to affect the gravity and experience of age, and in age, still more vainly, the spirit and gaiety of youth.”
The best of these entries in Melbourne’s commonplace book are interesting as showing how his circumstances frustrated the full development of his talents. Why, with a mind so penetrating and individual, was he not one of the great aphorists, an English La Rochefoucauld, a nineteenth century Halifax? The answer is surely that he did not write well enough: his mode of expression is as a rule improvised and diffuse. This was not because he lacked a gift for words. The phrases he tossed off in conversation are unforgettably pithy and racy. But he never took trouble to acquire that sustained art which is needed to turn good conversation into good literature. His literary energy had been weakened and dispersed by too much politics and too many parties.
For he kept up his social life too: dined out, went to the club, above all took trouble to satisfy his need for feminine society. The bonnet and shawl, which Greville noticed with such interest in the hall of South Street, indicates that he sometimes took the opportunity to gratify his more agreeable passions. But passion in itself never meant very much to Melbourne. What he required from women was companionship of mind and sentiment; and these he could only find in his own civilized world. During the reform years two new female characters make their appearance in his story. One was not his usual type. Miss Emily Eden, the thirty-five-year-old sister of Lord Auckland, was an aristocratic example of the kind of English lady whose most distinguished representative is Jane Austen; a clever, sensible, delightful spinster, combining a rational belief in orthodox, solid virtue with a zestful worldly-wise interest in her fellows and a sparkling satirical humour. Melbourne used to meet her staying with his sister Lady Cowper at Panshanger, he found her charming company; and she, though she could not bring herself wholly to approve of him, was peculiarly qualified to appreciate his oddness and his wit. Soon they were close friends, meeting often and writing to each other about politics, theological points and the foibles of their acquaintances. Naturally enough, Lady Cowper and others soon began to talk of their marrying. Miss Eden would obviously be better off with a husband and what an excellent wife she would be to Melbourne! At once intelligent, pleasant and good, was she not exactly the woman he had all his life been in need of? Perhaps she was! Perhaps she and Melbourne would both have been happier if they had had the wisdom to marry each other! Alas, love is not the child of wisdom; and neither of them wanted to. Miss Eden was of a cool prudent temperament and had long ago decided that she much preferred staying at home and looking after her brother to running the risks of matrimony. Certainly not with Melbourne: “He bewilders me and frightens me and swears too much,” she said laughingly when she heard of the suggestion. Anyway, she was sure that she was not the sort of woman he could ever feel romantic about. “I stand very low on the list of his loves,” she remarked, “and as for his thinking well of my principles, it would be rather hard if he did not, considering the society he lives in.” These comments show her shrewdness. Cool and rational himself, Melbourne did not look for these qualities in his wife: his heart could only be set on fire by a personality that glowed with the passion and enthusiasm he lacked.
His other new woman friend was not deficient in this respect. In December, 1830, he got a letter from a Mrs. Norton, the grand-daughter of the great Sheridan, asking him, on the strength of his old acquaintance with her family, if he could find a job for her husband. Since he had heard she was an attractive woman, he resolved to answer her letter in person. And one evening he called on her at her house in Storey’s Gate, Westminster. He was ushered up into a minute drawing-room, bright with flowers and muslin curtains and almost filled by a large blue sofa, from which rose to greet him a young woman of glittering beauty—all opulent shoulder and raven’s wing hair, who bending forward a little, looked up at him meltingly from under sweeping lashes and whose blood, as she spoke, mantled delicately under a clear olive skin.
Her conversation was as vivid as her appearance. Her countenance alive with changing and dramatic expressions, and speaking in a softly modulated contralto, she poured forth a flood of words in which ardent opinions and flights of high-flown sentiment were interspersed by flattering attentive pauses and lightened by a free-spoken rollicking Irish humour. Melbourne found her society agreeable enough to make him want very much to see her again. Accordingly he set about getting Mr. Norton made a police court magistrate. Soon all London was gossiping about this Home Secretary’s new entanglement. Every morning, it was said, Mrs. Norton could be seen waving to Lord Melbourne from her balcony as he walked by to his office; and every evening on his way home, he called in to see her.
She cannot much have minded the gossip. Caroline Norton was a natural prima donna, born it would seem to move through life under a spotlight of publicity. She had in a high degree the characteristics of her type; was vital, warm-hearted, impulsive, temperamental, egotistic and not quite a lady. It would have been a wonder if she had been, considering her history. At twenty-two years old she had already seen a remarkable amount of the seamy side of human existence. The Sheridan family hovered on the fringes of society, showy and impoverished, and surrounded always by a faint aura of scandal. For three generations they had set the world talking of their brilliance, their debts and their elopements. Mrs. Sheridan, worried to death about the future of her penurious daughters—there were three of them all beautiful—had married them off as quickly as she could. At the age of nineteen Caroline became the wife of George Norton, the younger brother of Lord Grantley. From the first, the marriage had been a failure. It was not Caroline’s fault. Even her enemies—and she was to have many—have not a word to say for George Norton; a coarse, shifty cad, pathologically mean about money, subject to fits of brutal ill-temper and always talking about the state of his stomach. Within a few weeks of the honeymoon, he had thrown an ink bottle at his wife’s head. He followed this up later by kicking her, setting fire to her writing-table and scalding her with a
tea kettle. Caroline was not the woman to take such treatment lying down. On the contrary, she now and again vented her outraged feelings by doing whatever she thought might most annoy him. With some skill; on one occasion, when they had returned squabbling very late from a ball and George Norton flung himself dog-tired into bed, she kept him awake by refusing to join him and instead standing at the window apparently in exalted contemplation of the dawn. For once we can hardly blame him for leaping up and throwing her heavily to the ground. She also retaliated on him by insulting his Scotch family pride, mocking at the dowdy dullness of the Nortons and pointing out their ludicrous inferiority to the radiant Sheridans.
However, she was neither sensitive nor spiritless enough to let her matrimonial troubles obsess her. If for once in a way Norton was in a friendlier humour, she was always ready to respond. For the rest, she turned her mind to other things. This was not difficult for her. Passionately she thirsted for pleasure, achievement, admiration. She also wanted money. George Norton had no fortune to compensate for his lack of other attractions. And since he was incapable of earning much himself, Caroline soon decided that, if they were to live in anything like the style she liked, she it was who must provide the means. Settling in London, she opened her campaign. Her chosen weapon was her pen. With some of her grandfather’s literary gift, she had inherited all his professional facility; that ability to master the tricks of the trade which later enabled her to turn out a well-made lively novel or pour out her feelings in fluent Byronic verse with a competent effectiveness which put her work from the first in quite a different category from that of the lady amateur. Already by 1830, she had with some success published two books of poems and had a play produced at Covent Garden. She also added to her income by writing articles and editing a fashionable magazine.
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