in costumes that reveal every charm, sway or turn or dance, as if inspired by her delightful gaiety. In another scene she imitates Sarah Bernhardt and there is infinite humour in her piquant caricature; some one else mimics Irving, and all this in a rain of the most terrible puns and verbal acrobatics ever heard on any stage-an unforgettable evening which made me put Burnand down as one of the men I must get to know as soon as possible, for he was evidently a force to count with, a verbal contortionist, at least, of most extraordinary agility.
I will give one proof of his quality from my memories of ten years or so later, just to give handsome little Frank his proper standing, for he was as kindly pleasant as he was good-looking and witty, and that's saying a good deal.
In the London New York Herald, a weekly paper, there had appeared the story of Lord Euston's arrest, so detailed that it was almost as libellous as the account in the Star, the ha' penny Radical evening paper, of which Ernest Parke was the editor. I knew Euston pretty well and he had told me that he meant to make it 'hot' for anyone who traduced him. He was a big, wellmade fellow of perhaps thirty, some six feet in height and decidedly manlylooking, the last person in the world to be suspected of any abnormal propensities. The story in the Star was detailed and libellous: Lord Euston was said to have gone in an ill-famed house in the West Central district; and the account in the Sunday Herald was just as damning. On the Monday following, Burnand came to lunch with me in Park Lane and by chance another guest was the Reverend John Verschoyle, whose talent for literature I have already described.
For some reason or other Verschoyle at table had condemned those who married their deceased wife's sister, evidently ignorant of the fact that Burnand had committed this offence against English convention. A little later, after the ladies had left the table, Verschoyle brought the conversation on the article in the New York Herald about Lord Euston; he was positive that a Sunday paper, by even mentioning such an affair, had killed itself in London. Burnand remarked, smiling, that he could not agree with such a verdict; surely it was the function of a newspaper to publish 'news,' and everyone was talking of this incident. But Verschoyle, purity-mad, stuck to his guns. 'How could you explain such an 'incident',' he insisted, 'to your wife or daughter, if she asked you what it was all about?'
'Very easily,' retorted Burnand, still smiling, but with keen antagonism in his sharp enunciation; 'I'd say: 'my dear, Lord Euston feels himself above the ordinary law, and having nothing better to do, went to this notorious gambling house to play. He thought the game was going to be poker, but when he found it was baccarat he came away.' '
No wittier explanation could be imagined; even Verschoyle had to try to smile. Curiously enough, in the libel action which Lord Euston brought against the Star newspaper, and which resulted in the condemnation of Ernest Parke, the editor, to a year's imprisonment, the explanation of Lord Euston was something like Burnand's excuse for him. He said that someone in the street had given him a card with poses plastiques on it; as he was at a loose end that night, he went to the address indicated. When he found that there were no poses plastiques, he came away.
One may say that burlesques and wit like Burnand's could also be found in Paris, but the comic humour, plus the physical beauty of the chorus girls, were not to be found there, nor the tragedy. Ernest Parke was a convinced Radical and a man of high character, yet he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for reproducing, so he told me, a police inspector's statement, and one which in any case did Lord Euston no harm at all. Yet no one in London expostulated or thought of criticizing the judge, though it seemed to me an infamous and vindictive sentence only possible in England. The preposterous penalty discovers a weak and bad side of the aristocratic constitution of English society. The judges almost all come from the upper middle class and invariably, in my experience, toady to aristocratic sentiment. Every judge's wife wants to be a Lady (with a capital, please, printer!), and her husband as a rule gets ennobled the quicker the more he contrives to please his superiors in the hierarchy. If Lord Euston had been Mr.
Euston of Clerkenwell, his libeller would have been given a small fine, but not imprisoned, though the imputation even of ordinary immorality would have injured him in purse and public esteem grievously, whereas it could not damage Lord Euston in any way.
And now for a contrast.
It was early in the eighties-I know it was a cold, windy day-that I went up to Haverstock Hill to call upon Dr. Karl Marx at his modest home in Maitland Park Road. We had met some time before, after one of Hyndman's meetings, and were more or less friends. Hyndman had contradicted something I had said, and when I quoted Engels as on my side, he told me that he knew Engels and spoke German as well as English. Seeing that a large part of the audience was German, I challenged him to reply to me and began speaking in German. When the meeting was over a German came up and congratulated me and asked me would I like to know Karl Marx? I replied that nothing would give me greater pleasure and he took me out and introduced me to the famous doctor. He was by no means so famous then as he is now forty years later, though he well deserved to be.
I had read Das Kapital some years before. The first book, indeed, all the theoretical part, seemed to be brain-cobwebs loosely spun; but the second book and the whole criticism of the English factory system was one of the most relentless and convincing indictments I had ever seen in print. No one who ignores it should be listened to on social questions. When I had absorbed it, I sent for Marx's other books, A Life of Lord Palmerston and Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. The Palmerston is written by one who had no feeling for character: the hero, an Irishman alive to his finger-tips, is buried under an erudition that prevents one seeing the forest for the trees; but the Revelations contain the best picture extant of the progress of Russia from the time she threw off the Tartar yoke to the latter half of the eighteenth century.
In person Marx was broad and short, but strong with a massive head, all framed in white hair; the eyes were still bright blue, by turns thoughtful, meditative and quick-glancing, sharply curious. My German astonished him; where had I got the fluency and the rhetoric? Talking of religious belief, I had said that der Lauf des menschlichen Gedanker-ganges ist filr mich die einzige Offenbarung Gotten (the course of the progress of human thought is to me the only revelation of God). 'Wunderbar! echt Deutsch!' Marx exclaimed (peculiarly German), which was the highest form of praise to a German of that time. He met me with critical courtesy, evidently surprised that an Englishman should have read not only Das Kapital, but all his contributions to periodicals. I told him I thought his book on the English factory system the most important work on sociology since The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith: on the one hand the advocate of socialism, on the other the individualist, while both forces, I thought, must meet in life and an equilibrium between them must be established. Marx smiled at me, but didn't even attempt to consider the new idea. He made much the same impression on me that Herbert Spencer made twenty years later, but Spencer was contemptuous-angry under contradiction, whereas Karl Marx was inattentively courteous. But both had shut themselves off from hearing anything against his pet theory, one-sided though it was. And just as Herbert Spencer was worth listening to on everything but 'the field I've made my own,' so was Karl Marx. He was the first to tell me how the French
bourgeoisie had massacred thirty thousand communists in Paris in cold blood after the defeat of 1870; but he condemned this bloodshed just as passionately as he condemned the strain of brutality in the anarchist Bakounin. His deep human pity and sympathy were the best of him, the heart better than the head-and wiser. Much in the same way, Spencer saw that savagery in man was developed and perpetuated in the standing armies of Europe, though wholly at variance with the spirit of forgiveness preached from a thousand pulpits. Marx and Spencer, like Carlyle and Ruskin, were of the race of Polyphemus-one-eyed giants; but the latter pair were artists to boot!
Another contrast.
It was about this time that I first met Lord Randolph Churchill's brother, the Duke of Marlborough. Though he was perhaps ten years older than I was, we became friends through sheer similarity of nature. He too wanted to touch life on many sides. He liked a good dinner and noble wine whether of Burgundy or Moselle, but above all, he loved women and believed with de Maupassant that the pursuit of them was the only entrancing adventure in a man's life. After a dinner at the Cafe Royal one night, he discoursed to me for an hour on the typical beauties of a dozen different races, not excluding the yellow or the black. He had as good a mind as his brother, but nothing like Randolph's genius as a captain or leader of men. I may tell one story of him here, though it took place much later, when I was editing the Fortnightly Review. I had met Lady Colin Campbell in Paris and found that she spoke excellent French and Italian because she had spent her childhood in Florence. Shortly after I was made editor of the Fortnightly Review-in 1887 it was, I think-Mrs. Jeune told me I ought to meet Lady Colin and publish some of her articles. I said I should be very glad to renew acquaintance with so pretty a woman. One day Mrs. Jeune brought about a meeting and told me to go to the back drawing-room where Lady Colin was waiting for me. I went upstairs
