George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life. George Augustus Selwyn
and chief of all was Charles Fox, who to Selwyn was incomprehensible. Selwyn had been his father's friend, and had known him from childhood. He loved him and liked his companionship; yet his unrestrained folly at the gambling-table and on the racecourse, his loose ideas on money matters, and his political opinions, at times annoyed, irritated, and puzzled him almost beyond endurance. With the older and the younger group Selwyn was on the same terms of intimate friendship: now pleasing by his wit, and now helping by his kindness and common sense.
Castle Howard was the place, outside London, which most attracted him. It is even to-day a long way from the metropolis, and one feels something like surprise that such a lover of the town as Selwyn could, even to the end of his life, undertake the tiresome journey to Yorkshire. But in the stately galleries of Vanbrugh's design he renewed his associations with France. There he was not bored by country society; in the home circle he had all the company he needed. He could look out over the rolling uplands and see the distant wolds, contented to observe and enjoy them from afar amidst the books and pictures which his host had collected. If he wanted exercise the spacious gardens were at hand, and the artificial adornment of temples and statuary pleased a taste highly cultivated after the fashion of the times.
In a drawing-room Selwyn was as welcome as in a club, and he could only be said to be out of place in his own country house, more especially at the time of an election for Gloucester. The modern love of landscape, of country life as an aesthetic pleasure, was unknown to him. Civilisation, refinement, seemed to him to be confined to London and Paris, to Bath or Tunbridge Wells. "Now sto per partire, and I ought in point of discretion to set out to-morrow, but I dare say 'twill be Friday evening before I'll have the courage to throw myself off the cart. But then go I must; for on Monday our Assizes begin, and how long I shall stay the Lord knows, but I hope in God not more than ten days at farthest, for I find my aversion to that part of the world greater and more insufferable every day of my life, and indeed have no wish to be absent from home but to go to Castle Howard, which I hope that I shall not delay many days after my return from Gloucestershire" (August, 1774). A week later he had arrived at his home. "The weather is very fine, and Matson in as great beauty as a place can be in, but the beauties of it make very little impression upon me; in short, there is nothing in the eccentric situation in which I am now that can afford me the least pleasure, and everything I love to see in the world is at a distance from me" (August 9, 1774).
To-day such a man as Selwyn Would have had a choice collection of water colours; he would be ashamed if he could not appreciate the tone and tenderness of an English landscape. But though a friend of Reynolds and of Romney, though he commissioned and appreciated Gainsborough, and valued the masterpieces of the past, in a word, was essentially a man of culture, yet this phase of modern refinement was utterly unknown to him.
As a politician Selwyn, as has already been said, was a sinecurist; he never took a political interest in affairs of state, and he looked at events which have become historical from an unpolitical point of view. But though he writes of parliamentary incidents as a spectator, there is always in his letters a personal characterisation which gives them vividness and life. For his long parliamentary career brought Selwyn continually into contact with many varied personalities of several political generations. When he entered the House of Commons Henry Pelham was Prime Minister, and the elder Pitt had not yet formed that coalition with the Duke of Newcastle which enabled him to command a majority in the House of Commons and to be the greatest War Minister of the century. When Selwyn died, still a Member of Parliament, the younger Pitt was Prime Minister and the French Revolution had upset that old regime which Selwyn had known so well. In his time Pelham, Newcastle, Bute, Grenville, Chatham, Grafton, North, Rockingham, Shelburne, and Portland were successively heads of administrations: of some of these, and of many who served under them, Selwyn was a friend. Of the political and personal life of every one of them he had been an interested spectator. There was no man of the age who had a longer period of parliamentary observation and of personal association with the leading politicians of the time. But this intimacy with political personages never impressed him with the importance of political office. "You will not believe it, perhaps," he once wrote to Lady Carlisle when he had been asked to meet Pitt at dinner, "but a minister of any description, though served up in his great shell of power, and all his green fat about him, is to me a dish by no means relishing, and I never knew but one in my life I could pass an hour with pleasantly, which was Lord Holland." Cabinet Ministers of the eighteenth century belonged to a single section of society, which included every one of note and every one in it knew their faults and their failings; they were not afraid of offending constituents or of being lectured in leading articles. Thus their littleness, rather than their greatness, was apt to impress a daily observer like Selwyn, and to give to his remarks an aspect of depreciation and of pessimism.
That Selwyn was a gossip, no one knew better than himself, and he has incurred the censure of Sir George Trevelyan for repeating tittle-tattle, as he calls it, about Fox and his gambling. But posterity desires to see the real Fox, not an ideal statesman—to see a man as he lived, not only a political figure. Looking back for more than a century we may very well appreciate to the full Fox's great qualities and yet be aware of his weaknesses and his vices, in which he showed the strength of a passionate and virile character in contact with certain characteristics of the society of the age. Instead, therefore, of blaming Selwyn for repeating to correspondents the minor incidents of the time, we ought to be thankful to him for enabling us to picture so many of the leading personages of that day as they were. If we look to a period before or after that of Selwyn, we see an immortal gossip in Pepys, and in Greville another who will be read after the works of eminent historians have been put on upper shelves as out of date. The detailing of the minor facts of life without malice and with absolute truth enables posterity to form a sound judgment on a past age.
Among the amusements of the society in which Selwyn delighted was one which now seems both morbid and cruel: that of attending the execution of those condemned to capital punishment. Even to his friends and immediate successors, no less than to those who have written of him, the fact that a man so full of kindness, who took pleasure in the innocent companionship of children, could with positive eagerness witness the hanging of a thief at Tyburn, has been a cause of surprise. When one is conversant with the history of the time the astonishment is ridiculous. The sight of a man on the gallows no more disturbed the serenity of the most good-natured of men at the end of the eighteenth century than do the dying flutters of a partridge the susceptibilities of the most cultured of modern sportsmen. Selwyn was ever trying to get as much amusement out of life as possible, and he would have been acting contrary to all the ideas of the fashionable society of his age if he had sat at home when a criminal was to die. It was said of Boswell, just as it was of Selwyn, that he was passionately fond of attending executions. We need not therefore be surprised that Selwyn did as others of his time. Gilly Williams was a kind and good-natured man, yet we find him writing to Selwyn:
"Harrington's porter was condemned yesterday. Cadogan and I have already bespoken places at the Braziers, and I hope Parson Digby will come time enough to be of the party. I presume we shall have your honour's company, if your stomach is not too squeamish for a single serving."
Another friend, Henry St. John, begins a letter to Selwyn by telling how he and his brother went to see an execution. "We had a full view of Mr. Waistcott as he went to the gallows with a white cockade in his hat." Not to be wanting in the ordinary courtesies of the time, Selwyn's correspondent presently remarks, as one nowadays would do of a day's grouse-shooting: "I hope you have had good sport at the Place de Greve, to make up for losing the sight of so notorious a villain as Lady Harrington's porter. Mais laisons la ce discours triste, and let us talk of the living and lively world." Selwyn made his world brighter by his wit and pleasantries, and the sight of an execution did not depress his spirits. "With his strange and dismal turn," wrote Walpole, "he has infinite fun and humour in him."* And the author of a social satire blunted his thrusts at Selwyn by a long explanatory note which concludes with the remark that "George is a humane man."*
* Letters, vol. ii. 315.
* "The Diaboliad," P. 18. See Chapter 3.
It was Selwyn's fate—and in every generation we find some one of whom the same may be said—to have his characteristics or foibles exaggerated. It occurred to him in regard to witticisms and the sight