Chapter XLIV
I Edward the Seventh as Prince of Wales — Personal Incidents
Everything, or almost everything, has been said about King Edward the Seventh, every tribute paid him from every quarter of the world; and the mourning of his people is the best tribute of all. I should like to add an estimate from a different point of view and a tribute, but I suppose they would have no proper place in these papers, and I confine myself therefore to memories. I will go back to the period when he was Prince of Wales, and to the place where he put off most of the splendours belonging to his rank, and where most of the man himself was to be seen; not once nor twice, but for years in succession.
Homburg was to the Prince of Wales a three weeks’ holiday. I do not think he took the medical side of it very seriously. He drank the waters and walked, as the doctors bade him, but with respect to diet he seemed to be his own doctor and his prescriptions were not severe. But then nobody, the local physicians excepted, ever did take Homburg very seriously as a cure. What the Prince liked was the freedom, of which he was himself the author. On occasions of ceremony and in the general course of his life at home, strict etiquette was enforced. At Homburg the Prince used his dispensing power and put aside everything but the essentials. He lived in a hired villa. He wore lounging suits in the daytime—sometimes of a rather flamboyant colour—and a soft grey hat. In the evening a black dining jacket, black tie, black waistcoat, black trousers, and a soft black Homburg hat. The silk hat and the dress coat and white tie or white waistcoat were unknown. Most of the officers of his household were left at home, but General Sir Stanley Clark was always with him.
His way of life was as informal as his dress. He was there to amuse himself and it was an art he understood perfectly. Homburg is a village, but it had, or had at that time, many resources. The three or four streets of which the place consisted were so many rendezvous for the visitors. The lawn-tennis grounds were another. The walks in the woods were delightful. There were drives over the hills and far away, in the purest air in Germany. If you tired of the little watering-place or its guests, there was Frankfort, only eight miles distant, with resources of a more varied kind. But in Homburg itself the Kursaal, though there had been no gambling since 1869, and the hotels, were always open and sometimes lively.
What the Prince liked was society, in one form or another. The open-air life suited him. It was sufficiently formal but less formal than indoors. He liked strolling about and meeting acquaintances or friends. When you had once seen His Royal Highness leaning against the railings of a villa—the villa stood each in its own ground—and talking to a lady leaning out of the first floor window, and this interview lasting a quarter of an hour, you felt that the conditions of life and the relations of royalty to other ranks in life had taken on a quite new shape in Homburg.
But the attitude of respect was maintained. Certain formalities were never forgotten. The Prince was always addressed as “Sir” or as “Your Royal Highness.” But these observances were not irksome, nor was conversation restricted or stiffened by the obligations of deference or by the accepted conventionalities which, after all, were more matters of form than of substance. And in his most careless moods the Prince had a dignity which was the more impressive for being apparently unconscious. Nobody ever forgot what was due to him; or ever forgot it twice. It was an offence he did not pardon; or pardoned only in those who could not remember what they had never known. A foreigner, an American, who erred in pure ignorance might count on forgiveness.
The Prince gave many luncheons and dinners, almost always at Ritter’s or at the Kursaal. I should think there was never a day when he did not play the host. The dinners at the Kursaal were given on the terrace, always crowded with other dinner-parties. At Ritter’s they were on the piazza. This open-air hospitality was the pleasanter because it was so seldom possible in England. He had brought the art of entertaining to perfection. He put his guests, even those who stood most in awe of royalty, at their ease. The costume perhaps helped. When a company of people were in dining jackets and the men wearing their soft black hats, even at table, by the Prince’s command, etiquette became a less formidable thing. The Prince talked easily, fluently, and well. He might ask a guest whom he liked to sit next him, ignoring distinctions of rank, but during the dinner he would talk, sooner or later, to everybody. There might be a dozen guests, a number seldom exceeded. I will give you one example of the dialogue which went on, and no more. The late Duke of Devonshire, at that time the Marquis of Hartington, was sitting nearly opposite the Prince, but at some distance, and this colloquy took place:
“Hartington, you ought not to be drinking all that champagne.”
“No, sir; I know I oughtn’t.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I had rather be ill now and then than always taking care of myself.”
“Oh, you think that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?”
“Sir, if you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not anticipate.”
The Prince laughed and everybody laughed. And Lord Hartington, for all his gout, lived to be seventy-four, one of the truest Englishmen of his time or of any time.
Among the Americans who were presented to the Prince at Homburg were Mr. Depew and Mark Twain. I was not in Homburg when Mr. Depew first came, but I asked one of the Prince’s equerries to arrange the presentation for Mr. Depew, and I wrote to Lady Cork begging her to do what she could for him. So the formalities were duly transacted. The Prince took a liking to the American, asked him to dine, put him on his right hand, and listened to his stories with delight. He told me afterward that Depew was a new experience. He asked him again and again, and the next year also; I believe several years, or as long as Depew went to Homburg. The Prince said:
“Depew’s stories were not all good, but he told the bad ones so well that they were better than the good.”
My letter to Lady Cork had a fate I did not foresee, though I ought to have foreseen. When she told the Prince that I had written her about Depew she had my manuscript in her hand. “Is that Smalley’s letter? May I see it?” asked the Prince; took it and read the whole. It happened that I was staying at the time with one of her married daughters, and there was a deal good of family gossip in the letter. When the Prince handed it back there was in his eyes a gleam of that humour so often seen there, and he said:
“Now I know some of the things I have been wanting to know.”
And Lady Cork answered:
“Sir, we have nothing to conceal from Your Royal Highness.”
There was, of course, an intimacy which put the Prince on his honour.
Mark Twain was staying at Nauheim, some twelve miles away. He had driven into Homburg and was wandering about the place when he was pointed out to the Prince, and was presented. Mark Twain had at the time no very great care about his personal appearance, and was very shabbily dressed. He was the “Tramp Abroad.” At first I don’t think he much interested the Prince. His slowness of speech and his unusual intonations were not altogether prepossessing. However, when he had taken his leave the Prince seemed to think he wished to see him again and said:
“I should like to ask him to dinner. Do you think he has a dining jacket?”
The risk, whatever it might be, was taken, the invitation was sent, and Mark came to dinner, dining jacket and all. But he did not care to adapt himself to the circumstances; considering, perhaps, that the circumstances ought to adapt themselves to him. The meeting was not a great success, and, so far as I know, was never repeated. Socially speaking, the Mississippi Pilot was an intransigeant at times, and this was one of the times. He could not, I suppose, overcome his drawling manner of speech nor reduce his interminable stories to dinner-table limits. He had the air of usurping more than his share of the conversation and of the time, which he certainly did not mean to. Intentions, unluckily, count for little. Men are judged by what they do, and the general impression was not as favourable to Mark on this occasion as it would have been if he had been better known. Among all Princes and Potentates there was never one more willing to make allowances or less exacting in respect to trivial matters than Mark’s host. But, after all, he was Prince of Wales and the future King of England, and if you were not prepared to recognize that, it was open to you to stay away.
Mark Twain, at any rate, was not one of the Americans who followed the Prince to Homburg. He met the Prince almost by accident, and returned from Nauheim by the Prince’s invitation for this not very successful dinner. His Republicanism was perhaps of a rebellious kind, and possibly, though without desiring to, he gave the Prince to understand as much. Some of Mark’s compatriots went far in the opposite direction, especially one or two American women. There was a handsome American girl who had found means to be presented to the Prince; no difficult matter for a pretty woman at any time. Then she sent him a photograph of himself and begged him to sign it. As I was passing the Prince one afternoon in the street he stopped me and pulled a parcel out of his pocket, saying:
“This is a photograph Miss X. sent me to sign, and I have signed it, and I was just going to leave it for her at the hotel. But I am afraid to. I don’t know what she may not ask me next. Would you mind leaving it for me?”
The Prince did not see, but as I went in I saw, on the porch, the girl herself. She must have looked on at what happened and I am not at all sure she did not hear what the Prince said. None the less, she accepted the signed photograph joyfully, and it always had a place of honour in New York. “Wasn’t it kind of His Royal Highness to give it to me?” queried this beautiful being, not knowing that the true story had been told me. When I made my report to the Prince I remarked casually that Miss X. had been sitting on the veranda and might have seen what took place. “I hope she heard also,” exclaimed the Prince. But he did not quite mean that. At any rate, he relented afterward and was seen to be talking to the girl, whose eyes he could not but admire.