V. BRITISH AMBASSADORS TO PARIS SINCE 1870 339 VI. SUMMARY OF ARGUMENTS, BRITISH AND FRENCH, IN FAVOUR OF ARBITRATION TREATY AND X. M. HANOTAUX ON BRITISH DIPLOMACY XI. PAPERS RELATING TO THE FRANCO-SCOTTISH SOCIETY AND THE SCOTS COLLEGE IN PARIS . 359 THIRTY YEARS CHAPTER I LAUNCHED IN PARIS "You must give me your answer at once; Alge is not strong, Blowitz is away, and our third man must be installed at the rue Vivienne by Monday night." Thus spoke John Macdonald, the then manager of The Times, a kind and considerate man by nature, but in business, masterful and often uncompromising. He had wired me on the Saturday morning to meet him at Printing House Square, and on the following Monday night, in May, 1876, after no more notice than the few minutes in which I had to make up my mind, the most momentous step in my career was taken and the whole course of my subsequent life determined. Paris from that moment till 1909 remained the centre of my affairs and my home. I had been saturated with things French from my childhood. My grandfather was a noted Scottish politician, a Hellenist, a student of French literature, and a philosopher, who thought Aristotle, Hume, and especially Voltaire, had got closer to intellectual" common sense " than had the Edinburgh school who labelled themselves with the term. He was such a believer in the emancipating character of T.Y. I B French culture that he sent all his children to pass some years in Paris. Access to German culture he considered less interesting to a Scotsman, but he wished his children to know the German language as added strength to their capabilities, and my grandmother, who spoke French fluently, learnt also German at the same time as my aunts at Neuwied on the Rhine. In this highly-cultured family at Cupar-Fife, "famed for litigation," as an ironical Cupar teacher used to call it,1 I passed much of my early life. To my young imagination the very name of France seemed to stand for all that was free, brilliant and reasonable. do "What," said my old Whig grandfather, political systems matter except to put one set of men in office in the place of others! They are all the mere tools of the thinkers. What really matters is freedom to think, speculate, talk, write about every conceivable thing." Paris was my Mecca. The French intellect, I had been taught, was the motive-power which was driving the machinery of the human mind throughout the world. I had just passed two years at the University of Jena, the two most delightful years of my life, for there for the first time I had been allowed to do individual work and research for myself instead of merely learning the wisdom of others. Germany, moreover, had broken loose from the old wisdom. Nobody in 1873-5 read any philosophical writer but Spencer, and 1 What Scotsman knows not the proverb "He that will to Cupar maun to Cupar?" The inhabitants of the " Kingdom," as Fife is called in Scotland, are notoriously litigious folk, and Cupar is the place where the Sheriff of Fife distributes justice to them. little of him. Darwin had overturned the tottering German idols. The professors were still sweeping the wreckage into the back yard, where the bits were being carefully collected by English university men and carried off to Oxford to be pieced together again. One of the "repairers" was my late uncle-in-law, Professor Wallace of Oxford, himself a distinguished philosopher, who wrote the famous "Prolegomena" to an English translation of Hegel's Logic, and was one of the worshippers of its then, in Germany, discarded author. Prof. Eucken, by the by, had just been "called" to Jena in succession to Kuno Fischer. I remember the disappointment at the loss of this somewhat histrionic lecturer, who had gone to Heidelberg, whither many students flitted after him. I am tempted to go beyond the scope of this volume and talk about a German university of forty years ago. All I can say here is that the University of Jena was the leading révoltée. It was the joint university of three States, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxe-Meiningen, and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The representative of the joint administrative interests explained to me why Jena possessed such independence as compared with other German universities. "One master," he said, is a master; two masters are half a master ; and three masters are none ! " 66 After having absorbed the new scientific spirit and revelled in this intellectual freedom, I saw, later on, the conventional spirit growing again under the new order, professors of the new order treating as heretics. those of a still newer order, and even Darwinism taking its place among the creeds. From my great teacher, Professor Hildebrand, I |