Every artist is his own masterpiece.—BURSTALL.
In beginning this chapter, I very nearly fell into the old mistake of saying “I suppose young people don’t read Dickens nowadays.” It is curious how generation after generation of us seniors fall into that trap. Miss Linthorpe said it to me once, when I was in the schoolroom, upon which I offered to submit to a Dickens examination, and passed it with flying colours. I said it myself to Francis one day, when he was lying on the floor with a book, and he held up the book, which was _Martin Chuzzlewit_. So I will make no apology this time for talking of Mrs. Leo Hunter as if she were a character familiar to my readers. She was a real old lady, who lived at Ipswich (I think) and had some phenomenal number of children, and wrote verses quite as bad as the “Dying Frog.” But indeed she was not one woman, she was every woman—every woman who has sufficient station in the world to be able to choose her own company. We all want to collect lions—none the less since we ourselves began to be Managing Directresses, and Q.C.’s, and Members of Parliament. So I am not ashamed of having hunted the lions in my day; and I have kept them for a separate chapter—just a few of them, who will be worth exhibiting, because everybody still remembers their names, and yet my younger readers never saw or only saw them at a distance.
I suppose it would be generally agreed that the greatest man of the period (I am speaking of the period round about 1960) was Lord Chief Justice Poltwhistle. He dated from the old days of the English Bar, before women could plead (“barbarous days, Lady Porstock”) or sit on juries. In his young days, he said, it was still customary for lawyers to demand their fees, even when they lost the case; and he could quote instances in which men had risen to great fame at the Bar without ever winning a single important case. “We took it all in a more sporting spirit then,” he would say, in his quaint old way. “You might win a moral victory as a pleader, although you failed to get a verdict owing to the intrinsic badness of your cause. But of course at that time counsel weren’t required to take any oath as to what they thought of the rights and wrongs of the case, and it was not contrary to etiquette to defend a man although you were morally certain he was guilty. Even the moral theologians allowed that; and you must understand, Lady Porstock, that a moral theologian has a conscience just one point less elastic than a lawyer’s. I recollect when the Act was passed in ’42 an old company-promoter called Blofeld sitting next to O’Leary, who was a prominent K.C. in those days, and saying, ‘Well, the next time I get into the Courts it seems as if I’d have to find either a knave or a fool to defend me.’ ‘And you’ll have your pick of the Bar,’ says O’Leary. Wonderful smart chap he was, O’Leary. ‘It isn’t fair on us Catholics,’ he’d say to me (there weren’t very many of us practising in those days), ‘for the Protestants all think we’re such liars, when I’ve defended a man it’s all I can do to prevent him getting up and pleading Guilty.’ In those days, too, you could accept any brief you liked, and accepted the party that offered the biggest retaining fee, instead of having to wait your turn. It nearly broke O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill went through. I remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t defend the old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel because he can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the best counsel the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich people who can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a wonderful smart chap, O’Leary.” And so the old gentleman would wander on, charming us with anecdotes of the bad old times that, just because they are so distant, still win our rebellious sympathies.