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diff --git a/9820-8.txt b/9820-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..de0cabb --- /dev/null +++ b/9820-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5461 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), +Volume I, by Mrs. Humphry Ward + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I + +Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward + +Posting Date: November 12, 2011 [EBook #9820] +Release Date: February, 2006 +First Posted: October, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS, VOL I *** + + + + +Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Sandra +Brown, David Gundry, and the Project Gutenberg Online +Distributed Proofreading Team + + + + + + + + + + + +A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME I + +BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD + +Published November, 1918 + + + + + + + +[Illustration: DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OF RUGBY] + + + + +_To + +T. H. W. + +(In memory of April 6, 1872)_ + + + + +CONTENTS + + +CHAPTER + + I. EARLY DAYS + + II. FOX HOW + + III. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW + + IV. OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW + + V. THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW + + VI. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD + + VII. BALLIOL AND LINCOLN + +VIII. EARLY MARRIED LIFE + + IX. THE BEGINNINGS OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + +DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OP RUGBY _Frontispiece_ + +MATTHEW ARNOLD + +JOHN HENRY NEWMAN J + +FOX HOW, THE WESTMORLAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS + +BENJAMIN JOWETT + + + + +A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS + + + + +CHAPTER I + + +EARLY DAYS + + +Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of +old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, +our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over +us?--the one advantage of _time!_ + +After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they. +When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the +young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees +with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet, "I saw him"--or, "I talked +with him"--which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as we +elders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age, +advancing "like an army with banners," this mere prerogative of years +becomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divest +ourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it--to +turn it into a kind of _panache_--to wear it with an air, since wear it +we must. + +So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to +look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows +upon most of us. I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very +interesting to many. A life spent largely among books, and in the +exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a +subject-matter, when one comes to write about it. I can only attempt it +with any success, if my readers will allow me a large psychological +element. The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are +sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The +world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with +any sort of energy, we _must_ have thought about it, and about ourselves +in relation to it--thought "furiously" often. And it is out of the many +"thinkings" of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that +thought itself grows. For progress surely, whether in men or nations, +means only a richer knowledge; the more impressions, therefore, on the +human intelligence that we can seize and record, the more sensitive +becomes that intelligence itself. + +But of course the difficulty lies in the seizing and recording--in the +choice, that is, of what to say, and how to say it. In this choice, as I +look back over more than half a century, I can only follow--and +trust--the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction. +I shall be telling what is primarily true, or as true as I can make it, +as distinguished from what is primarily imagination, built on truth. But +the truth one uses in fiction must be interesting! Milton expresses that +in the words "sensuous" and "passionate," which he applies to poetry in +the _Areopagitica_. And the same thing applies to autobiography, where +selection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to be +told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in +looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest +or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things +broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past, +and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in +the end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not much +detachment _is_ possible. + +For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl +of five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorland +valley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, +the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, to +greet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer +day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had +taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired, +dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, +the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had +built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly +another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that +it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, +Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the +young colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to my +childish feet seemed vast--but the _William Brown_ was a sailing-ship of +only 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months +and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather, +much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in +two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children +were plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My +father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who +were going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers. + +I can remember, too, being lifted--weak and miserable with toothache--in +my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared +the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we +first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first +night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me +as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and +uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently +saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Doctor Arnold's +eldest daughter--then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quaker +manufacturer, who afterward became the well-known Education Minister of +1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82. + +To my mother and her children, Fox How and its inmates represented much +that was new and strange. My mother was the granddaughter of one of the +first Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up in +the colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personal +beauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her old +Tasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us; +and I see as though I had been there a scene often described to me--my +mother playing Hermione in the "Winter's Tale," at Government House when +Sir William Denison was Governor--a vision, lovely and motionless, on +her pedestal, till at the words, "Music! awake her! Strike!" she kindled +into life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorell +had been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General William +Alexander Sorell, of the Coldstream Guards, was a soldier of some +eminence, whose two sons, William and Thomas, both served under Sir John +Moore and at the Cape. But my great-grandfather ruined his military +career, while he was Deputy Adjutant-General at the Cape, by a +love-affair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished or +promoted--whichever one pleases to call it--to the new colony of +Tasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by the +wife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth of +twenty-one or so, to join his father, the Governor, in Tasmania, and I +possess a little calf-bound diary of my grandfather written in a very +delicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in it +show him to have been a devoted son. But when, in 1830 or so, the +Governor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grandfather +remained in Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, became +very much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Registrar of +Deeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just remember +him, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old, +punctilious school, strictly honorable and exact, content with a small +sphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to his +children of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes and +promotions, and of his grandfather, General Sorell, who, as Adjutant of +the Coldstream Guards from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all the +home and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years, +through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American War +of Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson's +recollections. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairs +of an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whether +in its landscape or its life, a curiously English effect; as though an +English midland county had somehow got loose and, drifting to the +Southern seas, had there set up--barring a few black aborigines, a few +convicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns--another quiet version of the +quiet English life it had left behind. + +But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood in +them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots, +expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a military +stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are +points in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in my +mother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him which +remains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped +hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and +quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all +her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical +characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression--as of an +old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother, +and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her +temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life +and for her children's. This was the Protestant--the _French_ +Protestant--element; which no doubt represented in the family from which +she came a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism. +Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the least +like English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type. +There was nothing emotional or "enthusiastic" in it--no breath of Wesley +or Wilberforce; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history, +instinctive and invincible. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers, +with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame de +Maintenon, before--eternally hating and resenting "Papistry"--he +abandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty? +That is the impression which--looking back upon her life--it often makes +upon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly, +imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugby +she was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by a +kind of tragic surprise, which yet was no one's fault, the wife of a +Catholic. + +And that brings me to my father, whose character and story were so +important to all his children that I must try and draw them, though I +cannot pretend to any impartiality in doing so--only to the insight that +affection gives; its one abiding advantage over the critic and the +stranger. + +He was the second son of Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and the younger +brother--by only eleven months--of Matthew Arnold. On that morning of +June 12, 1842, when the headmaster who in fourteen years' rule at Rugby +had made himself so conspicuous a place, not merely in the public-school +world, but in English life generally[1] arose, in the words of +his poet son--to tread-- + + In the summer morning, the road-- + Of death, at a call unforeseen-- + Sudden-- + +My father, a boy of eighteen, was in the house, and witnessed the fatal +attack of _angina pectoris_ which, in two hours, cut short a memorable +career, and left those who till then, under a great man's shelter and +keeping, had-- + + Rested as under the boughs + Of a mighty oak.... + Bare, unshaded, alone. + +[Footnote 1: At the moment of correcting these proofs, my attention has +been called to a foolish essay on my grandfather by Mr. Lytton +Strachey, none the less foolish because it is the work of an extremely +clever man. If Mr. Strachey imagines that the effect of my +grandfather's life and character upon men like Stanley and Clough, or a +score of others who could be named, can be accounted for by the eidolon +he presents to his readers in place of the real human being, one can +only regard it as one proof the more of the ease with which a certain +kind of ability outwits itself.] + +He had been his father's special favorite among the elder children, as +shown by some verses in my keeping addressed to him as a small boy, at +different times, by "the Doctor." Those who know their _Tom Brown's +Schooldays_ will perhaps remember the various passages in the book where +the softer qualities of the man whom "three hundred reckless childish +boys" feared with all their hearts, "and very little besides in heaven +or earth," are made plain in the language of that date. Arthur's +illness, for instance, when the little fellow, who has been at death's +door, tells Tom Brown, who is at last allowed to see him: "You can't +think what the Doctor's like when one's ill. He said such brave and +tender and gentle things to me--I felt quite light and strong after it, +and never had any more fear." Or East's talk with the Doctor, when the +lively boy of many scrapes has a moral return upon himself, and says to +his best friend: "You can't think how kind and gentle he was, the great +grim man, whom I've feared more than anybody on earth. When I stuck, he +lifted me, just as if I'd been a little child. And he seemed to know all +I'd felt, and to have gone through it all." This tenderness and charm of +a strong man, which in Stanley's biography is specially mentioned as +growing more and more visible in the last months of his life, was always +there for his children. In a letter written in 1828 to his sister, when +my father as a small child not yet five was supposed to be dying, Arnold +says, trying to steel himself against the bitterness of coming loss, "I +might have loved him, had he lived, too dearly--you know how deeply I do +love him now." And three years later, when "little Tom," on his eighth +birthday, had just said, wistfully--with a curious foreboding instinct, +"I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of +my life," Arnold, painfully struck by the words, wrote some verses upon +them which I still possess. "The Doctor" was no poet, though the best of +his historical prose--the well-known passage in the Roman History, for +instance, on the death of Marcellus--has some of the essential notes of +poetry--passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian quality +of his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who are +aware of him chiefly as the great Liberal fighter of eighty years ago. +He replies to his little son: + + Is it that aught prophetic stirred + Thy spirit to that ominous word, + Foredating in thy childish mind + The fortune of thy Life's career-- + That naught of brighter bliss shall cheer + What still remains behind? + + Or is thy Life so full of bliss + That, come what may, more blessed than this + Thou canst not be again? + And fear'st thou, standing on the shore, + What storms disturb with wild uproar + The years of older men? + + * * * * * + + At once to enjoy, at once to hope-- + That fills indeed the largest scope + Of good our thoughts can reach. + Where can we learn so blest a rule, + What wisest sage, what happiest school, + Art so divine can teach? + +The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in +Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope. The +passages in Arnold's most intimate diary, discovered after his death, +and published by Dean Stanley, show what the Christian faith was to my +grandfather, how closely bound up with every action and feeling of his +life. The impression made by his conception of that faith, as +interpreted by his own daily life, upon a great school, and, through the +many strong and able men who went out from it, upon English thought and +feeling, is a part of English religious history. + +[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD. + +JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. From a drawing in possession +of H. E. Wilberforce, Esq.] + +But curiously enough the impression upon his own sons _appeared_, at any +rate, to be less strong and lasting than in the case of others. I mean, +of course, in the matter of opinion. The famous father died, and his +children had to face the world without his guiding hand. Matthew and +Tom, William and Edward, the eldest four sons, went in due time to +Oxford, and the youngest boy into the Navy. My grandmother made her home +at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the +youngest of whom was only eight when their father died. The devotion of +all the nine children to their mother, to one another, and to the common +home was never weakened for a moment by the varieties of opinion that +life was sure to bring out in the strong brood of strong parents. But +the development of the elder two sons at the University was probably +very different from what it would have been had their father lived. +Neither of them, indeed, ever showed, while there, the smallest tendency +to the "Newmanism" which Arnold of Rugby had fought with all his powers; +which he had denounced with such vehemence in the Edinburgh article on +"The Oxford Malignants." My father was at Oxford all through the agitated +years which preceded Newman's secession from the Anglican communion. He +had rooms in University College in the High Street, nearly opposite +St. Mary's, in which John Henry Newman, then its Vicar, delivered Sunday +after Sunday those sermons which will never be forgotten by the Anglican +Church. But my father only once crossed the street to hear him, and was +then repelled by the mannerism of the preacher. Matthew Arnold +occasionally went, out of admiration, my father used to say, for that +strange Newmanic power of words, which in itself fascinated the young +Balliol poet, who was to produce his first volume of poems two years +after Newman's secession to the Church of Rome. But he was never touched +in the smallest degree by Newman's opinions. He and my father and Arthur +Clough, and a few other kindred spirits, lived indeed in quite another +world of thought. They discovered George Sand, Emerson, and Carlyle, +and orthodox Christianity no longer seemed to them the sure refuge +that it had always been to the strong teacher who trained them as boys. +There are many allusions of many dates in the letters of my father +and uncle to each other, as to their common Oxford passion for George +Sand. _Consuelo_, in particular, was a revelation to the two young +men brought up under the "earnest" influence of Rugby. It seemed to +open to them a world of artistic beauty and joy of which they had +never dreamed; and to loosen the bands of an austere conception of +life, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life. +_Wilhelm Meister_, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time, +exercised a similar liberating and enchanting power upon my father. +The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly, +strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's generous +discontent with an iron world, where the poor suffer too much and +work too hard. And this discontent, when the time came for him to +leave Oxford, assumed a form which startled his friends. + +He had done very well at Oxford, taking his two Firsts with ease, and +was offered a post in the Colonial Office immediately on leaving the +University. But the time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a new +earth, wherein should dwell equality and righteousness. The storm of +1848 was preparing in Europe; the Corn Laws had fallen; the Chartists +were gathering in England. To settle down to the old humdrum round of +Civil Service promotion seemed to my father impossible. This revolt of +his, and its effect upon his friends, of whom the most intimate was +Arthur Clough, has left its mark on Clough's poem, the "Vacation +Pastoral," which he called "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," or, as it +runs in my father's old battered copy which lies before me, +"Tober-na-Fuosich." The Philip of the poem, the dreamer and democrat, +who says to Adam the Tutor-- + + Alas, the noted phrase of the prayer-book + Doing our duty in that state of life to which God has called us, + Seems to me always to mean, when the little rich boys say it, + Standing in velvet frock by Mama's brocaded flounces, + Eying her gold-fastened book, and the chain and watch at her bosom, + Seems to me always to mean, Eat, drink, and never mind others-- + +was in broad outline drawn from my father, and the impression made by +his idealist, enthusiastic youth upon his comrades. And Philip's +migration to the Antipodes at the end--when he + + rounded the sphere to New Zealand, + There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and + his spirit-- + +was certainly suggested by my father's similar step in 1847, the year +before the poem appeared. Only in my father's life there had been as yet +no parallel to the charming love-story of "The Bothie." His love-story +awaited him on the other side of the world. + +At that moment, New Zealand, the land of beautiful mountain and sea, +with its even temperate climate, and its natives whom English enthusiasm +hoped not only to govern, but to civilize and assimilate, was in the +minds of all to whom the colonies seemed to offer chances of social +reconstruction beyond any that were possible in a crowded and decadent +Europe. "Land of Hope," I find it often called in these old letters. +"The gleam" was on it, and my father, like Browning's Waring, heard the +call. + + After it; follow it. Follow the gleam! + +He writes to his mother in August, 1847, from the Colonial Office: + + Every one whom I meet pities me for having to return to London at + this dull season, but to my own feelings, it is not worse than at + other times. The things which would make me loathe the thought of + passing my life or even several years in London, do not depend on + summer or winter. It is the chronic, not the acute ills of London + life which are real ills to me. I meant to have talked to you + again before I left home about New Zealand, but I could not find + a good opportunity. I do not think you will be surprised to hear + that I cannot give up my intention--though you may think me + wrong, you will believe that no cold-heartedness towards home has + assisted me in framing my resolution. Where or how we shall meet + on this side the grave will be arranged for us by a wiser will than + our own. To me, however strange and paradoxical it may sound, + this going to New Zealand is become a work of faith, and I cannot + but go through with it. + +And later on when his plans are settled, he writes in exultation to his +eldest sister: + + The weather is gusty and rainy, but no cheerlessness without can + repress a sort of exuberant buoyancy of spirit which is supplied + to me from within. There is such an indescribable blessedness in + looking forward to a manner of life which the heart and conscience + approve, and which at the same time satisfies the instinct for the + heroic and beautiful. Yet there seems little enough in a homely life + in a New Zealand forest; and indeed there is nothing in the thing + itself, except in so far as it flows from a principle, a faith. + +And he goes on to speak in vague exalted words of the "equality" and +"brotherhood" to which he looks forward in the new land; winding up with +an account of his life in London, its daily work at the Colonial Office, +his walks, the occasional evenings at the opera where he worships Jenny +Lind, his readings and practisings in his lodgings. My poor father! He +little knew what he was giving up, or the real conditions of the life to +which he was going. + +For, though the Philip of "The Bothie" may have "hewed and dug" to good +purpose in New Zealand, success in colonial farming was a wild and +fleeting dream in my father's case. He was born for academic life and a +scholar's pursuits. He had no practical gifts, and knew nothing whatever +of land or farming. He had only courage, youth, sincerity, and a +charming presence which made him friends at sight. His mother, indeed, +with her gentle wisdom, put no obstacles in his way. On the contrary, +she remembered that her husband had felt a keen imaginative interest in +the colonies, and had bought small sections of land near Wellington, +which his second son now proposed to take up and farm. But some of the +old friends of the family felt and expressed consternation. In +particular, Baron Bunsen, then Prussian Ambassador to England, Arnold of +Rugby's dear and faithful friend, wrote a letter of earnest and +affectionate remonstrance to the would-be colonist. Let me quote it, if +only that it may remind me of days long ago, when it was still possible +for a strong and tender friendship to exist between a Prussian and an +Englishman! + +Bunsen points out to "young Tom" that he has only been eight or nine +months in the Colonial Office, not long enough to give it a fair trial; +that the drudgery of his clerkship will soon lead to more interesting +things; that his superiors speak well of him; above all, that he has no +money and no practical experience of farming, and that if he is going to +New Zealand in the hope of building up a purer society, he will soon +find himself bitterly disillusioned. + + Pray, my dear young friend, do not reject the voice of a man of + nearly sixty years, who has made his way through life under much + greater difficulties perhaps than you imagine--who was your father's + dear friend--who feels deeply attached to all that bears the honored + and blessed name of Arnold--who in particular had _your father's + promise_ that he would allow me to offer to _you_, after I had seen + you in 1839, something of that care and friendship he had bestowed + upon Henry [Bunsen's own son]--do not reject the warning voice of + that man, if he entreats you solemnly not to take a _precipitate_ + step. Give yourself time. Try a change of scene. Go for a month + or two to France or Germany. I am sure you wish to satisfy your + friends that you are acting wisely, considerately, in giving up + what you have. + + _Spartam quam nactus es, orna_--was Niebuhr's word to me when once, + about 1825, wearied with diplomatic life, I resolved to throw up my + place and go--not to New Zealand, but to a German University. Let me + say that concluding word to you and believe me, my dear young friend, + + Your sincere and affectionate friend + + BUNSEN. + + P.S.--If you feel disposed to have half an hour's quiet conversation + with me alone, pray come to-day at six o'clock, and then dine with us + quietly at half-past six. I go to-morrow to Windsor Castle for four + days. + +Nothing could have been kinder, nothing more truly felt and meant. But +the young make their own experience, and my father, with the smiling +open look which disarmed opposition, and disguised all the time a +certain stubborn independence of will, characteristic of him through +life, took his own way. He went to New Zealand, and, now that it was +done, the interest and sympathy of all his family and friends followed +him. Let me give here the touching letter which Arthur Stanley, his +father's biographer, wrote to him the night before he left England. + + UNIV. COLL., OXFORD, _Nov. 4, 1847._ + + Farewell!--(if you will let me once again recur to a relation so long + since past away) farewell--my dearest, earliest, best of pupils. I + cannot let you go without asking you to forgive those many annoyances + which I fear I must have unconsciously inflicted upon you in the last + year of your Oxford life--nor without expressing the interest which I + feel, and shall I trust ever feel, beyond all that I can say, in your + future course. You know--or perhaps you hardly can know--how when I + came back to Oxford after the summer of 1842, your presence here was + to me the stay and charm of my life--how the walks--the lectures--the + Sunday evenings with you, filled up the void which had been left in + my interests[1], and endeared to me all the beginnings of my College + labors. That particular feeling, as is natural, has passed away--but + it may still be a pleasure to you to feel in your distant home that + whatever may be my occupations, nothing will more cheer and support + me through them than the belief that in that new world your dear + father's name is in you still loved and honored, and bringing forth + the fruits which he would have delighted to see. + + Farewell, my dear friend. May God in whom you trust be with you. + + Do not trouble yourself to answer this--only take it as the true + expression of one who often thinks how little he has done for you in + comparison with what he would. + + Ever yours, + + A. P. STANLEY. + +[Footnote 1: By the sudden death of Doctor Arnold.] + +But, of course, the inevitable happened. After a few valiant but quite +futile attempts to clear his land with his own hands, or with the random +labor he could find to help him, the young colonist fell back on the +education he had held so cheap in England, and bravely took school-work +wherever in the rising townships of the infant colony he could find it. +Meanwhile his youth, his pluck, and his Oxford distinctions had +attracted the kindly notice of the Governor, Sir George Grey, who +offered him his private secretaryship--one can imagine the twinkle in +the Governor's eye, when he first came across my father building his own +hut on his section outside Wellington! The offer was gratefully refused. +But another year of New Zealand life brought reconsideration. The exile +begins to speak of "loneliness" in his letters home, to realize that it +is "collision" with other kindred minds that "kindles the spark of +thought," and presently, after a striking account of a solitary walk +across unexplored country in New Zealand, he confesses that he is not +sufficient for himself, and that the growth and vigor of the intellect +were, for him, at least, "not compatible with loneliness." + +A few months later, Sir William Denison, the newly appointed Governor of +Van Diemen's Land, hearing that a son of Arnold of Rugby, an Oxford +First Class man, was in New Zealand, wrote to offer my father the task +of organizing primary education in Van Diemen's Land. + +He accepted--yet not, I think, without a sharp sense of defeat at the +hands of Mother Earth!--set sail for Hobart, and took possession of a +post that might easily have led to great things. His father's fame +preceded him, and he was warmly welcomed. The salary was good and the +field free. Within a few months of his landing he was engaged to my +mother. They were married in 1850, and I, their eldest child, was born +in June, 1851. + +And then the unexpected, the amazing thing happened. At the time of +their marriage, and for some time after, my mother, who had been brought +up in a Protestant "scriptural" atmosphere, and had been originally +drawn to the younger "Tom Arnold," partly because he was the son of his +father, as Stanley's _Life_ had now made the headmaster known to the +world, was a good deal troubled by the heretical views of her young +husband. She had some difficulty in getting him to consent to the +baptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the Philip +of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by +Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that +Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate +friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to +become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the +surface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never able +to explain it afterward, even to me, who knew him best of all his +children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself. But he who had +only once crossed the High Street to hear Newman preach, and felt no +interest in the sermon, now, on the other side of the world, surrendered +to Newman's influence. It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to each +other at Oxford; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured for +years the critical and skeptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectly +transformed the Church of England after Newman himself had left it, now, +reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Arnold +himself was no longer there to fight it. A general reaction against the +negations and philosophies of his youth set in for "Philip," as +inevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for Ernest +Renan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole later +life showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But his +speculative Liberalism had carried him so much farther than his father's +had ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps of +it are dim. He was "struck" one Sunday with the "authoritative" tone of +the First Epistle of Peter. Who and what was Peter? What justified such +a tone? At another time he found a _Life of St. Brigit of Sweden_ at a +country inn, when he was on one of his school-inspecting journeys across +the island. And he records a mysterious influence or "voice" from it, as +he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian +bush. Last of all, he "obtained"--from England, no doubt--the _Tracts +for the Times_. And as he went through them, the same documents, and the +same arguments, which had taken Newman to Rome, nine years before, +worked upon his late and distant disciple. But who can explain +"conversion"? Is it not enough to say, as was said of old, "The Holy +Ghost fell on them that believed"? The great "Malignant" had indeed +triumphed. In October, 1854, my father was received at Hobart, Tasmania, +into the Church of Rome; and two years later, after he had reached +England, and written to Newman asking the new Father of the Oratory to +receive him, Newman replied: + + How strange it seems! What a world this is! I knew your father a + little, and I really think I never had any unkind feeling toward him. + I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death + (January, 1842). I was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh + thing against him I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I should + have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it + all up with me. Excuse this. I came here last night, and it is so + marvelous to have your letter this morning. + +So, for the moment, ended one incident in the long bout between two +noble fighters, Arnold and Newman, each worthy of the other's steel. For +my father, indeed, this act of surrender was but the beginning of a long +and troubled history. My poor mother felt as though the earth had +crumbled under her. Her passionate affection for my father endured till +her latest hour, but she never reconciled herself to what he had done. +There was in her an instinctive dread of Catholicism, of which I have +suggested some of the origins--ancestral and historical. It never +abated. Many years afterward, in writing _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, I drew +upon what I remembered of it in describing some traits in Laura +Fountain's inbred, and finally indomitable, resistance to the Catholic +claim upon the will and intellect of men. + +And to this trial in the realm of religious feeling there were added all +the practical difficulties into which my father's action plunged her and +his children. The Tasmanian appointment had to be given up, for the +feeling in the colony was strongly anti-Catholic; and we came home, as I +have described, to a life of struggle, privation, and constant anxiety, +in which my mother suffered not only for herself, but for her children. + +But, after all, there were bright spots. My father and mother were +young; my mother's eager, sympathetic temper brought her many friends; +and for us children, Fox How and its dear inmates opened a second home, +and new joys, which upon myself in particular left impressions never to +be effaced or undone. Let me try and describe that house and garden and +those who lived in it, as they were in 1856. + + + + +CHAPTER II + + +FOX HOW + + +The gray-stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a "how" or rising +ground in the beautiful Westmorland valley leading from Ambleside to +Rydal. The "Doctor" built it as a holiday paradise for himself and his +children, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedrooms +and three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of +Fairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowed +front and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the green +floor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled my +grandfather or his children. What they cared for was the perfect outline +of the mountain wall, the "pensive glooms," hovering in that deep breast +of Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud across +it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. +The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck +with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild +strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a +stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing +like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in +the parts left wild--all these things have made the joy of three +generations. + +Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palace +it appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-ton +sailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, its +mistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touched +with gray, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft brown +eyes had the eager, sympathetic look of her Cornish race. Charlotte +Brontë, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to Miss +Martineau, speaks of her as having been a "very pretty woman," and +credits her and her daughters with "the possession of qualities the most +estimable and endearing." In another letter, however, written to a less +familiar correspondent, to whom Miss Brontë, as the literary lady with a +critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and +more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and +charming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character." +The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and its +slight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which Matthew +Arnold describes the same visit the more amusing. + + At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss Brontë (Jane Eyre); talked to + Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the + Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see + her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a + sheep. I talked to Miss Brontë (past thirty and plain, with expressive + gray eyes, though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education + in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at + half-past nine. + +No one, indeed, would have applied the word "power" to my grandmother, +unless he had known her very well. The general impression was always one +of gentle sweetness and soft dignity. But the phrase, "completeness of +character," happens to sum up very well the impression left by her life +both on kindred and friends. What Miss Brontë exactly meant by it it is +difficult to say. But the widowed mother of nine children, five of them +sons, and all of them possessed of strong wills and quick intelligence, +who was able so to guide their young lives that to her last hour, thirty +years after her husband's death had left her alone with her task, she +possessed their passionate reverence and affection, and that each and +all of them would have acknowledged her as among the dearest and noblest +influences in their lives, can hardly be denied "completeness of +character." Many of her letters lie before me. Each son and daughter, as +he or she went out into the world, received them with the utmost +regularity. They knew that every incident in their lives interested +their mother; and they in their turn were eager to report to her +everything that came to them, happy or unhappy, serious or amusing. And +this relation of the family to their mother only grew and strengthened +with years. As the daughters married, their husbands became so many new +and devoted sons to this gentle, sympathetic, and yet firm-natured +woman. Nor were the daughters-in-law less attached to her, and the +grandchildren who in due time began to haunt Fox How. In my own life I +trace her letters from my earliest childhood, through my life at school, +to my engagement and marriage; and I have never ceased to feel a pang of +disappointment that she died before my children were born. Matthew +Arnold adored her, and wrote to her every week of his life. So did her +other children. William Forster, throughout his busy life in Parliament, +vied with her sons in tender consideration and unfailing loyalty. And +every grandchild thought of a visit to Fox How as not only a joy, but an +honor. Indeed, nothing could have been more "complete," more rounded, +than my grandmother's character and life as they developed through her +eighty-three years. She made no conspicuous intellectual claim, though +her quick intelligence, her wide sympathies, and clear judgment, +combined with something ardent and responsive in her temperament, +attracted and held able men; but her personality was none the less +strong because it was so gently, delicately served by looks and manner. + +Perhaps the "completeness" of my grandmother's character will be best +illustrated by one of her family letters, a letter which may recall to +some readers Stevenson's delightful poem on the mother who sits at home, +watching the fledglings depart from the nest. + + So from the hearth the children flee, + By that almighty hand + Austerely led; so one by sea + Goes forth, and one by land; + Nor aught of all-man's sons escapes from that command. + + * * * * * + + And as the fervent smith of yore + Beat out the glowing blade, + Nor wielded in the front of war + The weapons that he made, + But in the tower at home still plied his ringing trade; + + So like a sword the son shall roam + On nobler missions sent; + And as the smith remained at home + In peaceful turret pent, + So sits the while at home the mother well content. + +The letter was written to my father in New Zealand in the year 1848, as +a family chronicle. The brothers and sisters named in it are Walter, the +youngest of the family, a middy of fourteen, on board ship, and not very +happy in the Navy, which he was ultimately to leave for Durham +University and business; Willy, in the Indian Army, afterward the author +of _Oakfield_, a novel attacking the abuses of Anglo-Indian life, and +the first Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab--commemorated by +his poet brother in "A Southern Night"; Edward, at Oxford; Mary, the +second daughter, who at the age of twenty-two had been left a widow +after a year of married life; and Fan, the youngest daughter of the +flock, who now, in 1917, alone represents them in the gray house under +the fells. The little Westmorland farm described is still exactly as it +was; and has still a Richardson for master, though of a younger +generation. And Rydal Chapel, freed now from the pink cement which +clothed it in those days, and from the high pews familiar to the +children of Fox How, still sends the cheerful voice of its bells through +the valley on Sunday mornings. + +The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubled +year of 1848, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The "painful +interest" with which the writer has read Clough's "Bothie" refers, I +think, to the fact that she has recognized her second son, my father, as +to some extent the hero of the poem. + + Fox How, _Nov. 19, 1848._ + + My Dearest Tom,--... I am always intending to send you something + like a regular journal, but twenty days of the month have now passed + away, and it is not done. Dear Matt, who was with us at the + beginning, and who I think bore a part in our last letters to you, + has returned to his post in London, and I am not without hope of + hearing by to-morrow's post that he has run down to Portsmouth to + see Walter before he sails on a cruise with the Squadron, which I + believe he was to do to-day. But I should think they would hardly + leave Port in such dirty weather, when the wind howls and the rain + pours, and the whole atmosphere is thick and lowering as I suppose + you rarely or never see it in New Zealand. I wish the more that + Matt may get down to Spithead, because the poor little man has been + in a great ferment about leaving his Ship and going into a smaller + one. By the same post I had a letter from him, and from Captain + Daws, who had been astonished and grieved by Walter's coming to him + and telling him he wished to leave the ship. It was evident that + Captain D. was quite distressed about it. + +She then discusses, very shrewdly and quietly, the reasons for her boy's +restlessness, and how best to meet it. The letter goes on: + + Certainly there is great comfort in having him with so true and good + a friend as Captain D. and I could not feel justified in acting + against his counsel. But as he gets to know Walter better, I think + it very likely that he will himself think it better for him to be in + some ship not so likely to stay about in harbor as the _St. Vincent_; + and will judge that with a character like his it might be better for + him to be on some more distant stations. + + I write about all this as coolly as if he were not my own dear + youngest born, the little dear son whom I have so cherished, and who + was almost a nursling still, when the bond which kept us all together + was broken. But I believe I do truly feel that if my beloved sons are + good and worthy of the name they bear, are in fact true, earnest, + Christian men, I have no wish left for them--no selfish longings + after their companionship, which can for a moment be put in + comparison with such joy. Thus it almost seemed strange to me when, + in a letter the other day from Willy to Edward, in reference to + his--E's--future destination--Willy rather urged upon him a home, + domestic life, on _my_ account, as my sons were already so scattered. + As I say, those loving words seemed strange to me; because I have + such an overpowering feeling that the all-in-all to me is that my + sons should be in just that vocation in life most suited to them, + and most bringing out what is highest and best in them; whether it + might be in England, or at the furthest extremity of the world. + + * * * * * + + _November 24, 1848._--I have been unwell for some days, dearest Tom, + and this makes me less active in all my usual employments, but it + shall not, if I can help it, prevent my making some progress in this + letter, which in less than a week may perhaps be on its way to New + Zealand. I have just sent Fan down-stairs, for she nurses her Mother + till I begin to think some change good for her. She has been reading + aloud to me, and now, as the evening advances I have asked some of + them to read to me a long poem by Clough--(the "Bothie") which I + have no doubt will reach you. It does not _look_ attractive to me, + for it is in English Hexameters, which are to me very cumbrous and + uninviting; but probably that may be for some want of knowledge in + my own ear and taste. The poem is addressed to his pupils of last + summer, and in scenery, etc., will have, I suppose, many touches + from his Highland residence; but, in a brief Preface, he says that + the tale itself is altogether fiction. + + * * * * * + + To turn from things domestic to things at large, what a state of + things is this at Berlin! a state of siege declared, and the King at + open issue with his representatives!--from the country districts, + people flocking to give him aid, while the great towns are almost in + revolt. "Always too late" might, I suppose, have been his motto; and + when things have been given with one hand, he has seemed too ready + to withdraw them with the other. But, after all, I must and do + believe that he has noble qualities, so to have won Bunsen's love + and respect. + + + _November 25._--Mary is preparing a long letter, and it will + therefore matter the less if mine is not so long as I intended. I + have not yet quite made up the way I have lost in my late + indisposition, and we have such volumes of letters from dear Willy + to answer, that I believe this folio will be all I can send to you, + my own darling; but you do not dwell in my heart or my thoughts + less fondly. I long inexpressibly to have some definite ideas of + what you are now--after some eight months of residence--doing, + thinking, feeling; what are your occupations in the present, what + your aims and designs for the future. The assurance that it is + your first and heartful desire to please God, my dear son; that + you have struggled to do this and not allowed yourself to shrink + from whatever you felt to be involved in it, this is, and will be + my deepest and dearest comfort, and I pray to Him to guide you + into all truth. But though supported by this assurance, I do not + pretend to say that often and often I do not yearn over you in + my thoughts, and long to bestow upon you in act and word, as + well as in thought, some of that overflowing love which is + cherished for you in your home. + +And here follows a tender mother-word in reference to an early and +unrequited attachment of my father's, the fate of which may possibly +have contributed to the restlessness which sent him beyond the seas. + + But, dear Tom, I believe that though the hoped for flower and fruit + have faded, yet that the plant has been strengthened and + purified.... It would be a grief to me not to believe that you + will yet be most happy in married life; and when you can make to + yourself a home I shall perhaps lose some of my restless longing + to be near you and ministering to your comfort, and sharing in + your life--if I can think of you as cheered and helped by one + who loved you as I did your own beloved father. + + + _Sunday, November 26._--Just a year, my son, since you left England! + But I really must not allow myself to dwell on this, and all the + thoughts it brings with it; for I found last night that the contrast + between the fulness of thought and feeling, and my own powerlessness + to express it weighed on me heavily; and not having yet quite + recovered my usual tone, I could not well bear it. So I will just + try to collect for you a few more home Memoranda, and then have + done.... Our new tenant, James Richardson, is now fairly established + at his farm, and when I went up there and saw the cradle and the + happy childish faces around the table, and the rows of oatmeal cake + hanging up, and the cheerful, active Mother going hither and + thither--now to her Dairy--now guiding the steps of the little one + that followed her about--and all the time preparing things for her + husband's return from his work at night, I could not but feel that + it was a very happy picture of English life. Alas! that there are + not larger districts where it exists! But I hope there is still much + of it; and I feel that while there is an awful undercurrent of + misery and sin--the latter both caused by the first and causing + it--and while, on the surface, there is carelessness, and often + recklessness and hardness and trifling, yet that still, in our + English society, there is, between these two extremes, a strength + of good mixed with baser elements, which must and will, I fully + believe, support us nationally in the troublous times which are + at hand--on which we are actually entered. + + But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to the + Rydal Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the + bells sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens + are white and sparkling in the sun. + + I have a note from Clough.... His poem is as remarkable, I think, + as you would expect, coming from him. Its _power_ quite overcame + my dislike to the measure--so far at least as to make me read it + with great interest--often, though, a painful one. And now I + must end. + +As to Miss Brontë's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternoon +call of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that he +was already the author of "a volume of poems" (_The Poems by A,_ 1849), +remarks that his manner "displeases from its seeming foppery," but +recognizes, nevertheless, in conversation with him, "some genuine +intellectual aspirations"! It was but a few years later that my uncle +paid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters--to Charlotte of +the "expressive gray eyes"--to Emily of the "chainless soul." I often +try to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room: Matthew +Arnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his first +poetic honors thick upon him, looking with a half-critical, +half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau had +brought to call upon his mother; and beside him that small, intrepid +figure, on which the worst storms of life had already beaten, which was +but five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face to +face, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister who +could write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter that +every lover of great prose ought to have by heart-- + + Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will + suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short + conflict.... We are very calm at present, why should we be + otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the + spectacle of the pains of death is gone; the funeral day is + past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the + hard frost and the keen wind. _Emily does not feel them_.-- + +must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she lived +to read "A Southern Night"--that loveliest, surely, of all laments of +brother for brother. + + + + +CHAPTER III + + +THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW + + +Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, afterward Mrs. W.E. +Forster, my godmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, as +one of the noblest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty-one +when her father died, and she had been his chief companion among his +children for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latin +and Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historical +interests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After his +death she was her mother's right hand at Fox How; and her letters to her +brothers--to my father, especially, since he was longest and farthest +away--show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of her +nature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek; she +goes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to translate +some German for that busy woman; she reads Dante beside her mother, when +the rest of the family have gone to bed; she sympathizes passionately +with Mazzini and Garibaldi; and every week she walks over Loughrigg +through fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a night +school at Skelwith. Then the young Quaker manufacturer, William Forster, +appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Her +letters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy and +ardor, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one of +the sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast, +the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving his +sister away--with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists a +delightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some idea +of the excitement roused in the quiet Ambleside valley by Jane Arnold's +engagement to the tall Yorkshireman who came from surroundings so +different from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds had +been brought up. + +Then followed married life at Rawdon near Bradford, with supreme +happiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing, +religious, and social life around the young wife. In 1861 William +Forster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included him +in that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under the +onslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of the +Council, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifles +like the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which William +Forster brought in in 1870 (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies' +Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech), +has been the foundation-stone ever since of English popular education. +It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the bill was largely +influenced by William Forster's wife, and, through her, by the +convictions and beliefs of her father. The compromise by which the +Church schools, with the creeds and the Church catechism, were +preserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their way +as to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the substitution for +them of "simple Bible-teaching," in the schools founded under the new +School Boards, which the bill set up all over England, has +practically--with, of course, modifications--held its ground for nearly +half a century. It was illogical; and the dissenters have never ceased +to resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. But +English life is illogical. It met the real situation; and it would never +have taken the shape it did--in my opinion--but for the ardent beliefs +of the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal and a +devoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley, and Maurice +understood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and had +thereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from the +Quaker body. His respect for her judgment and intellectual power was +only equaled by his devotion to her. And when the last great test of his +own life came, how she stood by him!--through those terrible days of the +Land League struggle, when, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Forster +carried his life in his hand month after month, to be worn out finally +by the double toil of Parliament and Ireland, and to die just before Mr. +Gladstone split the Liberal party in 1886, by the introduction of the +Home Rule Bill, in which Forster would not have followed him. + +I shall, however, have something to say later on in these Reminiscences +about those tragic days. To those who watched Mrs. Forster through them, +and who knew her intimately, she was one of the most interesting figures +of that crowded time. Few people, however, outside the circle of her +kindred, knew her intimately. She was, of course, in the ordinary social +and political world, both before and after her husband's entrance upon +office, and admission to the Cabinet; dining out and receiving at home; +attending Drawing-rooms and public functions; staying at country houses, +and invited to Windsor, like other Ministers' wives, and keenly +interested in all the varying fortunes of Forster's party. But though +she was in that world, she was never truly of it. She moved through it, +yet veiled from it, by that pure, unconscious selflessness which is the +saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strength +is spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one with +their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, +parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, and +court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their +gentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows are +often unaware of their true spiritual rank. + +It is interesting to recall the instinctive sympathy with which a nature +so different from Charlotte Brontë's as that of Arnold's eldest +daughter, met the challenge of the Brontë genius. It would not have been +wonderful--in those days--if the quiet Fox How household, with its +strong religious atmosphere, its daily psalms and lessons, its love for +_The Christian Year_, its belief in "discipline" (how that comes out in +all the letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of _Jane +Eyre_; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof +from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman +to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put +it. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and Harriet +Martineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth--the +literary rank, in fact--of _Jane Eyre_. Not long after her marriage, +Jane Forster with her husband went over to Haworth to see Charlotte +Brontë. My aunt's letter, describing the visit to the dismal parsonage +and church, is given without her name in Mrs. Gaskell's _Life_, and Mr. +Shorter, in reprinting it in the second of his large volumes, does not +seem to be aware of the identity of the writer. + + Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own Jane Eyre [wrote my + godmother]. She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so + quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester + called her; except that all birds are joyous, and that joy can + never have entered that house since it was built. And yet, perhaps, + when that old man (Mr. Brontë) married and took home his bride, + and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even + that desolate graveyard and biting blast could not quench + cheerfulness and hope. Now (i.e. since the deaths of Emily and + Anne) there is something touching in the sight of that little + creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself there + like a spirit; especially when you think that the slight still + frame incloses a force of strong, fiery life, which nothing has + been able to freeze or extinguish. + +This letter was written before my birth and about six years before the +writer of it appeared, as an angel of help, in the dingy dock-side inn, +where we tired travelers had taken shelter on our arrival from the other +side of the world, and where I was first kissed by my godmother. As I +grew up into girlhood, "Aunt K." (K. was the pet name by which Matthew +Arnold always wrote to her) became for me part of the magic of Fox How, +though I saw her, of course, often in her own home also. I felt toward +her a passionate and troubled affection. She was to me "a thing enskied" +and heavenly--for all her quick human interests, and her sweet ways with +those she loved. How could any one be so good!--was often the despairing +reflection of the child who adored her, caught herself in the toils of a +hot temper and a stubborn will; but all the same, to see her enter a +room was joy, and to sit by her the highest privilege. I don't know +whether she could be strictly called beautiful. But to me everything +about her was beautiful--her broad brow, her clear brown eyes and wavy +brown hair, the touch of stately grace with which she moved, the mouth +so responsive and soft, yet, at need, so determined, the hand so +delicate, yet so characteristic. + +She was the eldest of nine. Of her relation to the next of them--her +brother Matthew--there are many indications in the collection of my +uncle's letters, edited by Mr. George Russell. It was to her that +"Resignation" was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks and +talks together; and in a letter to her, the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," +"Others abide our question--thou art free," was first written out. Their +affection for each other, in spite of profound differences of opinion, +only quickened and deepened with time. + + +Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barely +a year's difference of age. The elder was born in December, 1822, and +the younger in November, 1823. They were always warmly attached to each +other, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent--sharply +divergent--they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected. +Both had derived from some remoter ancestry--possibly through their +Cornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and a +Trevenen--elements and qualities which were lacking in the strong +personality of their father. Imagination, "rebellion against fact," +spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the passionate love of +beauty and charm, "ineffectualness" in the practical competitive +life--these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture at +Oxford on "The Study of Celtic Literature," were and are the +characteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributed +between the two brothers. "Unworldliness," "rebellion against fact," +"ineffectualness" in common life, fell rather to my father's share than +my uncle's; though my uncle's "worldliness," of which he was sometimes +accused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imagination +in my father led to a lifelong and mystical preoccupation with religion; +it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. + +There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy, +sensitive look of early youth, when he was the center of a band of +remarkable friends--Clough, Stanley, F.T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett +(Browning's Waring), and others. It is the face--nobly and delicately +cut--of one to whom the successes of the practical, competitive life +could never be of the same importance as those events which take place +in thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. "For ages +and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out +of the Celt's grasp," wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celt +has great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible; +the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of passionate +beginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic and +defiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same natural +tendency, found all that he needed in Catholicism, and specially, I +think, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Mass which keeps +Catholicism alive. + +Matthew Arnold was very different in outward aspect. The face, strong +and rugged, the large mouth, the broad lined brow, and vigorous +coal-black hair, bore no resemblance, except for that fugitive yet +vigorous something which we call "family likeness," to either his father +or mother--still less to the brother so near to him in age. But the +Celtic trace is there, though derived, I have sometimes thought, rather +from an Irish than a Cornish source. Doctor Arnold's mother, Martha +Delafield, according to a genealogy I see no reason to doubt, was partly +of Irish blood; one finds, at any rate, Fitzgeralds and Dillons among +the names of her forebears. And I have seen in Ireland faces belonging +to the "black Celt" type--faces full of power and humor, and softness, +visibly molded out of the good common earth by the nimble spirit within, +which have reminded me of my uncle. Nothing, indeed, at first sight +could have been less romantic or dreamy than his outer aspect. +"Ineffectualness" was not to be thought of in connection with him. He +stood four-square--a courteous, competent man of affairs, an admirable +inspector of schools, a delightful companion, a guest whom everybody +wanted and no one could bind for long; one of the sanest, most +independent, most cheerful and lovable of mortals. Yet his poems show +what was the real inner life and genius of the man; how rich in that +very "emotion," "love of beauty and charm," "rebellion against fact," +"spirituality," "melancholy" which he himself catalogued as the cradle +gifts of the Celt. Crossed, indeed, always, with the Rugby +"earnestness," with that in him which came to him from his father. + +It is curious to watch the growing perception of "Matt's" powers among +the circle of his nearest kin, as it is reflected in these family +letters to the emigrant brother, which reached him across the seas from +1847 to 1856, and now lie under my hand. The _Poems by A._ came out, as +all lovers of English poetry know, in 1849. My grandmother writes to my +father in March of that year, after protesting that she has not much +news to give him: + + But the little volume of Poems!--that is indeed a subject of new and + very great interest. By degrees we hear more of public opinion + concerning them, and I am very much mistaken if their power both in + thought and execution is not more and more felt and acknowledged. I + had a letter from dear Miss Fenwick to-day, whose first impressions + were that they were by _you_, for it seems she had heard of the + volume as much admired, and as by one of the family, and she had + hardly thought it could be by one so moving in the busy haunts of + men as dear Matt.... Matt himself says: "I have learned a good + deal as to what is _practicable_ from the objections of people, + even when I thought them not reasonable, and in some degree they + may determine my course as to publishing; e.g., I had thoughts of + publishing another volume of short poems next spring, and a tragedy + I have long had in my head, the spring after: at present I shall + leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them + when I cannot help it, and try to get on with my Tragedy + ('Merope'), which however will not be a very quick affair. But as + that must be in a regular and usual form, it may perhaps, if it + succeeds, enable me to use meters in short poems which seem proper to + myself; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or + not. But all this is rather vague at present.... I think I am + getting quite indifferent about the book. I have given away the + only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic + people about them are young men of course; but I have heard of one + or two people who found pleasure in 'Resignation,' and poems of + that stamp, which is what I like." + +"The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course." The +sentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The young +poet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make his +bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the +divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of +Time and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the +Greek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world." And if, +"The Strayed Reveller," and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," and +"Resignation," delighted those who were young in 1849, that same +generation, as the years passed over it, instead of outgrowing their +poet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can we +explain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation which +befell my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had assured him by +then--leaving out of count the later development of his influence both +in the field of poetry and elsewhere--his place in the history of +English literature. + +But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, compared +to the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation from +his sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At the +time this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty-three, and already +a widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her young +husband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London, +attending Bedford College, and F.D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, +like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment a fine, +restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some +respects, and much older in others--with worlds hitherto unsuspected in +the quiet home life. She writes: + + I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a + good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I + used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to + make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before. + Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not + think those Poems could be read--quite independently of their + poetical power--without leading one to expect a great deal from + Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from + and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face + with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt + there was so much more of this practical questioning in Matt's + book than I was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a + knowledge of life and conflict which was _strangely like experience_ + if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great + power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book + well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most, perhaps, as + illustrating what I have been speaking of. + +And again, to another member of the family: + + It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the _moral consciousness_ + which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been + prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great + deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something + altogether different from this, something which such a man as + Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt; + but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak + of the impression received from those I understand. Some are + perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which + is surely more poetical than true. + +_Strangely like experience!_ The words are an interesting proof of the +difficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the persons and things +which are nearest to us. The astonishment of the sisters--for the same +feeling is expressed by Mrs. Forster--was very natural. In these early +days, "Matt" often figures in the family letters as the worldling of the +group--the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown to +the Fox How circle, where, under the shadow of the mountains, the +sisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for all +their tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certain +anxiety lest Matt should be "spoiled." As Lord Lansdowne's private +secretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich and +important people, and finds himself, as a rule, much cleverer than they; +above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social and +other success. Already at Oxford "Matt" had been something of an +exquisite--or, as Miss Brontë puts it, a trifle "foppish"; and (in the +manuscript) _Fox How Magazine_, to which all the nine contributed, and +in which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are many +family jests leveled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment. + +But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehow +separated from them by the "great world" passes away from mother and +sisters--forever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, besides +making the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, a +more devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published letters +are there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter of +Mrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the +_Poems by A._ She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to become +William Forster's wife, were at the time in London. "K" had been +seriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time. + + Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we + came up--now so long ago!--and it is pleasant indeed to see his + dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so + unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society + entirely different from anything we can enter into. + +But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by a +run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one +or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, +was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple +kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and +later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, +till after his death--kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful +writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, a +school-boy. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's +"Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, would alone have saved +him from it. And as to his relation to "society," and the great ones in +it, no one more frankly amused himself--within certain very definite +limits--with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightly +to them. He never denied--none but the foolish ever do deny--the immense +personal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, wherever +it exists. He was quite conscious--none but those without imagination +can fail to be conscious--of the glamour of long descent and great +affairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians," the materialized or stupid +holders of power and place, and their "fortified posts"--i.e., the +country houses--just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles; +when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto, +"Choose Equality"; and he and Clough--the Republican--were not really +far apart. He mocked even at Clough, indeed, addressing his letters to +him, "Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford"; but in the midst of the +revolutionary hubbub of 1848 he pours himself out to Clough only--he and +"Thyrsis," to use his own expression in a letter, "agreeing like two +lambs in a world of wolves," and in his early sonnet (1848) "To a +Republican Friend" (who was certainly Clough) he says: + + If sadness at the long heart-wasting show + Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted; + If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow + + The armies of the homeless and unfed-- + If these are yours, if this is what you are, + Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share. + +Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no belief in sudden +radical change, nor in any earthly millennium-- + + Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream, + Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high + Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, + Sparing us narrower margin than we dream. + +On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionary +spectacle of 1848, an unpublished letter written--piquantly +enough!--from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famous +year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the +artist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, +the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies"; then the sudden +clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house," +writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have been +written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and +Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the bookcase, and the +clock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles...has been +given to a local School of Art in Wiltshire! The green lawn remains, but +I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer +come up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies' +[i.e., Lord Lansdowne himself] is still often to be seen in the gravel +court! He was three years old when the letter was written." + +Here, then, is the letter: + + LANSDOWNE HOUSE, _Feb. 8, 1848._ + + MY DEAREST TOM,--...Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus + and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and + the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little + demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture, + Rembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert + resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony + heath sloping to the Baltic--she leaning over her two children + who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical + clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 P.M. On my left two great + windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through + one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp + breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an + English February sometimes brings--so different from a November + mildness. The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is + studded over with crocuses of all colors--growing out of the grass, + for there are no flower-beds; delightful for the large still-faced + white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the + gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and + the neighboring streets, through the open door whereat the civil + porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in + all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by + the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion. + + But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other + lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear: + +"Se...c...ond Edition of the Morning _Herald_--L...a...test news from +Paris:--arrival of the King of the French." + + I have gone out and bought the said portentous _Herald_, and send it + herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race forever + stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform + Banquets [in Paris] last summer?--well!--the diners omitted the + king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile: + the majority and the king grew excited; the Government forbade the + Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words + "_passions aveugles_" to characterize the dispositions of the + Banqueters: and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of + Revolution all over the world. His practice suited his words, or + seemed to suit them, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French + Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add + to this the corruption cases you remember, the Praslin murder, and + later events, which powerfully stimulated the disgust (moral + indignation that People does not feel!) entertained by the lower + against the governing class. + + Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made + most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly + defining the crisis as a question between revolution and + counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the + former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest, + were very damaging on the same side. The Government were harsh-- + abrupt--almost scornful. They would not yield--would not permit + banquets: would give no Reform till they chose. Guizot spoke + (alone in the Chamber, I think) to this effect. With decreasing + Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the + address, amidst furious scenes; opposition members crying that they + were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition + banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22d. + In the week between the close of the debate and this day there was + a profound, uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appall the + rulers. They had the fortifications; all kinds of stores; and + 100,000 troops of the line. To be quite secure, however, they + determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the + doors; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the + Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard, + who sympathized, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then + the Government forbade the meeting altogether--absolutely--and + the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law. + + _So did not the people!_ + + They gathered all over Paris: the National Guard, whom Ministers did + not trust, were not called out: the Line checked and dispersed the + mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again: the + Ministers in a constitutional fright called out the National Guard: + a body of these hard by the Opéra refused to clear the street, they + joined the people. Troops were brought up: the Mob and the National + Guard refused to give them passage down the Rue le Pelletier, which + they occupied: after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on + along the Boulevard. + + This settled the matter! Everywhere the National Guard fraternized + with the people: the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed + the Ministers: he sent for Molé; a shade better: not enough: he + sent for Thiers--a pause; this was several shades better--still + not enough: meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different + posts, with slight bloodshed, increased the excitement: finally + _the King abdicated_ in favor of the Count of Paris, and fled. The + Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber--the people + broke in; too late--not enough:--a republic--an appeal to the + people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu, + England: _a Provisional Government named_. + + You will see how they stand: they have adopted the last measures of + Revolution.--News has just come that the National Guard have declared + against a Republic, and that a collision is inevitable. + + If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper + than the _Herald_ by this mail. + + Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom, + + M. ARNOLD. + +To this let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all +unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been +drawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describing +his election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, in 1857. Here, first +of all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol of +every well-disposed Anglican household: + + I dined last night with a Mr. Grove,[1] a celebrated man of science: + his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The + husband and I agree wonderfully on some points. He is a bad sleeper, + and hardly ever free from headache; he equally dislikes and + disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in + which everybody lives: and he sighs after a paternal despotism + and the calm existence of a Russian or Asiatic. He showed me a + picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine: I am almost inclined + to get it: it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm, + earnest look unlike the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical, + twinkling expression. + +[Footnote 1: Afterward Sir William Grove, F.R.S., author of the famous +essay on "The Correlation of Physical Force."] + +Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if any +one will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet +parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly what Matthew Arnold +meant. + +In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" elder +three children--Jane, Matthew, and my father--married in that year, and +a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How +circle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, his +father's biographer, and his own Oxford tutor, the following reference +to "Matt's" marriage, and to the second series of Poems--containing +"Sohrab and Rustum"--which were published in 1854. "You will have +heard," writes Stanley, "of the great success of Matt's poems. He is in +good heart about them. He is also--I must say so, though perhaps I have +no right to say so--greatly improved by his marriage--retaining all the +genius and nobleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesser +faults pruned and softened down." Matt himself wrote to give news of his +wedding, to describe the bride--Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear and +gracious little lady whom we grandchildren knew and loved as "Aunt Fanny +Lucy"--and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothing +among the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till +1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand: + + I hope you have got my book by this time. What you will like best, I + think, will be the "Scholar Gipsy." I am sure that old Cumner and + Oxford country will stir a chord in you. For the preface I doubt if + you will care, not having much before your eyes the sins and + offenses at which it is directed: the first being that we have + numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of + perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting + a "_bedeutendes Individuum"_--so that their productions are most + unedifying and unsatisfactory. But this is a long story. + + As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less + with them than they did when you left England. Certainly religion is + not, to all appearance at least, losing ground here: but since the great + people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively + unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to + hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up + almost entirely to organizing and educating the Roman Catholics, and is + gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher. + + God bless you, my dearest Tom: I cannot tell you the almost painful + longing I sometimes have to see you once more. + +The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost +immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford. +He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations: + + HAMPTON, _May 16, 1857._ + + MY DEAR TOM,--My thoughts have often turned to you during my canvass + for the Professorship--and they have turned to you more than ever + during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You + alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the + _freest_ and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with + you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and + formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that + unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a + poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the + remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner + hills before they were quite effaced--and as such Clough and + Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am + told, as was perhaps likely from its _couleur locale_. I am hardly + ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering + to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the + interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was + when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away, + and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and + into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered + such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on + Lutterworth road long years ago. + + You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and + hear so little of you, and, alas! _can_ see and hear but so little + of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond + of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's + memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there + is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which + the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among + scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English, + might be stimulating and interesting. + +On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an +amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to +town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic +news of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"--i.e., the +High Church party in Oxford--had put up an opposition candidate, and the +excitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of three +small boys, Tom, Trevenen--_alias_ Budge--and Richard--"Diddy." + + We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about + 4, we got a message from Walrond--"nothing certain is known, but + it is rumored that you are ahead." Then we went to get some toys + for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have + found a more genuine distraction than in selecting wagons for Tom + and Trev, with horses of precisely the same color, not one of which + should have a hair more in his tail than the other--and a musical + cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph + office, and got the following message--"Nothing declared, but you + are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place." ["Eaton Place" was + then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father.] + To Eaton Place we went, and then a little after 6 o'clock we were + joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excitement with + the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him + from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at + Paddington Station.... The income is £130 a year or thereabouts: + the duties consist as far as I can learn in assisting to look over + the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of + founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and + giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the + year. _These lectures I hope to give in English_. + +The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter to +my father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold's +Lectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical work +produced by him during the years of his professorship, became so great a +force in the development of English criticism and English taste, that +the lifelike detail of this letter acquires a kind of historical value. +As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford while my +uncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, the +crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my +own shy pride in him--from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, +bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far +ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held +his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary +England in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of +_Essays in Criticism_, the _Lectures on Celtic Literature_, or _On +Translating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy_ and the rest, were all the time +working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or +antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual +life of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a +stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these +thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people +could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences: + + Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much + pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain. + ... I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me, + also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It + was an immense victory--some 200 more voted than have ever, it is + said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great + lesson to Christ Church, which was rather disposed to imagine it + could carry everything by its great numbers. + + Good-by, my dearest mother.... I have just been up to see the three + dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep.... My + affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for + their kind interest in my success. + +It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age serene +and bright," and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and +rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer. + +So the ten years of approach and attack--in the intellectual +sense--came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success +began. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became a +resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin--the _Stones of Venice_ and +certain chapters in _Modern Painters_--had been my chief intellectual +passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, +as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this +generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read _Essays +in Criticism._ It is not too much to say that the book set for me the +currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of +kinship. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduring +love of France and of French literature, which played the part of +schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a +priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer--if he had not died +so soon after I had really begun to know him--how many debts to him +would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were +never said! + + + + +CHAPTER IV + + +OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW + + +I have now to sketch some other figures in the Fox How circle, together +with a few of the intimate friends who mingled with it frequently, and +very soon became names of power to the Tasmanian child also. + +Let me take first Doctor Arnold's third son, "Uncle Willy"--my father's +junior by some four years. William Delafield Arnold is secure of long +remembrance, one would fain think, if only as the subject of Matthew +Arnold's two memorial poems--"A Southern Night" and "Stanzas from +Carnac." But in truth he had many and strong claims of his own. His +youth was marked by that "restlessness," which is so often spoken of in +the family letters as a family quality and failing. My father's +"restlessness" made him throw up a secure niche in English life, for the +New Zealand adventure. The same temperament in Mary Twining, the young +widow of twenty-two, took her to London, away from the quiet of the +Ambleside valley, and made her an ardent follower of Maurice, Kingsley, +and Carlyle. And in Willy, the third son, it showed itself first in a +revolt against Oxford, while he was still at Christ Church, leading to +his going out to India and joining the Indian Army, at the age of +twenty, only to find the life of an Indian subaltern all but +intolerable, and to plunge for a time at least into fresh schemes of +change. + +Among the early photographs at Fox How there is a particularly fine +daguerreotype of a young officer in uniform, almost a boy, slim and well +proportioned, with piled curly hair, and blue eyes, which in the late +'fifties I knew as "Uncle Willy"; and there were other photographs on +glass of the same young man, where this handsome face appeared again, +grown older--much older--the boyish look replaced by an aspect of rather +grave dignity. In the later pictures he was grouped with children, whom +I knew as my Indian cousins. But him, in the flesh, I had never seen. He +was dead. His wife was dead. On the landing bookcase of Fox How there +was, however, a book in two blue volumes, which I soon realized as a +"novel," called _Oakfield_, which had been written by the handsome young +soldier in the daguerreotype. I tried to read it, but found it was about +things and persons in which I could then take no interest. But its +author remained to me a mysteriously attractive figure; and when the +time came for me to read my Uncle Matthew's poems, "A Southern Night," +describing the death at Gibraltar of this soldier uncle, became a great +favorite with me. I could see it all as Matthew Arnold described it--the +steamer approaching Gibraltar, the landing, and the pale invalid with +the signs on him of that strange thing called "death," which to a child +that "feels its life in every limb" has no real meaning, though the talk +of it may lead vaguely to tears, as that poem often did with me. + +Later on, of course, I read _Oakfield_, and learned to take a more +informed pride in the writer of it. But it was not until a number of +letters written from India by William Arnold to my father in New Zealand +between 1848 and 1855, with a few later ones, came into my possession, +at my father's death, that I really seemed to know this dear vanished +kinsman, though his orphaned children had always been my friends. + +[Illustration: FOX HOW, THE WESTMORELAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS.] + +The letters of 1848 and 1849 read like notes for _Oakfield_. They were +written in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes and +ideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from the +training of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into a +society of boys--the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry--living +for the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without any +restraining public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid the +temptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is, +indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the +references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly +forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the hero +of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and +Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at +home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and +scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after +the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, full +of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and +society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, the +great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes, +changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby +"earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, while +infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in +the story--the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court +martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and +Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah--are told with +force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more +detached and mature in the way of novel-writing. + +But there were few years left to him, "poor gallant boy!"--to quote the +phrase of his poet brother; and within them he was to find his happiness +and his opportunity in love and in public service, not in literature. + +Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the +early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox +How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily +renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and +sea. + + The fact that one learns first in India [he says, bitterly] is the + profound ignorance which exists in England about it. You know how one + hears it spoken of always as a magnificent field for exertion, and + this is true enough in one way, for if a man does emerge at all, he + emerges the more by contrast--he is a triton among minnows. But I + think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young + fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or + Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is + so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and + inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not + strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. + ... One soon observes here how seldom one meets _a happy man_. + + I came out here with three great advantages [he adds]. First, being + twenty instead of seventeen; secondly not having been at Addiscombe; + third, having been at Rugby and Christ Church. This gives me a sort + of position--but still I know the danger is awful--for + constitutionally I believe I am as little able to stand the + peculiar trials of Indian life as anybody. + +And he goes on to say that if ever he feels himself in peril of sinking +to the level of what he loathes--"I will go at once." By coming out to +India he had bound himself to one thing only--"to earn my own bread." +But he is not bound to earn it "as a gentleman." The day may come-- + + when I shall ask for a place on your farm, and if you ask how I am + to get there, you, Tom, are not the person to deny that a man who + is in earnest and capable of forming a resolution can do more + difficult things than getting from India to New Zealand! + +And he winds up with yearning affection toward the elder brother so far +away. + + I think of you very often--our excursion to Keswick and Greta Hall, + our walk over Hardknot and Wrynose, our bathes in the old Allen + Bank bathing-place [Grasmere], our parting in the cab at the corner + of Mount St. One of my pleasantest but most difficult problems is + when and where we shall meet again. + +In another letter, written a year later, the tone is still despondent. +"It is no affectation to say that I feel my life, in one way, cannot now +be a happy one." He feels it his duty for the present to "lie still," as +Keble says, to think, it may be to suffer. "But in my castle-buildings I +often dream of coming to you." He appreciates, more fully than ever +before, Tom's motives in going to New Zealand--the desire that may move +a man to live his own life in a new and freer world. "But when I am +asked, as I often am, why you went, I always grin and let people answer +themselves; for I could not hope to explain without preaching a sermon. +An act of faith and conviction cannot be understood by the light of +worldly motives and interests; and to blow out this light, and bring the +true one, is not the work of a young man with his own darkness to +struggle through; so I grin as aforesaid." "God is teaching us," he +adds--i.e., the different members of the family--"by separation, +absence, and suffering." And he winds up--"Good-by. I never like +finishing a letter to you--it seems like letting you fall back again to +such infinite distance. And you are often very near me, and the thought +of you is often cheery and helpful to me in my own conflict." Even up to +January, 1850, he is still thinking of New Zealand, and signing himself, +"ever, dear Tom, whether I am destined to see you soon, or never again +in this world--Your most truly affectionate brother." + +Alack! the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both took +so hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After two +years in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He had +not only been dreaming of New Zealand; besides his daily routine, he had +been working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, both +John and Henry, had found him out, and realized his quality. It was at +Sir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850 that he met Miss Fanny +Hodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, General +Hodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time the +Indian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly in +love, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to New +Zealand is pitched in quite another key. He still judges Indian life and +Indian government with a very critical eye. "The Alpha and Omega of the +whole evil in Indian Society" is "the regarding India as a rupee-mine, +instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-hunters and +Pension-earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries." And outside +his domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mail +one can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of love +and to the honorable interests of an opening life. + +"To-day, my Thomas [October 2, 1850], I sit, a married man in the Bengal +army, writing to a brother, it may be a married man, in Van Diemen's +Land." (Rumors of Tom's courtship of Julia Sorell had evidently just +reached him.) He goes on to describe his married home at Hoshyarpore, +and his work at Indian languages. He has been reading Carlyle's +_Cromwell_, and marveling at the "rapid rush of thought which seems more +and more to be engrossing people in England!" "In India you will easily +believe that the torpor is still unbroken." (The Mutiny was only seven +short years ahead!) And he is still conscious of the "many weights which +do beset and embitter a man's life in India." But a new stay within, the +reconciliation that love brings about between a man and the world, +upholds him. + +"'To draw homeward to the general life,' which you, and dear Matt +himself, and I, and all of us, are--or at least may be--living, +independent of all the accidents of time and circumstance--this is a +great alleviation." The "_fundamentals"_ are safe. He dwells happily on +the word--"a good word, in which you and I, so separated, as far as +accidents go, it may be for all time, can find great comfort, speaking +as it does of Eternity." One sees what is in his mind--the brother's +"little book of poems" published a year before: + + Yet they, believe me, who await + No gifts from chance, have conquered fate, + They, winning room to see and hear, + And to men's business not too near + Though clouds of individual strife + Draw homeward to the general life. + * * * * * + To the wise, foolish; to the world + Weak;--yet not weak, I might reply, + Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye, + To whom each moment in its race, + Crowd as we will its neutral space, + Is but a quiet watershed + Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed. + +Six months later the younger brother has heard "as a positive fact" of +Tom's marriage, and writes, with affectionate "chaff": + + I wonder whether it has changed you much?--not made a Tory of you, + I'll undertake to say! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all, + Master Tom, it is not the very exact _finale_ which we should have + expected to your Republicanism of the last three or four years, to + find you a respectable married man, holding a permanent appointment! + +Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family news. +What blind judges, sometimes, the most attached brothers are of each +other! + + I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many + thoughts. I own that Matt is one of the very last men in the world + whom I can fancy happily married--or rather happy in matrimony. But + I dare say I reckon without my host, for there was such a "_longum + intervallum"_ between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month + in town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most + entire absence of elder-brotherism on his part, and only the most + kind and thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel + grateful, yet our intercourse was that of man and boy; and though + the difference of years was not so formidable as between "Matthew" + and Wordsworth, yet we were less than they a "pair of Friends," + though a pair of very loving brothers. + +But even in this gay and charming letter one begins to see the shadows +cast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been +"delicate" for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting the +heat. + + The hot weather, old boy, is coming on like a tiger. It is getting + on for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the + punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat, + my brother, very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at + gun-fire, about half-past four A.M. and drive down to the civil + station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our + own corps ... who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account, + write a letter or so, and lie down with _Don Quixote_ under a + punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets me, and + sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my daily + business, such as it is--hard work, believe me, in a hot sleep- + inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and + windows are thrown open ... and mortals go out to "eat the air," as + the natives say. + +The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon an +organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the +secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European +invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with +his wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future War +Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855. +There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young +soldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the +old childish Fox How days, and already shown in _Oakfield_, was becoming +more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the +_Times_, the _Economist_, and _Fraser_, and was presently offered the +editorship of the _Economist_. But just as he was about to accept it, +came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of +Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the +Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife and +two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to +organize the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it so +well during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny broke +out, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub was +never interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and the +young Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whether +the whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and its +Anglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted and +serene. + +To this day, three portrait medals in gold and silver are given every +year to the best pupils in the schools of the Punjaub, the product of a +fund raised immediately after his death by William Arnold's +fellow-workers there, in order to commemorate his short heroic course in +that far land, and to preserve, if they could, some record of that +"sweet stateliness" of aspect, to use the expression of one who loved +him, which "had so fascinated his friends." + +The Mutiny passed. Sir John Lawrence paid public and flattering tribute +to the young official who had so amply justified a great man's choice. +And before the storm had actually died away, within a fortnight of the +fall of Delhi, while it was not yet certain that the troops on their way +would arrive in time to prevent further mischief, my uncle, writing to +my father of the awful days of suspense from the 14th to the 30th of +September, says: + + A more afflicted country than this has been since I returned to it + in November. 1855--afflicted by Dearth--Deluge--Pestilence--far + worse than war, it would be hard to imagine. _In the midst of it + all, the happiness of our domestic life has been almost perfect_. + +With that touching sentence the letters to my father, so far, at least, +as I possess them, come to an end. Alas! In the following year the +gentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in the +Himalayas, and a few months later her husband, ill and heartbroken, sent +his motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by the +overland route. Too late! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on to +Malta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die. From Cairo he had written +to the beloved mother who was waiting for him in that mountain home he +so longed to reach, that he hoped to be able to travel in a fortnight. + + But do not trust to this.... Do not in fact expect me till you hear + that I am in London. I much fear that it may be long before I see + dear, dear Fox How. In London I must have advice, and I feel sure + I shall be ordered to the South of England till the hot weather is + well advanced. I must wait too in London for the darling children. + But once in London, I cannot but think my dearest mother will + manage to see me, and I have even had visions of your making one + of your spring tours, and going with me to Torquay or wherever I + may go.... Plans--plans--plans! They will keep. + +And a few days later: + + As I said before, do not expect me in England till you hear I am + there. Perhaps I was too eager to get home. Assuredly I have been + checked, and I feel as if there were much trouble between me and + home yet.... I see in the papers the death of dear Mrs. + Wordsworth.... + + Ever my beloved mother ... + + Your very loving son, + + W.D. ARNOLD. + +He started for England, but at Gibraltar, a dying man, was carried +ashore. His younger brother, sent out from England in post haste, missed +him by ill chance at Alexandria and Malta, and arrived too late. He was +buried under the shelter of the Rock of Spain and the British flag. His +intimate friend, Meredith Townsend, the joint editor and creator of the +_Spectator_, wrote to the _Times_ shortly after his death: + + William Arnold did not live long enough (he was thirty-one) to gain + his true place in the world, but he had time enough given him to + make himself of importance to a Government like that of Lord + Dalhousie, to mold the education of a great province, and to win + the enduring love of all with whom he ever came in contact. + +It was left, however, for his poet-brother to build upon his early grave +"the living record of his memory." A month after "Willy's" death, "Matt" +was wandering where-- + + beneath me, bright and wide + Lay the low coast of Brittany-- + +with the thought of "Willy" in his mind, as he turns to the sea that +will never now bring the wanderer home. + + O, could he once have reached the air + Freshened by plunging tides, by showers! + Have felt this breath he loved, of fair + Cool northern fields, and grain, and flowers. + + He longed for it--pressed on!--In vain! + At the Straits failed that spirit brave, + The south was parent of his pain, + The south is mistress of his grave. + +Or again, in "A Southern Night"--where he muses on the "two jaded +English," man and wife, who lie, one under the Himalayas, the other +beside "the soft Mediterranean." And his first thought is that for the +"spent ones of a work-day age," such graves are out of keeping. + + In cities should we English lie + Where cries are rising ever new, + And men's incessant stream goes by!-- + * * * * * + Not by those hoary Indian hills, + Not by this gracious Midland sea + Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills + Should our graves be! + +Some Eastern sage pursuing "the pure goal of being"--"He by those Indian +mountains old, might well repose." Crusader, troubadour, or maiden dying +for love-- + + Such by these waters of romance + 'Twas meet to lay! + +And then he turns upon himself. For what is beauty, what wisdom, what +romance if not the tender goodness of women, if not the high soul of +youth? + + Mild o'er her grave, ye mountains, shine! + Gently by his, ye waters, glide! + To that in you which is divine + They were allied. + + * * * * * + +Only a few days after their father's death, the four orphan children of +the William Arnolds arrived at Fox How. They were immediately adopted as +their own by William and Jane Forster, who had no children; and later +they added the name of Forster to that of Arnold. At that moment I was +at school at Ambleside, and I remember well my first meeting with the +Indian children, and how I wondered at their fair skins and golden hair +and frail, ethereal looks. + +By this time Fox How was in truth a second home to me. But I have still +to complete the tale of those who made it so. Edward Penrose, the +Doctor's fourth son, who died in 1878, on the threshold of fifty, was a +handsome, bearded man of winning presence and of many friends. He was at +Balliol, then a Fellow of All Souls, and in Orders. But he first found +his real vocation as an Inspector of Schools in Devon and Cornwall, and +for eighteen years, from 1860 to 1878, through the great changes in +elementary education produced by his brother-in-law's Education Act, he +was the ever-welcome friend of teachers and children all over the wide +and often remote districts of the West country which his work covered. +He had not the gifts of his elder brothers--neither the genius of +Matthew nor the restless energy and initiative of William Delafield, nor +the scholarly and researching tastes of my father; and his later life +was always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness, +and Matthew's humor--the "chaff" between the two brothers was +endless!--and a large allowance of William's charm. His unconscious talk +in his last illness was often of children. He seemed to see them before +him in the country school-rooms, where his coming--the coming of "the +tall gentleman with the kind blue eyes," as an eye-witness describes +him--was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carried +enthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a very +common enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing more +nor less than the cause of _the international intelligence_, and its +sharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been the +Cinderella of politics; this nation apparently does not love to be +taught! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can never +expect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields. +But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward. + +"Aunt Mary," Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my +father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married +again, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate near +Loughborough. Her home--Woodhouse--on the borders of Charnwood Forest, +and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to my +cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house +between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long +summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry +room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the +description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult"; +the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir, +where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful +mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very +graciously over neighbors and tenants--all these are among the lasting +memories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with +each successive Scott heroine,--Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the +White Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after +all, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism, +she raised the Liberal flag--her father's flag--with indomitable +courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her +youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly +delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and +motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul +does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it--a golden and +pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her +clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a +quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the +bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's, +and all her warm and most human personality--they are still vividly +present to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour or +two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that +killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, she +had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a +lot by no means ideal--a home in the depths of the country, among +neighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she +had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she +made something beautiful, and all her own--by sheer goodness, +conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; she +often puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a large +heart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages +beside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, a +peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one of +our best friends. + +Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in +1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and +trees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busy +heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon +engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. +She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people--those +lifelong neighbors who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter, +Frances, "Aunt Fan," I may not speak, because she is still with us in +the old house--alive to every political and intellectual interest of +these darkened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, and +making sunshine still for Arnold's grandchildren and their children's +children. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly +confided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, +and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic as +of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and all +it stands for, so long. + + + + +CHAPTER V + + +THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW + + +It remains for me now to say something of those friends of Fox How and +my father whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmosphere +in which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up. + +Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and my +grandfather were much attached to each other--"old Coleridge," says my +grandfather, "inoculated a little knot of us with the love of +Wordsworth"--though their politics were widely different, and the poet +sometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of the +younger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's _Life_ my grandfather +mentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, on +a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend of +the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, +accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount. +Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and he +broke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold. +The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold's +left stole various alarmed glances at him to see how he was taking it. +He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted, +Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning back +toward Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyes +on the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threw +back his head with a laugh of enjoyment.--"What _beautiful_ English the +old man talks!" + +The poet complained sometimes--as I find from an amusing passage in the +letter to Mr. Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of his +neighbor, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always so +surrounded with children and pupils, "like little dogs" running round +and after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with his +constant friendship to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned by +him during the family absences at Rugby; the round chimneys of the house +are said to be of his design; and it was for Fox How, which still +possesses the MS., that the fine sonnet was written, beginning-- + + Wansfell, this household has a favored lot + Living with liberty on thee to gaze-- + +a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines +that Wordsworth ever wrote. + +It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of +Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between +the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of +Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But +from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here, +for instance, is a passing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in +the Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in a +letter from my grandmother to my father: + + Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear + old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to + draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat + on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well, + he talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of + Coleridge, etc., etc.; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than + he has often done lately. + +But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had +hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless though +gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily on +his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the +unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very +year--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the +late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of _The Reign of +Law_--which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print. +The Rev. J.S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of the +John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later +brought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and +Duchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes +"celebrities," advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's old +tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their +inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but of +Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, +first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of +the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian. + + On Saturday [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after + drove to Rydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, + and a little languid in manner. He became less so as he talked. + ... He talked incessantly, but not generally interestingly.... I + looked at him often and asked myself if that was the man who had + stamped the impress of his own mind so decidedly on a great part + of the literature of his age! He took us to see a waterfall near + his house, and talked and chattered, but said nothing remarkable + or even thoughtful. Yet I could see that all this was only that + we were on the surface, and did not indicate any decay of mental + powers. [Still] we went away with no other impression than the + vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so well-- + and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which + spoke through them. + +On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to +Rydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, and +apparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant." They did not +realize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was +Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never +be forgotten while literature lasts. + +In the evening, however-- + + ... after visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth + good-by, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as + before, seated by the fireside and languid and sleepy in manner. + Again he awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming + in, we rose to go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so + soon, and said he would walk out with us. We went to the mound in + front, and the Duchess then asked if he would repeat some of his own + lines to us. He said he hardly thought he could do that, but that he + would have been glad to read some to us. We stood looking at the + view for some time, when Mrs. Wordsworth came out and asked us back + to the house to take some tea. This was just what we wanted. We sat + for about half an hour at tea, during which I tried to direct the + conversation to interesting subjects--Coleridge, Southey, etc. He + gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His + memory seemed clear and unclouded--his remarks forcible and + decided--with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote. + + When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us. + He said, "Oh dear, that is terrible!" but consented, asking what we + chose. He jumped at "Tintern Abbey" in preference to any part of the + "Excursion." + + He told us he had written "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, taking four days + to compose it; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he + walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol. It was curious to feel + that we were to hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years + before. + + He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low, + clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective + lines, his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervor and + almost passion of delivery which was very striking and beautiful. I + observed that Mrs. Wordsworth was strongly affected during the + reading. The strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to + the person to whom the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural + at the time. "My DEAR, DEAR friend!"--and on the words, "In thy wild + eyes." It was not till after the reading was over that we found out + that the poor paralytic invalid we had seen in the morning was the + _sister_ to whom "Tintern Abbey" was addressed, and her condition, + now, accounted for the fervor with which the old Poet read lines + which reminded him of their better days. But it was melancholy to + think that the vacant gaze we had seen in the morning was from the + "wild eyes" of 1798. + + ... We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in + his reading the source of the inspiration of his poetry, which it + was impossible not to feel was the poetry of the heart. Mrs. + Wordsworth told me it was the first time he had read since his + daughter's death, and that she was thankful to us for having made + him do it, as he was apt to fall into a listless, languid state. We + asked him to come to Inverary. He said he had not courage; as he had + last gone through that country with his daughter, and he feared it + would be too much for him. + +Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the deathday of +Shakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnold +of Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughrigg +which overlooks Rydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a great +poet was near--to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiar +friend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved through +the April day, along the mountainside, under the shadow of death; and, +suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drew +down the blinds; and by the darkened windows they knew that the life of +Wordsworth had gone out. + +Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth +who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her +poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine +years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one +of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little +lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down, +unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys with +the setting sun." My grandmother writes of her--of "her sweet grace and +dignity," and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this +person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley--with a tender +enthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And it +is my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to Rydal +Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs. +Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain +furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can +still recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the +house no common house--that a presence still haunted it. Instinctively +the childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"--and I have always +remembered. + +A few years later I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs. +Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far and +near the neighbors came, very curious, very full of real regret, and a +little awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniture +was arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently came +upon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else--a +store of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by +"James," the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollect +sitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in a +kind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colors and pictures. + +Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, the +tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks. +The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's +great-granddaughter and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My +eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I +arrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me there +on September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many +Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress--the +Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiled +room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in +Wordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own early +recollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let the +account of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words as +she wrote it down for me the following morning. + + RYDAL MOUNT, _September 14, 1911._ + + Last night, my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, + over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way + up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, + over the back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window. + The window, a casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke + quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting + bolt upright in bed, looking toward the window. Very bright + moonlight was shining into the room and I could just see the corner + of Loughrigg out in the distance. My first impression was of bright + moonlight, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight + striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an + old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window. I said to myself, + "That's Wordsworth!" He was sitting with either hand resting on the + arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent, and he seemed + to be looking down straight in front of him with a rapt expression. + He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The moonlight lit + up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed that the + hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something solemn and + beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I looked-- + I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of + ceasing to look, or looking away--the figure disappeared and I + became aware of the empty chair.--I lay back again, and thought for + a moment in a pleased and contented way, "That was Wordsworth." And + almost immediately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my + knowledge, been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke; but I had + been reading Hutton's essay on "Wordsworth's Two Styles" out of + Knight's _Wordsworthiana_, before I fell asleep. + + I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and + stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house. + +Neither the seer of this striking vision--unique in her experience--nor +I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a +supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the +influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. +A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary +record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that +there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence +remains still to be noted--we did not know it till afterward--that the +seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where +Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that very +corner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he +came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, +that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his +poetic youth. + +In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid +which my own childhood was passed I have already said something of my +father's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, a +Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was +about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of +Oriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But +the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up +between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than +that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to +use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not +many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend +of his youth: + + I loved him, oh, so well: and also respected him more profoundly + than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure + soul was without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by + wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of + any sort. As to "Philip," something that he saw in me helped to + suggest the character--that was all. There is much in Philip that is + Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly + was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in + freedom--for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying + experiments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out + to New Zealand; and in the two years before I sailed (December, + 1847) Clough and I were a great deal together. + +It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, John +Campbell Shairp, afterward Principal Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough's +reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents +which had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht, +which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie." One of the half-dozen short +poems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature--_Qui +laborat oral_--was found by my father one morning on the table of his +bachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on a +shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left the +poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough's +letters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle nought +availeth"--another of the half-dozen--written out by him; and the +original copy--_tibi primo confisum_, of the pretty, though unequal +verses, "A London Idyll." The little volume of miscellaneous poems, +called _Ambarvalia,_ and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out +to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his +brother the _Poems by A_. + +Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849--having just received +Matt's volume: + + At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our + volumes go forth together. Otherwise you won't read + mine--_Ambarvalia_, at any rate--at all. Froude also has published a + new book of religious biography, auto or otherwise (_The Nemesis of + Faith_), and therewithal resigns his Fellowship. But the Rector (of + Exeter) talks of not accepting the resignation, but having an + expulsion--fire and fagot fashion. _Quo usque_? + +But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with +affectionate welcome indeed of the _Poems by A_, but with enthusiasm of +the "Bothie." + + It greatly surpasses my expectations! It is on the whole a noble + poem, well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of + promise. With joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, "awakening + like a strong man out of sleep and shaking his invincible locks"; + and if he remains true and works, I think there is nothing too high + or too great to be expected from him. + +"True," and a worker, Clough remained to the last hours of his short +life. But in spite of a happy marriage, the burden and perplexity of +philosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health, +checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the "Bothie," +its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of human +feeling and passion. The "music" of his "rustic flute". + + Kept not for long its happy, country tone; + Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note + Of men contention-tost, of men who groan. + +The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus," "Easter Day," +and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes in +triumph--all humorous joy and animation--to my father, from the Paris of +1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year +later--February 24, 1849: + + To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of + '48, whereof what shall I now say? Put not your trust in republics, + nor in any constitution of man! God be praised for the downfall of + Louis Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last + year's scream of "_À bas Guizot_!" seems to be the sum total. Or are + we to salute the rising sun, with "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ and the green + liveries? President for life I think they'll make him, and then + begin to tire of him. Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the + Pope and crush the renascent Roman Republic, of which Joseph Mazzini + has just been declared a citizen! + +A few months later, the writer--at Rome--"was in at the death" of this +same Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitterness +of soul. + + I saw the French enter [he writes to my father]. Unto this has come + our grand Lib. Eq. and Frat. revolution! And then I went to Naples-- + and home. I am full of admiration for Mazzini.... But on the + whole--"Farewell Politics!" utterly!--What can I do? Study is much + more to the purpose. + +So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough," leaving Oxford +and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, +married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was +remarkable, and will be long read--whether it be poetry or no--by those +who find perennial attraction in the lesser-known ways of literature and +thought, and at last closed his short life at Florence in 1862, at the +age of forty-one, leaving an indelible memory in the hearts of those who +had talked and lived with him. + + To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air, + Wandering with the Great Mother's train divine (And purer or more + subtle soul than thee, I trow the mighty Mother doth not see) Within + a folding of the Apennine, + + Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!-- + +But I remember him, in an English setting, and on the slopes of English +hills. In the year 1858, as a child of seven, I was an inmate of a +little school kept at Ambleside, by Miss Anne Clough, the poet's sister, +afterward the well-known head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and wisest +leader in the cause of women. It was a small day-school for Ambleside +children of all ranks, and I was one of two boarders, spending my +Sundays often at Fox How. I can recall one or two golden days, at long +intervals, when my father came for me, with "Mr. Clough," and the two +old friends, who, after nine years' separation, had recently met again, +walked up the Sweden Bridge lane into the heart of Scandale Fell, while +I, paying no more attention to them than they--after a first ten +minutes--did to me, went wandering and skipping and dreaming by myself. +In those days every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch, +every stretch of silken, flower-sown grass, every bend of the wild +stream, and all its sounds, whether it chattered gently over stony +shallows or leaped full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam-- +were to me the never-ending joys of a "land of pure delight." Should I +find a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew by +heart?--or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the big auricula, or +streaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead? I might quite +safely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took no +account, mercifully, of a child's boots and stockings--male tongues, +besides, being safely busy with books and politics. Was that a dipper, +rising and falling along the stream, or--positively--a fat brown trout +in hiding under that shady bank?--or that a buzzard, hovering overhead. +Such hopes and doubts kept a child's heart and eyes as quick and busy as +the "beck" itself. It was a point of honor with me to get to Sweden +Bridge--a rough crossing for the shepherds and sheep, near the head of +the valley--before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet over +the unprotected edge of its grass-grown arch, blissfully conscious on a +summer day of the warm stretches of golden fell folding in the stream, +the sheep, the hovering hawks, the stony path that wound up and up to +regions beyond the ken of thought; and of myself, queening it there on +the weather-worn keystone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physical +joy of each contented sense--the sun on my cotton dress, the scents from +grass and moss, the marvelous rush of cloud-shadow along the hills, the +brilliant browns and blues in the water, the little white stones on its +tiny beaches, or the purples of the bigger rocks, whether in the stream +or on the mountain-side. How did they come there--those big rocks? I +puzzled my head about them a good deal, especially as my father, in the +walks we had to ourselves, would sometimes try and teach me a little +geology. + +I have used the words "physical joy," because, although such passionate +pleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the sense +of the Greek [Greek: epikouros]) through life, has connected itself, no +doubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic or +religious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the only +conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself indorse the +famous contrast in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," between the "haunting +passion" of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling of +later years when Nature takes an aspect colored by our own moods and +memories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what we +feel about the "bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons, +that "in our life alone doth Nature live." No one can answer for the +changing moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But so +far, I am inclined to think of this quick, intense pleasure in natural +things, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntary +and inbred; independent--often selfishly independent--of the real human +experience. I have been sometimes ashamed--pricked even with self- +contempt--to remember how in the course of some tragic or sorrowful +hours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could not +help observing some change in the clouds, some effect of color in the +garden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me--even for the +moment--intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon as +felt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in my +power to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things-- +colors, forms, scents--when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, +has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and +consciousness seemed suspended--"as though of hemlock one had drunk." +Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly, +as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philosophy. But it +is my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost to +the end. + +The best and noblest people I have known have been, on the whole--except +in first youth--without this correspondence between some constant +pleasure-sense in the mind, and natural beauty. It cannot, therefore, be +anything to be proud of. But it is certainly something to be glad +of--"amid the chances and changes of this mortal life"; it is one of the +joys "in widest commonalty spread"--and that may last longest. It is +therefore surely to be encouraged both in oneself and in children; and +that, although I have often felt that there is something inhuman, or +infrahuman, in it, as though the earth-gods in us all--Pan, or Demeter-- +laid ghostly hands again, for a space, upon the soul and sense that +nobler or sadder faiths have ravished from them. + +In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes another +companion--a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost another +son to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children. How shall +one ever make the later generation understand the charm of Arthur +Stanley? There are many--very many--still living, in whom the sense of +it leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who never +saw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say? +That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich and a member of the old +Cheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley; that he was a Rugby boy and +a devoted pupil of Arnold, whose _Life_ he wrote, so that it stands out +among the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit, +but for its wide and varied influence on feeling and opinion; that he +was an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle of +Liberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newman +and the Tractarian movement; that, as Regius Professor at Oxford, and +Canon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he at +least kept alive--by his power of turning all he knew into image and +color--that great "art" of history which the Dryasdusts so willingly let +die; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of all +the Liberalism in the Church, still the same generous friend and +champion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been? None of +the old "causes" beloved of his youth could ever have said of him, as of +so many others: + + Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in + his coat-- + +He was, no doubt, the friend of kings and princes, and keenly conscious, +always, of things long-descended, with picturesque or heroic +associations. But it was he who invited Colenso to preach in the Abbey, +after his excommunication by the fanatical and now forgotten Bishop of +Cape Town; it was he who brought about that famous Communion of the +Revisers in the Abbey, where the Unitarian received the Sacrament of +Christ's death beside the Wesleyan and the Anglican, and who bore with +unflinching courage the idle tumult which followed; it was he, too, who +first took special pains to open the historical Abbey to working-men, +and to give them an insight into the meaning of its treasures. He was +not a social reformer in the modern sense; that was not his business. +But his unfailing power of seeing and pouncing upon the _interesting_-- +the _dramatic_--in any human lot, soon brought him into relation with +men of callings and types the most different from his own; and for the +rest he fulfilled to perfection that hard duty--"the duty to our +equals"--on which Mr. Jowett once preached a caustic and suggestive +sermon. But for him John Richard Green would have abandoned history, and +student after student, heretic after heretic, found in him the man who +eagerly understood them and chivalrously fought for them. + +And then, what a joy he was to the eye! His small spare figure, +miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory--only that ivory +is not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were the +features of the little Dean; the eager, thin-lipped mouth, varying with +every shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it; the clear +eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and +spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes +all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the +Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and +photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those +at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur," +and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most faithful of friends, +though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, in +later years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed on +a former page, written on the night before my father left England for +New Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, there +is a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, sometimes lacking in +the much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not that +Arthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a worldling in +the ordinary sense. But "the world" asks too much of such men as +Stanley. It heaps all its honors and all its tasks upon them, and +without some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrument +cannot meet the strain. + +Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the George Arthur of _Tom Brown's +Schooldays_ had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But I +should like to believe that some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays had +entered at least into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class, +breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector. +Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or the +picturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with the +humorous or striking things of contemporary life. I remember an amusing +instance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, and a +few days before he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historical +sense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice and +Arnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold's +granddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the wedding +breakfast was quite as much concerned with "graves and worms and +epitaphs" as with things hymeneal. But from "the little Dean" all things +were welcome. + +My personal memory of him goes back to much earlier days. As a child at +Fox How, he roused in me a mingled fascination and terror. To listen to +him quoting Shakspeare or Scott or Macaulay was fascination; to find his +eye fixed on one, and his slender finger darting toward one, as he asked +a sudden historical question--"Where did Edward the First die?"--"Where +was the Black Prince buried?"--was terror, lest, at seven years old, one +should not be able to play up. I remember a particular visit of his to +Fox How, when the dates and places of these royal deaths and burials +kept us--myself in particular--in a perpetual ferment. It must, I think, +have been when he was still at Canterbury, investigating, almost with +the zest and passion of the explorer of Troy or Mycenae, what bones lie +hid, and where, under the Cathedral floor, what sands--"fallen from the +ruined sides of Kings"--that this passion of deaths and dates was upon +him. I can see myself as a child of seven or eight, standing outside the +drawing-room door at Fox How, bracing myself in a mixture of delight and +fear, as to what "Doctor Stanley" might ask me when the door was opened; +then the opening, and the sudden sharp turn of the slight figure, +writing letters at the middle table, at the sight of "little Mary"--and +the expected thunderbolt: + +"_Where did Henry the Fourth die_?" + +Confusion--and blank ignorance! + +But memory leaps forward to a day four or five years later, when my +father and I invaded the dark high room in the old Deanery, and the +little Dean standing at his reading-desk. He looks round--sees "Tom," +and the child with him. His charming face breaks into a broad smile; he +remembers instantly, though it is some years since he and "little Mary" +met. He holds out both his hands to the little girl-- + +"Come and see the place where Henry the Fourth died!" + +And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber. + +CHAPTER VI + +YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD + +I + +How little those who are school-girls of to-day can realize what it was +to be a school-girl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last +century! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped +throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I +first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one. The +games, the gymnastics, the solid grounding in drawing and music, +together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, or +literature and language, which are at the service of the school-girl of +to-day, had not begun to be when I was at school. As far as intellectual +training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were +practically wasted. I learned nothing thoroughly or accurately, and the +German, French, and Latin which I soon discovered after my marriage to +be essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had all to be +relearned before they could be of any real use to me; nor was it ever +possible for me-who married at twenty--to get that firm hold on the +structure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, which +my brother William, only fifteen months my junior, got from his six +years at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. What I +learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact +with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough; +from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me +through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in +Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent +Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or +fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls +then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, +in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may +spend their minds. + +English girls' schools to-day providing the higher education are, so far +as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise +in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last +half-century. They are almost entirely taught by women, and women with +whom, in many cases, education--the shaping of the immature human +creature to noble ends--is the sincerest of passions; who find, indeed, +in the task that same creative joy which belongs to literature or art, +or philanthropic experiment. The schoolmistress to whom money is the +sole or even the chief motive of her work, is, in my experience, rare +to-day, though we have all in our time heard tales of modern "academies" +of the Miss Pinkerton type, brought up to date--fashionable, exclusive, +and luxurious--where, as in some boys' preparatory schools (before the +war!) the more the parents paid, the better they were pleased. But I +have not come across them. The leading boarding-schools in England and +America, at present, no less than the excellent day-schools for girls of +the middle class, with which this country has been covered since 1870, +are genuine products of that Women's Movement, as we vaguely call it, in +the early educational phases of which I myself was much engaged; whereof +the results are now widely apparent, though as yet only half-grown. If +one tracks it back to somewhere near its origins, its superficial +origins, at any rate, one is brought up, I think, as in the case of so +much else, against one leading cause--_railways_! With railways and a +cheap press, in the second third of the nineteenth century, there came +in, as we all know, the break-up of a thousand mental stagnations, +answering to the old physical disabilities and inconveniences. And the +break-up has nowhere had more startling results than in the world of +women, and the training of women for life. We have only to ask ourselves +what the women of Benjamin Constant, or of Beyle, or Balzac, would have +made of the keen school-girl and college girl of the present day, to +feel how vast is the change through which some of us have lived. +Exceptional women, of course, have led much the same kind of lives in +all generations. Mrs. Sidney Webb has gone through a very different sort +of self-education from that of Harriet Martineau; but she has not +thought more widely, and she will hardly influence her world so much as +that stanch fighter of the past. It is the rank and file--the average +woman--for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly. The revelation +of her wide-spread and various capacity that the present war has brought +about is only the suddenly conspicuous result of the liberating forces +set in action by the scientific and mechanical development of the +nineteenth century. It rests still with that world "after the war," to +which we are all looking forward with mingled hope and fear, to +determine the new forms, sociological and political, through which this +capacity, this heightened faculty, must some day organically express +itself. + +In the years when I was at school, however--1858 to 1867--these good +days were only beginning to dawn. Poor teaching, poor school-books, and, +in many cases, indifferent food and much ignorance as to the physical +care of girls--these things were common in my school-time. I loved +nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at +Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and +influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child. +I had few tools and little grounding; and I was much more childish than +I need have been. A few vivid impressions stand out from these years: +the great and to me mysterious figure of Newman haunting the streets of +Edgbaston, where, in 1861, my father became head classical master of the +Oratory School; the news of the murder of Lincoln, coming suddenly into +a quiet garden in a suburb of Birmingham, and an ineffaceable memory of +the pale faces and horror-stricken looks of those discussing it; the +haunting beauty of certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out and +carried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a whole +the books from which they came; my first visit to the House of Commons +in 1863; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summer +beauty of the fells; together with an endless storytelling phase in +which I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they told +stories to me; coupled with many attempts on my part at poetry and +fiction, which make me laugh and blush when I compare them to-day with +similar efforts of my own grandchildren. But on the whole they were +starved and rather unhappy years; through no one's fault. My parents +were very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best he +could. + +With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change. + +It was in July, 1865, while I was still a school-girl, that in the very +middle of the Long Vacation I first saw Oxford. My father, after some +five years as Doctor Newman's colleague at the Oratory School, had then +become the subject of a strong temporary reaction against Catholicism. +He left the Roman Church in 1865, to return to it again, for good, +eleven years later. During the interval he took pupils at Oxford, +produced a very successful _Manual of English Literature,_ edited the +works of Wycliffe for the Clarendon Press, made himself an Anglo-Saxon +scholar, and became one of the most learned editors of the great Rolls +Series. To look at the endless piles of his note-books is to realize how +hard, how incessantly he worked. Historical scholarship was his destined +field; he found his happiness in it through all the troubles of life. +And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its libraries, its stately, +imperishable beauty, was delightful to him. So also, I think, for some +years, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind of +nostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Catholic +haven in 1876, never to wander more. + +But when he first showed me Oxford he was in the ardor of what seemed a +permanent severance from an admitted mistake. I see a deserted Oxford +street, and a hansom coming up it--myself and my father inside it. I was +returning from school, for the holidays. When I had last seen my people, +they were living near Birmingham. I now found them at Oxford, and I +remember the thrill of excitement with which I looked from side to side +as we neared the colleges. For I knew well, even at fourteen, that this +was "no mean city." As we drove up Beaumont Street we saw what was then +"new Balliol" in front of us, and a jutting window. "There lives the +arch-heretic!" said my father. It was a window in Mr. Jowett's rooms. He +was not yet Master of the famous College, but his name was a rallying- +cry, and his personal influence almost at its zenith. At the same time, +he was then rigorously excluded from the University pulpit; it was not +till a year later that even his close friend Dean Stanley ventured to +ask him to preach in Westminster Abbey; and his salary as Greek +Professor, due to him from the revenues of Christ Church, and withheld +from him on theological grounds for years, had only just been wrung--at +last--from the reluctant hands of a governing body which contained Canon +Liddon and Doctor Pusey. + +To my father, on his settlement in Oxford, Jowett had been a kind and +helpful friend; he had a very quick sympathy with my mother; and as I +grew up he became my friend, too, so that as I look back upon my Oxford +years both before and after my marriage, the dear Master--he became +Master in 1870--plays a very marked part in the Oxford scene as I shall +ever remember it. + +It was not, however, till two years later that I left school, and +slipped into the Oxford life as a fish into water. I was sixteen, +beginning to be conscious of all sorts of rising needs and ambitions, +keenly alive to the spell of Oxford and to the good fortune which had +brought me to live in her streets. There was in me, I think, a real +hunger to learn, and a very quick sense of romance in things or people. +But after sixteen, except in music, I had no definite teaching, and +everything I learned came to me from persons--and books--sporadically, +without any general guidance or plan. It was all a great voyage of +discovery, organized mainly by myself, on the advice of a few men and +women very much older, who took an interest in me and were endlessly +kind to the shy and shapeless creature I must have been. + +It was in 1868 or 1869--I think I was seventeen--that I remember my +first sight of a college garden lying cool and shaded between gray +college walls, and on the grass a figure that held me fascinated--a lady +in a green brocade dress, with a belt and chatelaine of Russian silver, +who was playing croquet, then a novelty in Oxford, and seemed to me, as +I watched her, a perfect model of grace and vivacity. A man nearly +thirty years older than herself, whom I knew to be her husband, was +standing near her, and a handful of undergraduates made an amused and +admiring court round the lady. The elderly man--he was then fifty- +three--was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, and the croquet- +player had been his wife about seven years. After the Rector's death in +1884, Mrs. Pattison married Sir Charles Dilke in the very midst of the +divorce proceedings which were to wreck in full stream a brilliant +political career; and she showed him a proud devotion till her death in +1904. None of her early friends who remember her later history can ever +think of the "Frances Pattison" of Oxford days without a strange +stirring of heart. I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married, +and derived an impression from the life lived there that has never left +me. Afterward I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison, who was generally on the +Riviera in the winter; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned, +critical, bitter, fastidious, and "Mrs. Pat," with her gaiety, her +picturesqueness, her impatience of the Oxford solemnities and decorums, +her sharp, restless wit, her determination _not_ to be academic, to hold +on to the greater world of affairs outside--mattered more to me perhaps +than anybody else. They were very good to me, and I was never tired of +going there; though I was much puzzled by their ways, and--while my +Evangelical phase lasted--much scandalized often by the speculative +freedom of the talk I heard. Sometimes my rather uneasy conscience +protested in ways which I think must have amused my hosts, though they +never said a word. They were fond of asking me to come to supper at +Lincoln on Sundays. It was a gay, unceremonious meal, at which Mrs. +Pattison appeared in the kind of gown which at a much later date began +to be called a tea-gown. It was generally white or gray, with various +ornaments and accessories which always seemed to me, accustomed for so +long to the rough-and-tumble of school life, marvels of delicacy and +prettiness; so that I was sharply conscious, on these occasions, of the +graceful figure made by the young mistress of the old house. But some +last stubborn trace in me of the Evangelical view of Sunday declared +that while one might talk--and one _must_ eat!--on Sunday, one mustn't +put on evening dress, or behave as though it were just like a week-day. +So while every one else was in evening dress, I more than once--at +seventeen--came to these Sunday gatherings on a winter evening, +purposely, in a high woolen frock, sternly but uncomfortably conscious +of being sublime--if only one were not ridiculous! The Rector, "Mrs. +Pat," Mr. Bywater, myself, and perhaps a couple of undergraduates--often +a bewildered and silent couple--I see that little vanished company in +the far past so plainly! Three of them are dead--and for me the gray +walls of Lincoln must always be haunted by their ghosts. + +The historian of French painting and French decorative art was already +in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, +sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white +paneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black center, on which both +the French furniture and the living inmates of the room looked their +best. And up-stairs, in "Mrs. Pat's" own working-room, there were +innumerable things that stirred my curiosity--old French drawings and +engravings, masses of foreign books that showed the young and brilliant +owner of the room to be already a scholar, even as her husband counted +scholarship; together with the tools and materials for etching, a +mysterious process in which I was occasionally allowed to lend a hand, +and which, as often as not, during the application of the acid to the +plate, ended in dire misfortune to the etcher's fingers or dress, and in +the helpless laughter of both artist and assistant. + +The Rector himself was an endless study to me--he and his frequent +companion, Ingram Bywater, afterward the distinguished Greek Professor. +To listen to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars in +Paris or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius; as they poured scorn +on Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of Balliol, +which aimed at turning out public officials, as compared with the +researching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to the +Rector the only ideals worth calling academic; or as they flung gibes at +Christ Church, whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerful +Church party of the University--was to watch the doors of new worlds +gradually opening before a girl's questioning intelligence. The Rector +would walk up and down, occasionally taking a book from his crowded +shelves, while Mr. By water and Mrs. Pattison smoked, with the after- +luncheon coffee--and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarity +in England--and sometimes, at a caustic _mot_ of the former's there +would break out the Rector's cackling laugh, which was ugly, no doubt, +but, when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. To +me he was from the beginning the kindest friend. He saw that I came of a +literary stock and had literary ambitions; and he tried to direct me. +"Get to the bottom of something," he would say. "Choose a subject, and +know _everything_ about it!" I eagerly followed his advice, and began to +work at early Spanish in the Bodleian. But I think he was wrong--I +venture to think so!--though, as his half-melancholy, half-satirical +look comes back to me, I realize how easily he would defend himself, if +one could tell him so now. I think I ought to have been told to take a +history examination and learn Latin properly. But if I had, half the +exploring joy of those early years would, no doubt, have been cut away. + +Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumatic +gout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and lonelier +Rector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book-lined sanctum, +and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly. +Presently I married, and his interest in me changed; though our +friendship never lessened, and I shall always remember with emotion my +last sight of him lying, a white and dying man, on his sofa in London-- +the clasp of the wasted hand, the sad, haunting eyes. When his _Memoirs_ +appeared, after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to me +that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable +books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly and more +tenderly than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understood +why in that skeptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anglican +ecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Catholic convert as +Manning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great name +of John Henry Newman with the slightest touch of disrespect. On the +other hand, I once saw him receive a message that some friend brought +him from Newman with an eager look and a start of pleasure. He had been +a follower of Newman's in the Tractarian days, and no one who ever came +near to Newman could afterward lightly speak ill of him. It was Stanley, +and not the Rector, indeed, who said of the famous Oratorian that the +whole course of English religious history might have been different if +Newman had known German. But Pattison might have said it, and if he had +it would have been without the smallest bitterness as the mere +expression of a sober and indisputable truth. Alas!--merely to quote it, +nowadays, carries one back to a Germany before the Flood--a Germany of +small States, a land of scholars and thinkers; a Germany that would +surely have recoiled in horror from any prevision of that deep and +hideous abyss which her descendants, maddened by wealth and success, +were one day to dig between themselves and the rest of Europe. + +One of my clearest memories connected with the Pattisons and Lincoln is +that of meeting George Eliot and Mr. Lewes there, in the spring of 1870, +when I was eighteen. It was at one of the Sunday suppers. George Eliot +sat at the Rector's right hand. I was opposite her; on my left was +George Henry Lewes, to whom I took a prompt and active dislike. He and +Mrs. Pattison kept up a lively conversation in which Mr. Bywater, on the +other side of the table, played full part. George Eliot talked very +little, and I not at all. The Rector was shy or tired, and George Eliot +was in truth entirely occupied in watching or listening to Mrs. Lewes. I +was disappointed that she was so silent, and perhaps her quick eye may +have divined it, for, after supper, as we were going up the interesting +old staircase, made in the thickness of the wall, which led direct from +the dining-room to the drawing-room above, she said to me: "The Rector +tells me that you have been reading a good deal about Spain. Would you +care to hear something of our Spanish journey?"--the journey which had +preceded the appearance of _The Spanish Gypsy,_ then newly published. My +reply is easily imagined. The rest of the party passed through the dimly +lit drawing-room to talk and smoke in the gallery beyond, George Eliot +sat down in the darkness, and I beside her. Then she talked for about +twenty minutes, with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a word +or dropping a sentence, and I realized at last that I was in the +presence of a great writer. Not a great _talker_. It is clear that +George Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to "talk" her books, or +evolve her books from conversation, like Madame de Staël. She was too +self-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughts +for that. But in tête-à-tête, and with time to choose her words, she +could--in monologue, with just enough stimulus from a companion to keep +it going--produce on a listener exactly the impression of some of her +best work. As the low, clear voice flowed on in Mrs. Pattison's drawing- +room, I _saw_ Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of the +old Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that the +description was particularly vivid--in talking of famous places John +Richard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success; +but it was singularly complete and accomplished. When it was done the +effect was there--the effect she had meant to produce. I shut my eyes, +and it all comes back--the darkened room, the long, pallid face, set in +black lace, the evident wish to be kind to a young girl. + +Two more impressions of her let me record. The following day, the +Pattisons took their guests to see the "eights" races from Christ Church +meadow. A young Fellow of Merton, Mandell Creighton, afterward the +beloved and famous Bishop of London, was among those entertaining her on +the barge, and on the way home he took her and Mr. Lewes through Merton +garden. I was of the party, and I remember what a carnival of early +summer it was in that enchanting place. The chestnuts were all out, one +splendor from top to toe; the laburnums; the lilacs; the hawthorns, red +and white; the new-mown grass spreading its smooth and silky carpet +round the college walls; a May sky overhead, and through the trees +glimpses of towers and spires, silver gray, in the sparkling summer +air--the picture was one of those that Oxford throws before the +spectator at every turn, like the careless beauty that knows she has +only to show herself, to move, to breathe, to give delight. George Eliot +stood on the grass, in the bright sun, looking at the flower-laden +chestnuts, at the distant glimpses on all sides, of the surrounding +city, saying little--that she left to Mr. Lewes!--but drinking it in, +storing it in that rich, absorbent mind of hers. And afterward when Mr. +Lewes, Mr. Creighton, she, and I walked back to Lincoln, I remember +another little incident throwing light on the ever-ready instinct of the +novelist. As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln--suddenly, at one +of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far +right-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of +Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes. +It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or +Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college +wall. The pale, pretty head, _blond-cendrée_; the delicate, smiling +features and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white +dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and +patches--Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly +to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She +took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some +day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and that +flower-laden garden would have reappeared. I seemed to see her +consciously and deliberately committing them both to memory. + +But I do not believe that she ever meant to describe the Rector in "Mr. +Casaubon." She was far too good a scholar herself to have perpetrated a +caricature so flagrantly untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, and +could never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitful +and illuminating of English essays, and one of the most brilliant pieces +of European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows +_Middlemarch_. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar +with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a +legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of _Middlemarch_, +while her supposed victim passed it by with amused indifference. + +As to the relation between the Rector and the Squire of _Robert Elsmere_ +which has been often assumed, it was confined, as I have already said +(in the introduction to the library edition of _Robert Elsmere_ +published in 1909), to a likeness in outward aspect--"a few personal +traits, and the two main facts of great learning and a general +impatience of fools." If one could imagine Mark Pattison a landowner, he +would certainly never have neglected his estates, or tolerated an +inefficient agent. + +Only three years intervened between my leaving school and my engagement +to Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. +But those three years seem to me now to have been extraordinarily full. +Lincoln and the Pattisons, Balliol and Mr. Jowett, and the Bodleian +Library, outside the influences and affections of my own home, stand in +the forefront of what memory looks back on as a broad and animated +scene. The great Library, in particular, became to me a living and +inspiring presence. When I think of it as it then was, I am, aware of a +medley of beautiful things--pale sunlight on book-lined walls, or +streaming through old armorial bearings on Tudor windows; spaces and +distances, all books, beneath a painted roof from which gleamed the +motto of the University--_Dominus illuminatio mea_; gowned figures +moving silently about the spaces; the faint scents of old leather and +polished wood; and fusing it all, a stately dignity and benignant charm, +through which the voices of the bells outside, as they struck each +successive quarter from Oxford's many towers, seemed to breathe a +certain eternal reminder of the past and the dead. + +But regions of the Bodleian were open to me then that no ordinary reader +sees now. Mr. Coxe--the well-known, much-loved Bodley's Librarian of +those days--took kindly notice of the girl reader, and very soon, +probably on the recommendation of Mark Pattison, who was a Curator, made +me free of the lower floors, where was the "Spanish room," with its +shelves of seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes in sheepskin or +vellum, with their turned-in edges and leathern strings. Here I might +wander at will, absolutely alone, save for the visit of an occasional +librarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the Spanish +Room one had to pass through the Douce Library, the home of treasures +beyond price; on one side half the precious things of Renaissance +printing, French or Italian or Elizabethan; on the other, stands of +illuminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures and +flower-work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of the room. +That light was to me something tangible and friendly. It seemed to be +the mingled product of all the delicate browns and yellows and golds in +the bindings of the books, of the brass lattice-work that covered them, +and of reflections from the beautiful stone-work of the Schools +Quadrangle outside. It was in these noble surroundings that, with far +too little, I fear, of positive reading, and with much undisciplined +wandering from shelf to shelf and subject to subject, there yet sank +deep into me the sense of history, and of that vast ocean of the +recorded past from which the generations rise and into which they fall +back. And that in itself was a great boon--almost, one might say, a +training, of a kind. + +But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in +the Oxford summer term. + +In _Miss Bretherton_, my earliest novel, and in _Lady Connie_, so far my +latest,[1] will be found, by those who care to look for it, the +reflection of that other life of Oxford, the life which takes its shape, +not from age, but from youth, not from the past which created Oxford, +but from the lively, laughing present which every day renews it. For six +months of the year Oxford is a city of young men, for the most part +between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In my maiden days it was +not also a city of young women, as it is to-day. Women--girls +especially--were comparatively on sufferance. The Heads of Houses were +married; the Professors were mostly married; but married tutors had +scarcely begun to be. Only at two seasons of the year was Oxford invaded +by women--by bevies of maidens who came, in early May and middle June, +to be made much of by their brothers and their brothers' friends, to be +danced with and flirted with, to know the joys of coming back on a +summer night from Nuneham up the long, fragrant reaches of the lower +river, or of "sitting out" in historic gardens where Philip Sidney or +Charles I had passed. + +[Footnote 1: These chapters were written before the appearance of +_Missing_ in the autumn of 1917.] + +At the "eights" and "Commem." the old, old place became a mere +background for pretty dresses and college luncheons and river picnics. +The seniors groaned often, as well they might; for there was little work +done in my day in the summer term. But it is perhaps worth while for any +nation to possess such harmless festivals in so beautiful a setting as +these Oxford gatherings. How many of our national festivals are spoiled +by ugly and sordid things--betting and drink, greed and display! Here, +all there is to see is a competition of boats, manned by England's best +youth, upon a noble river, flowing, in Virgilian phrase, "under ancient +walls"; a city of romance, given up for a few days to the pleasure of +the young, and breathing into that pleasure her own refining, exalting +note; a stately ceremony--the Encaenia--going back to the infancy of +English learning; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic or +classical halls built long ago by the "fathers who begat us." My own +recollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hay-fields, the +dawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, or +the evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that still water, +now, as always, "float double, swan and shadow"--these things I hope +will be with me to the end. To have lived through them is to have tasted +youth and pleasure from a cup as pure, as little alloyed with baser +things, as the high gods allow to mortals. + +Let me recall one more experience before I come to the married life +which began in 1872--my first sight of Taine, the great French +historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of +the Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectures +on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after +the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been +hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine +crossed to England the insurrection of the Commune had broken out, and +while he was actually in Oxford, delivering his six lectures, the +terrible news of the last days of May, the burning of the Tuileries, the +Hôtel de Ville, and the Cour des Comptes, all the savagery of the beaten +revolution, let loose on Paris itself, came crashing, day by day and +hour by hour, like so many horrible explosions in the heavy air of +Europe, still tremulous with the memories and agonies of recent war. + +How well I remember the effect in Oxford!--the newspaper cries in the +streets, the fear each morning as to what new calamities might have +fallen on civilization, the intense fellow-feeling in a community of +students and scholars for the students and scholars of France! + +When M. Taine arrived, he himself bears witness (see his published +Correspondence, Vol. II) that Oxford could not do enough to show her +sympathy with a distinguished Frenchman. He writes from Oxford on May +25th: + + I have no courage for a letter to-day. I have just heard of the + horrors of Paris, the burning of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the + Hôtel de Ville, etc. My heart is wrung. I have energy for nothing. I + cannot go out and see people. I was in the Bodleian when the + Librarian told me this and showed me the newspapers. In presence of + such madness and such disasters, they treat a Frenchman here with a + kind of pitying sympathy. + +Oxford residents, indeed, inside and outside the colleges, crowded the +first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a +France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified +and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, +the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, +made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner +at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published +Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that +I must have confided in him not a little--as to my Bodleian reading, and +the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, +however, that he did his best to draw me--examining the English girl as +a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only +perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there was +too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in +the English _cuisine_. From English cooking--which showed ill in the +Oxford of those days--he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite of +his great literary knowledge of England and English, was his spoken +English clear enough to enable him to grapple with the lodging-house +cook. Professor Max Müller, who had induced him to give the lectures, +and watched over him during his stay, told me that on his first visit to +the historian in his Beaumont Street rooms he found him sitting +bewildered before the strangest of meals. It consisted entirely of a +huge beefsteak, served in the unappetizing, slovenly English way, and--a +large plate of buttered toast. Nothing else. "But I ordered bif-tek and +pott-a-toes!" cried the puzzled historian to his visitor! + +Another guest of the Master's on that night was Mr. Swinburne, and of +him, too, I have a vivid recollection as he sat opposite to me on the +side next the fire, his small lower features and slender neck +overweighted by his thick reddish hair and capacious brow. I could not +think why he seemed so cross and uncomfortable. He was perpetually +beckoning to the waiters; then, when they came, holding peremptory +conversation with them; while I from my side of the table could see them +going away, with a whisper or a shrug to each other, like men asked for +the impossible. At last, with a kind of bound, Swinburne leaped from his +chair and seized a copy of the _Times_ which he seemed to have persuaded +one of the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire behind +him, and very close to him, must indeed have been burning the very +marrow out of a long-suffering poet. And, alack! in that house without a +mistress the small conveniences of life, such as fire-screens, were +often overlooked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale exasperation +Swinburne folded the _Times_ over the back of his chair and sat down +again. Vain was the effort! The room was narrow, the party large, and +the servants, pushing by, had soon dislodged the _Times_. Again and +again did Swinburne in a fury replace it; and was soon reduced to +sitting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly pressed against the chair +and the newspaper, in a concentrated struggle with fate. + +Matthew Arnold was another of the party, and I have a vision of my uncle +standing talking with M. Taine, with whom he then and there made a +lasting friendship. The Frenchman was not, I trust, aware at that moment +of the heresies of the English critic who had ventured only a few years +before to speak of "the exaggerated French estimate of Racine," and even +to indorse the judgment of Joubert--"_Racine est le Virgile des +ignorants"!_ Otherwise M. Taine might have given an even sharper edge +than he actually did to his remarks, in his letters home, on the +critical faculty of the English. "In all that I read and hear," he says +to Madame Taine, "I see nowhere the fine literary sense which means the +gift--or the art--of understanding the souls and passions of the past." +And again, "I have had infinite trouble to-day to make my audience +appreciate some _finesses_ of Racine." There is a note of resigned +exasperation in these comments which reminds me of the passionate +feeling of another French critic--Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve's best +successor--ten years later. _À propos_ of some judgment of Matthew +Arnold--whom Scherer delighted in--on Racine, of the same kind as those +I have already quoted, the French man of letters once broke out to me, +almost with fury, as we walked together at Versailles. But, after all, +was the Oxford which contained Pater, Pattison, and Bywater, which had +nurtured Matthew Arnold and Swinburne--Swinburne with his wonderful +knowledge of the intricacies and subtleties of the French tongue and the +French literature--merely "_solide and positif_," as Taine declares? The +judgment is, I think, a characteristic judgment of that man of +formulas--often so brilliant and often so mistaken--who, in the famous +_History of English Literature_, taught his English readers as much by +his blunders as by his merits. He provoked us into thinking. And what +critic does more? Is not the whole fraternity like so many successive +Penelopes, each unraveling the web of the one before? The point is that +the web should be eternally remade and eternally unraveled. + +II + +I married Mr. Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose +College, on April 6, 1872, the knot being tied by my father's friend, my +grandfather's pupil and biographer, Dean Stanley. For nine years, till +the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the +Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town. They +were years, for both of us, of great happiness and incessant activity. +Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and +1879. We had many friends, all pursuing the same kind of life as +ourselves, and interested in the same kind of things. Nobody under the +rank of a Head of a College, except a very few privileged Professors, +possessed as much as a thousand a year. The average income of the new +race of married tutors was not much more than half that sum. Yet we all +gave dinner-parties and furnished our houses with Morris papers, old +chests and cabinets, and blue pots. The dinner-parties were simple and +short. At our own early efforts of the kind there certainly was not +enough to eat. But we all improved with time; and on the whole I think +we were very fair housekeepers and competent mothers. Most of us were +very anxious to be up-to-date and in the fashion, whether in esthetics, +in housekeeping, or in education. But our fashion was not that of +Belgravia or Mayfair, which, indeed, we scorned! It was the fashion of +the movement which sprang from Morris and Burne-Jones. Liberty stuffs +very plain in line, but elaborately "smocked," were greatly in vogue, +and evening dresses, "cut square," or with "Watteau pleats," were +generally worn, and often in conscious protest against the London "low +dress," which Oxford--young married Oxford--thought both ugly and +"fast." And when we had donned our Liberty gowns we went out to dinner, +the husband walking, the wife in a bath chair, drawn by an ancient +member of an ancient and close fraternity--the "chairmen" of old Oxford. + +Almost immediately opposite to us in the Bradmore Road lived Walter +Pater and his sisters. The exquisiteness of their small house, and the +charm of the three people who lived in it, will never be forgotten by +those who knew them well in those days when by the publication of the +_Studies in the Renaissance_ (1873) their author had just become famous. +I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and +poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also +from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher +and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in the +intellectual sense--as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and +renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford. +The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was a +cry of "Neo-paganism," and various attempts at persecution. The author +of the book was quite unmoved. In those days Walter Pater's mind was +still full of revolutionary ferments which were just as sincere, just as +much himself, as that later hesitating and wistful return toward +Christianity, and Christianity of the Catholic type, which is embodied +in _Marius the Epicurean_, the most beautiful of the spiritual romances +of Europe since the _Confessions_. I can remember a dinner-party at his +house, where a great tumult arose over some abrupt statement of his made +to the High Church wife of a well-known Professor. Pater had been in +some way pressed controversially beyond the point of wisdom, and had +said suddenly that no reasonable person could govern his life by the +opinions or actions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago. The +Professor and his wife--I look back to them both with the warmest +affection--departed hurriedly, in agitation; and the rest of us only +gradually found out what had happened. + +But before we left Oxford in 1881 this attitude of mind had, I think, +greatly changed. Mr. Gosse, in the memoir of Walter Pater contributed to +the Dictionary of National Biography, says that before 1870 he had +gradually relinquished all belief in the Christian religion--and leaves +it there. But the interesting and touching thing to watch was the gentle +and almost imperceptible flowing back of the tide over the sands it had +left bare. It may be said, I think, that he never returned to +Christianity in the orthodox or intellectual sense. But his heart +returned to it. He became once more endlessly interested in it, and +haunted by the "something" in it which he thought inexplicable. A +remembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration and +revolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during the +later 'seventies, I once said to him in tête-à-tête, reckoning +confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of +youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long against +its assailants, especially from the historical and literary camps, and +that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked +rather troubled. + +"I don't think so," he said. Then, with hesitation: "And we don't +altogether agree. You think it's all plain. But I can't. There are such +mysterious things. Take that saying, 'Come unto me, all ye that are +weary and heavy-laden.' How can you explain that? There is a mystery in +it--something supernatural." + +A few years later, I should very likely have replied that the answer of +the modern critic would be, "The words you quote are in all probability +from a lost Wisdom book; there are very close analogies in Proverbs and +in the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and may +represent on the Lord's lips either a quotation or the text of a +discourse. Wisdom is speaking--the Wisdom 'which is justified of her +children.'" But if any one had made such a reply, it would not have +affected the mood in Pater, of which this conversation gave me my first +glimpse, and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisite +passages of _Marius_. Turn to the first time when Marius--under Marcus +Aurelius--is present at a Christian ceremony, and sees, for the first +time, the "wonderful spectacle of those who believed." + + The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel + or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent + had passed away.... They had faced life and were glad, by some + science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly + no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from + beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"--a message of hope ... + already molding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and + here? + +Or again to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death: + + At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily + through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its + height; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of + the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose + to write there. + +_Marius_ was published twelve years after the _Studies in the +Renaissance_, and there is a world between the two books. Some further +light will be thrown on this later phase of Mr. Pater's thought by a +letter he wrote to me in 1885 on my translation of Amiel's _From Journal +Intime_. Here it is rather the middle days of his life that concern me, +and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we were +all young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows and +tutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger, a fact +which naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautiful +little house across the road, with its two dear mistresses, drew me +perpetually, both before and after my marriage. The drawing-room, which +runs the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind, +was "Paterian" in every line and ornament. There were a Morris paper; +spindle-legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and +pots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day were +always foraging, to return, often, with treasures of which the very +memory now stirs a half-amused envy of one's own past self, that had +such chances and lost them; framed embroidery of the most delicate +design and color, the work of Mr. Pater's elder sister; engravings, if I +remember right, from Botticelli, or Luini, or Mantegna; a few mirrors, +and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet conscious +art. I see that room always with the sun in it, touching the polished +surfaces of wood and brass and china, and bringing out its pure, bright +color. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister, +Clara--a personality never to be forgotten by those who loved her. Clara +Pater, whose grave and noble beauty in youth has been preserved in a +drawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed a "rare and dedicated spirit." When I +first knew her she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive, +sympathetic, with a delightful humor and a strong judgment, but without +much positive acquirement. Then after some years she began to learn +Latin and Greek with a view to teaching; and after we left Oxford she +became Vice-President of the new Somerville College for Women. Several +generations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and most +grateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, and +friend. Her point of view, her opinion, had always the crispness, the +savor that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she loved +many, as they loved her. She loved animals, too, as all the household +did. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother and +sisters to a poor little paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save-- +in vain! When, later, I came across in _Marius_ the account of Marcus +Aurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus--"pressed closely to +his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, to +be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress"--I remembered the +absorption of the writer of those lines, and of his sisters, in the +suffering of that poor little creature, long years before. I feel +tolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that past +experience in mind. + +After Walter Pater's death, Clara, with her elder sister, became the +vigilant and joint guardians of their brother's books and fame, till, +four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, in +her brother's words, the "unclouded and receptive soul." + +CHAPTER VII + +BALLIOL AND LINCOLN + +When the Oxford historian of the future comes across the name and +influence of Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol, and Greek +professor, in the mid-current of the nineteenth century, he will not be +without full means of finding out what made that slight figure (whereof +he will be able to study the outward and visible presence in some +excellent portraits, and in many caricatures) so significant and so +representative. The _Life_ of the Master, by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis +Campbell, is to me one of the most interesting biographies of our +generation. It is long--for those who have no Oxford ties, no doubt, too +long; and it is cumbered with the echoes of old controversies, +theological and academic, which have mostly, though by no means wholly, +passed into a dusty limbo. But it is one of the rare attempts that +English biography has seen to paint a man as he really was; and to paint +him not with the sub-malicious strokes of a Purcell, but in love, +although in truth. + +[Illustration: BENJAMIN JOWETT] + +The Master, as he fought his many fights, with his abnormally strong +will and his dominating personality; the Master, as he appeared, on the +one hand, to the upholders of "research," of learning, that is, as an +end in itself apart from teaching, and, on the other, to the High- +Churchmen encamped in Christ Church, to Pusey, Liddon, and all their +clan--pugnacious, formidable, and generally successful--here he is to +the life. This is the Master whose personality could never be forgotten +in any room he chose to enter; who brought restraint rather than ease to +the gatherings of his friends, mainly because, according to his own +account, of a shyness he could never overcome; whose company on a walk +was too often more of a torture than an honor to the undergraduate +selected for it; whose lightest words were feared, quoted, chuckled +over, or resented, like those of no one else. + +Of this Master I have many remembrances. I see, for instance, a drawing- +room full of rather tongue-tied, embarrassed guests, some Oxford +residents, some Londoners; and the Master among them, as a stimulating-- +but disintegrating!--force, of whom every one was uneasily conscious. +The circle was wide, the room bare, and the Balliol arm-chairs were not +placed for conversation. On a high chair against the wall sat a small +boy of ten--we will call him Arthur--oppressed by his surroundings. The +talk languished and dropped. From one side of the large room, the +Master, raising his voice, addressed the small boy on the other side. + +"Well, Arthur, so I hear you've begun Greek. How are you getting on?" + +To the small boy looking round the room it seemed as though twenty awful +grownups were waiting in a dead silence to eat him up. He rushed upon +his answer. + +"I--I'm reading the Anabasis," he said, desperately. + +The false quantity sent a shock through the room. Nobody laughed, out of +sympathy with the boy, who already knew that something dreadful had +happened. The boy's miserable parents, Londoners, who were among the +twenty, wished themselves under the floor. The Master smiled. + +"The Anábasis, Arthur," he said, cheerfully. "You'll get it right next +time." + +And he went across to the boy, evidently feeling for him and wishing to +put him at ease. But after thirty years the boy and his parents still +remember the incident with a shiver. It could not have produced such an +effect except in an atmosphere of tension; and that, alas! too often, +was the atmosphere which surrounded the Master. + +I can remember, too, many proud yet anxious half-hours in the Master's +study--such a privilege, yet such an ordeal!--when, after our migration +to London, we became, at regular intervals, the Master's week-end +visitors. "Come and talk to me a little in my study," the Master would +say, pleasantly. And there in the room where he worked for so many +years, as the interpreter of Greek thought to the English world, one +would take a chair beside the fire, with the Master opposite. I have +described my fireside tête-à-têtes, as a girl, with another head of a +College--the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison. But the Master was a far +more strenuous companion. With him, there were no diversions, none!--no +relief from the breathless adventure of trying to please him and doing +one's best. The Rector once, being a little invalidish, allowed me to +make up the fire, and, after watching the process sharply, said: "Good! +Does it drive _you_ distracted, too, when people put on coals the wrong +way?" An interruption which made for human sympathy! The Master, as far +as I can remember, had no "nerves"; and "nerves" are a bond between +many. But he occasionally had sudden returns upon himself. I remember +once after we had been discussing a religious book which had interested +us both, he abruptly drew himself up, in the full tide of talk, and +said, with a curious impatience, "But one can't be always thinking of +these things!" and changed the subject. + +So much for the Master, the stimulus of whose mere presence was, +according to his biographers, "often painful." But there were at least +two other Masters in the "Mr. Jowett" we reverenced. And they, too, are +fully shown in this biography. The Master who loved his friends and +thought no pains too great to take for them, including the very rare +pains of trying to mend their characters by faithfulness and plain +speaking, whenever he thought they wanted it. The Master, again, whose +sympathies were always with social reform and with the poor, whose +hidden life was full of deeds of kindness and charity, who, in spite of +his difficulties of manner, was loved by all sorts and conditions of +men--and women--in all circles of life, by politicians and great ladies, +by diplomats and scholars and poets, by his secretary and his servants-- +there are many traits of this good man and useful citizen recorded by +his biographers. + +And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimate +friends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in the +Introduction to the _Phoedrus_: "Under the marble exterior of Greek +literature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion," says +the Master. His own was not exactly a marble exterior; but the placid +and yet shrewd cheerfulness of his delicately rounded face, with its +small mouth and chin, its great brow and frame of snowy hair, gave but +little clue to the sensitive and mystical soul within. If ever a man was +_Gottbetrunken_, it was the Master, many of whose meditations and +passing thoughts, withdrawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet +written down--in thirty or forty volumes!--for his own discipline and +remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of +the _Life_, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often, +in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a +mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the +Master's once said to me that he believed "Jowett's inner mind, +especially toward the end of his life, was always in an attitude of +Prayer. One would go and talk to him on University or College business +in his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, slightly and silently, +and know what it meant." The records of him which his death revealed-- +and his closest friends realized it in life--show a man perpetually +conscious of a mysterious and blessed companionship; which is the mark +of the religious man, in all faiths and all churches. Yet this was the +man who, for the High Church party at Oxford, with its headquarters at +Christ Church, under the flag of Doctor Pusey and Canon Liddon, was the +symbol and embodiment of all heresy; whose University salary as Greek +professor, which depended on a Christ Church subsidy, was withheld for +years by the same High-Churchmen, because of their inextinguishable +wrath against the Liberal leader who had contributed so largely to the +test-abolishing legislation of 1870--legislation by which Oxford, in +Liddon's words, was "logically lost to the Church of England." + +Yet no doubt they had their excuses! For this, too, was the man who, in +a city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographer +that "Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put +together!"--who scornfully asks himself in his diary, _à propos_ of the +Bishops' condemnation of _Essays and Reviews_, "What is Truth against an +_esprit de corps_?"--and drops out the quiet dictum, "Half the books +that are published are religious books, and what trash this religious +literature is!" Nor did the Evangelicals escape. The Master's dislike +for many well-known hymns specially dear to that persuasion was never +concealed. "How cocky they are!" he would say, contemptuously. "'When +upward I fly--Quite justified I'--who can repeat a thing like that?" + +How the old war-cries ring again in one's ears as one looks back! Those +who have only known the Oxford of the last twenty years can never, I +think, feel toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies of +the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the +great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by +their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln--the Liberal and +utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship +camp--with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the +growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour-- +they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces still +visibly incarnate, and in marching array. Balliol _versus_ Christ +Church--Jowett _versus_ Pusey and Liddon--while Lincoln despised both, +and the new scientific forces watched and waited--that was how we saw +the field of battle, and the various alarms and excursions it was always +providing. + +But Balliol meant more to me than the Master. Professor Thomas Hill +Green--"Green of Balliol"--was no less representative in our days of the +spiritual and liberating forces of the great college; and the time which +has now elapsed since his death has clearly shown that his philosophic +work and influence hold a lasting and conspicuous place in the history +of nineteenth-century thought. He and his wife became our intimate +friends, and in the Grey of _Robert Elsmere_ I tried to reproduce a few +of those traits--traits of a great thinker and teacher, who was also one +of the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men--which Oxford will +never forget, so long as high culture and noble character are dear to +her. His wife--so his friend and biographer, Lewis Nettleship, tells +us--once compared him to Sir Bors in "The Holy Grail": + + A square-set man and honest; and his eyes, An outdoor sign of all the + wealth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud, But + Heaven had meant it for a sunny one! + +A quotation in which the mingling of a cheerful, practical, humorous +temper, the temper of the active citizen and politician, with the heavy +tasks of philosophic thought, is very happily suggested. As we knew him, +indeed, and before the publication of the _Prolegomena to Ethics_ and +the Introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume had led to his +appointment as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Mr. Green was not +only a leading Balliol tutor, but an energetic Liberal, a member both of +the Oxford Town Council and of various University bodies; a helper in +all the great steps taken for the higher education of women at Oxford, +and keenly attracted by the project of a High School for the town boys +of Oxford--a man, in other words, preoccupied, just as the Master was, +and, for all his philosophic genius, with the need of leading "a useful +life." + +Let me pause to think how much that phrase meant in the mouths of the +best men whom Balliol produced, in the days when I knew Oxford. The +Master, Green, Toynbee--their minds were full, half a century ago, of +the "condition of the people" question, of temperance, housing, wages, +electoral reform; and within the University, and by the help of the +weapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural +allies of the Liberal party which was striving for these things through +politics and Parliament. "Usefulness," "social reform," the bettering of +daily life for the many--these ideas are stamped on all their work and +on all the biographies of them that remain to us. + +And the significance of it is only to be realized when we turn to the +rival group, to Christ Church, and the religious party which that name +stood for. Read the lives of Liddon, of Pusey, or--to go farther back-- +of the great Newman himself. Nobody will question the personal goodness +and charity of any of the three. But how little the leading ideas of +that seething time of social and industrial reform, from the appearance +of _Sybil_ in 1843 to the Education Bill of 1870, mattered either to +Pusey or to Liddon, compared with the date of the Book of Daniel or the +retention of the Athanasian Creed? Newman, at a time when national +drunkenness was an overshadowing terror in the minds of all reformers, +confesses with a pathetic frankness that he had never considered +"whether there were too many public-houses in England or no"; and in all +his religious controversies of the 'thirties and the 'forties, you will +look in vain for any word of industrial or political reform. So also in +the _Life_ of that great rhetorician and beautiful personality, Canon +Liddon, you will scarcely find a single letter that touches on any +question of social betterment. How to safeguard the "principle of +authority," how to uphold the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch, +and of the Book of Daniel, against "infidel" criticism; how to stifle +among the younger High-Churchmen like Mr. (now Bishop) Gore, then head +of the Pusey House, the first advances toward a reasonable freedom of +thought; how to maintain the doctrine of Eternal Punishment against the +protest of the religious consciousness itself--it is on these matters +that Canon Liddon's correspondence turns, it was to them his life was +devoted. + +How vainly! Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in it +the seeds of growth and permanence--the Balliol type, or the Christ +Church type? There are many High-Churchmen, it is true, at the present +day, and many Ritualist Churches. But they are alive to-day, just in so +far as they have learned the lesson of social pity, and the lesson of a +reasonable criticism, from the men whom Pusey and Liddon and half the +bishops condemned and persecuted in the middle years of the nineteenth +century. + +When we were living in Oxford, however, this was not exactly the point +of view from which the great figure of Liddon presented itself, to us of +the Liberal camp. We were constantly aware of him, no doubt, as the +rival figure to the Master of Balliol, as the arch wire-puller and +ecclesiastical intriguer in University affairs, leading the Church +forces with a more than Roman astuteness. But his great mark was made, +of course, by his preaching, and that not so much by the things said as +by the man saying them. Who now would go to Liddon's famous Bamptons, +for all their learning, for a still valid defense of the orthodox +doctrine of the Incarnation? Those wonderful paragraphs of subtle +argumentation from which the great preacher emerged, as triumphantly as +Mr. Gladstone from a Gladstonian sentence in a House of Commons debate-- +what remains of them? Liddon wrote of Stanley that he--Stanley--was +"more entirely destitute of the logical faculty" than any educated man +he knew. In a sense it was true. But Stanley, if he had been aware of +the criticism, might have replied that, if he lacked logic, Liddon +lacked something much more vital--i.e., the sense of history--and of the +relative value of testimony! + +Newman, Pusey, Liddon--all three, great schoolmen, arguing from an +accepted brief; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intense +but futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric-- +history, with its patient burrowings, has surely undermined the work of +all three, sparing only that element in the work of one of them-- +Newman--which is the preserving salt of all literature--i.e., the magic +of personality. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have been +their own spiritual children. As was fitting! For the Tractarian +movement, with its appeal to the primitive Church, was in truth, and +quite unconsciously, one of the agencies in a great process of +historical inquiry which is still going on, and of which the end is not +yet. + +But to me, in my twenties, these great names were not merely names or +symbols, as they are to the men and women of the present generation. +Newman I had seen in my childhood, walking about the streets of +Edgbaston, and had shrunk from him in a dumb, childish resentment as +from some one whom I understood to be the author of our family +misfortunes. In those days, as I have already recalled in an earlier +chapter, the daughters of a "mixed marriage" were brought up in the +mother's faith, and the sons in the father's. I, therefore, as a +schoolgirl under Evangelical influence, was not allowed to make friends +with any of my father's Catholic colleagues. Then, in 1880, twenty years +later, Newman came to Oxford, and on Trinity Monday there was a great +gathering at Trinity College, where the Cardinal in his red, a blanched +and spiritual presence, received the homage of a new generation who saw +in him a great soul and a great master of English, and cared little or +nothing for the controversies in which he had spent his prime. As my +turn came to shake hands, I recalled my father to him and the Edgbaston +days. His face lit up--almost mischievously. "Are you the little girl I +remember seeing sometimes--in the distance?" he said to me, with a smile +and a look that only he and I understood. + +On the Sunday preceding that gathering I went to hear his last sermon in +the city he had loved so well, preached at the new Jesuit church in the +suburbs; while little more than a mile away, Bidding Prayer and sermon +were going on as usual in the University Church where in his youth, week +by week, he had so deeply stirred the hearts and consciences of men. The +sermon in St. Aloysius's was preached with great difficulty, and was +almost incoherent from the physical weakness of the speaker. Yet who +that was present on that Sunday will ever forget the great ghost that +fronted them, the faltering accents, the words from which the life-blood +had departed, yet not the charm? + +Then--Pusey! There comes back to me a bowed and uncouth figure, whom one +used to see both in the Cathedral procession on a Sunday, and--rarely-- +in the University pulpit. One sermon on Darwinism, which was preached, +if I remember right, in the early 'seventies, remains with me, as the +appearance of some modern Elijah, returning after long silence and exile +to protest against an unbelieving world. Sara Coleridge had years before +described Pusey in the pulpit with a few vivid strokes. + + He has not one of the graces of oratory [she says]. His discourse is + generally a rhapsody describing with infinite repetition the + wickedness of sin, the worthlessness of earth, and the blessedness + of Heaven. He is as still as a statue all the time he is uttering + it, looks as white as a sheet, and is as monotonous in delivery as + possible. + +Nevertheless, Pusey wielded a spell which is worth much oratory--the +spell of a soul dwelling spiritually on the heights; and a prophet, +moreover, may be as monotonous or as incoherent as he pleases, while the +world is still in tune with his message. But in the 'seventies, Oxford, +at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey's message, and the effect of +the veteran leader, trying to come to terms with Darwinism, struggling, +that is, with new and stubborn forces he had no further power to bind, +was tragic, or pathetic, as such things must always be. New Puseys arise +in every century. The "sons of authority" will never perish out of the +earth. But the language changes and the argument changes; and perhaps +there are none more secretly impatient with the old prophet than those +younger spirits of his own kind who are already stepping into his shoes. + +Far different was the effect of Liddon, in those days, upon us younger +folk! The grace and charm of Liddon's personal presence were as valuable +to his party in the 'seventies as that of Dean Stanley had been to +Liberalism at an earlier stage. There was indeed much in common between +the aspect and manner of the two men, though no likeness, in the strict +sense, whatever. But the exquisite delicacy of feature, the brightness +of eye, the sensitive play of expression, were alike in both. Saint +Simon says of Fenelon: + + He was well made, pale, with eyes that showered intelligence and + fire--and with a physiognomy that no one who had seen it once could + forget. It had both gravity and polish, seriousness and gaiety; it + spoke equally of the scholar, the bishop, and the _grand seigneur_, + and the final impression was one of intelligence, subtlety, grace, + charm; above all, of dignity. One had to tear oneself from looking + at him. + +Many of those who knew Liddon best could, I think, have adapted this +language to him; and there is much in it that fitted Arthur Stanley. + +But the love and gift for managing men was of course a secondary thing +in the case of our great preacher. The University politics of Liddon and +his followers are dead and gone; and as I have ventured to think, the +intellectual force of Liddon's thoughts and arguments, as they are +presented to us now on the printed page, is also a thing of the past. +But the vision of the preacher in those who saw it is imperishable. The +scene in St. Paul's has been often described, by none better than by +Doctor Liddon's colleague, Canon Scott Holland. But the Oxford scene, +with all its Old World setting, was more touching, more interesting. As +I think of it, I seem to be looking out from those dark seats under the +undergraduates' gallery--where sat the wives of the Masters of Arts--at +the crowded church, as it waited for the preacher. First came the stir +of the procession; the long line of Heads of Houses, in their scarlet +robes as Doctors of Divinity--all but the two heretics, Pattison and +Jowett, who walked in their plain black, and warmed my heart always +thereby! And then the Vice-Chancellor, with the "pokers" and the +preacher. All eyes were fixed on the slender, willowy figure, and the +dark head touched with silver. The bow to the Vice-Chancellor as they +parted at the foot of the pulpit stairs, the mounting of the pulpit, the +quiet look out over the Church, the Bidding Prayer, the voice--it was +all part of an incomparable performance which cannot be paralleled to- +day. + +The voice was high and penetrating, without much variety, as I remember +it; but of beautiful quality, and at times wonderfully moving. And what +was still more appealing was the evident strain upon the speaker of his +message. It wore him out visibly as he delivered it. He came down from +the pulpit white and shaken, dripping with perspiration. Virtue had gone +out of him. Yet his effort had never for a moment weakened his perfect +self-control, the flow and finish of the long sentences, or the subtle +interconnection of the whole! One Sunday I remember in particular. +Oxford had been saddened the day before by the somewhat sudden death of +a woman whom everybody loved and respected--Mrs. Acland, the wife of the +well-known doctor and professor. And Liddon, with a wonderfully happy +instinct, had added to his sermon a paragraph dealing with Mrs. Acland's +death, which held us all spellbound till the beautiful words died into +silence. It was done with a fastidious literary taste that is rather +French than English; and yet it came from the very heart of the speaker. +Looking back through my many memories of Doctor Liddon as a preacher, +that tribute to a noble woman in death remains with me as the finest and +most lasting of them all. + +CHAPTER VIII + +EARLY MARRIED LIFE + +How many other figures in that vanished Oxford world I should like to +draw!--Mandell or "Max" Creighton, our lifelong friend, then just +married to the wife who was his best comrade while he lived, and since +his death has made herself an independent force in English life. I first +remember the future Bishop of London when I was fifteen, and he was +reading history with my father on a Devonshire reading-party. The tall, +slight figure in blue serge, the red-gold hair, the spectacles, the keen +features and quiet, commanding eye--I see them first against a +background of rocks on the Lynton shore. Then again, a few years later, +in his beautiful Merton rooms, with the vine tendrils curling round the +windows, the Morris paper, and the blue willow-pattern plates upon it, +that he was surely the first to collect in Oxford. A luncheon-party +returns upon me--in Brasenose--where the brilliant Merton Fellow and +tutor, already a power in Oxford, first met his future wife; afterward, +their earliest married home in Oxford so near to ours, in the new region +of the Parks; then the Vicarage on the Northumberland coast where +Creighton wrestled with the north-country folk, with their virtues and +their vices, drinking deep draughts thereby from the sources of human +nature; where he read and wrote history, preparing for his _magnum +opus_, the history of the Renaissance Popes; where he entertained his +friends, brought up his children, and took mighty walks--always the same +restless, energetic, practical, pondering spirit, his mind set upon the +Kingdom of God, and convinced that in and through the English Church a +man might strive for the Kingdom as faithfully and honestly as anywhere +else. The intellectual doubts and misgivings on the subject of taking +orders, so common in the Oxford of his day, Creighton had never felt. +His life had ripened to a rich maturity without, apparently, any of +those fundamental conflicts which had scarred the lives of other men. + +The fact set him in strong contrast with another historian who was also +our intimate friend--John Richard Green. When I first knew him, during +my engagement to my husband, and seven years before the _Short History_ +was published, he had just practically--though not formally--given up +his orders. He had been originally curate to my husband's father, who +held a London living, and the bond between him and his Vicar's family +was singularly close and affectionate. After the death of the dear +mother of the flock, a saintly and tender spirit, to whom Mr. Green was +much attached, he remained the faithful friend of all her children. How +much I had heard of him before I saw him! The expectation of our first +meeting filled me with trepidation. Should I be admitted, too, into that +large and generous heart? Would he "pass" the girl who had dared to be +his "boy's" fiancée? But after ten minutes all was well, and he was my +friend no less than my husband's, to the last hour of his fruitful, +suffering life. + +And how much it meant, his friendship! It became plain very soon after +our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership. My first +published story, written when I was eighteen, had appeared in the +_Churchman's Magazine_ in 1870, and an article on the "Poema del Cid," +the first-fruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in +_Macmillan_ early in 1872. My husband was already writing in the +_Saturday Review_ and other quarters, and had won his literary spurs as +one of the three authors of that _jeu d'esprit_ of no small fame in its +day, the _Oxford Spectator_. Our three children arrived in 1874, 1876, +and 1879, and all the time I was reading, listening, talking, and +beginning to write in earnest--mostly for the _Saturday Review_. +"J.R.G.," as we loved to call him, took up my efforts with the warmest +encouragement, tempered, indeed, by constant fears that I should become +a hopeless bookworm and dryasdust, yielding day after day to the mere +luxury of reading, and putting nothing into shape! + +Against this supposed tendency in me he railed perpetually. "Any one can +read!" he would say; "anybody of decent wits can accumulate notes and +references; the difficulty is to _write_--to make something!" And later +on, when I was deep in Spanish chronicles and thinking vaguely of a +History of Spain--early Spain, at any rate--he wrote, almost +impatiently: "_Begin_--and begin your _book_. Don't do 'studies' and +that sort of thing--one's book teaches one everything as one writes it." +I was reminded of that letter years later when I came across, in +_Amiel's Journal_, a passage almost to the same effect: "It is by +writing that one learns--it is by pumping that one draws water into +one's well." But in J.R.G.'s case the advice he gave his friend was +carried out by himself through every hour of his short, concentrated +life. "He died learning," as the inscription on his grave testifies; but +he also died _making_. In other words, the shaping, creative instinct +wrestled in him with the powers of death through long years, and never +deserted him to the very end. Who that has ever known the passion of the +writer and the student can read without tears the record of his last +months? He was already doomed when I first saw him in 1871, for signs of +tuberculosis had been discovered in 1869, and all through the 'seventies +and till he died, in 1883, while he was writing the _Short History_, the +expanded Library Edition in four volumes, and the two brilliant +monographs on _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, the +last of which was put together from his notes, and finished by his +devoted wife and secretary after his death, he was fighting for his +life, in order that he might finish his work. He was a dying man from +January, 1881, but he finished and published _The Making of England_ in +1882, and began _The Conquest of England_. On February 25th, ten days +before his death, his wife told him that the end was near. He thought a +little, and said that he had still something to say in his book "which +is worth saying. I will make a fight for it. I will do what I can, and I +must have sleeping-draughts for a week. After that it will not matter if +they lose their effect." He worked on a little longer---but on March 7th +all was over. My husband had gone out to see him in February, and came +home marveling at the miracle of such life in death. + +I have spoken of the wonderful stimulus and encouragement he could give +to the young student. But he was no flatterer. No one could strike +harder or swifter than he, when he chose. + +It was to me--in his eager friendship for "Humphry's" young wife--he +first intrusted the task of that primer of English literature which +afterward Mr. Stopford Brooke carried out with such astonishing success. +But I was far too young for such a piece of work, and knew far too +little. I wrote a beginning, however, and took it up to him when he was +in rooms in Beaumont Street. He was entirely dissatisfied with it, and +as gently and kindly as possible told me it wouldn't do and that I must +give it up.[1] Then throwing it aside, he began to walk up and down his +room, sketching out how such a general outline of English literature +might be written and should be written. I sat by enchanted, all my +natural disappointment charmed away. The knowledge, the enthusiasm, the +_shaping_ power of the frail human being moving there before me--with +the slight, emaciated figure, the great brow, the bright eyes; all the +physical presence instinct, aflame, with the intellectual and poetic +passion which grew upon him as he traced the mighty stream of England's +thought and song--it was an experience never forgotten, one of those by +which mind teaches mind, and the endless succession is carried on. + +[Footnote 1: Since writing these lines, I have been amused to discover +the following reference in the brilliant biography of Stopford Brooke, +by his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, to my unlucky attempt. "The only +advantage," says Mr. Brooke in his diary for May 8, 1899, "the older +writer has over the younger is that he knows what to leave out and has a +juster sense of proportion. I remember that when Green wanted the Primer +of English Literature to be done, Mrs. ---- asked if she might try her +hand at it. He said 'Yes,' and she set to work. She took a fancy to +_Beowulf_, and wrote twenty pages on it! At this rate the book would +have run to more than a thousand pages."] + +There is another memory from the early time, which comes back to me--of +J.R.G. in Notre Dame. We were on our honeymoon journey, and we came +across him in Paris. We went together to Notre Dame, and there, as we +all lingered at the western end, looking up to the gleaming color of the +distant apse, the spirit came upon him. He began to describe what the +Church had seen, coming down through the generations, from vision to +vision. He spoke in a low voice, but without a pause or break, standing +in deep shadow close to the western door. One scarcely saw him, and I +almost lost the sense of his individuality. It seemed to be the very +voice of History--Life telling of itself. + +Liberty and the passion for liberty were the very breath of his being. +In 1871, just after the Commune, I wrote him a cry of pity and horror +about the execution of Rossel, the "heroic young Protestant who had +fought the Versaillais because they had made peace, and prevented him +from fighting the Prussians." J.R.G. replied that the only defense of a +man who fought for the Commune was that he believed in it, while Rossel, +by his own statement, did not. + + People like old Delescluze are more to my mind, men who believe, + rightly or wrongly (in the ideas of '93), and cling to their faith + through thirteen years of the hulks and of Cayenne, who get their + chance at last, fight, work, and then when all is over know how to + die--as Delescluze, with that gray head bared and the old threadbare + coat thrown open, walked quietly and without a word up to the fatal + barricade. + +His place in the ranks of history is high and safe. That was abundantly +shown by the testimony of the large gathering of English scholars and +historians at the memorial meeting held in his own college some years +ago. He remains as one of the leaders of that school (there is, of +course, another and a strong one!) which holds that without imagination +and personality a man had better not write history at all; since no +recreation of the past is really possible without the kindling and +welding force that a man draws from his own spirit. + +But it is as a friend that I desire--with undying love and gratitude--to +commemorate him here. To my husband, to all the motherless family he had +taken to his heart, he was affection and constancy itself. And as for +me, just before the last visit that we paid him at Mentone in 1882, a +year before he died, he was actually thinking out schemes for that +history of early Spain which it seemed, both to him and me, I must at +last begin, and was inquiring what help I could get from libraries on +the Riviera during our stay with him. Then, when we came, I remember our +talks in the little Villa St. Nicholas--his sympathy, his enthusiasm, +his unselfish help; while all the time he was wrestling with death for +just a few more months in which to finish his own work. Both Lord Bryce +and Sir Leslie Stephen have paid their tribute to this wonderful talk of +his later years. "No such talk," says Lord Bryce, "has been heard in our +generation." Of Madame de Staël it was said that she wrote her books out +of the talk of the distinguished men who frequented her _salon_. Her own +conversation was directed to evoking from the brains of others what she +afterward, as an artist, knew how to use better than they. Her talk-- +small blame to her!--was plundering and acquisitive. But J.R.G.'s talk +_gave_ perpetually, admirable listener though he was. All that he had he +gave; so that our final thought of him is not that of the suffering +invalid, the thwarted workman, the life cut short, but rather that of +one who had richly done his part and left in his friends' memories no +mere pathetic appeal, but much more a bracing message for their own +easier and longer lives. + +Of the two other historians with whom my youth threw me into contact, +Mr. Freeman and Bishop Stubbs, I have some lively memories. Mr. Freeman +was first known to me, I think, through "Johnny," as he was wont to call +J.R.G., whom he adored. Both he and J.R.G. were admirable letter- +writers, and a volume of their correspondence--much of it already +published separately--if it could be put together--like that of Flaubert +and George Sand--would make excellent reading for a future generation. +In 1877 and 1878, when I was plunged in the history of West-Gothic +Kings, I had many letters from Mr. Freeman, and never were letters about +grave matters less grave. Take this outburst about a lady who had sent +him some historical work to look at. He greatly liked and admired the +lady; but her work drove him wild. "I never saw anything like it for +missing the point of everything.... Then she has no notion of putting a +sentence together, so that she said some things which I fancy she did +not mean to say--as that 'the beloved Queen Louisa of Prussia' was the +mother of M. Thiers. When she said that the Duke of Orleans's horses ran +away, 'leaving two infant sons,' it may have been so: I have no evidence +either way." + +Again, "I am going to send you the Spanish part of my Historical +Geography. It will be very bad, but--when I don't know a thing I believe +I generally know that I don't know it, and so manage to wrap it up in +some vague phrase which, if not right, may at least not be wrong. Thus I +have always held that the nursery account of Henry VIII-- + + "'And Henry the Eighth was as fat as a pig--' + +"is to be preferred to Froude's version. For, though certainly an +inadequate account of the reign, it is true as far as it goes." + +Once, certainly, we stayed at Somerleaze, and I retain the impression of +a very busy, human, energetic man of letters, a good Churchman, and a +good citizen, brimful of likes and dislikes, and waving his red beard +often as a flag of battle in many a hot skirmish, especially with +J.R.G., but always warm-hearted and generally placable--except in the +case of James Anthony Froude. The feud between Freeman and Froude was, +of course, a standing dish in the educated world of half a century ago. +It may be argued that the Muse of History has not decided the quarrel +quite according to justice; that Clio has shown herself something of a +jade in the matter, as easily influenced by fair externals as a certain +Helen was long ago. How many people now read the _Norman Conquest_-- +except the few scholars who devote themselves to the same period? +Whereas Froude's History, with all its sins, lives, and in my belief +will long live, because the man who wrote it was a _writer_ and +understood his art. + +Of Bishop Stubbs, the greatest historical name surely in the England of +the last half of the nineteenth century, I did not personally see much +while we lived in Oxford and he was Regius Professor. He had no gifts-- +it was his chief weakness as a teacher--for creating a young school +around him, setting one man to work on this job, and another on that, as +has been done with great success in many instances abroad. He was too +reserved, too critical, perhaps too sensitive. But he stood as a great +influence in the background, felt if not seen. A word of praise from him +meant everything; a word of condemnation, in his own subjects, settled +the matter. I remember well, after I had written a number of articles on +early Spanish Kings and Bishops, for a historical Dictionary, and they +were already in proof, how on my daily visits to the Bodleian I began to +be puzzled by the fact that some of the very obscure books I had been +using were "out" when I wanted them, or had been abstracted from my +table by one of the sub-librarians. _Joannes Biclarensis_--he was +missing! Who in the world could want that obscure chronicle of an +obscure period but myself? I began to envisage some hungry German +_Privatdozent_, on his holiday, raiding my poor little subject, and my +books, with a view to his Doctor's thesis. Then one morning, as I went +in, I came across Doctor Stubbs, with an ancient and portly volume under +his arm. _Joannes Biclarensis_ himself!--I knew it at once. The +Professor gave me a friendly nod, and I saw a twinkle in his eye as we +passed. Going to my desk, I found another volume gone--this time the +_Acts of the Councils of Toledo_. So far as I knew, not the most ardent +Churchman in Oxford felt at that time any absorbing interest in the +Councils of Toledo. At any rate, I had been left in undisturbed +possession of them for months. Evidently something was happening, and I +sat down to my work in bewilderment. + +Then, on my way home, I ran into a fellow-worker for the Dictionary--a +well-known don and history tutor. "Do you know what's happened?" he +said, in excitement. "_Stubbs_ has been going through our work! The +Editor wanted his imprimatur before the final printing. Can't expect +anybody but Stubbs to know all these things! My books are gone, too." We +walked up to the Parks together in a common anxiety, like a couple of +school-boys in for Smalls. Then in a few days the tension was over; my +books were on my desk again; the Professor stopped me in the Broad with +a smile, and the remark that Joannes Biclarensis was really quite an +interesting fellow, and I received a very friendly letter from the +Editor of the Dictionary. + +And perhaps I may be allowed, after these forty years, one more +recollection, though I am afraid a proper reticence would suppress it! A +little later "Mr. Creighton" came to visit us, after his immigration to +Embleton and the north; and I timidly gave him some lives of West-Gothic +Kings and Bishops to read. He read them--they were very long and +terribly minute--and put down the proofs, without saying much. Then he +walked down to Oxford with my husband, and sent me back a message by +him: "Tell M. to go on. There is nobody but Stubbs doing such work in +Oxford now." The thrill of pride and delight such words gave me may be +imagined. But there were already causes at work why I should not "go +on." + +I shall have more to say presently about the work on the origins of +modern Spain. It was the only thorough "discipline" I ever had; it +lasted about two years--years of incessant, arduous work, and it led +directly to the writing of _Robert Elsmere_. But before and after, how +full life was of other things! The joys of one's new home, of the +children that began to patter about it, of every bit of furniture and +blue pot it contained, each representing some happy _chasse_ or special +earning--of its garden of half an acre, where I used to feel as +Hawthorne felt in the garden of the Concord Manse--amazement that Nature +should take the trouble to produce things as big as vegetable marrows, +or as surprising as scarlet runners that topped one's head, just that we +might own and eat them. Then the life of the University town, with all +those marked antagonisms I have described, those intellectual and +religious movements, that were like the meeting currents of rivers in a +lake; and the pleasure of new friendships, where everybody was equal, +nobody was rich, and the intellectual average was naturally high. In +those days, too, a small group of women of whom I was one were laying +the foundations of the whole system of women's education in Oxford. Mrs. +Creighton and I, with Mrs. Max Müller, were the secretaries and founders +of the first organized series of lectures for women in the University +town; I was the first secretary of Somerville Hall, and it fell to me, +by chance, to suggest the name of the future college. My friends and I +were all on fire for women's education, including women's medical +education, and very emulous of Cambridge, where the movement was already +far advanced. + +But hardly any of us were at all on fire for woman suffrage, wherein the +Oxford educational movement differed greatly from the Cambridge +movement. The majority, certainly, of the group to which I belonged at +Oxford were at that time persuaded that the development of women's power +in the State--or rather, in such a state as England, with its far- +reaching and Imperial obligations, resting ultimately on the sanction of +war--should be on lines of its own. We believed that growth through +Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for +bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on +Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of +progress. However, I shall return to this subject on some future +occasion, in connection with the intensified suffragist campaign which +began about ten years ago (1907-08) and in which I took some part. I +will only note here my first acquaintance with Mrs. Fawcett. I see her +so clearly as a fresh, picturesque figure--in a green silk dress and a +necklace of amber beads, when she came down to Oxford in the +mid-'seventies to give a course of lectures in the series that Mrs. +Creighton and I were organizing, and I remember well the atmosphere of +sympathy and admiration which surrounded her as she spoke to an audience +in which many of us were well acquainted with the heroic story of Mr. +Fawcett's blindness, and of the part played by his wife in enabling him +to continue his economic and Parliamentary work. + +But life then was not all lectures!--nor was it all Oxford. There were +vacations, and vacations generally meant for us some weeks, at least, of +travel, even when pence were fewest. The Christmas vacation of 1874 we +were in Paris. The weather was bitter, and we were lodged, for +cheapness' sake, in an old-fashioned hotel, where the high canopied beds +with their mountainous duvets were very difficult to wake up in on a +cold morning. But in spite of snow and sleet we filled our days to the +brim. We took with us some introductions from Oxford--to Madame Mohl, +the Renans, the Gaston Parises, the Boutmys, the Ribots, and, from my +Uncle Matthew, to the Scherers at Versailles. Monsieur Taine was already +known to us, and it was at their house, on one of Madame Taine's +Thursdays, that I first heard French conversation at its best. There was +a young man there, dark-eyed, dark-haired, to whom I listened--not +always able to follow the rapid French in which he and two other men +were discussing some literary matter of the moment, but conscious, for +the first time, of what the conversation of intellectual equals might +be, if it were always practised as the French are trained to practise it +from their mother's milk, by the influence of a long tradition. The +young man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels, +while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark him +out as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he was +soon to become. M. Bourget did not then speak English, and my French +conversation, which had been wholly learned from books, had a way at +that time--and, alack! has still--of breaking down under me, just as one +reached the thing one really wanted to say. So that I did not attempt to +do more than listen. But I seem to remember that those with whom he +talked were M. Francis Charmes, then a writer on the staff of the +_Débats_, and afterward the editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ in +succession to M. Brunetière; and M. Gaston Paris, the brilliant head of +French philology at the Collège de France. What struck me then, and +through all the new experiences and new acquaintanceships of our +Christmas fortnight, was that strenuous and passionate intensity of the +French temper, which foreign nations so easily lose sight of, but which, +in truth, is as much part of the French nature as their gaiety, or as +what seems to us their frivolity. The war of 1870, the Commune, were but +three years behind them. Germany had torn from them Alsace-Lorraine; she +had occupied Paris; and their own Jacobins had ruined and burned what +even Germany had spared. In the minds of the intellectual class there +lay deep, on the one hand, a determination to rebuild France; on the +other, to avenge her defeat. The blackened ruins of the Tuileries and of +the Cour des Comptes still disfigured a city which grimly kept them +there as a warning against anarchy; while the statue of the Ville de +Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde had worn for three years the +funeral garlands, which, as France confidently hopes, the peace that +will end this war will, after nearly half a century, give way once more +to the rejoicing tricolor. At the same time reconstruction was +everywhere beginning--especially in the field of education. The corrupt, +political influence of the Empire, which had used the whole educational +system of the country for the purpose of keeping itself and its +supporters in power, was at an end. The recognized "École Normale" was +becoming a source of moral and mental strength among thousands of young +men and women; and the "École des Sciences politiques," the joint work +of Taine, Renan, and M. Boutmy, its first director, was laying +foundations whereof the results are to be seen conspicuously to-day, in +French character, French resource, French patience, French science, as +this hideous war has revealed them. + +I remember an illuminating talk with M. Renan himself on this subject +during our visit. We had never yet seen him, and we carried an +introduction to him from Max Müller, our neighbor and friend in Oxford. +We found him alone, in a small working-room crowded with books, at the +College de France. Madame Renan was away, and he had abandoned his large +library for something more easily warmed. My first sight of him was +something of a shock--of the large, ungainly figure, the genial face +with its spreading cheeks and humorous eyes, the big head with its +scanty locks of hair. I think he felt an amused and kindly interest in +the two young folk from Oxford who had come as pilgrims to his shrine, +and, realizing that our French was not fluent and our shyness great, he +filled up the time--and the gaps--by a monologue, lit up by many touches +of Renanesque humor, on the situation in France. + +First, as to literature--"No, we have no genius, no poets or writers of +the first rank just now--at least so it seems to me. But we _work--nous +travaillons beaucoup! Ce sera noire salut_." It was the same as to +politics. He had no illusions and few admirations. "The Chamber is full +of mediocrities. We are governed by _avocats_ and _pharmaciens_. But at +least _Ils ne feront pas la guerre_!" + +He smiled, but there was that in the smile and the gesture which showed +the smart within; from which not even his scholar's philosophy, with its +ideal of a world of cosmopolitan science, could protect him. At that +moment he was inclined to despair of his country. The mad adventure of +the Commune had gone deep into his soul, and there were still a good +many pacifying years to run, before he could talk of his life as "_cette +charmante promenade à travers la realité_"--for which, with all it had +contained of bad and good, he yet thanked the Gods. At that time he was +fifty-one; he had just published _L'Antichrist,_ the most brilliant of +all the volumes of the "Origines"; and he was not yet a member of the +French Academy. + +I turn to a few other impressions from that distant time. One night we +were in the Théâtre Français, and Racine's "Phèdre" was to be given. I +at least had never been in the Maison de Molière before, and in such +matters as acting I possessed, at twenty-three, only a very raw and +country-cousinish judgment. There had been a certain amount of talk in +Oxford of a new and remarkable French actress, but neither of us had +really any idea of what was before us. Then the play began. And before +the first act was over we were sitting, bent forward, gazing at the +stage in an intense and concentrated excitement such as I can scarcely +remember ever feeling again, except perhaps when the same actress played +"Hernani" in London for the first time in 1884. Sarah Bernhardt was +then--December, 1874--in the first full tide of her success. She was of +a ghostly and willowy slenderness. Each of the great speeches seemed +actually to rend the delicate frame. When she fell back after one of +them you felt an actual physical terror lest there should not be enough +life left in the slight, dying woman to let her speak again. And you +craved for yet more and more of the _voix d'or_ which rang in one's ears +as the frail yet exquisite instrument of a mighty music. Never before +had it been brought home to me what dramatic art might be, or the power +of the French Alexandrine. And never did I come so near quarreling with +"Uncle Matt" as when, on our return, after having heard my say about the +genius of Sarah Bernhardt, he patted my hand indulgently with the +remark, "But, my dear child, you see, you never saw Rachel!" + +As we listened to Sarah Bernhardt we were watching the outset of a great +career which had still some forty years to run. On another evening we +made acquaintance with a little old woman who had been born in the first +year of the Terror, who had spent her first youth in the _salon_ of +Madame Récamier, valued there, above all, for her difficult success in +drawing a smile from that old and melancholy genius, Châteaubriand; and +had since held a _salon_ of her own, which deserves a special place in +the history of _salons_. For it was held, according to the French +tradition, and in Paris, by an Englishwoman. It was, I think, Max Müller +who gave us an introduction to Madame Mohl. She sent us an invitation to +one of her Friday evenings, and we duly mounted to the top of the old +house in the Rue du Bac which she made famous for so long. As we entered +the room I saw a small disheveled figure, gray-headed, crouching beside +a grate, with a kettle in her hand. It was Madame Mohl--then eighty- +one--who was trying to make the fire burn. She just raised herself to +greet us, with a swift investigating glance; and then returned to her +task of making the tea, in which I endeavored to help her. But she did +not like to be helped, and I soon subsided into my usual listening and +watching, which, perhaps, for one who at that time was singularly +immature in all social respects, was the best policy. I seem still to +see the tall, substantial form of Julius Mohl standing behind her, with +various other elderly men who were no doubt famous folk, if one had +known their names. And in the corner was the Spartan tea-table, with its +few biscuits, which stood for the plain living whereon was nourished the +high thinking and high talking which had passed through these rooms. +Guizot, Cousin, Ampère, Fauriel, Mignet, Lamartine, all the great men of +the middle century had talked there; not, in general, the poets and the +artists, but the politicians, the historians, and the _savants_. The +little Fairy Blackstick, incredibly old, kneeling on the floor, with the +shabby dress and tousled gray hair, had made a part of the central scene +in France, through the Revolution, the reign of the Citizen king, and +the Second Empire--playing the rôle, through it all, of a good friend of +freedom. If only one had heard her talk! But there were few people in +the room, and we were none of us inspired. I must sadly put down that +Friday evening among the lost opportunities of life. For Mrs. Simpson's +biography of Madame Mohl shows what a wealth of wit and memory there was +in that small head! Her social sense, her humor, never deserted her, +though she lived to be ninety. When she was dying, her favorite cat, a +tom, leaped on her bed. Her eyes lit up as she feebly stroked him. "He +is so distinguished!" she whispered. "But his wife is not distinguished +at all. He doesn't know it. But many men are like that." It was one of +the last sayings of an expert in the human scene. + +Madame Mohl was twenty-one when the Allies entered Paris in 1814. She +had lived with those to whom the fall of the _Ancien Régime_, the +Terror, and the Revolutionary wars had been the experience of middle +life. As I look back to the _salon_ in the Rue du Bac, which I saw in +such a flash, yet where my hand rested for a moment in that of Madame +Récamier's pet and protegée, I am reminded, too, that I once saw, at the +Forsters', in 1869, when I was eighteen, the Doctor Lushington who was +Lady Byron's adviser and confidant when she left her husband, and who, +as a young man, had stayed with Pitt and ridden out with Lady Hester +Stanhope. One night, in Eccleston Square, we assembled for dinner in the +ground-floor library instead of the drawing-room, which was up-stairs. I +slipped in late, and saw in an arm-chair, his hands resting on a stick, +an old, white-haired man. When dinner was announced--if I remember +right--he was wheeled into the dining-room, to a place beside my aunt. I +was too far away to hear him talk, and he went home after dinner. But it +was one of the guests of the evening, a friend of his, who said to me-- +with a kindly wish, no doubt, to thrill the girl just "out": "You ought +to remember Doctor Lushington! What are you?--eighteen?--and he is +eighty-six. He was in the theater on the night when the news reached +London of Marie Antoinette's execution, and he can remember, though he +was only a boy of eleven, how it was given out from the stage, and how +the audience instantly broke up." + +Doctor Lushington, of course, carries one farther back than Madame Mohl. +He was born in 1782, four years after the deaths of Rousseau and +Voltaire, two years before the death of Diderot. He was only six years +younger than Lady Hester Stanhope, whose acquaintance he made during the +three years--1803-1806--when she was keeping house for her uncle, +William Pitt. + +But on my right hand at the same dinner-party there sat a guest who was +to mean a good deal more to me personally than Doctor Lushington--young +Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, as he then was, Lord Macaulay's nephew, +already the brilliant author of _A Competition Wallah, Ladies in +Parliament_, and much else. We little thought, as we talked, that after +thirty-five years his son was to marry my daughter. + +CHAPTER IX + +THE BEGINNINGS OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_ + +If these are to be the recollections of a writer, in which perhaps other +writers by profession, as well as the more general public, may take some +interest, I shall perhaps be forgiven if I give some account of the +processes of thought and work which led to the writing of my first +successful novel, _Robert Elsmere_. + +It was in 1878 that a new editor was appointed for one of the huge well- +known volumes, in which under the aegis of the John Murray of the day, +the _Nineteenth Century_ was accustomed to concentrate its knowledge-- +classical, historical, and theological--in convenient, if not exactly +handy, form. Doctor Wace, now a Canon of Canterbury, was then an +indefatigable member of the _Times_ staff. Yet he undertook this extra +work, and carried it bravely through. He came to Oxford to beat up +recruits for Smith's _Dictionary of Christian Biography_, a companion +volume to that of _Classical Biography_, and dealing with the first +seven centuries of Christianity. He had been told that I had been +busying myself with early Spain, and he came to me to ask whether I +would take the Spanish lives for the period, especially those concerned +with the West-Goths in Spain; while at the same time he applied to +various Oxford historians for work on the Ostrogoths and the Franks. + +I was much tempted, but I had a good deal to consider. The French and +Spanish reading it involved was no difficulty. But the power of reading +Latin rapidly, both the degraded Latin of the fifth and sixth centuries +and the learned Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth, was essential; +and I had only learned some Latin since my marriage, and was by no means +at home in it. I had long since found out, too, in working at the +Spanish literature of the eleventh to the fourteenth century, that the +only critics and researches worth following in that field were German; +and though I had been fairly well grounded in German at school, and had +read a certain amount, the prospect of a piece of work which meant, in +the main, Latin texts and German commentaries, was rather daunting. The +well-trained woman student of the present day would have felt probably +no such qualms. But I had not been well trained; and the Pattison +standards of what work should be stood like dragons in the way. + +However, I took the plunge, and I have always been grateful to Canon +Wace. The sheer, hard, brain-stretching work of the two or three years +which followed I look back to now with delight. It altered my whole +outlook and gave me horizons and sympathies that I have never lost, +however dim all the positive knowledge brought me by the work has long +since become. The strange thing was that out of the work which seemed +both to myself and others to mark the abandonment of any foolish hopes +of novel-writing I might have cherished as a girl, _Robert Elsmere_ +should have arisen. For after my marriage I had made various attempts to +write fiction. They were clearly failures. J. R. G. dealt very +faithfully with me on the subject; and I could only conclude that the +instinct to tell stories which had been so strong in me as a child and +girl meant nothing, and was to be suppressed. I did, indeed, write a +story for my children, which came out in 1880--_Milly and Olly_; but +that wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives. + +And yet I venture to think it was, after all, the instinct for "making +out," as the Brontës used to call their own wonderful story-telling +passion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me. Those +far-off centuries became veritably alive to me--the Arian kings fighting +an ever-losing battle against the ever-encroaching power of the Catholic +Church, backed by the still lingering and still potent ghost of the +Roman Empire; the Catholic Bishops gathering, sometimes through winter +snow, to their Councils at Seville and Toledo; the centers of culture in +remote corners of the peninsula, where men lived with books and holy +things, shrinking from the wild life around them, and handing on the +precious remnants and broken traditions of the older classical world; +the mutual scorn of Goth and Roman; martyrs, fanatics, heretics, +nationalists, and cosmopolitans; and, rising upon, enveloping them all, +as the seventh and eighth centuries drew on, the tide of Islam, and the +menace of that time when the great church of Cordova should be half a +mosque and half a Christian cathedral. + +I lived, indeed, in that old Spain, while I was at work in the Bodleian +and at home. To spend hours and days over the signatures to an obscure +Council, identifying each name so far as the existing materials allowed, +and attaching to it some fragment of human interest, so that gradually +something of a picture emerged, as of a thing lost and recovered-- +dredged up from the deeps of time--that, I think, was the joy of it all. + +I see, in memory, the small Oxford room, as it was on a winter evening, +between nine and midnight, my husband in one corner preparing his +college lectures, or writing a "Saturday" "middle"; my books and I in +another; the reading-lamp, always to me a symbol of peace and +"recollection"; the Oxford quiet outside. And yet, it was not so +tranquil as it looked. For beating round us all the time were the +spiritual winds of an agitated day. The Oxford of thought was not quiet; +it was divided, as I have shown, by sharper antagonisms and deeper feuds +than exist to-day. Darwinism was penetrating everywhere; Pusey was +preaching against its effects on belief; Balliol stood for an unfettered +history and criticism, Christ Church for authority and creeds; Renan's +_Origines_ were still coming out, Strauss's last book also; my uncle was +publishing _God and the Bible_ in succession to _Literature and Dogma_; +and _Supernatural Religion_ was making no small stir. And meanwhile what +began to interest and absorb me were _sources_--_testimony_. To what--to +whom--did it all go back, this great story of early civilization, early +religion, which modern men could write and interpret so differently? + +And on this question the writers and historians of four early centuries, +from the fifth to the ninth, as I lived with them, seemed to throw a +partial, but yet a searching, light. I have expressed it in _Robert +Elsmere_. Langham and Robert, talking in the Squire's library on +Robert's plans for a history of Gaul during the breakdown of the Empire +and the emergence of modern France, come to the vital question: "History +depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and virtue of testimony at +given times? In other words, did the man of the third century +understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of +the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences?-- +and what are the deductions to be made from them?" + +Robert replies that his work has not yet dug deep enough to make him +answer the question. + +"It is enormously important, I grant--enormously," he repeated, +reflectively. + +On which Langham says to himself, though not to Elsmere, that the whole +of "orthodoxy" is in it, and depends on it. + +And in a later passage, when Elsmere is mastering the "Quellen" of his +subject, he expresses himself with bewilderment to Catherine on this +same subject of "testimony." He is immersed in the chronicles and +biographies of the fifth and sixth centuries. Every history, every +biography, is steeped in marvel. A man divided by only a few years from +the bishop or saint whose life he is writing reports the most fantastic +miracles. What is the psychology of it all? The whole age seems to +Robert "non-sane." And, meanwhile, across and beyond the medieval +centuries, behind the Christian era itself, the modern student looks +back inevitably, involuntarily, to certain Greeks and certain Latins, +who "represent a forward strain," who intellectually "belong to a world +ahead of them." "You"--he says to them--"_you_ are really my kindred." + +That, after all, I tried to express this intellectual experience--which +was, of course, an experience of my own--not in critical or historical +work, but in a novel, that is to say in terms of human life, was the +result of an incident which occurred toward the close of our lives in +Oxford. It was not long after the appearance of _Supernatural Religion_, +and the rise of that newer school of Biblical criticism in Germany +expressed by the once-honored name of Doctor Harnack. Darwinian debate +in the realm of natural science was practically over. The spread of +evolutionary ideas in the fields of history and criticism was the real +point of interest. Accordingly, the University pulpit was often filled +by men endeavoring "to fit a not very exacting science to a very +grudging orthodoxy"; and the heat of an ever-strengthening controversy +was in the Oxford air. + +In 1881, as it happened, the Bampton Lectures were preached by the Rev. +John Wordsworth, then Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose, and, later, Bishop +of Salisbury. He and my husband--who, before our marriage, was also a +Fellow of Brasenose--were still tutorial colleagues, and I therefore +knew him personally, and his first wife, the brilliant daughter of the +beloved Bodley's Librarian of my day, Mr. Coxe. We naturally attended +Mr. Wordsworth's first Bampton. He belonged, very strongly, to what I +have called the Christ Church camp; while we belonged, very strongly, to +the Balliol camp. But no one could fail to respect John Wordsworth +deeply; while his connection with his great-uncle, the poet, to whom he +bore a strong personal likeness, gave him always a glamour in my eyes. +Still, I remember going with a certain shrinking; and it was the shock +of indignation excited in me by the sermon which led directly--though +after seven intervening years--to _Robert Elsmere._ + +The sermon was on "The present unsettlement in religion"; and it +connected the "unsettlement" definitely with "sin." The "moral causes of +unbelief," said the preacher, "were (1) prejudice; (2) severe claims of +religion; (3) intellectual faults, especially indolence, coldness, +recklessness, pride, and avarice." + +The sermon expounded and developed this outline with great vigor, and +every skeptical head received its due buffeting in a tone and fashion +that now scarcely survive. I sat in the darkness under the gallery. The +preacher's fine ascetic face was plainly visible in the middle light of +the church; and while the confident priestly voice flowed on, I seemed +to see, grouped around the speaker, the forms of those, his colleagues +and contemporaries, the patient scholars and thinkers of the Liberal +host, Stanley, Jowett, Green of Balliol, Lewis Nettleship, Henry +Sidgwick, my uncle, whom he, in truth--though perhaps not consciously-- +was attacking. My heart was hot within me. How could one show England +what was really going on in her midst? Surely the only way was through +imagination; through a picture of actual life and conduct; through +something as "simple, sensuous, passionate" as one could make it. Who +and what were the persons of whom the preacher gave this grotesque +account? What was their history? How had their thoughts and doubts come +to be? What was the effect of them on conduct? + +The _immediate_ result of the sermon, however, was a pamphlet called +_Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the Bampton +Lecture of Sunday, March 6th_. It was rapidly written and printed, and +was put up in the windows of a well-known shop in the High Street. In +the few hours of its public career it enjoyed a very lively sale. Then +an incident--quite unforeseen by its author--slit its little life! A +well-known clergyman walked into the shop and asked for the pamphlet. He +turned it over, and at once pointed out to one of the partners of the +firm in the shop that there was no printer's name upon it. The +booksellers who had produced the pamphlet, no doubt with an eye to their +large clerical _clientèle_, had omitted the printer's name, and the +omission was illegal. Pains and penalties were threatened, and the +frightened booksellers at once withdrew the pamphlet and sent word of +what had happened to my much-astonished self, who had neither noticed +the omission nor was aware of the law. But Doctor Foulkes, the clergyman +in question--no one that knew the Oxford of my day will have forgotten +his tall, militant figure, with the defiant white hair and the long +clerical coat, as it haunted the streets of the University!--had only +stimulated the tare he seemed to have rooted up. For the pamphlet thus +easily suppressed was really the germ of the later book; in that, +without attempting direct argument, it merely sketched two types of +character: the character that either knows no doubts or has suppressed +them, and the character that fights its stormy way to truth. + +The latter was the first sketch of _Robert Elsmere_. That same evening, +at a College party, Professor Green came up to me. I had sent him the +pamphlet the night before, and had not yet had a word from him. His kind +brown eyes smiled upon me as he said a hearty "thank you," adding "a +capital piece of work," or something to that effect; after which my +spirits were quite equal to telling him the story of Doctor Foulkes's +raid. + + * * * * * + +The year 1880-81, however, was marked for me by three other events of +quite a different kind: Monsieur Renan's visit to Oxford, my husband's +acceptance of a post on the staff of the _Times_, and a visit that we +paid to the W.E. Forsters in Ireland, in December, 1880, at almost the +blackest moment of the Irish land-war. + +Of Renan's visit I have mingled memories--all pleasant, but some touched +with comedy. Gentle Madame Renan came with her famous husband and soon +won all hearts. Oxford in mid-April was then, as always, a dream of +gardens just coming into leaf, enchasing buildings of a silvery gray, +and full to the brim of the old walls with the early blossom--almond, or +cherry, or flowering currant. M. Renan was delivering the Hibbert +Lectures in London, and came down to stay for a long week-end with our +neighbors, the Max Müllers. Doctor Hatch was then preaching the Bampton +Lectures, that first admirable series of his on the debt of the Church +to Latin organization, and M. Renan attended one of them. He had himself +just published _Marc Aurèle_, and Doctor Hatch's subject was closely +akin to that of his own Hibbert Lectures. I remember seeing him emerge +from the porch of St. Mary's, his strange, triangular face pleasantly +dreamy. "You were interested?" said some one at his elbow. "_Mais oui_!" +said M. Renan, smiling. "He might have given my lecture, and I might +have preached his sermon! _(Nous aurions du changer de cahiers_!)" Renan +in the pulpit of Pusey, Newman, and Burgon would indeed have been a +spectacle of horror to the ecclesiastical mind. I remember once, many +years after, following the _parroco_ of Castel Gandolfo, through the +dreary and deserted rooms of the Papal villa, where, before 1870, the +Popes used to make _villegiatura_, on that beautiful ridge overlooking +the Alban lake. All the decoration of the villa seemed to me curiously +tawdry and mean. But suddenly my attention was arrested by a great +fresco covering an entire wall. It represented the triumph of the Papacy +over the infidel of all dates. A Pope sat enthroned, wearing the triple +crown, with angels hovering overhead; and in a huge brazier at his feet +burned the writings of the world's heretics. The blazing volumes were +inscribed--Arius--Luther--Voltaire--_Renan_! + +We passed on through the empty rooms, and the _parroco_ locked the door +behind us. I thought, as we walked away, of the summer light fading from +the childish picture, painted probably not long before the entry of the +Italian troops into Rome, and of all that was symbolized by it and the +deserted villa, to which the "prisoner of the Vatican" no longer +returns. But at least Rome had given Ernest Renan no mean place among +her enemies--Arius, Luther, Voltaire--_Renan_! + +But in truth, Renan, personally, was not the enemy of any church, least +of all of the great Church which had trained his youth. He was a born +scholar and thinker, in temper extremely gentle and scrupulous, and with +a sense of humor, or rather irony, not unlike that of Anatole France, +who has learned much from him. There was, of course, a streak in him of +that French paradox, that impish trifling with things fundamental, which +the English temperament dislikes and resents; as when he wrote the +_Abbesse de Jouarre_, or threw out the whimsical doubt in a passing +sentence of one of his latest books, whether, after all, his life of +labor and self-denial had been worth while, and whether, if he had lived +the life of an Epicurean, like Théophile Gautier, he might not have got +more out of existence. "He was really a good and great man," said +Jowett, writing after his death. But "I regret that he wrote at the end +of his life that strange drama about the Reign of Terror." + +There are probably few of M. Renan's English admirers who do not share +the regret. At the same time, there, for all to see, is the long life as +it was lived--of the ever-toiling scholar and thinker, the devoted +husband and brother, the admirable friend. And certainly, during the +Oxford visit I remember, M. Renan was at his best. He was in love-- +apparently--with Oxford, and his charm, his gaiety, played over all that +we presented to him. I recall him in Wadham Gardens, wandering in a kind +of happy dream--"Ah, if one had only such places as this to work in, in +France! What pages--and how perfect!--one might write here!" Or again, +in a different scene, at luncheon in our little house in the Parks, when +Oxford was showing, even more than usual, its piteous inability to talk +decently to the great man in his own tongue. It is true that he neither +understood ours--in conversation--nor spoke a word of it. But that did +not at all mitigate our own shame--and surprise! For at that time, in +the Oxford world proper, everybody, probably, read French habitually, +and many of us thought we spoke it. But a mocking spirit suggested to +one of the guests at this luncheon-party--an energetic historical +tutor--the wish to enlighten M. Renan as to how the University was +governed, the intricacies of Convocation and Congregation, the +Hebdomadal Council, and all the rest. The other persons present fell at +first breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopeless +adventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one after +another we rushed in to help, till the constitution of the University +must have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much- +puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot. +Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what the +constitution of Oxford University _was_, he suavely took up his parable +as to what it should be. He drew the ideal University, as it were, in +the clouds; clothing his notion, as he went on, in so much fun and so +much charm, that his English hosts more than forgot their own defeat in +his success. The little scene has always remained with me as a crowning +instance of the French genius for conversation. Throw what obstacles in +the way you please; it will surmount them all. + +To judge, however, from M. Renan's letter to his friend, M. Berthelot, +written from Oxford on this occasion, he was not so much pleased as we +thought he was, or as we were with him. He says, "Oxford is the +strangest relic of the past, the type of living death. Each of its +colleges is a terrestrial paradise, but a deserted Paradise." (I see +from the date that the visit took place in the Easter vacation!) And he +describes the education given as "purely humanist and clerical," +administered to "a gilded youth that comes to chapel in surplices. There +is an almost total absence of the scientific spirit." And the letter +further contains a mild gibe at All Souls, for its absentee Fellows. +"The lawns are admirable, and the Fellows eat up the college revenues, +hunting and shooting up and down England. Only one of them works--my +kind host, Max Müller." + +At that moment the list of the Fellows of All Souls contained the names +of men who have since rendered high service to England; and M. Renan was +probably not aware that the drastic reforms introduced by the two great +University Commissions of 1854 and 1877 had made the sarcastic picture +he drew for his friend not a little absurd. No doubt a French +intellectual will always feel that the mind-life of England is running +at a slower pace than that of his own country. But if Renan had worked +for a year in Oxford, the old priestly training in him, based so solidly +on the moral discipline of St. Nicholas and St. Sulpice, would have +become aware of much else. I like to think that he would have echoed the +verdict on the Oxford undergraduate of a young and brilliant Frenchman +who spent much time at Oxford fifteen years later. "There is no +intellectual _élite_ here so strong as ours (i.e., among French +students)," says M. Jacques Bardouz, "but they undoubtedly have a +political _élite_, and, a much rarer thing, a moral _élite_.... What an +environment!--and how full is this education of moral stimulus and +force!" + +Has not every word of this been justified to the letter by the +experience of the war? + +After the present cataclysm, we know very well that we shall have to +improve and extend our higher education. Only, in building up the new, +let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable things of the old! + +It was not long after M. Renan's visit that, just as we were starting +for a walk on a May afternoon, the second post brought my husband a +letter which changed our lives. It contained a suggestion that my +husband should take work on the _Times_ as a member of the editorial +staff. We read it in amazement, and walked on to Port Meadow. It was a +fine day. The river was alive with boats; in the distance rose the +towers and domes of the beautiful city; and the Oxford magic blew about +us in the summer wind. It seemed impossible to leave the dear Oxford +life! All the drawbacks and difficulties of the new proposal presented +themselves; hardly any of the advantages. As for me, I was convinced we +must and should refuse, and I went to sleep in that conviction. + +But the mind travels far--and mysteriously--in sleep. With the first +words that my husband and I exchanged in the morning, we knew that the +die was cast and that our Oxford days were over. + +The rest of the year was spent in preparation for the change; and in the +Christmas vacation of 1880-81 my husband wrote his first "leaders" for +the paper. But before that we went for a week to Dublin to stay with the +Forsters, at the Chief Secretary's Lodge. + +A visit I shall never forget! It was the first of the two terrible +winters my uncle spent in Dublin as Chief Secretary, and the struggle +with the Land League was at its height. Boycotting, murder, and outrage +filled the news of every day. Owing to the refusal of the Liberal +Government to renew the Peace Preservation Act when they took office in +1880--a disastrous but perhaps intelligible mistake--the Chief +Secretary, when we reached Dublin, was facing an agrarian and political +revolt of the most determined character, with nothing but the ordinary +law, resting on juries and evidence, as his instrument--an instrument +which the Irish Land League had taken good care to shatter in his hands. +Threatening letters were flowing in upon both himself and my godmother; +and the tragedy of 1882, with the revelations as to the various murder +plots of the time, to which it led, were soon to show how terrible was +the state of the country and how real the danger in which he personally +stood. But, none the less, social life had to be carried on; +entertainments had to be given; and we went over, if I remember right, +for the two Christmas balls to be given by the Chief Secretary and the +Viceroy. On myself, fresh from the quiet Oxford life, the Irish +spectacle, seen from such a point of view, produced an overwhelming +impression. And the dancing, the visits and dinner-parties, the keeping +up of a brave social show--quite necessary and right under the +circumstances!--began to seem to me, after only twenty-four hours, like +some pageant seen under a thunder-cloud. + +Mr. Forster had then little more than five years to live. He was on the +threshold of the second year of his Chief-Secretary ship. During the +first year he had faced the difficulties of the position in Ireland, and +the perpetual attacks of the Irish Members in Parliament, with a +physical nerve and power still intact. I can recall my hot sympathy with +him during 1880, while with one hand he was fighting the Land League and +with the other--a fact never sufficiently recognized--giving all the +help he could to the preparation of Mr. Gladstone's second Land Act. The +position then was hard, sometimes heartbreaking; but it was not beyond +his strength. The second year wore him out. The unlucky Protection Act-- +an experiment for which the Liberal Cabinet and even its Radical +Members, Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain, were every whit as chargeable +as himself--imposed a personal responsibility on him for every case out +of the many hundreds of prisoners made under the Act, which was in +itself intolerable. And while he tried in front to dam back the flood of +Irish outrage, English Radicalism at his heels was making the task +impossible. What he was doing satisfied nobody, least of all himself. +The official and land-owning classes in Ireland, the Tories in England, +raged because, in spite of the Act, outrage continued; the Radical party +in the country, which had always disliked the Protection Act, and the +Radical press, were on the lookout for every sign of failure; while the +daily struggle in the House with the Irish Members while Parliament was +sitting, in addition to all the rest, exhausted a man on whose decision +important executive acts, dealing really with a state of revolution, +were always depending. All through the second year, as it seemed to me, +he was overwhelmed by a growing sense of a monstrous and insoluble +problem, to which no one, through nearly another forty years--not Mr. +Gladstone with his Home Rule Acts, as we were soon to see, nor Mr. +Balfour's wonderful brain-power sustained by a unique temperament--was +to find the true key. It is not found yet. Twenty years of Tory +Government practically solved the Land Question and agricultural Ireland +has begun to be rich. But the past year has seen an Irish rebellion; a +Home Rule Act has at last, after thirty years, been passed, and is dead +before its birth; while at the present moment an Irish Convention is +sitting.[1] Thirty-six years have gone since my husband and I walked +with William Forster through the Phoenix Park, over the spot where, a +year later, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered. And +still the Aeschylean "curse" goes on, from life to life, from Government +to Government. When will the Furies of the past become the "kind +goddesses" of the future--and the Irish and English peoples build them a +shrine of reconciliation? + +[Footnote 1: These words were written in the winter of 1917. At the +present moment (June, 1918) we have just seen the deportation of the +Sinn Feiners, and are still expecting yet another Home Rule Bill!] + +With such thoughts one looks back over the past. Amid its darkness, I +shall always see the pathetic figure of William Forster, the man of +Quaker training, at grips with murder and anarchy; the man of sensitive, +affectionate spirit, weighed down under the weight of rival appeals, now +from the side of democracy, now from the side of authority; bitterly +conscious, as an English Radical, of his breach with Radicalism; still +more keenly sensitive, as a man responsible for the executive government +of a country, in which the foundations had given way, to that atmosphere +of cruelty and wrong in which the Land League moved, and to the hideous +instances poured every day into his ears. + +He bore it for more than a year after we saw him in Ireland at his +thankless work. It was our first year in London, and we were near enough +to watch closely the progress of his fight. But it was a fight not to be +won. The spring of 1882 saw his resignation--on May 2d--followed on May +6th by the Phoenix Park murders and the long and gradual disintegration +of the powerful Ministry of 1880, culminating in the Home Rule disaster +of 1886. Mr. Churchill in the _Life_ of his father, Lord Randolph, says +of Mr. Forster's resignation, "he passed out of the Ministry to become +during the rest of Parliament one of its most dangerous and vigilant +opponents." The physical change, indeed, caused by the Irish struggle, +which was for a time painfully evident to the House of Commons, seemed +to pass away with rest and travel. The famous attack he made on Parnell +in the spring of 1883, as the responsible promoter of outrage in +Ireland, showed certainly no lack of power--rather an increase. I +happened to be in the House the following day, to hear Parnell's reply. +I remember my uncle's taking me down with him to the House, and begging +a seat for me in Mrs. Brand's gallery. The figure of Parnell; the +speech, nonchalant, terse, defiant, without a single grace of any kind, +his hands in the pockets of his coat; and the tense silence of the +crowded House, remain vividly with me. Afterward my uncle came up-stairs +for me, and we descended toward Palace Yard through various side- +passages. Suddenly a door communicating with the House itself opened in +front of us, and Parnell came out. My uncle pressed my arm and we held +back, while Parnell passed by, somberly absorbed, without betraying by +the smallest movement or gesture any recognition of my uncle's identity. + +In other matters--Gordon, Imperial Federation, the Chairmanship of the +Manchester Ship Canal, and the rest--William Forster showed, up till +1885, what his friends fondly hoped was the promise of renewed and +successful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark of +those two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just before +the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retina +of the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door of +Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffin +had gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. After +them came Mr. Gladstone, with other members of the Cabinet. At the +threshold Mr. Gladstone moved forward, and took my aunt's hand, bending +over it bareheaded. Then she went with the dead, and he turned away +toward the House of Commons. To those of us who remembered what the +relations of the dead and the living had once been, and how they had +parted, there was a peculiar pathos in the little scene. + +A few days later Mr. Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill, and the +two stormy months followed which ended in the Liberal Unionist split and +the defeat of the Bill on June 7th by thirty votes, and were the prelude +to the twenty years of Tory Government. If William Forster had lived, +there is no doubt that he must have played a leading part in the +struggles of that and subsequent sessions. In 1888 Mr. Balfour said to +my husband, after some generous words on the part played by Forster in +those two terrible years: "Forster's loss was irreparable to us [i.e., +to the Unionist party]. If he and Fawcett had lived, Gladstone could not +have made head." + +It has been, I think, widely recognized by men of all parties in recent +years that personally William Forster bore the worst of the Irish day, +whatever men may think of his policy. But, after all, it is not for +this, primarily, that England remembers him. His monument is +everywhere--in the schools that have covered the land since 1870, when +his great Act was passed. And if I have caught a little picture from the +moment when death forestalled that imminent parting between himself and +the great leader he had so long admired and followed, which life could +only have broadened, let me match it by an earlier and happier one, +borrowed from a letter of my own, written to my father when I was +eighteen, and describing the bringing in of the Education Act. + + He sat down amidst loud cheering.... _Gladstone pulled him down with + a sort of hug of delight._ It is certain that he is very much + pleased with the Bill, and, what is of great consequence, that he + thinks the Government has throughout been treated with great + consideration in it. After the debate he said to Uncle F., "Well, I + think our pair of ponies will run through together!" + +Gladstone's "pony" was, of course, the Land Act of 1870. + +THE END OF VOL. I + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Writer's Recollections (In Two +Volumes), Volume I, by Mrs. Humphry Ward + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS, VOL I *** + +***** This file should be named 9820-8.txt or 9820-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/9/8/2/9820/ + +Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Sandra +Brown, David Gundry, and the Project Gutenberg Online +Distributed Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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